by Stacy Schiff
There was no time for prolonged celebration in any event. The Nabokovs succumbed to their mutual flu just after Christmas and, still suffering from it, braced themselves for a small army of January visitors. Alfred Appel and his wife visited in midmonth. Sonia Slonim followed, after which a team of Rowohlt translators descended with their dictionaries on the Palace. Over the course of a week the Nabokovs vetted the German translation of Pale Fire. The hotel put a small, spartan salon at their disposal, in which everyone sat with a copy of the original work on his lap as a Rowohlt secretary read slowly through the German text, line by line.* Véra signaled often that something was amiss. A spirited discussion would follow, Véra speaking German when she needed to suggest an alternate phrasing, otherwise confining herself to English. It was clear to the translators that she had been designated to speak for her husband, who would often tease her at the outset of these marathon sessions, as if coaxing her out of her corner, priming her to talk. Afterward he entertained the visitors with garbled French and Italian translations. The strain of the long days on the Nabokovs was clear to the Rowohlt team, who returned in 1973 and 1974 to devote a series of ten-day sessions to Ada. The drill was more complicated yet when the Italians came, as they did in November 1969 for their Ada. Mondadori’s general director knew no English, nor Vladimir any Italian. “Everything,” reported Véra, “went over a French bridge.”
It would have been easy for someone in that Palace salon to conclude that the two Nabokovs constituted the same sort of “twinned genius-ego” Vladimir had described in Ada, a rollicking meditation on time and space, richly allusive, swarming with slights, all of it braided through a particularly happy, particularly long-lived, and perfectly incestuous love affair. Blinding in its mirror-play, the novel is ostensibly written by Van Veen, acrobat-aesthete-philosopher, with textual interpolations by Ada Veen, his sister, his peer, and the perpetual if not permanent object of his affection. It did not help that Ada was her own Department of Recollection, playing on the page the role Véra played in the life, questioning the accuracy of Van’s recall, appending Russian-speckled comments of her own, laboring to keep their history pure. Nor did it help that the Nabokovs, as much married as Kitty and Levin, seemed to conduct their marriage with the furtiveness of Anna and Vronsky. It is no great surprise that the novel tangled itself up with the reality; it was generally difficult to ignore Véra’s presence in light of Ada, described by Appel—who knew them both well—as “not only Veen’s muse, desire, tormentor and alter ego, but his severest critic and collaborator as well.” The overlapping, intergrading entity termed “Vaniada” in the novel was not so far from the real-life “Vervolodya,” the most intimate of VN’s doubles, one that delighted in its own brand of “sun-and-shade games.” Ada and Van rework a translation of John Shade’s verse just as Véra and Vladimir reworked that of Shade’s maker. One reviewer read the work as an alchemical conflation of the Tamara of Speak, Memory and Nabokov’s famously long and happy marriage. If nothing else, what was true of Van was true of Vladimir: All temptations aside, he could not live one day without this particular woman. Nor was there any question that the Nabokovs were engaged in their own trilingual game of total recall. The temptation to see Véra in the novel was irresistible, especially for those who had not found her in Lolita, especially given the name on the dedication page, especially given the supremely self-referential character of the work itself.
Of course Ada is not Véra, but the ferocity with which Vladimir charged at the reviewer—even the friendly reviewer—who found traces of her in the work seemed suspect. He tackled the critic who said as much in The New York Review of Books. “What the hell, Sir, do you know about my married life?” he challenged Matthew Hodgart, who had the good grace to issue the demanded apology.* John Updike saw more than art and ardor in Ada: “She is also, in a dimension or two, Nabokov’s wife Véra, his constant collaboratrice and the invariable dedicatee of his works.… I suspect that many of the details in this novel double as personal communication between husband and wife; some of the bothersomely exact dates, for instance, must be, to use a favorite word of our author, ‘fatidic.’ ” Updike’s wrist was lightly slapped. He was hitting a nail upon its head in his last observation, although it would be Brian Boyd who, palpating the tender ground later, learned to parse the denials. Speaking after her husband’s death, Véra voiced her discomfort with an observation Boyd made regarding dates in the novel, which she suggested he omit. “But there are many birthdays commemorated in Ada,” he objected. “I know,” she replied, waltzing neatly around the fact that her birthday figures prominently and meaningfully in the novel. No one ever dared ask her if there was something in the twinned genius motif, what she made of the novel-as-dialogue, the woman who claims her ideas to be the “mimotypes” of another’s. Had they done so they would doubtless have been rewarded with another of Véra’s dazzling non sequiturs. But Ada likes snakes, she might have responded—as she had noted that Zina was only half-Jewish—therefore, she is not I. Earlier she had listened carefully as VN described to a journalist her intercepting him on his way to the incinerator with the partial manuscript of Lolita. “I don’t remember that. Did I?” she asked vaguely. She could not possibly have forgotten. Of course, as Nabokov reminds us in Ada, if people remembered the same things, they would not be different people.
A long-awaited novel, Ada was greeted in 1969 mostly with extravagant praise from reviewers, more than some of them later wished they had showered on the novel. Appel reviewed the book glowingly on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, although he had disliked it on his first reading, finding it overly precious. He came around to the belief that he had written his review in a state of starstruck intoxication, from which he later awoke—to the conviction that Nabokov in his Ada period was but a step away from Joyce in the period of Finnegans Wake, a novel Nabokov dismissed as a “petrified superpun.” British reviewers came more directly to a negative appraisal, referring to the seven-hundred-page volume as Nabokov’s Waterloo, alleging that language had perhaps too facilely triumphed over imagination. Ada is a ravishingly beautiful piece of writing; it can also fairly be said to be a flabby novel, in which the acrobatic commingling of centuries and nationalities works less well than that of the human limbs. All the same the May 1969 publication landed Nabokov on the cover of Time, a place where the magazine’s editor had long hoped to see him; VN was hailed as “the greatest living American novelist.” Briefly Ada battled The Love Machine, Portnoy’s Complaint, and The Godfather on the summer bestseller lists, where it remained for five months, an overweight and off-putting tome selling, to McGraw-Hill’s relief and delight, “like six-packs of Budweiser in July.”
5
Véra was less willing to underwrite the fictions that leapt out of her husband’s mouth than those he committed to the page. One interviewer noted that nothing—least of all the truth—could stand between VN and a good story. He vaulted at a good pun, or a fertile coincidence, from a mile away. The interviewer did not reckon on Véra, a one-woman Department of Corrections, who—at the risk of inviting back the specter of Ada—assisted Vladimir as much in his efforts to order and reorder the past. Nabokov had been happy to inform Filippa Rolf that he had played at the magnificent, mirrored halls of the Hotel Negresco as a child in 1905—at least until Véra pointed out that the hotel had not yet been built. He summoned the same synthetic nostalgia for the Continental in Paris, the only establishment at which the couple had been able to find a room in 1959, but which VN jovially declared he had chosen for sentimental reasons, having visited the hotel in 1906, which was perhaps true as well. For the ninety-ninth time Véra might listen to his lurid tale of the Belgian cannibal, rolling her eyes. She reserved a half-bemused smile for her husband at such moments, as if astonished that he could still be trotting out this outrageous repertoire. The cannibal story was no more true today than it had been in the 1930s, she objected. When Vladimir began to discourse on Mozart, she reminded him he knew noth
ing about the subject. Quietly and with good humor she corrected him in front of an interviewer: He did not weigh eighty-five kilos, but eighty-nine. And when he bragged that his Russian Scrabble scores hovered between four hundred and five hundred points, Véra pointed out that “five hundred is barely possible,” a statement with which Vladimir heartily agreed, being the first to confess to a hyperbole addiction.
He was as eager to make use of his wife’s credibility as he was, for the sake of a good story, to steamroll past it. In Cambridge he had had a habit of spinning a yarn that was patently false, then bolstering its veracity by insisting that he had told Véra all about it, as if his having done so constituted irrefutable proof. Véra could not always have been pleased to squash these tall tales. In front of Nina and Alfred Appel she did so reluctantly. At the Palace her husband shared with an acquaintance the story of the Appels having met in his class, edging their way closer to each other as the semester progressed until—by Anna Karenina, and under his spell—they had practically emerged as Mr. and Mrs. Appel. Sadly, Appel demurred. The future Mrs. Appel had taken the course in 1954–55, while he had done so the previous year. Vladimir looked helplessly to Véra for corroboration. Slowly and solemnly, like an Old Testament judge, she shook her head no. Vladimir shrugged, and slumped a bit. “Well, it’s a beautiful story anyway,” he concluded. It should have happened that way, just as there should have been a charity ball on May 8, 1923, when he had met an enchanting masked woman for the first time.
“Véra has a much better memory than I do,” Nabokov boasted, trusting himself to it completely. He lived in manifest if occasionally ill-humored deference to his wife’s ability to summon details from the past. As the man who had now revisited his own autobiography—one hundred pages of new material, photographs, and an index were added to the book in 1966—well knew, his recall was faulty.* He wished Véra had made him write more down when he was younger, a statement that made his wife growl, with what sounds to have been the foot-stamping frustration of someone who had tried to do precisely that. William Buckley Jr., who met the Nabokovs in the 1970s, found the corroborating almost a tic. Vladimir’s conversation was studded with regular “Isn’t that right, Véra?”s. As often as not, the answer was “Almost.” Not for a second would she have failed to reply honestly, so long as the question was impersonal. Nor would she hesitate to intrude on the narratives. In the course of a dinner with the Appels the Nabokovs wound up in a hearty disagreement about the definition of “ananas” in Russian. Was it pineapple or banana? As soon as her table manners allowed, Véra bolted upstairs to settle the matter. After a few moments she returned from her consultation with the dictionary; she did not have time to open her mouth before her husband boomed, “Defeat. I recognize the posture of defeat.” Véra smiled. “I can always tell when she knows she’s wrong,” he trilled in jolly triumph. These miniature intellectual tournaments were standard fare, the good-natured rivalry between a man who thought his wife’s Russian stupendous and a woman who thought her husband’s without equal. Nabokov folded this minor contest into Ada.
Véra was graceful in her defeats, though often visibly vexed with her husband. Along with the fact-keeping and fiction-quashing came a fair amount of straightforward conversational disciplining. As the stream of visitors to Montreux observed, the act came to consist of Vladimir verging into the off-color, the provocative, Véra reining him in, Vladimir complying like the errant schoolboy. He seemed to be playing not so much to his visitor as to his wife’s amused—or not so amused—tolerance. Late in the 1960s, Jason Epstein was walking north across the Place de la Concorde in Paris when he heard a familiar Harry Truman twang, a booming midwestern laugh. It was Vladimir. Over a drink at the Meurice, Vladimir went on to relate to his liberal friend and former editor his deep affection for Nixon. Véra interceded, clearly embarrassed. Vladimir glowed as she did so, the naughty boy who enjoys the mess being swabbed up around him. When he announced to a visitor that he had decided to return to Russian prose for good, he was dismayed to see that his wife did not flinch. That was the point of the exercise. On some occasions when he made inflammatory remarks but could not coax Véra out of her corner he still obtained the reaction he was after. The 1969 Time researcher noted that after one particularly tasteless comment she looked as if she would like to choke her husband. It was certainly one way to tease her out.
Filippa Rolf found another. The Cambridge-based poet had engaged in a steady correspondence with Véra since the Nice visit that had so changed her life; Véra had hardly been able to keep up with the torrent of letters. Generally she waded her way past the more personal comments but was at times provoked into taking a stand. In early 1962 when she had written about the visit of Rolf’s Swedish friend she took a very firm stand indeed. She believed the relationship “imprudent and unwise,” adding that Vladimir was in full agreement with her. “Do you always do exactly what is expected from you? You are the best actress any director could dream of,” Rolf remonstrated, a legitimate question phrased less delicately than it might have been. Véra ignored the outburst. A month earlier she had asked Rolf if she might see her way clear to translating Pale Fire, a request she did not rescind even after these insolent comments. She could not have been pleased to hear later that Rolf had “smuggled” both Nabokovs into a short story but gracefully assured the self-appointed protégée that “we trust completely in your discretion and good taste.” Equably she continued to dispense professional advice, encouraging Rolf to focus on the drama on the page instead of that in Harvard Square, not to brood about Life and Love. In response to that brief and cordial statement she received, late in April 1963, a suicide note: “Goodbye. You are the only one I have ever loved or ever will love.”
The communication may have been unexpected but Rolf’s fixation on both Nabokovs, her mental unrest, and her difficulty in acclimating to America had long been obvious. Véra and Elena Levin had exchanged numerous letters on the subject. Véra treated the April missive as she did most threats that did not offend her honor: she gave it a wide berth. In October she was writing sympathetically about Rolf’s new book of verse, which her publisher had rejected, and about the Nabokovs’ abiding confidence that Rolf should undertake the Pale Fire translation. That Véra, in her eminent, stiff-upper-lip sanity, would have preferred to have waltzed past the suicide note and its personal overtures makes sense. That she felt the proper therapy for someone on the brink of mental illness might be to lock her up with a fictional madman’s fantasies would seem either a lapse of logic or an overdose of the stuff. She did all she could to limit her contact with Rolf during the 1964 Cambridge visit and claimed to do so again in December of that year, when Rolf traveled to Europe for a quiet visit with the couple, in the course of which they reviewed her translating progress. They also bought her a coat, an act that would not have impressed on Rolf any burgeoning rift in the relationship. Véra could not seem to wean herself from the idea that she had found, for all the complications, the ideal Swedish translator for her husband’s work. And Rolf could not seem to get past the idea that the Nabokovs had banished her to an inhospitable place, which they had made all the more inhospitable by writing the Levins in advance of her very private sexual habits. Véra appeared—hers had been the fist that pounded the table for emphasis—the prime culprit. Her assuredness, her invincibility, seemed to egg Rolf on.
By 1965 she was bombarding the couple with drafts of the story she had written about them, “an act of vandalism,” she confessed, but one she labored obsessively to perfect. The Nabokovs did not flinch. At the time Vladimir wrote glowingly on Rolf’s behalf to The New Yorker. Véra defended her energetically to Lena, in Sweden, with “She is one of the most gifted women we have ever met.” Of another draft she wrote that Rolf could indeed publish the story if she liked, with two minor changes. She went out of her way to make it clear that the request was Vladimir’s, although the lines in question concerned her. She herself was wholly indifferent.* Of course nothing could have
been further from the truth, as the highly perceptive Rolf would have known. She seems to have been incited by Véra’s protests, determined to force her to drop the mask. At times the correspondence reads like a feral attempt to scare Mrs. Nabokov out of the bushes; in May 1966 Rolf taunted Véra by saying that she knew Nabokov’s works were, all of them, letters to his dream of a wife, from whom she expected an autobiography. A hint of exasperation crept into the correspondence only a year later, when Véra sidestepped again, deferring to Vladimir in her communication. “My husband has been terribly busy and simply could not keep track of the revisions of your story and the story of your revisions,” she wrote stiffly. A whole collection of rambling letters had arrived in the interim. Increasingly these proved to be sardonic, half-lucid documents penned in a spidery script that wound itself around the page, in and out of several languages en route. For all of the madness in the fictions, Véra’s encounters with mental illness were few. She continued to describe the demands of her life to Rolf—the Rowohlt translators had just left, dissecting Pale Fire line by line had been debilitating, the correspondence only grew and grew—as if she could somehow will the correspondence back on to neutral, rational ground.
In 1969, when the letters, postcards, and telegrams amounted to some twenty communications a month and when Rolf’s insolence had devolved into brute obscenity, Véra turned to Paul, Weiss for help. She was obviously rattled; her June letter to the firm is a jumble of pronouns. She did not seem to know if she was writing as herself, her husband (“In the middle 60s I surrendered to her eager desire of translating into Swedish one of my longest and most difficult novels …”), or both of them. Since November of the previous year they had chosen not to answer Rolf’s unsettling letters, about her obsessive adoration of, or her ripening hatred for, them; Rolf continued to insist the Nabokovs were characters in her own work. Véra read and approved the Paul, Weiss missive, to which Rolf contemptuously replied that she could not and would not discontinue her correspondence with the couple. The rain of mail in Montreux tripled. Véra issued her own ultimatum at the end of July, setting out her version of the relationship in a document that makes clear that the meticulous, too, can disfigure history. Her summary was supremely lucid, perfectly truthful, highly inaccurate. Véra failed to acknowledge that the Nice invitation had been anything but casual; that Rolf had clipped Swedish reviews at her request and been a great help in the Wahlström fiasco; that the Nabokovs had in any way enjoyed what Véra now termed her “endless visit”; that they had in large part set the agenda. Rolf was not, and never had been, a friend. Her habit of advertising her lesbianism was shameless. She was abusing the considerable talent with which she had been born. Furthermore, and in perhaps the worst instance of impertinence, she had never been granted permission to address either Nabokov by his or her given name.