Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Only toward the spring of 1970 did Rolf’s Cambridge friends discover what she had been up to; the Nabokovs were not the only recipients of the aberrant spiralgrams. A devoted friend saw that she be taken to a hospital, where she spent a much-needed month. She was later diagnosed as having suffered a psychotic episode of paranoid megalomania, for which therapy and complete rest were prescribed. She recovered, and published her first English prose in Partisan Review soon after. The Nabokovs continued to receive two communications from her a day. In 1978, she was mailing regular letters and compositions to Véra, along with poems through which she laced references to the Nabokovs, a theme with which she never finished. In August of that year Rolf was diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer and died within weeks; word of her death must have reached Switzerland but left no record there. The entire episode proved a drain on the already taxed resources in Montreux, where such a premium was placed on the rational that Véra was able to say of a brilliant, temperate summer day that “the weather has finally come to its senses.”* Rolf had been one of the few to challenge her to drop her mask, to speak, as herself, with a near-stranger. Véra tried to claim the whole saga was a madman’s fantasy, which was not true. Having long evaded the credit, in this case she dodged all personal responsibility as well. The strategy worked less well with people than with literature.

  6

  At the beginning of October 1967, Phyllis and Ken Christiansen, Vladimir’s Museum of Comparative Zoology assistant and her entomologist husband, passed through Montreux. They were delighted to see the boy for whom Phyllis (then Phyllis Smith) had occasionally baby-sat in Cambridge, now a dashing six-foot-five-inch professional singer. To their astonishment they found Véra virtually unchanged. They were all the more taken aback when she asked about the cocker spaniel Phyllis had owned twenty years before, by name. The Nabokovs had forgotten nothing, and over Sunday lunch (tournedos, strawberries) plied Phyllis with questions about her family, whom they had known through the museum. In particular they expressed concern for her thirty-six-year-old sister, with whom Phyllis had had a troubled relationship, and who had since been diagnosed as mentally ill. Vladimir returned persistently to the subject, probing for the cause of the disorder. Phyllis was so startled by the interest, and by the line of direct questioning, that she felt she fumbled the answers. It is unlikely that the close interrogation of 1967 had anything to do with the flurry of mail then arriving from Filippa Rolf. But it was abundantly clear that the Nabokovs did understand—and could summon compassion for—those grappling with their balance. The visit was an altogether charmed one, from both sides. The Christiansens remarked especially on the continued adoration of husband and wife. Vladimir still called Véra “Darling”; as another visitor observed, there was nothing remotely casual about his use of the appellation. In the lounge after lunch he spooned sugar into his coffee but missed the cup. A small mountain of crystal balanced neatly on his loafer. Impishly Véra broke the news: “Darling, you have just sweetened your shoe.” Her husband roared with laughter.

  Filippa Rolf was not the only visitor who thought the Nabokovs lonely in their European exile, which she assumed was the reason she had been invited to Nice. Martha Duffy, the Time researcher who flew to Montreux for the 1969 cover story, found them constantly on the brink of loneliness as well. Nina Appel felt the loneliness seeping out of them at all times. Philippe Halsman, who had photographed VN in 1966, asked as much directly. “No, we do not feel lonesome. We have the run of the hotel, and peace,” Véra assured him, grousing instead about the weather, more intractable even than the worst of her husband’s publishers. She seems to have had a point. The Nabokovs were, after all, a couple who could have a rollicking good time alone with a couple of dictionaries. Vladimir’s sister Elena, widowed in 1958, visited biweekly from Geneva; she agreed that Véra would have been entirely happy on a desert island with Vladimir. Which she for the most part was. Off-season the 350-room Palace was empty—some twenty guests flitted among its hallways and salons—with a kind of Last Year at Marienbad feel to it. Regular visits from Dmitri, to whom Véra spoke by telephone several times a week, were equally vital. Asked about his social circle, Vladimir provided a short list, beginning with tufted ducks, crested grebes, and the characters in his new novel. He told Wilson, who visited Montreux for the first time and the Nabokovs for the last time in 1964, that they saw almost no one in the winter, which kept his mind uncluttered.

  A steady stream of intellectuals—the first Nabokovians—came to call, as, less formally, did old and new fans. Screwing up his courage, a Cornellian ambushed Véra one spring morning in Montreux in 1964. Positioning himself near a favored Montreux newsstand, he reminded her of the 1958 conversation in which her evangelical husband had advised him that if he was going to become a writer he had better memorize the names of everything. Véra beamed and assured the former student, “We tell that story all the time.” She was unfailingly gracious with these visitors, though many saw the public game Rolf had described, Véra playing net to VN’s unfailing ground strokes. In the fall of 1968 Leonard Lyons was very nearly accurate in reporting that “every major studio is sending a man to Vladimir Nabokov’s home in Switzerland to read his new novel,” because he refused to let the manuscript—which boasted two nymphets—leave the house. Lazar was behind the unprecedented arrangement, having stipulated that only heads of studios need apply. Paramount’s Robert Evans was the first on the scene. The Nabokovs balked when they met him, subjecting him to a cross-examination. “You’re a child,” VN asserted. “You can’t be more than twenty,” alleged Véra. “You’re really head of Paramount?” (Evans wound up trading his passport for the 881-page Ada manuscript, which he read in a day, with amphetamines. And did not buy.) Andrew Field, who at twenty-nine had already published a trailblazing study of Nabokov’s work, arrived for a week’s stay in January 1969. He returned later in the year, and spent all of January 1971 with the Nabokovs. The admiration, and the conversation, must have been welcome, but Véra remained ever mindful that anything that escaped either Nabokov’s lips might end up on a library shelf one day. Her philosophy on the subject was crystal clear: Under the circumstances one said only congenial things.

  With other scholars she loosened up considerably, most often doing her impressive best to fade into the background, even if she had to lunge forward to keep herself there. Ellendea and Carl Proffer paid their first call on the Nabokovs in Lugano, late in July 1969, on the return from Moscow. Proffer was then a young professor with a deep love of Russian literature; the two couples enjoyed a spirited three-hour lunch, in the course of which Ellendea was struck by Véra’s deep curiosity about people. She appeared especially appreciative of the twenty-four-year-old miniskirted graduate student who asked good questions and showed no particular deference to the man whose picture had just graced the cover of Time; generally Véra smiled on those women who stood up to her husband. On a subsequent visit, having navigated a number of difficult subjects, Ellendea mentioned the informal study she was making of how couples met. Vladimir began willingly to talk. It was at this time that Véra cut in with her quip about the KGB. What were all these questions? She had a half-smile on her face when she did so, but proved a master of the conversationally spilled ink. A half hour later she turned the question around, almost shyly. “And when did you find your happiness?” she asked the Proffers. She could be warm and welcoming—Stephen Parker and his French-born wife Marie-Luce, the Appels, Berkeley’s Simon Karlinsky, the scholar Gennady Barabtarlo and his wife, all saw the twinkle in the eye, enjoyed the sprightly turns of phrase—without giving away anything of herself.* Nina Appel noted that it was almost impossible to prompt Véra into talking about herself. Parker learned to disguise his questions as ones about VN if he expected Véra to answer. Those who got beyond, or around, the wariness found something of the Véra her husband knew. An agent who worked with her in her eighties believed her the most interesting person she had ever met, echoing a comment Alison Bishop had ma
de about the two Nabokovs at Cornell. Jane Rowohlt perhaps put it best. The Montreux rooms were declared a nonsmoking zone; Jane was a committed smoker. It hardly mattered, she shrugged. One smoked when one tended to be bored, and with Véra one was never bored.

  These, though, were friendships as bibliography. A few relationships reached beyond art. Véra and Sonia grew closer in middle age than they had been previously, although they remained capable of the full-fledged blowout, the kind that could send one party hurtling out of a hotel in a self-righteous huff. After Sonia moved from New York to Geneva in mid-1968 the sisters managed to see each other with some regularity. Together they had arranged for Véra to fly to New York earlier in the year so as to relocate the ailing and disoriented Anna Feigin to Montreux. Sonia was happy to assist with the move, but the responsibility for Feigin’s care necessarily fell to her older sister; Anna and Sonia feuded on alternate days of the week and had been on and off speaking terms for years. Feigin thought Sonia selfish in the extreme; she trusted only Véra. By the time Véra arrived in New York in March 1968, the seventy-eight-year-old Feigin had begun to talk of traveling to Switzerland by taxi. She was frail but combative. Véra remained calm, in a gray suit and pearls, throughout the ordeal. She installed her cousin with a dame de compagnie in a Montreux apartment, visiting her every other day. The arrangement placed new burdens on her time. She resorted even to a form letter, attributing her silence to her cousin’s deteriorating health.

  She spent considerably less time with Lena, whose manner she found irritating even at nearly a thousand miles’ distance. She disapproved of the emotional tone of her sister’s letters; of Lena’s relationship with her son, Michaël; of her vaunted sense of self-importance. The nondiscussion of the matter that lay between them continued. After Lena alluded to the religion issue in 1966, Véra suggested crisply that they agree to disagree: “It is no use raking up that past of which you write. You know what I think about it, and you have explained your own viewpoint. So why call up memories which are distracting to you?” Lena did not endear herself to her sister by warning—she would have known this numbered among Véra’s greatest fears—that she was letting herself be duped in Sweden, where Vladimir’s books were execrably translated. She was evidently as put off by her sister’s not having consulted her on the subject as Véra must have been by the reprimand. It says a good deal that Véra rarely appealed to Lena, a translator among a tight-knit community of such experts—she knew, and boasted of knowing, most of Sweden’s foremost translators—for so much as a newspaper clipping. In her own way each sister made a play for sounding superior. Véra’s manner of doing so was to sound detached, serene, utterly unflappable.

  Relations deteriorated in early 1967, when Lena described her first grandson, born nine weeks premature and three months after his parents’ marriage, in less than tender terms. Véra found her choice of words offensive and indignantly said as much, adding: “And thank God that we live at a time when at least some of the medieval prejudices have been abandoned—who cares whether a child was born outside of wedlock insofar as the child itself is concerned?!” By midyear the two had moved the battle to the arena where they clearly felt most comfortable. “ ‘Avorton’ is a French word to designate any animal, plant, or person that appears prematurely. The word is derogatory only when it is applied outside of this definition or to an adult. As I have this poor child with me one week out of two, I know what I’m talking about,” Lena insisted, describing her two-pound, fourteen-ounce grandson. (He proved entirely healthy.) She concluded with an exasperated: “You don’t understand a thing!” After she saw photos, Véra backed down, though not without a parting shot: “Of course, I did not understand anything—but then you never explained anything in an intelligible way.” She professed shock to hear in 1968 that Lena, who was not well-off, had neither known of nor applied for reparations payments. Her own case had been successfully resolved, Goldenweiser having secured monthly payments for his client that exceeded even his expectations. The amount seemed like a princely sum to Lena. Even in her ostensibly helpful letter Véra managed to include a little gibe about Jews and non-Jews; she could not forgive her sister for hiding behind a faith not her own. Nor did she forgive her when, inadvertently or not, Lena managed to insult Goldenweiser, with whom Véra put her in touch to file a claim.*

  She was more at ease with a few well-chosen friends. She met Vivian Crespi in 1964 through James Mason, Kubrick’s Humbert Humbert and a Swiss neighbor. Crespi endeared herself immediately to Véra, who found the new divorcée’s personal life a source of continual fascination and who took a maternal interest in it. Worldly, effervescent, politically conservative, irreverent, Crespi more than held up her end of the deal. She proved the kind of woman whom Vladimir could interview over dinner about her views on incest. “What would you think of a relationship between a brother and sister?” he inquired. “Well, I’ve never had a brother,” replied Crespi.* She could testify to Véra’s gift for friendship—Véra counseled her on her liaison with Mason, whose exit she applauded, as she did the entrance of Luigi Barzini; Véra confided in Crespi her concerns about Dmitri’s future—but felt too that Véra had little need for others. Crespi’s ribald humor was much appreciated; Véra howled when she explained the allure of a mutual friend’s new wife, a retired contortionist. Véra also admired her younger friend’s taste in clothing and recruited her for visits to a Vevey dress shop, where she bought much of her understated wardrobe. She had a limited tolerance for such endeavors, and told Crespi it bored her terribly to go alone. Doubtless it did, but the vivacious Crespi thought she was asked to go for an additional reason: She found Véra painfully, cripplingly shy. With Crespi Véra was as much at her ease as she ever allowed Mrs. Nabokov to be. Informed that Mason’s daughter was dating a member of the band Blood, Sweat and Tears, she quipped, “I trust it isn’t the second.” Asked her opinion of a portrait Mason had painted, she offered, “It looks just like that little creature in Mad magazine.”

  Crespi was somewhere at, or near, the ambiguous center of the Nabokovs’ limited social life in Montreux. “I could always get them out for Americans,” she noted, and she did. She had less luck coaxing them farther afield. Come to Rome, she insisted in 1973, shortly after the Paul Getty III kidnapping and its gruesome ransom note. “No thank you,” Véra demurred, “Vladimir prefers to keep his ears.” It was Crespi whom the Nabokovs included in their evenings when Saul Steinberg or George Weidenfeld visited; it was she who introduced the couple to William Buckley, one of the few Americans of her acquaintance whom Véra found politically enlightened. They did not often consent to an outing, nor were they easy to invite.* Topazia Markevitch, the Italian ex-wife of the Russian conductor, discovered as much when she entertained the Nabokovs one evening in her delightful Vevey apartment. She racked her brains for someone else to invite with the couple, whom she had met soon after their move to Montreux. It must be someone intelligent, it must be someone who knew how to read, it must be someone who was anticommunist. She settled on the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont, whom she briefed before the meal. He was not to speak of left-wing causes, half seriously or otherwise. The dinner began swimmingly, de Rougemont following his instructions to the letter. Midway through the meal he made an anti-Zionist comment. The air turned arctic. Markevitch tried her best but could do nothing to salvage the evening.

  Crespi came to know the frustrations of Véra’s life. She bestowed on the Nabokovs a Cyrillic Scrabble board she had bought in New York, on which the couple fought well-matched duels in the evening. (Véra’s game was often ingenious, strong rather than truly great. Vladimir focused more on the brilliant trouvaille.) It counted among the best gifts they had ever received, but was a source of some aggravation as well: “You’ve been a bad influence,” Véra informed Crespi with a chuckle. “Vladimir is cheating. He’s inventing words I know don’t exist.” It was probably the first time she had complained of this particular phenomenon, on which she had after all staked her life
. Buckley observed that Vladimir preferred for Véra to put the brakes on; the responsibilities extended well beyond keeping the Scrabble scores in check. In his diary, Nabokov kept careful track of his liquor consumption, which he rationed, as his weight was of some concern. Véra’s concerns were different. As early as the 1950s, when the jug of Tokay lounged on the kitchen counters in Ithaca, she had warned that alcohol destroys brain cells. Mary McCarthy had found her positively prohibitionist. Occasional skirmishes resulted. Horst Tappe arrived to photograph Nabokov in 1971, at about two in the afternoon. His subject kept him waiting. Véra asked the photographer to make himself comfortable and offered him a glass of wine; the bottle was nowhere to be found. “The wine is gone,” announced Vladimir on his return. But what had happened to it? “I dropped it off the balcony,” he replied, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world.