Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  The next years were about nothing so much as the luxury of fuzziness, of dislocation, of the domestic arrangement that allows one to abstract oneself from daily life. As the Nabokovs reacquainted themselves with the Riviera, Dmitri was settling in Milan, where a fine voice instructor had been found for him. Véra’s letters to the young artist are all of them reminders to put art above comfort. He was to disregard street noise, unsightly lavatories, cockroaches (an inevitable fixture of life, Véra reminded her son), and focus exclusively on his work. It alone mattered. She knew well which facts should be kept at bay so that the fictions might flourish. Dmitri had been commissioned to translate The Gift for Putnam’s, and his progress was slower than his parents might have liked. “Do tell me your deadline,” Véra advised Minton in January. “Don’t tell Dmitri.” In the end Dmitri translated the first chapter, and Michaël Scammell, then a Columbia graduate student, the remaining four.

  The dispossession was not entirely spatial. Véra’s December challenge to Lena elicited a shrill four-page reply, in French. Lena had been long with her sister’s letter: “To be perfectly frank, I was thoroughly disgusted by it.” Did Véra think that twenty-one-year-old Michaël believed in the stork? He knew by heart the names of every one of his grandparents and great-grandparents. Surely she could not think it possible that Lena had been decorated as she had—Véra’s older sister was very attached to her decorations, as to her title—while making a secret of her ancestry? Lena seemed to think her sister’s assumptions were based on reports she had heard from Russian friends, which launched her into a vituperative screed about the behavior of their compatriots in Berlin. Did her sister have any idea how thoroughly the Russian emigration had embraced Hitler, of the difficulty of raising a child alone, of the Nazis’ attempt to blacken her husband’s name? (The husband, from whom she had separated in 1938, had taken refuge in a Hungarian monastery, bombed in the war. Lena had had word from him in 1945 but never heard from or saw him again.) Where Véra reproached her elder sister for having renounced her Judaism, Lena was happy to provide a litany of reasons why she had entirely shrugged off the past, neglecting to distinguish between religion and nationality. She questioned her younger sister’s affiliations, having heard—erroneously—that Véra corresponded with a Russian Nazi in England. Moreover and most objectionably, Lena applied a generous dose of sibling rivalry to the hardships of the previous years. Véra had not suffered sufficiently. Did she remember Lena was a widow? She would not be surprised if Véra had forgotten:

  Your life seems to have been easy and simple compared to mine. You were not involved in the war. [Tu n’as pas fait la guerre.] You didn’t see people die, or be tortured; you didn’t see prisoners. You don’t understand what it is to barely escape a violent death. I did that twice. You don’t know what it is to, alone, build a life for two: for myself and for the child, and to protect him against the physical dangers as well as the others, more serious than the first. Since his birth, I have been both mother and father.

  If she had discarded the past, she had done so with ample reason, whether Véra understood her reasons or not.* (She could have carried the inventory further: Several of Lena’s close friends had ended their lives in suicide; she herself had twice been imprisoned, once with her three-month-old son. Her books and papers had been confiscated. She had nearly been deported.) Her postscript was doubtless a high-handed gesture toward conciliation, but could not have been read that way. Lena advised her younger sister on the steps necessary to put Vladimir in contention for the Nobel Prize.

  Writing from Menton, in measured tones and in English, Véra failed to rise to the bait. “I am glad your son knows who he is which means that he and we can meet on frank terms of friendship. I do not think the rest of your letter has anything to do with my question,” she replied. She was astonished by the explosive letter, a long-winded, nonexplanation of the question she had wanted to ask and had herself posed in a rather roundabout fashion: Why was her Jewish sister a practicing Catholic? This was the stumbling block, although it was not discussed; on all levels the sisters were speaking different languages. Véra forwarded Lena’s answer to Sonia. The youngest Slonim sister claimed not to be surprised by the letter, which says a good deal about Sonia’s continued feelings about Lena, from whom she had now been estranged for nearly forty years, and who she believed was generally unbalanced. Coolly Véra chided Lena, “I am sorry you did not write me sooner since now we are taking the boat for the States on February 19th.” She sounded not at all unhappy to be putting six thousand miles between herself and her elder sister. For the record, she denied that she corresponded with a Nazi, or a former Nazi, in England or elsewhere. And as for the Nobel, she was pleased to report that her husband cared so little for such distinctions that he had only the week before declined membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. That was an honorable institution. “The Nobel Prize Committee, on the other hand, has lately become a political racket which keeps dropping curtseys in the direction of the Kremlin. Who wants to be lumped together with Quasimodo [the 1959 laureate] and Dr. Zhivago? I think I have answered your questions,” she closed, informing Lena that her next address would be the Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills, California.

  Véra signed the letter “with love,” as Lena had done as well, but appears to have had as little inclination to embrace her sister as she did her sister’s version of the past. Certain baggage was under no circumstances to be shed, and the Jewish trunk was one such piece, all the more indispensable for being battered. Véra held on to it for moral rather than religious reasons, in much the same way that her husband had once articulated his entire political philosophy: “When in doubt choose that course which annoys the Reds most.” What had once been a healthy sibling rivalry—Véra’s handwriting is nowhere more polished than in her missives to Lena—displayed itself over the next years in a series of subtle and less subtle digs on Lena’s part, a series of lofty but biting acknowledgments on Véra’s. The two never got past the religion issue, into which they channeled their differences. Lena felt Véra made too much of her Judaism; Véra failed to grasp why her sister had—as one family member so perfectly expressed it—“gone whole hog into Catholicism.” The relationship was not strengthened by the fact that Lena had raised her son alone and felt her disconnection profoundly. She was continually astonished by Swedish mores; she found the world outside Russia to be a barren landscape. Having devoted her life to a single, highly personal cause, Véra, especially in 1960, felt her isolation represented a luxury.

  This did not prevent the two sisters from exchanging pleasantries, from sharing photos of their sons, from a short, agreeable visit at the end of 1962. (Véra was startled by how ancient her sister looked, especially since Lena was only eighteen months her elder. The reunion was followed by a two-year silence, which Véra found mystifying but made no effort to break.) Much that she felt about her hard-won statelessness—and much that she felt about her sister—was loaded into a pronouncement she delivered to Lena in 1962, when Véra was still without a permanent address. Lena could reach her by writing any major newspaper, magazine, or library. “Or practically any big publisher—especially, of course, any one of those that publish V’s books,” she added, grandiosely. While the effort to recapture the past was clear in the couple’s itinerary it did not extend overly to family. The Nabokovs left Europe for Hollywood without seeing Lena, or meeting her son. Nor did they manage a second visit with Vladimir’s brother Kirill, a travel agent in Brussels, who had attended the Weidenfeld reception. Véra wrote him from California, apologizing for the quick change in continents, and wondering why Kirill—a very talented poet—did not consider working as a translator. She had hopes he might tackle the Russian version of Lolita.

  Loaded down with gifts for Anna Feigin and Sonia, uneasy about leaving Dmitri on his own in Milan, Véra set off with Vladimir on February 18, 1960. It took Lolita’s screenwriter twelve days to travel from Menton to Beverly Hills, to trade Europe
an palms for North American ones. Photographers met the couple in Cherbourg and in New York, where after a rough passage—Véra spent one night clinging to the side of the bed, while the armchairs and table in their parlor sashayed into the suite door—they made a forty-eight-hour stop. She met with the Paul, Weiss lawyers; the first item on the agenda was termed “Escape from Olympia.” These chains would prove more difficult to slip than had most of the familial and geographic ones. At the end of the year Véra discreetly (and unsuccessfully) appealed to her husband’s foreign publishers to withhold Olympia’s share of the royalties until their differences with Lolita’s original editor were settled; the Nabokovs were never convinced Girodias had respected any terms of their contract. Walter Minton advised Véra to drop the matter, aware that Girodias would not allow himself to be so easily thrown overboard. Minton did not believe in moral victories; Véra did. She conceded only that her husband had lost interest in the dispute. “Girodias bores him, and he would like to drop the fight, which I think would be a pity,” she replied.*

  In the immediate, and through Irving Lazar, she negotiated a comfortable arrangement with Kubrick. Her husband was to be granted every creative freedom in his work; he was not to be paid for fewer than twenty-six weeks or detained in Hollywood for longer than thirty-four; he was to be entitled to a vacation. In exchange he guaranteed Kubrick his exclusive attention and agreed to participate in the film’s publicity. By rail the couple traveled from New York to Los Angeles; having spent a decade in upstate New York, Véra was exhilarated to emerge from the snowbound Rockies into the brilliant California sunshine. Upon arrival Vladimir met with Kubrick at his Universal Studios bungalow, after which he began devoting eight-hour days to the screenplay. On March 11 the Nabokovs moved into a lovely hillside house on Mandeville Canyon Road, a home that came with avocado, tangerine, lemon, and hibiscus trees and, best of all, with Klara, an excellent six-day-a-week, live-in housekeeper. At the same time Véra rented a car with which to ferry her husband to story meetings. He was more enthralled by the vehicle than was its driver. “Papa says ‘it’s an amazing white Impala,’ ” Véra told Dmitri. “I say it’s an ‘enormous thing from which I can’t see my own wings.’ ” She was unaccustomed to no-glare glass; as ever, she drew a certain comfort from reflections. Moreover, something seemed off in the Impala’s proportions. Véra could discuss neither the car nor the California roadways without recourse to the word “hypertrophied.” She found Los Angeles’s sprawl daunting, New York driving simple by comparison, the Impala both unfashionable and almost impossible to park. “We don’t go anywhere,” she wrote Elena Levin, “and we live quite far from downtown, too, so it takes hours to get to the studio for conferences.” It was about a forty-minute drive.

  For the most part she settled into the land of perfect rootlessness happily. To a great extent what pleased her in California life was its resemblance to something else: It was, she felt, “an illusion of European life as reflected in a—not crooked, but—unusual mirror.” She made the trip to the studio (which was by no measure downtown) only every two to three weeks. While Vladimir sat in the Mandeville Canyon yard with his index cards, she communed with her typewriter. In the letters that issued from it—even the one asking Mondadori to procure a “Lolita doll” for their inspection, as her husband suspected copyright infringement; or the one chastising Dmitri for his disrespect for deadlines—she sounds sunny, casual, at ease, often positively giddy. Didn’t Walter Minton think he needed a California vacation? The Nabokovs were playing tennis three times a week with an excellent coach; Véra had made great progress with her backhand. Marvelous reviews continued to pour in from all over the world. Dmitri had already begun to sing on provincial Italian stages with much success; proudly Véra compiled scrapbooks on both of her men. Vladimir expected to finish his script before the six months were out. They rubbed elbows with their share of celebrities: They dined with James Mason and Sue Lyon, who were cast in the film; they talked with David Selznick and Ira Gershwin.* At a party they were introduced to Marilyn Monroe.† Later Vladimir joked that they did their best to avoid these gatherings, at which he inevitably offended someone. He asked John Wayne what he did for a living. (“I’m in pictures,” Wayne replied.) He asked a woman he vaguely recognized if she was French; it was Gina Lollobrigida. While friends were now addressing the Nabokovs as “Dear Rock Hudson and Greta Garbo,” Véra proved as resistant to this brush with celebrity as she was to the Impala. Her day-to-day life was far from glamorous. In mid-June she apologized for her silence to Filippa Rolf, Nabokov’s fan in Sweden, who had turned out to be a poet, and a better correspondent than Véra:

  We have been extraordinarily busy since we came here, even for us. I have to carry on the whole business side—not only the enormous correspondence with publishers and agent (we only have one agent, in Paris, and I handle most of the other rights myself), but also investments, banks, planning future moves, etc. etc. And since I have had very little experience in business matters before, everything is far from smooth. But my husband has neither experience nor time for all this, so there is no choice for me but try to do my best, on a general “hit-and-miss” basis.

  The Hollywood interlude was twice prolonged, once at Kubrick’s request, a second time because Vladimir was happily researching the new book in a local library and did not want his progress interrupted. This was one of several periods in which Véra explained that various matters would have to wait until he was again “movable.” The fall itinerary remained undecided; the Mandeville Canyon lease was extended until October 10. September was devoted to Pale Fire, for which Véra undertook various arcane research assignments: She compiled a catalogue of tree descriptions—“a hoar-leaved willow,” “a cloven pine,” “a knotty-entrailed oak”—in Shakespeare. She set the “word golf” records of which Kinbote brags—from “hate” to “love,” from “lass” to “male” in three moves—working out the solutions on index cards. By the time the Nabokovs boarded the Super Chief, on October 12, the East had begun to seem entirely unreal to Véra. She had hoped to revisit old haunts and old friends before continuing to Europe but managed only to fly, by herself—it was her first trip by air—to Ithaca, to rearrange the personal effects there. (On her return, as if obliging a theme of the life, the keys to the Nabokovs’ trunk challenged their owners to a protracted game of hide-and-seek.) During the two weeks in New York the couple saw only close friends and relatives, save for the occasional chance encounter. On Fifth Avenue one afternoon they ran into German-born Jenni Moulton, whose husband had left Cornell for Princeton. Mrs. Moulton was not the first to notice a change in Véra, with whom celebrity seemed to agree; she was radiant in a silver mink stole. “I thought of you every day in California,” Véra informed the younger woman. “Mrs. Nabokov, I cannot think of a single reason why you should think of me,” replied the startled professor’s wife. “But my dear, in Hollywood we had a German maid,” came the icy response.

  The Queen Elizabeth carried the Nabokovs back to Europe on the afternoon of November 2, 1960. They made their way circuitously to the south of France, never much out of the sight of reporters, settling temporarily at Nice’s sumptuous Hotel Negresco. They picked up the housing search where they had left off, renting a spacious apartment in an ornate, mustard-yellow building well past its splendid prime, directly on the Promenade. The place was sober but well-appointed; the pale greenish sea lay just beyond its windows. To the fourth-floor doorjamb Véra tacked a visiting card, on which she printed “Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov.” Vladimir found the sea—and even the rain—highly conducive to his work; he began writing the minute they brought their bags into the place. Véra especially appreciated the proximity to Milan and Dmitri, whom they had never before left alone for so long, and who had a more liberal interpretation of a budget than his parents would have liked. Nothing would budge the nomads now; it took a fiction to tie them to earth. Véra was hugely relieved. Her husband had had no real peace since the publication of Lolita, and the embr
yonic Pale Fire had nearly died for the screenwriting interruption. She vowed that they were not leaving Nice until the novel was out of danger. All the same the couple’s foothold on the planet remained a tentative one. When Nabokov alerted Wilson in 1964 that they were heading for America, he had some difficulty with his phrasing. It was unclear to him whether they were “going to America” or “sailing home.” He settled on the latter.

  On Véra’s part, there appears to have been little temptation to return. The couple’s protests that they intended one day to do so, in a month, a season, a year—as serious as they may have seemed in 1961—largely amounted to a polite formality, the exile’s abstract idea of return. They did not want to be perceived as disloyal, or ungrateful, or—worst of all—tax exiles, none of which they were. Nor did they want to jeopardize their American citizenship. The party line for the first years was that they were abroad only provisionally; the idea of splitting their time between America and Europe seemed appealing. After the 1960 Hollywood stint Vladimir spent a total of six weeks in America, Véra—who was willing to fly—slightly more. It was not so much that they were avoiding America as that they were embracing a state of semi-permanence; while they were neither light nor leisurely packers, the Nabokovs enjoyed their freedom of movement. Or did for the most part. In the last Cornell year Vladimir had asked where a prized student and her husband expected to settle and was informed they expected “to be in motion for some time to come.” “That’s a nice town,” he had chuckled approvingly. Véra had long written to friends that their plans were vague, the itinerary negotiable, with a hint of triumph. She was after all the daughter of a man whose life had been predicated on residency permits. At the end of the year, in Lugano, she complained of fatigue to Lisbet Thompson, her old Berlin friend, who noticed she looked worn down. She had every reason to feel, with Pnin, “battered and stunned by thirty-five years of homelessness,” but claimed to revel in the undecided future. Two more years would elapse before finally she conceded: “Nomadic life is a wonderful thing—for a time. Then it becomes something of a strain. I am well qualified to say so after some 45 years of it. However, we still remain ‘homeless.’ ” At the end of 1961 the Nabokovs were advised to settle on a fixed address for the most paradoxical of reasons: As the Paul, Weiss lawyers demonstrated, a taxpayer cannot be said to be away from home if his only home is wherever he happens to be working. In order to deduct their traveling expenses from their taxes, the couple needed to maintain a permanent residence from which they could be said to be away.