Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  She was not as forthcoming about the nature of the new work itself. “It … is not like anything either he or anyone else has ever written before. It is absolutely fascinating. I wish I were permitted to say more about it” was the description she offered the Bishops. She was no less cryptic with Elena Levin, or with Filippa Rolf, who had already heard the first two cantos. (For his part, Vladimir told reporters little beyond the fact that the word “shadow” figured in the title.) The sprint to the finish of Pale Fire was, as friends were well aware, a strain. Véra acknowledged that Vladimir was less available than ever, apologizing to various correspondents that their questions would have to wait until she could claim his full attention. It was impossible for him to “switch channels.” For the first time she was not typing the new opus; the director of the Palace had put the couple in touch with Jacqueline Callier, a cheerful bilingual secretary in her early fifties, who transcribed the novel from Nabokov’s cards on her machine at home. This left Véra free to tend to a thousand other matters. Could Minton mail them the June Playboy, in which Vladimir’s riposte to Girodias—the feud was now being fought in the American press as much as in the French courts—had appeared? Could Doussia Ergaz send on a few good novels? She would return them after reading.

  Mostly she was preoccupied by the financial details of their life, especially as the Nabokovs expected the income of the Lolita years to prove an anomaly. There was some disagreement over the Harris and Kubrick arrangements, which were baroque, and which became more so. Nor was Véra convinced that the Paul, Weiss lawyering was sufficiently imaginative. She asked Minton to hint—it was important to her that he not reveal the source of the query, which says a great deal about a great number of questions asked of a great number of other publishers over the years—to Iseman that very real and very legal methods of minimizing U.S. taxes did exist. Doubtless she had in mind a strategy she had heard Robert Graves had adopted. “Would you know, by any chance, or could you find out who is Robert Graves’ lawyer who turned him into a Liechtenstein corporation?” she queried Weidenfeld that fall.* She looked upon the creative interpretation of the U.S. tax code as a kind of magic, to which she applied herself energetically, with various advisers. (Iseman, who was extremely fond of Véra, marveled over her intuition and grasp of detail. He was also well acquainted with her very active concerns. “There never was an emotional tie between Véra and me which would transcend a tax benefit,” he commented later.) That brand of sorcery took up a great deal of her time, while in the next room Vladimir fabricated an intricate, nonlinear code of his own. On November 20 Véra predicted that her husband would “reach the blessed shore” in another two weeks, after which he would need only two additional weeks to put the finishing touches on the manuscript. Vladimir surprised even his wife; Pale Fire went to Putnam’s on December 6.

  “Don’t work too much, both of you,” Filippa Rolf cautioned the Nabokovs a week before Christmas, sounding herself under more end-of-semester strain than was healthy. Véra responded to a flurry of mail—six letters from Rolf in the space of three weeks—a month later. She advised Filippa (still “Miss Rolf” as far as Mrs. Nabokov was concerned) that she must not allow overwork to do her in. That said, she had herself found the pressure of work twice as great in the preceding months. She was well aware of the gift Lolita had bestowed: “For me one result of his [Vladimir’s] fame is that I can never stop answering his business and fan mail which consumes most of my time.” She could say as much, but disagreed heartily when a friend suggested she needed a rest. “V. is the one who works very hard (I do write an enormous number of letters, also an occasional contract, and I read proofs and translations, but this is nothing compared to his work),” she demurred, backpedaling from all prior declarations. There was ample proof in that fall and winter’s correspondence—with Lisbet Thompson, with Filippa Rolf, with Dmitri—that self-command was her middle name. Lisbet had just received her chilling medical diagnosis; Véra now shared the philosophy that had helped her through the Taos cancer scare. Most essential was that Lisbet not indulge her worst fears. As for Rolf, she hoped that in Cambridge she might fully realize her tremendous talent. “Don’t let anything upset you, just go your own way and write,” Véra exhorted, acutely sensitive to but not saddled with the artistic temperament. She was sorry to have to say so, but she could not countenance Rolf’s Swedish housemate visiting her in America. It is unclear if she disapproved because she assumed the relationship to be homosexual, or because she assumed it would not be beneficial to the work. She suggested to the young opera singer in Milan that he work eight-and-a-half-hour days, as both she and his father did. By definition an artistic career entailed steps forward and back; Dmitri must take the injustices in his stride. No artist saw his own work clearly, particularly at close range. His father had been no different.

  She could perhaps be faulted for having held the rest of the world to the measure of her husband, who had written eight novels under less than idyllic circumstances in Berlin. Much about those years still remained at the forefront of her mind. In February 1962, she began to feel sheepish about her reparations claim. Her husband’s books were being translated into German and enjoying a huge success there. At the end of the year, she learned that she was to receive a modest monthly pension for her loss of income, as well as a onetime sum for loss of property. She was pleased with the results, though Goldenweiser felt he could press the case further, and proceeded to do so. Véra returned one of her last affidavits in November 1965, along with a note: “I am unable honestly to bear witness to the loss of my ability to work: never in my life have I worked as much as I do now.” Fortune and misfortune met; as she feared the Palace Hotel address might sound too lavish to the Germans, she directed her monthly checks to a borrowed address.

  4

  In March 1961 Nabokov had attempted to interest Esquire in an excerpt of Pale Fire. “It is a narrative poem of 999 lines in four cantos supposed to be written by an American poet and scholar, one of the characters in my new novel, where it will be reproduced and annotated by a madman,” he had written from Nice.* He warned that the work was “rather racy and tricky, and unpleasant, and bizarre” but hoped Esquire might take it. The honor fell to Harper’s, who ran the novel’s foreword in their May 1962 issue, on American newsstands just as full-page ads announcing Kubrick’s Lolita appeared in the papers. Vladimir had said he would travel to Antarctica if necessary to see the film; he had only to sail to New York, which much to Minton’s delight, the Nabokovs prepared to do. Véra funneled some of her anxiety about the return into her wardrobe; her seamstress, from whom she had ordered a new coat and dress, took the brunt of it. Explaining that Vladimir had squawked when she tried on the new traveling clothes—“But they’re horrible! I would never let you wear that. Send them back”—she did so, regretfully:

  I apologize for causing you such troubles, but mine are far worse: after three weeks’ wait, having lost hours to countless fittings, here I am twelve days before my departure without the clothes which are absolutely indispensable for my trip. I cannot risk ordering anything else, I cannot risk another failure, and I don’t have time to try things on six or seven times. I have a great deal of work. My only option now is to find something off-the-rack in Geneva or Lausanne which will require only minor alterations.

  Madame Cherix admitted that the garments seemed jinxed. All apologies, she made some minor adjustments to an old gray skirt and two black dresses. Véra was distracted from the fashion fiasco by proof pages of Onegin and Pale Fire, the French translation of Pnin, and the English translation of The Gift.

  The Nabokovs set sail on the Queen Elizabeth on the evening of May 31, 1961, Vladimir correcting Onegin proofs throughout the crossing. Six journalists met them on the gangway of the ship in New York; a barrage of interviews coincided with the stay, at the St. Regis. Véra was thrilled to see her husband positively “lionized”—photographed, sought after, recognized on the street and in stores. (The exception was the Nabo
kovs’ arrival at Loews for the June 13 premiere of Lolita. As they emerged from their limousine, the photographers lowered their cameras, failing to recognize the man who had begun all the commotion.) To his immense relief Vladimir found the Kubrick film extremely good, in no way offensive, vulgar, or unartistic. While he was happy to defend the film publicly, he had no illusions about what had become of his screenplay. It had been almost entirely revised, replaced in large parts by a pre-existing script, again reworked in Kubrick’s London attic days before shooting began. Véra was more candid on this point than Vladimir, allowing that “in general the picture would have been much more brilliant” had the producers followed her husband’s script more closely. For all the obvious reasons Nabokov received sole credit for the screenplay, the result of which was an Academy Award nomination for an adaptation he had not written.* Proudly he showed off the Hollywood citation to visitors. Only in 1969 did he at last admit that he resented that his script had not been used.

  To the work he had written, the critics responded as had his Cornell students. Half were seduced, half peevishly puzzled. Orville Prescott was this time joined in his dismissal of the book by the Times’s Sunday reviewer, who found Pale Fire refreshing but suspected it had been more fun to write than it was to read. Mary McCarthy proved one of the most articulate admirers, concluding in her New Republic review:

  In any case, this centaur-work of Nabokov’s, half poem, half prose, this merman of the deep, is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality, and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the very great works of art of this century, the modern novel that everyone thought dead and that was only playing possum.†

  Véra acknowledged that the majority of the symbols McCarthy had found in the book were of her own making, but could only have revised her opinion of “that evil woman” at this time. Her personal favorite was Donald Malcolm’s glowing piece in The New Yorker, a more general reading of the novel, and a more general embrace of its author.

  Vladimir himself had little use for the commotion. The man who had sworn nearly a decade earlier that no Switzerlands could lure him away from the canyons of Arizona was now impatient with the fanfare, dreaming of the Swiss Alps. “In general the atmosphere, heady and exhilarating though it is, reflects on his nerves, and I will be glad to set sail on the 20th,” Véra declared a few days into the stay, sounding as short as she ever would with the nervefrayed celebrity. (She could have pressed the case further. Recalled one friend, “VN could be like a cornered rhino when he was in a bad mood.”) He was spared the sight of his likeness on the cover of Newsweek, which appeared on newsstands as the couple sailed back to Europe, and similarly escaped France just as a Paris-Match cover story went on sale. Reporters trailed the couple through their summer wanderings, in Zermatt, and later in the hills a few miles above Cannes. They caused quite a commotion in sedate, traffic-free Zermatt, where a six-man team arrived from the BBC to film an interview. Gleefully Véra observed that they followed Vladimir all over, “mostly in cabs, unpacking, putting up cameras and mikes, repacking, moving to another location, and all the time shooting pictures of V. catching butterflies or talking, this occasion, I am afraid, became for many tourists the highlight of their stay here. They followed in droves! And one little old lady (not this one) did her best trying to get into the picture.” While not being pursued by the press the couple spent long hours correcting the French page proofs of Pnin, which they pronounced the worst translation with which they had ever wrestled.

  After New York, and Zermatt, and France, the return to Montreux felt to Véra like coming home, but she lived still in a state of semiflux. She began to talk of a long stay, as opposed to a return to the United States, admitting that she was out of touch with most everyone she had known in Cambridge. A year later she described the perch on Lake Léman—it consisted then of two small apartments and an extra room—more in terms of default than affection: “It still is not a ‘home’ where one could be completely ‘chez soi.’ But it has so many advantages that we hesitate to change.” She was perfectly happy to concede that the lodgings were ideal, that hotel life was awfully convenient, that Montreux was “one of the most beautiful places on Earth,” but not that they had made a permanent commitment to the place. “Where we’ll settle permanently we haven’t yet decided. Maybe in Palm Springs, California,” she suggested as the years slipped by, and well after she had advised Paul, Weiss to base all financial plans on their remaining Swiss residents.

  There would be only one additional joint trip to America, in the spring of 1964. After a decade’s work, Eugene Onegin was nearing publication; The Harvard Advocate prevailed upon Nabokov to speak in Cambridge, at the university. Or had done so before suddenly falling silent: In March Vladimir nearly canceled the engagement when his hosts failed to convey the specifics of the visit. Véra appealed to him to be patient. For all her rigorousness she proved more and more the voice of moderation, signaling to her husband when she thought his words might offend, softening them for public consumption. (In 1961 a Cornellian, then working at Simon & Schuster, had sent her former professor an advance copy of Catch-22. Véra was delegated to transmit Nabokov’s response. “This book is a torrent of trash, the automatic produce of a prolix typewriter,” she proclaimed, although she had been asked to deem it “dialogical diarrhea.”) She had other concerns throughout the 1964 American stay, a one-month visit that began with a public reading at the Ninety-second Street YMHA in New York. The Nabokovs lunched on March 25 with the head of the Poetry Center and his assistant, for whom Vladimir performed his analysis of Anna Karenin(a), speaking in his customary fully rounded paragraphs. He was nervous about the upcoming evening, but expansive. He described his writing process: He handed on to Véra his cards to be typed and critiqued; she provided her analyses over dinner. If she thought something did not work, he explained, he would revise it, and she would retype it. “I do a lot of typing,” Véra offered quietly. At her request, a chair was set up in the wings, from which she observed her husband’s splendid performance. The audience was his from the moment he opened his mouth.

  The mink Véra wore throughout that trip seemed so inconsistent with the Véra Nabokov of the black cloth overcoats that few friends noticed that the woman inside the fur coat was not entirely herself either. In Cambridge Filippa Rolf, whom the Nabokovs met for tea, caught on immediately. Véra held herself so stiffly she seemed on the verge of toppling over. Elena Levin observed as much that evening, when she threw a small party for the Nabokovs’ before the reading. She saw that Véra was ashen, lacking in all vivacity. Since the arrival she had been suffering severe abdominal pains, discomfort she admitted to no one apart from Sonia, which left her some explaining to do afterward; she finally allowed that she had been ill continually since November 1963. In New York the doctors had found nothing amiss and prescribed tranquilizers; she had been heavily sedated in Cambridge. Elena Levin—who sat next to Véra in the ideally uncomfortable Sanders Theater while onstage Levin introduced Nabokov at what was to be his last public reading—thought her behavior heroic, although she, too, had no explanation until later. Véra spent her thirty-ninth wedding anniversary in bed, at Hampshire House, in New York, from which she thanked the Levins for all they had done. She was well enough on April 20 to smoke out the political leanings of a visitor: Arthur Luce Klein picked up the Nabokovs on Central Park South early that rainy Monday to drive them to the sound studio where Vladimir was to make a Lolita recording. Véra profited from the rush hour traffic to interview Klein, a former Berkeley professor, about his politics. Why had he not signed the university’s loyalty oath? She drilled him mercilessly, the three of them wedged tightly together in the front seat of Klein’s beat-up car, the rain pelting down, the traffic going nowhere.

  On April 21, in New York, she managed to stand tall at the Bollingen reception, looking, it was remembered, sensationally beautiful; it was after this event that she memorably produced
her pistol for Saul Steinberg. After five years of hairsplitting, second-guessing, triple-checking, the 1,945-page, four-volume Onegin book was at last scheduled for late June publication. To the dismay of many readers, Nabokov had rendered the most sacred work of Russian literature into English in loose iambic form, preserving Pushkin’s fourteen-line stanzas but sacrificing rhyme to meaning. Observing that others had wrongheadedly sacrificed meaning to rhyme, Véra stood familiar ground. To an interested foreign publisher, she billed the work as the first actual translation of Onegin into English.

  Several weeks before the Bollingen reception the Nabokovs had made their last trip to Ithaca, by train, where they spent three days rummaging through the items in storage. Much about the portrayals of their arrival at Owego station speaks to Véra’s vocation of the next years. In Field’s 1977 account the regal couple emerge from the dingy Erie-Lackawanna, Véra more magnificent than ever. Her husband instantly claps for a porter; of which, needless to say, there is none for hundreds of miles. Boyd pulls the camera back to reveal that it was Morris Bishop who—meeting the couple at the station—observed this grand-ducal gesture, so wholly incongruent with the surroundings, proof that the Nabokovs and America were no longer speaking the same language. Told of this interpretation later, both Nabokovs collapsed in fits of laughter. Dollying the camera back still farther, they maintained that the porter-summoning had been performed solely for Bishop’s benefit.* It was, claimed Vladimir, an entirely self-conscious gesture, calculated to raise the eyebrows of their closest American friends. They were this time players on their own stage. The performance paralleled the couple’s general attitude to America, a country on which they had set their sights since 1923, for which they had held out such great expectations, which Nabokov had so lovingly, cunningly, dissected, and from which they now distanced themselves, all the better to work their special effects. Optically the relationship corresponded to the study Lewis Carroll’s Guard makes of Alice, “first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera glass.” The remarks, elucidations, magnifications of the next years were delivered always with an eye on the full house.