Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Primarily because of Anna Feigin, the two Nabokovs occasionally traveled separately from Montreux, Vladimir decamping first, Véra following once she had seen to her cousin’s needs. In early April 1970, just before their forty-fifth wedding anniversary, they were separated for a week. Vladimir traveled alone to Taormina, where Véra was to meet him. He was in search of butterflies, sun, and salvation from American tourists, who considered him their property. From Sicily he picked up the correspondence where he had left it years earlier, writing his wife daily, reprising his themes of the 1920s. Had she found the note he had slipped into her suitcase? He had found their restaurant, the one they remembered with such affection from the 1960 visit. He was utterly in love with Taormina, and had nearly bought a villa (“8 rooms, 3 baths, 20 olives”). He was bored without her. He could not resist the old temptation of coining a new endearment with each letter. She was his “golden-voiced angel.” A New York Times reporter called about a visit; Vladimir put him off until Véra’s arrival, when the three could explore the local lepidoptera together. He had bought her a present. He held tenaciously to her being with him on their anniversary, a sentiment he expressed in a trilingual sentence, days before her arrival on the fifteenth, when her favorite orchids were delivered to her room. He was sorry to see the correspondence end. By August he was composing love poems to her again.

  Nineteen-seventy was the year of translating mercilessly. It began with Vladimir reworking Michaël Glenny’s version of Mary, Nabokov’s first novel, to which he did not feel Glenny had done justice. (For his part, Glenny concluded the author to be “some kind of lexicomaniac.”) The couple spent Easter week in Rome, during which time Véra was in constant touch with Mondadori, who had brought out and hastily withdrawn an Italian Ada. If the Milan-based editor would consent to travel to Rome with the book’s translator and a fat English-Italian dictionary, the Nabokovs would be willing to consecrate several evenings to all three of them, Véra offered, in French. She took careful notes of the phone conversation that followed this proposal. The Mondadori editor assured her that “it did not matter for Italian readers if [the] translation has some howlers.” Véra rejoined that it did for the author. Although there was no further contact with Mondadori, the Nabokovs occasionally attempted to rework the text themselves over the summer. They made minimal progress, as Vladimir threw up his arms in despair each time they sat down to check a passage or two. (As well he should have: Five years later the original defective translation was back on sale in Italy.) At the end of the year he noted in his diary that Dmitri had reworked some two-thirds of Glory into English. “The rest heroically translated by Véra, the entire thing corrected by me, an excruciating task that took 3 months to complete with a few interruptions. Last Russian novel, thank God,” he added, a sentiment his wife could only have shared. Not that that was her salvation. Two years later she was badgering Mondadori again, this time on Glory’s account. She had discovered thirteen serious errors in the first twelve pages of the Italian edition. These tribulations led VN to an inevitable conclusion: “All writers should write in English.”

  Not unrelatedly, 1970 proved something of a banner year financially. The taxes about which Vladimir carped so vocally were considerable; he pronounced them “shocking.” Véra assumed all blame for the situation. She had made provisions for only about half the amount her husband actually earned that year. “Lack of imagination on my part,” she quipped in a letter to Paul, Weiss, inquiring as to how, if at all, the damage might be minimized after the fact. She proposed a rather novel interpretation of foreign rights income, one, alas, that counsel was not convinced would be acceptable to the IRS. There was nothing whatever lacking in her imagination. She was moreover befuddled by Putnam’s accounting. “I wonder what other writers (or their wives) do to keep these things in order. I feel sadly incompetent,” she lamented.

  The paper threatened to bury her—the folders and files cluttered most surfaces of the Montreux apartment, where the overflow of office files occupied her bedroom—but the intrusions she most resisted, or most attempted to resist, were the human ones. In 1970 she counseled Dmitri that a crucial lesson in life was learning to push people away without offending them. There were simply not enough hours in a day. She had additional reason to have resisted the callers; no one who knew her well thought her extroverted. In the spring of 1970, after a trip to London, McGraw-Hill’s executive editor and director of subsidiary rights, Beverly Jane Loo, stopped in at the Montreux Palace. A poised and tough negotiator, Loo was not known in the industry as a shrinking violet. All the same she changed her clothes four times before the initial meeting, settling finally on a classic glen plaid suit, in which she paced nervously by the lake. In the lounge a half hour before the appointed time she found Vladimir, who greeted her warmly; he may have been told she was Chinese, as he recognized her immediately. Explained Nabokov to the woman with whom his wife had been corresponding and speaking regularly: “Oh Miss Loo, it’s so good to meet you at last. I’m sorry Véra isn’t here, but she’s very nervous about meeting you. She thinks of you as la Formidable.” When Véra came down she ordered a whiskey, neat. Loo was stunned, and said as much. “I thought all Americans drank whiskey,” Véra explained quietly. The two formidables became fast friends, joking later about their mutual apprehension. Véra had already requested that all McGraw-Hill paper—she had been writing various members of the firm as often as four letters a day—be channeled through Loo, who took to visiting once or twice a year, and who became one of the two New York publishers to whom Véra signed her letters with love.

  Beverly Loo kept a small menagerie in and near New York: a dog, four cats, and a horse. Véra displayed photos of them in the Montreux apartment and sent warm regards to them in her letters. Asked why the Nabokovs did not keep an animal, Vladimir told Loo he was unwilling to share Véra with anyone, even a pet. (Given that response and the couple’s general demeanor, she was surprised to discover they had a son.) Loo lunched one day with the Nabokovs in early 1976, after which the three moved to the salon for coffee. Between courses, Vladimir excused himself. He was not feeling well, and promised to rejoin the two women in the lounge. He had brought down his wooden box of notecards to impress his progress on their visitor, lunching with the cards on the floor beside his chair. Uncharacteristically, he forgot the box when he left the table. The maître d’ came running into the lounge to return the cards to Véra, who smiled at Loo. “Let’s play a little joke,” she suggested, wedging the box behind the visitor on her plush armchair. By the time Vladimir returned the cards had vanished. “Oh, VN, you took the box upstairs with you, didn’t you?” Véra asked off-handedly. Her husband flashed red and began to sputter. He seemed on the verge of a heart attack. The panic was contagious; Véra and Loo scrambled to produce the box, waving it excitedly in the air. The genial conjurer rebounded splendidly. Slyly he assured his wife, “I was just trying to scare you.”

  The select few for whom she might have cooked scrambled eggs in the apartment—the other half of the repertoire remained a family secret—came too seldom. She missed neither America nor campus life, but did long for a few friends. Véra protested regularly that she did not hear from Elena Levin as often as she would like, sounding slightly hurt. “I don’t know if you ever remember us but we do remember you—affectionately,” she wrote on her 1970 Christmas card. Wistfulness crept into her voice as the decade wore on, not enough to move her to revise her opinion of Solzhenitsyn, whom Elena admired and Véra dismissed as third-rate, but enough to make clear her affection: “How sadly we regret that you do not come to Europe; or if you do, never to Switzerland; or, if you do, never to Montreux! Please do do it!” she implored the Levins. More stunning was the concession she made in early 1975 to Barbara Epstein, who had written from The New York Review to see if she might tempt Vladimir into a review. “We still have not given up hope that at some time in a not too distant future we may have the pleasure of seeing you and Jason again. We shall not discuss Vi
et Nam or anything political, and shall have a wonderful time together,” Véra promised, having delivered the news that her husband was far too busy to consider Epstein’s assignment. She was at once deeply concerned, and deeply serious, about friends’ children. Were they happy? Were they in love? Were they in good schools, i.e., those with old-fashioned curricula?

  The Véra of the tender emotions did not for a minute disagree with the assertion that she was charged with representing her husband’s anger. The letters to Ergaz are strung together with protests that VN was distressed, furious, enervated, perplexed, resentful, offended, incensed. “ ‘Le doux M. Nabokov’ n’est pas toujours doux,” Véra warned the French agent on one occasion. If she first performed a little jig of do-I-have-to-Volodya? it has been lost to posterity. It seems unlikely; she was generally as angry as he, often more so. As early as January 1971, Andrew Field began to notice resistance on the part of his subject; he and Vladimir exchanged no unpleasant words. That dialogue was entrusted to Véra, “acting as plenipotentiary,” in a phone call between hotels. A good year later she sounded still a reluctant (or naïve) plenipotentiary. Surely Field could not resent her for having typed what her husband dictated.

  There was of course a certain disingenuousness in the don’t-shoot-the-messenger-missives. Her husband’s words were immortal, hers were to be thrown away. “I don’t think about my letters, write them anyhow and they are not fit to be quoted. Incidental information that I impart is not meant to be treated as anything absolute. Not fit for footnotes,” she cautioned Boyd. When her words were taken at face value, when she was cited, she availed herself of a ferocious instinct to disavow. No one, it seemed, could get his facts straight. In 1971 she denied every remark ascribed to her in a scrupulously researched New York Times Magazine piece. She engaged in a veritable cult of denials. She swore up and down that she had never said a single word Boyd quoted her as saying; she abjured all marginal notes, even those in her firm hand; she went so far as to deny to a reporter that she was proud of Dmitri. Appel watched her renounce statements he had heard with his own ears. She asked him to delete a comment she had made about Gina Lollobrigida from his manuscript of Nabokov’s Dark Cinema: “I am sorry to bother you with this but I really hate to appear to be insulting poor Lollobrigida and I never, ever, ever made the remark ascribed to me!”* The objections were all the more heated the closer they approached truth, as Boyd noted when Véra attempted to wriggle free of Zina Mertz. She attempted to refute the entire Irina Guadanini affair and had gone so far as drafting a letter to that effect—until, wrangling with his conscience, Boyd broke the news that the love letters had survived. She remained elusive even after having admitted to him that she was well hidden. He felt she would have denied she was the “you” of Speak, Memory if she could have.

  At Cornell the Polish princess who had accompanied Nabokov to class had been silent. In Montreux the woman over whose patronymic her Russian correspondents routinely stumbled was anything but.* This only allowed greater room for misunderstanding. She went blithely on her way, letting the counterfeit versions of Véra Nabokov pile up while the original remained unknown. She seemed to feel she could will someone to believe she cast no shadow, or, if he noticed an angular black shape trailing behind her, that that shadow was not hers. She remained a bafflement to the biographer. Having given him next to nothing to go on, she rebuked Boyd, sounding a little wounded, that she “was surprised by my reflection in your mirror.” Nabokov wanted what every writer wants: to exist solely in his prose. This was to be their mutual fate. It was Vladimir’s blessing, Véra’s misfortune. In any language her letters were terse; they arrived in place of her husband’s; she haggled over money where he did not; her eyes never left her husband in interviews; she would not deign to explain herself. In short she was a shrewish, controlling, dragon lady, and she was holding her husband hostage in Montreux. The biographer abhors a vacuum.

  For many years she was unaware of the ill will. It took her some time to see that a shy, overworked, morbidly private, highly principled woman could appear prickly, humorless, aloof, and instransigent. For the most part she did not care. She laughed with Sonia at the assertion that she was “sharp-witted.” Doubtless this read to her as a compliment. Less flattering was the description Edmund Wilson provided in Upstate, published in 1971. Before the book of recollections was published Wilson had written Vladimir to say that he trusted the account would do nothing to “again impair our personal relations.” Since the two had been feuding publicly since 1965 over matters Vladimir considered as much personal as professional, it is unlikely anything could have done so.‡ Véra’s charms had always been lost on Wilson, who now published an uncharitable account of his May 1957 Ithaca visit, in which she appeared prudish, disobliging, belligerent, blinded in her devotion to her own live-in juggernaut. She knew that she was not one of Wilson’s favorites but was taken aback all the same to find herself portrayed so unflatteringly. Each Nabokov wrote off the attack as fiction, in his and her own way. Vladimir bellowed that Wilson’s words verged perilously on libel, that the Nabokov of which his former friend wrote was but a fiction. Among much else, his wife’s begrudging special attention to anyone other than himself was a matter of pure invention. Véra shrugged the matter off, or at least did a year later, when there was no longer any Edmund Wilson left with whom to spar. “For my part I did not mind at all the silly things he ascribed to me in UPSTATE,” she wrote Elena Levin. “I was not very close to him. He could not have any idea of my feelings or moods, and never showed particular interest, so that those petty insinuations were like so many signals from a distant and alien planet. There were many things I valued highly in him, and V. was genuinely fond of him. He was nonetheless angry at the silly attack on me.” Her composure would be sorely tried over the next years. She knew as well as anyone that there are stock characters in literature, and that writers’ wives—and writers’ widows—are among them.

  2

  After forty-eight years of marriage, Countess Tolstoy drafted a press release from Yasnaya Polyana announcing that having devoted her entire life to him, she was leaving her husband. (She did not get far. Several months later it was Tolstoy who fled; the story of his defection consumed the front pages.) The same year in her marriage found Véra Nabokov tangling with Andrew Field on her husband’s behalf. Field’s manuscript arrived in mid-January 1973, poor timing in the extreme. On January 6, the day after Véra’s seventy-first birthday, Anna Feigin had died of a sudden heart attack in the Montreux hospital. She was legally blind and practically deaf; the Nabokovs had been caring for her for exactly five years. The emotional loss was rivaled by physical pain for Véra, who was suffering from two slipped discs. She was uncharacteristically vocal about the discomfort, which had plagued her since Christmas and would continue through February, admitting that the French phrase “deux vertébres écrasés” much better conveyed the torture of her condition than the English. (The Nabokovs’ illnesses were by and large occupational hazards. Vladimir twisted his thumb picking up a dictionary; he pulled out his back lifting a case of books—“second-rate books,” more insultingly. Véra’s eyes, wrists, right arm, and back caused her the most trouble. Cribbing from his own lectures, VN held in the 1972 Transparent Things that the spine is “the true reader’s main organ”; it was almost too appropriate that Véra’s should crumple.) The discomfort was such that she was barely able to fold herself into a taxi—with Anna Feigin’s dame de compagnie, in imitation ermine, and with Vladimir carrying Véra’s handbag—to attend to the formalities. Véra was too ill to attend the cremation, at which Sonia joined Vladimir. The loss of the relative with whom the family’s fortunes and misfortunes had been so much entwined for nearly a half century was deeply unsettling. Vladimir woke from his sleep the night before the funeral in an “angry panic,” having dreamed that he and Véra had been separated at an Italian railway station. He had lost her to a departing train. Two nights later he sat up in bed and saw a set of guillotines i
n the shadows under the window in his room. He had just enough time before the image faded to wonder if Véra was being “prepared” next door.

  Field’s manuscript arrived the following week. The original plan had been for Véra to read through the pages first, but she returned from a hospital stay only at the end of January, by which time Vladimir had already begun his review. He pronounced the manuscript “cretinous.” In discomfort of all kinds, Véra annotated the chronicle as she read; between them the Nabokovs produced 181 pages of comments on a 670-page manuscript, a process that consumed the better part of a month. Husband and wife submitted their general comments to the biographer in separate letters, along with a long list of matters of fact to which they expected him to attend. Véra’s six-page missive went out on March 10. She was primarily disturbed by the flattened image of her husband she found on the page:

  You have written a book about a man whose life is creation and cannot be separated from its creative substance, and you have managed to write it without ever allowing this creative substance to show. Your subject is as creative when he speaks of last night’s dinner as of his new work in progress. After close to 48 years of life together I can swear that I never once heard him utter a cliché or a banality. This is the central point of his life, and you have managed to miss it completely.