Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Vladimir made the same point differently. He existed only on the preprepared page. He disassociated himself from the lame words he may—or may not—have let fall in conversation. A monumental ego doing his best to obliterate the self, he had long contested he was a dreary character, of uninteresting habits and few friends. These assertions sounded different when they came from Véra, as did the account of her husband’s Parisian affair, which she was assigned to address as well. A husband’s infidelity always sounds different in a wife’s retelling; this wife essentially shrugged off the events of 1937.

  The review made for an arduous and infuriating exercise, and the opening skirmish in what became a protracted war. Ever the obscurantist, Véra did herself no favors. Field attempted to deny she was “a guardian harpy” and was asked to excise the reference. He was not allowed to assert that she loved her husband. (As Vivian Crespi observed of Véra, “She so often put her worst foot forward due to shyness.”) At the end of May Field delivered a revised manuscript, which did nothing to pacify Vladimir; by December biographer and subject were off speaking terms. In Véra’s view a hideous year’s labor had yielded a biography “which teems with factual errors, snide insinuations and blunders that Field refuses to correct after having promised, when starting the job, to publish nothing that VN would not approve.” A full-dress legal battle ensued, the manuscript hurtling back and forth between publisher and lawyer over the course of four years. Véra read the final version upon its 1977 publication. By page two she had disputed Field’s physical description of her husband, of the sitting room of the apartment, his report on how VN took his coffee. With his statement that the marriage was as intricate and as essential as the work she had no quibble.

  She was well enough to travel by the end of May, when the couple set off for Italy, on a vacation that disappeared under a deluge of letters and tax forms. Moreover, the McGraw-Hill contract had been good for five years and was up for renewal; Véra was under some pressure to set her thoughts on the matter to paper. “This still is not the long letter on the McGraw-Hill employment agreement which I am slowly composing but cannot complete because of the ever more baffling monetary situation and also because the complexities and diversity of the details to be tackled leave me breathless whenever I try to look at them all at once. So I write down something different every now and then but know that I still do not have a proper picture of the entire situation,” she apologized to the lawyers. She was weary, and gave up ground in the negotiation. Her personal correspondence came to a halt. At the end of the summer she was moving at a reduced speed, and felt miserably behind in everything. Two weeks later the Rowohlt translators arrived for their last weeklong Ada session; they conferred every evening until seven. As ever Véra’s concern was for her husband, who was working flat-out on a new novel—it was to be Look at the Harlequins!—from which he could not be separated. She was practically beside herself. “I know that he doesn’t need to work so much, that it’s bad for him, but I don’t know what to do,” she wrote Dmitri, adding that she felt herself impossibly beleaguered. Even the letters she most wanted to answer sat sometimes for four months. “We can only plead the appalling pressure of work that obliterated all sense of time,” she apologized to Simon Karlinsky, who had attempted to intervene with Field.

  Field was the most conspicuous of the shadowgraphers in 1973 but not the only one. In Paris Irina Guadanini continued to pine for Nabokov, as she had since 1937. She kept a file on him nearly until her death in 1976, clipping even Véra’s photos from the paper. Less fond of Véra, and more vocal, was Zinaida Shakhovskoy, still licking her wounds from the near-encounter at the Gallimard party in 1959. Shakhovskoy had known the Nabokovs since the early 1930s and was happy to distort most of the intervening years to her own uses. Slowly it came out that the two women had had an unpleasant conversation in Paris, before the war. But in Shakhovskoy’s eyes Véra’s offenses were legion. First and foremost, the Nabokovs appeared intolerably happy. “It has not been an unhappy marriage then?” an interviewer inquired. Vladimir won no new friends by replying, “That is the understatement of the century.” This was clearly a hoax. How could it be otherwise when Véra so effectively shooed visitors away, when her husband had been renowned in the emigration for his amorous conquests? Among their countrymen the trouble went beyond jealousy. The sense was that Véra did not want Russians around. And as Rosalind Wilson, Edmund’s daughter, observed of Véra’s profile in a certain community: “High-born Russian ladies of Tsarist times are hopeless snobs about Russian ladies they consider bourgeoise.” That Véra was celebrated and supreme in Montreux was all the more unpardonable, in the eyes of an ex-aristocrat, for her not having been born so.

  She was of course something far more objectionable still. It was Véra who paid the price for Vladimir’s exogamy. Old friends still wrote to say that while they were enthralled by Pnin, Lolita, Ada, they could not help mourning the fact that Vladimir had parted with Russian prose. Véra was held responsible for his defection, just as, biographically speaking, she often took the bullet meant for her husband. Nabokov’s early readers, the old family friends, waited in vain for him to return to his real themes, to their passions, to novels of the heart and not the mind. For him to have escaped all the schools who liked to claim him was one thing, but this was the Homeland calling. Quite obviously, the “foreign influence” was to blame. Shakhovskoy saw Véra where Pale Fire’s Kinbote saw Sibyl Shade, reviewing her husband’s pages and artfully excising everything connected with his luscious Zemblan theme from the manuscript. If it were not for Véra, Vladimir would be jolly and forthcoming and gregarious and spiritual, and most important, he would write in Russian. That he was by nature discerning in the company he kept, and jealous with his time, and bored by most of the polemics that consumed émigré society, and a champion grudge-holder*—that he enjoyed playing cat-and-mouse games with his reader—meant nothing if there was a Jewish wife in the picture. In a word, he had been “Jewified.”

  In Paris Shakhovskoy made herself an active clearinghouse for all the noxious comments occasioned by envy, linguistic resentment, and unsettled scores. Véra’s cardinal sins began with the 1932 morning in Kolbsheim, when she had reminded Shakhovskoy’s mother that she did not celebrate a saint’s day. She had answered correspondence in her husband’s stead; she had suggested her husband write Lolita for commercial gain; she had coddled Dmitri; she had sent back her hot consommé in the Palace dining room; she was a mythmaker. Shakhovskoy went so far as to assert that Véra had nearly been her husband’s coauthor, acknowledging that in her efforts she had outstripped all the other Russian literary wives. As the pantheon included Sonya Tolstoy and Anna Dostoyevsky, this was some feat. The taller pedestal only made her more vulnerable to attack. Into this mix of admiration and resentment Shakhovskoy stirred a fair, and potent, quantity of prejudice.† The charges were the usual ones, this side of well-poisoning: The Nabokovs surrounded themselves with Jews. Véra was tightfisted, and made her husband miserly. They were cunning. They were ambitious. They were rich. Asked if he would ever travel to Russia, Vladimir had replied, to the Soviet Union, no, to Israel, yes. Generally this is the wrong thing to say within earshot of someone who subscribes to racial stereotype.

  Even as Vladimir published Strong Opinions, a volume of comments and crotchets meant to brick up any chinks in the walls of his fortress reputation, Shakhovskoy began quietly sandblasting away. In 1973 Véra believed Field to be her greatest headache, but that was only because she had not read a Paris-based Russian periodical called The New Review. Its June issue carried Shakhovskoy’s “The Desert,” a short story about the acclaimed writer Walden, a name the Russian reader recognizes immediately as a variation on “Wladimir.” Celebrated as much for his genius as for his arrogance, Walden has lived for years in temporary accommodations and resides finally in a luxury hotel. His daughter is beautiful and spoiled and an amateur actress, making a film in Italy. For years Walden’s wife has done everything for him,
from ordering his meals in restaurants to arranging his interviews. Now he is to face a young scholar alone for the first time; his wife has died six weeks earlier. Her photo sits on the table in the apartment: “Her blue eyes seemed transparent, her thin lips were compressed, and her thin-nosed sharp face bore the mask of the refined arrogance which she considered the mark of aristocracy specifically because she did not belong to the aristocracy.” Walden’s thoughts drift back to a great love, a fiancée of his youth, the perfect embodiment of all Slavic ideals, a simple-hearted girl whose father had advised against the marriage. And he is overwhelmed by emotion, by the sudden realization that he has lost his entire empire, that the dead wife, “under the pretense of caring for him and liberating him from his cares,” has instead sapped him of his strengths:

  It was only to her that he read his manuscripts, it was her advice alone that he followed. She signed his contracts, corrected the proofs, drove him in an automobile, ordered his clothing and plane tickets, decided whom he might see and whom he should not. She was his cashier and manager and besides her, he had nothing except that which he imagined and about which he wrote.

  His works were soulless. He has turned to ice, in person and on the page.* Overwhelmed by his memories of the past, by the realization that once, long before, he had been alive, in love, radiant, surrounded by friends, “he suddenly felt like removing the forcibly placed mask that had already overgrown his actual face.” Rising from his chair he defies the pale eyes that stare out at him from their frame. Fearfully but decisively, he relegates the photo to a drawer. He is flooded with relief.

  Only when the story found its way into an anthology later did “The Desert” come to Véra’s attention. So transparent were its references that a reviewer referred to the “Swiss hotel” in which Walden lives, although the country of his residence appears nowhere in the story. Elena Sikorski read the story in 1978 and lost no time in firing off an outraged letter to its author. She predicted that Véra Evseevna—“like a true aristocrat in spirit, if not in estate”—would not even dignify the Princess’s screed with her attention. She underestimated the force of Véra’s inattention. She was livid that her sister-in-law had leapt into the fray, all the more so after reading her letter. “Why did you find it necessary to defend me?” she reprimanded her. A birthday plant arrived from Elena the same week; petulantly Véra informed her that she would not even thank her for the present. She was less certain of how to proceed in 1979, when Shakhovskoy published a Russian-language biography of Nabokov, a work that offered up a similar effigy of Véra, this time as nonfiction.*

  “Without drawing a portrait of Véra Evseevna myself I will say only that virtually all the printed descriptions I have read of her strike me as wholly or seriously wanting,” conceded Field, in a line that provoked no marginal eruptions. Véra doubtless agreed, with one possible exception. Throughout the latter half of 1973 Nabokov was at work on the new novel for which McGraw-Hill was waiting impatiently, having scheduled the book for the fall of the following year. He finished Look at the Harlequins! in April 1974, days after his seventy-fifth birthday, which the couple celebrated quietly in Montreux with George Weidenfeld. The forced march left both Nabokovs winded. Véra did all she could to put off visitors until May, to allow her husband a chance to catch his breath; the weather was damp, aggravating his neuralgia and the rheumatism in her neck and shoulders. Pressured for a description from which he might draft catalogue copy, editor Fred Hills was informed that the book was a love story, spanning fifty years and several continents. It is in fact another novel masquerading as a memoir, in which a latticework of truth occasionally flashes provocatively from beneath the luscious overgrowth of a thousand fragrant fictions. Vadim Vadimovich is an émigré novelist with whom Vladimir Vladimirovich shares a birthday and a backlist, as well as a taste for soft-boiled eggs. He is thought by his compatriots to be arrogant, unsocial, a traitor to the Russian language. He has great success with women, four of whom consent to marry him. The most succulent bloom of his variegated love life is a prepubescent girl; this time the nymphet is his biological daughter. If ever a book was written to confound a “matter-of-fact, father-of-muck, mucking biograffitist,” this is it; Nabokov seems to have set out to prove that no one could travesty his life as elaborately as the man inside that life.

  Vladimir had enjoyed pulling Field’s leg about his previous wives and now gave full rein to the idea, providing a familiar catalogue of Nabokovian women. Wife number one speaks no Russian, is cruel, and disloyal; wife number two is dismally stupid, prudish, forgetful, and a poor typist. Both die before their time, freakishly sacrificed to the plot. Wife number three is a willing sexual partner but volatile, an inattentive reader, a lover of middlebrow literature, and ultimately faithless. The twenty-seven-year-old whom Vadim Vadimovich meets when he is seventy proves the “ultimate and immortal one.” She is again “You,” as was Véra in Speak, Memory. As in that memoir, she appears well before her entrance into the novel. That entrance is made in a fashion far more appropriate to the relationship it calls to mind than was the evening encounter on a Berlin bridge: On an American college campus “You” comes upon Vadim Vadimovich as gravity conspires against him and the folder under his arm spills its contents onto the campus walkway. She helps him to order his papers. She knows the whole radiant oeuvre, having studied the early work in photocopies. She disapproves of the smell of liquor on his breath. She addresses a sheet of paper as if it were an animate object. She identifies a butterfly, in gorgeous Russian. And she does this nimbly, animatedly, decisively, all at once, exactly as Véra did everything.

  A “turquoise temple-vein” glistens under the late arrival’s translucent skin; Vladimir had nuzzled a blue one in a letter to Véra. Zina’s is alternately blue or turquoise in The Gift. When asked to read a manuscript attentively, You snaps—sounding almost too much like Véra—“I read everything attentively.” This VV decides retroactively to dedicate his early works in their English editions to You.* He slams the door shut in the face of the prying biographer in precisely the words he used in Speak, Memory, when writing of the other “You,” the real-life Mrs. Nabokov; we are not to know what she, what he, what the two of them, know. “Your delicate fingers” of Speak, Memory are here “your dear delicate hand.” Her mask is a fictionally inspired one, a pair of harlequin sunglasses, a Lolita legacy Véra had modeled for a photographer in Montreux. In a gratifying case of life imitating art imitating life, You makes faint crosses in the margins of Vadim’s manuscript cards, ostensibly the book we hold in our hands. What should appear on the manuscript pages of Look at the Harlequins! but Véra’s faint little querying crosses. You turns everything in Vadim’s life around, quite an achievement, given his particular spatial disability. It is a peculiar tribute to someone who has deprived the book’s author of a language and a life and was holding him hostage in a foreign country.

  When pressed to name her favorites among her husband’s works, Véra generally cited Pale Fire.* Whether she felt exposed or not, she allowed herself the rare luxury of an extravagant opinion about Look at the Harlequins! Where Transparent Things had been “adorable” and Ada had been “wonderful,” she raved about the new novel, which she positively loved. Vladimir suspected that reviewers of Harlequins might fail to share that rapture. On October 1 he composed a Russian poem, dedicated to Véra. His harlequins would be ill appreciated, he predicted, “dubbed jesterly and deceptive.” Véra alone would properly grasp and appreciate their—and his—kaleidoscopic virtues. He was right; the book struck many as self-indulgent, as if Nabokov had penned a Festschrift to himself. It seemed a kind of dead-end novel, a work in which a high-octane writer was noisily spinning his wheels. The general sense was that VN should, well, get out more. “To say it plainly, the book strikes me as the production of an imagination paralyzed by vanity,” opined Anatole Broyard in the Times. Where Shakhovskoy had credited Véra with having stifled her husband, reviewers began to suspect Switzerland. Even some of Na
bokov’s best readers believed the isolation was taking a toll on the work. They had a point. Where the rest of the oeuvre is involute, the last works feel ingrown, Harlequins perhaps most of all. “This is the novel to end all of Nabokov’s novels—or at least one hopes so,” declared a less-than-smitten Peter Ackroyd in London. He could not have known his statement to be to some measure prophetic.

  3

  “Here we are at last my darling,” Vladimir wrote Véra in Russian, illustrating the dates April 15, 1925, and April 15, 1975, with a splendid, shimmering butterfly. For years he had reminded himself of his wedding date by posting the prepared agenda book sticker “Aujourd’hui, c’est notre anniversaire de mariage” in his datebook. (Generally he was sensitive to anniversaries. On May 8, 1963, he had scrawled, “40 years since Véra and I met.” On the same day he noted that the tailor was to mark up her fur coat.)* The April date must have been particularly significant to the author of Ada, to the writer who has been called America’s great artist in nostalgia. Véra was aware of the fifteenth of April as well, although she usually forgot her birthday, which Vladimir very touchingly remembered. The extent to which the life and the work were inseparable in her mind—and the extent to which she was ill equipped to discuss the former—is clear in the only mention she made of that golden date in her correspondence. Just after the anniversary she wrote the Paris lawyer Louba Schirman, who was exploring possibilities of a film adaptation of Mary. Véra was pleased with the idea, as she was particularly fond of that novel. “Incidentally, Mashen’ka [Mary] was written in the first year of our marriage of which we celebrated the 50th anniversary this April 15. That makes the book fifty years old,” she extrapolated. It was an odd way of putting it: That also made the marriage fifty years old. She spent at least part of that anniversary at her desk. On April 15, 1975, she replied to an admirer who confessed to having relieved the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe of their copy of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, having found an inscribed volume in the stacks. She had removed it to her home for better care, replacing the library gem with a fresh copy. On her husband’s behalf, a chuckle in her voice, Véra wrote: “Though basically a law-abiding citizen he cannot help condoning your little crime.”