Letters to Véra

by Vladimir Nabokov

  He played ball marvellously today; spread five butterflies and signed the labels himself; built a new house with Marisha; bought a new Superman which I read to him at bedtime; he eats lots and falls straight to sleep.

  The weather is vile: rather clear, a kind of convulsive sun and incessant wind. I love you. No moths – i.e. opening the window is impossible – it’s blowing too hard. Overall, a rather useless summer, but it’s doing him good. I read ‘The Nose’ to him. He laughed a lot, but prefers Superman.

  Don’t forget to bring: 1) rum 2) the box 3) pins (medium). Tell Banks that I miss the museum a lot.

  You wrote me such a darling letter. If the apartment turns out to be good, but a tad expensive – take it. I’d rather groan over a payment than discomforts. These Arctia virgo flutter in like a Harlequin onto the stage (I have just opened the window a bit, to the lamp’s great consternation). And don’t forget about my room. I will have lots of work this winter.

  The bank sent your cheques. Goldenweiser says he will pass on 50 doll. to Anyuta. I will write a Russian poem one of these days. He has suddenly understood how you need to catch and throw.

  The little cart has not arrived yet; it’ll probably come tomorrow. I kiss you my dear joy, my constant superdurable and marvellous joy.

  V.

  I am addressing this to Lisbet. Otherwise it will boomerang back here.

  A letter from Anyuta arrived at the last moment. It’s enclosed. Kissing you tenderly.

  ____________________

  [APCS]

  [postmarked 2 October 1942]

  TO: 8, Craigie Circle, Cambridge, Mass.

  [Hartsville, South Carolina]

  Friday

  Morning

  My darling, just a few words to say that I adore you and that I arrived happily after various adventures at 6 pm, while the lecture (very successful) was at eight. I am now running to the next one (three in all). I will write to you in detail again today.

  Kiss my Miten’ka and Anyuta.

  V.

  [ALS, 8 PP.]

  [2–3 October 1942]

  TO: 8 Craigie Circle, app. 35, Cambridge, Mass.

  [Hartsville, South Carolina]

  2-3-X

  Friday and Saturday

  My sweetheart,

  a million butterflies and a thousand ovations (corrected for ardent Southern expansiveness).

  But I had the vilest of trips. When I climbed into a sleeping-car in New York, it turned out that my berth was occupied by another horizontal passenger, who had been sold the same number as mine. He however took it meekly and we had a friendly chat in the atrium of the lavatory while the conductors solved our little problem. At last he was sent to another car and I scrambled up to my legitimate place – which happened around midnight. Couldn’t sleep at all, since at the numerous stations the wild jolts and thunderings of the train cars’ couplings and unlatchings allowed no rest. By day, lovely landscapes skimmed past – huge trees in a profusion of forms – with their somehow oily tint and iridescent greenery reminding me either of the image I have of the valleys of the Caucasus or of the sublimated vegetation of Potter (with a dash of Corot). Not the least trace of autumn and yet the softest ‘enchantment of the eyes’. When I got off in Florence, I was immediately surprised by the heat and the sun, and the gaiety of the shadows – like what you feel when you reach the Riviera from Paris. The train was an hour late, and of course the bus had long since gone. I called Coker, and they replied that they would call back about a car. I waited an hour and a half, in a little restaurant, by the telephone booth, in a state of ever-increasing fatigue, unshavenness and irritation. Finally a rich voice said to me on the phone that he was in Florence on business, that he was a professor (I didn’t catch his name) at the college, that they had informed him about the situation, and that around six he would return – with me – to Hartsville. The lecture was scheduled for eight. I asked, in what must have seemed a rather pale voice, how he imagined I would wait there (there were three hours to go till six), and then he merrily said that he would come over immediately and take me to a hotel, he didn’t say which, and I wasn’t even sure whether I had understood him correctly. I headed for the waiting room nearby and began to wait for him. After a while I got a feeling that a young taxi driver, talking with someone on the taxi phone by the entrance (I had gone outside, bored by the hard benches and the stuffiness), had pronounced my name. I walked closer and asked whether it was my name he had said. It turned out to be a mistake – he had had a call from some Yellowater or something like that – something that was remotely similar in sound. But then, being talkative, he told me that his friend, who someone from some hotel had ordered to bring someone from the railroad station, wrecked his car when he hit a truck and asked him to take on the job. It sounded to me as if the name of the hotel was exactly the one mentioned by the rich voice, and I proposed, for his somewhat slow consideration, the question: perhaps I was the one he was supposed to pick up. It turned out that, indeed, the gentleman was to go to Hartsville, but his colleague told him neither my name nor the name of the man who had sent him, and now he was out of reach. As no one was coming for me and as I had absolutely no idea what to do (well, I could certainly get a car for ten dollars and just go to Coker – but I was afraid that the owner of the rich voice would search for me for ever), I decided for some reason that I was the person in question. When I was delivered with my suitcase to the Salmon Hotel, it turned out that no one there knew anything. The last weak link with Hartsville represented by the driver who had delivered me disappeared (I had foolishly let him go), and I was sticking around the hall with a nightmarish feeling that everything was an utter misunderstanding, that I had been brought here instead of someone else and that the Voice was looking for me hopelessly at the railroad station.

  Thinking it over, I decided to call the college again, at least, to find out the name of the Voice; at the same time I hadn’t finished my big business on the train and had the urge to do that immediately. When I was approaching the office for the requisite information, I heard how one of the numerous people in the hall was saying to another that he could not understand what was the matter – why the taxi he had sent to the station hadn’t returned. I interfered and asked rather desperately whether it was me he was waiting for. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I am waiting for a Russian professor.’ ‘But I am the Russian professor!’ ‘Well, you don’t look like one,’ he said with a laugh, and here everything became clear, and we embraced. He turned out to be Ingram by name, a professor of theology, very good-natured and just very nice. It was already around four, and he promised that having finished what he had to do he would pick me up around five to drive me (fifty miles!) to Coker. Feeling that I wouldn’t have time to shave before the lecture (the dinner was fixed for 6.15) I set out (after the lavatory where I had awful diarrhoea) to a barber’s. They shaved me horribly, leaving my Adam’s apple all bristly, and since in the next chair a wildly screaming five-year-old child was fighting with the barber who was trying to touch the back of his head with the clippers, the old man shaving me was nervous, hushed the child, and finally cut me slightly under the nose.

  Ingram arrived on time and just as we managed to get to our first corner a skinny lady called to us from the edge of the pavement. When we stopped, she was all embarrassed and said that she had taken our car for a taxi and (as everyone here is very talkative) added that she was trying to get to Coker College – where her daughter was a student – and was afraid to be late for a Russian writer’s lecture. The day was obviously a day of whimsical coincidences, and so here were the three of us rolling along the highway, talking about Christianity and the war – a very good but somewhat tiresome conversation, lasting right to Hartsville. At six on the dot I was driven into a magnificent estate, to the magnificent multi-columned mansion of Mrs Coker (the belle-fille of the college founder, Major Coker, who lost a leg during the Civil War and who lived till he was 90), and here I remain as a guest till Tuesday. As soon a
s I barged in she told me that in ten minutes the guests invited in my honour would arrive, and at breakneck speed I began to bathe and tug at my dinner-jacket armour. I love you. The shirt came out so starched that the cufflinks would not go through the cuffs, and it ended with one of them rolling under the bed (to be discovered only today). Finally, seeing that it was already twenty past six, I shrugged off the cuffs and appeared downstairs ‘without a trace of underwear’. Intuition prompted me to demonstrate the lack of cufflinks there and then, and someone else’s cufflinks appeared at once, and to the approval of all, one of the ladies (but not the prettiest) attached them to my cardboard wrists. From that minute everything went smoothly and successfully.

  The photograph had not been sent here, so it’s no surprise that the college was expecting a gentleman with Dostoevsky’s beard, Stalin’s moustache, Chekhov’s pince-nez, and in a Tolstoyan blouse. The books hadn’t got here yet, either (they came on Friday – I have been writing this letter for two days, my darling – it’s now 10 p.m. Saturday). For that reason President Greene introduced me to the large audience in rather smoky fashion. I spoke on ‘common sense’ and it turned out – well, even better than I normally expect. After that there was the good old Wellesley ‘punch’ and lots of girls. About ten I came home with Mrs Coker and, having noticed on the brightly lit columns of the façade some very interesting moths, spent about an hour collecting them into a glass with carbona. You can imagine how tired I was by that confused day – but then I had a marvellous sleep and the next morning lectured on the tragedy of tragedy (and to finish the lecture theme: today’s, the third and final one – also in the morning, consisted of reading ‘Mlle O’ – for all this I received a cheque today – for a hundred dollars – which I will cash on Monday).

  In front of the house there is a huge garden, around it huge trees, various species of live oaks, and in one corner flower beds and the amazing caramel fragrance of ‘tea olive’ – this all in the blue of a Crimean summer – and masses of butterflies. I caught them there after the lecture, and after breakfast the college biologist (rather like McCosh) drove me in her car to the woods – or rather the coppices by the lake, where I caught remarkable Hesperids and various kinds of Pierids. Wanted to send my dear Mityushen’ka one of the broadest local Papilio, but they are tattered, so I will send a ‘eubule’, the most striking butterfly here – I will soak and spread it for him when I get back. It is hard to convey the bliss of roaming through this strange bluish grass, between blossoming bushes (one bush here is in bright berries, as if dyed in a cheap Easter purple – an utterly shocking chemical hue, but the main tree in the area is some very tender pine). To the west, cotton plantations, and the prosperity of the numerous Cokers who seem to own half of Hartsville is founded on this very cotton industry. It is picking time now – and the ‘darkies’ (an expression that jars on me, reminding me distantly of the patriarchal ‘Yid’ of western Russian landowners) pick out in the fields, getting a dollar for a hundred ‘bushels’ – I am reporting this interesting data because it stuck mechanically in my ears. In the evening there was a dinner at some other Cokers’ (I am absolutely lost among all the different daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and so on, but the father of my hostess was a famous artist, and his rather academic paintings and his self-portrait – Uncle Sam beard, Napoleon III moustache – hang everywhere; her beau-père, a Major – but I’ve already written about the Major). Today after the ‘tragedy of tragedy’ I went collecting again – and again it was marvellous, and after breakfast a presbyterian minister, Smythe, turned up, a passionate butterfly collector and son of the famous lepidopterologist Smythe whom I know a good deal about (he worked on Sphingids). The minister and I, both with nets, headed for a new locality several miles away and collected till half past four; I got something for Bankes there (Chrysoptera flies). At five, the college’s best tennis player, a botanist, drove over for me, and we had a very pleasant game (the white shorts came in handy) till six, after which there was dinner (have had a dinner-jacket on for three days in a row) and then, at the college, the kind of academic reception we both know. By the way, the last visiting lecturer was the rather spooky Charles Morgan.

  My room is wonderful, of course, the string-instrument sound of the crickets at night, a train puffing somewhere far away. I hope that at the next lecture stops there will be as many butterflies – but less hospitality and less whisky on the rocks. I haven’t spent a cent here yet, and Fisher writes to me that in Valdosta they are ready to lodge me for as long as I like. Tomorrow, besides another Coker dinner at a nearby estate, I seem to have no other engagements, and will go further afield to collect butterflies. They have one large tailed Hesperid with some peacock fluff on her body – charming. A great many of the people here have read my little pieces in the Atlantic and New Yorker – and in general the atmosphere here is the same middle-brow one as at Wellesley. I have told all the same jokes and anecdotes which I’ve told at the gatherings there, and in general have been spreading the same tinsel glitter which I am sick of. The minister and I collected lots of interesting caterpillars which he will raise. I am thirsty. All the glasses have carbona.

  Here, my sweetheart, is a full account of Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I hope you have already been to the museum. I will write to Banks in the next few days – to tell him that I will stay a bit longer than I had thought (by the way Fisher has not sent the next itinerary yet – only a card about Valdosta). I am already madly impatient to return to you and the museum, and only when I fight my way through the bushes for some Thecla do I feel that it was worthwhile coming here. Greene is awfully and very touchingly pleased, such a sweet, jovial, child-like gentleman. One lady who had been complaining about caterpillars in her garden and whom I told that tailed butterflies would come out of them, replied ‘I don’t think so. I have never seen them grow wings or anything.’ One of the Cokers told me that when he was seeing off his wife leaving for Europe on the Bremen, some German next to him was waving a kerchief for all he was worth and shouted to his wife who was waving back from the deck: ‘Geh zu deine Kabine: ich bin müde!’ In the evenings, those who have children rarely go out because (despite their wealth) they have no one to leave the kids with – Negro servants never sleep over in the whites’ homes – it is not allowed – and they cannot have white servants because they cannot work with blacks. There are Uncle Toms sitting at every corner here.

  Write to me in detail about everything, too. Kiss Anyuta: I think about our life together with great pleasure – I hope it will continue for years. I want so badly to let in one Acidalia perched outside on the dark-as-night glass, but the mosquitoes here are Riviera-ish, brutal. They have washed one change of underwear here for me.

  I am kissing you my dear sweetheart – and please do not imagine that I am running after Creole girls here. Here they’re more the Miss Perkins type, and the younger women have fiery husbands; I barely see any girl students. I’m being heartily fed on. I’ll let her in anyway.

  V.

  MY MITYUSHOK, GREY WAR PLANES ARE FLYING HERE, LIKE FISH.

  ____________________

  [ALS, 1 P.]

  [5 October 1942]

  TO: 8, Craigie Circle, ap. 35, Cambridge, Mass.

  [Atlanta, GA]

  5–X–42

  Monday

  My love, I leave Florence for Richmond tomorrow by the afternoon train. Yesterday – Sunday – I collected butterflies in the morning; rested and read after lunch; and about four went canoeing with one of the Cokers along the charming water cypress groves, – i.e. remember what we saw somewhere on the way to New Mexico – a winding river (or, rather, ‘creek’, the sleeve of a lake) all overgrown with cypress and cedar – and all of that mixed up and re-reflected, with all kinds of tunnels and backwaters, and the trunks of trees deeply rooted in the water’s dark glass widen towards the bottom, at the level of the water, and then narrow down, elongated by their reflection. Here and there you meet red-bellied turtles on snags – and one can glide
along these water cypress labyrinths for hours, seeing nothing except them. A not quite tropical, not quite Tertiary sensation.

  I dined again at the Cokers’ (they are the couple Morgan stayed with and they know Weeks, Morrison, and other Bostonians of that kind well), – an enormous house, two cars, swimming pool and the other trappings of a factory owner, but we sat in the kitchen while he and she prepared dinner from cans (true, there was also cold pheasant).

  It’s now eight a.m., I’ll go and cash the cheque, and then wander around with my net. Tell my Miten’ka that one child here calls a ‘butterfly’ a ‘flutter-by’. I am sending him a jewel-like ‘vanilla’. Kisses for him and you, my dear joy.

  V.

  ____________________

  [ALS, 1 P.]

  [postmarked 7 October 1942]

  TO: 8 Craigie Circle, a p. 35, Cambridge, Mass.

  c/o President Read, Spelman College, Atlanta Georgia

  Wednesday

  My love,

  I am writing you from a black Wellesley – a college for Negresses, where Fisher chased me on because there’s a military black-out in Richmond and the lecture there’s postponed. I am writing to him today that no matter how much these breaks are justified by the general situation and no matter what kind of hospitality I meet, I want to cut short the tour to be home by mid-November and not mid-December. I stay here till Tuesday, giving lectures for bed and board. The apartment’s lovely and the woman president very nice indeed – and tomorrow I am going with a biologist (a third variant of Miss MacCosh) to collect butterflies in the vicinity – but ultimately my having a good time means wasting my time. I miss you, my darling, and my Mityushen’ka. Write me either here (if this letter arrives on Friday) or to Valdosta.

  Monday I spent among Cokers and butterflies, but my head was already aching a little, and on Tuesday the ache was unbearable, with chills. It was hell to pack my suitcases, but I had some aspirin and took a sleeping-car. After an hour by Greyhound I reached the Florence railroad station around seven, completely done in, and waited for a train there till half past ten. Overnight a crying baby kept me awake (by the morning, he’d split in two – it turned out there had been two crying, one on the opposite berth and one on the berth next to mine), but by morning my illness was over and I arrived at college completely fresh. Lunch with Miss President and the dazzling sun. A tour of campus. At six thirty there will be dinner with the faculty. Before that, I’d like a nap. Kisses, my love.