Vera (23 page)

4
THE PERSON IN QUESTION

“
I speak fluently English, French, and German,” Véra had written on her immigration documents, a claim that speaks for itself. Linguistically this third dislocation was the most jarring. She who had worked in English throughout the Berlin years was far from entirely at ease with the language; unlike her husband, she had never set foot in—much less studied or conducted business in—an Anglophone country. A full year after the arrival in New York she would recall, “
I find it difficult to follow many-pronged conversations in English.” The handicap must have been all the more acutely felt in the company of academics, with whom she would spend the summer of 1941. There was every reason why those who met her in the first American years should have been struck primarily by Véra Nabokov's silence.

Vladimir had known Véra Slonim for a matter of months
when he first invited her to settle in America with him. As unrealizable as that dream had seemed in 1923, the reality proved vastly more complicated now. Nabokov had been penniless when the two married, but he had been penniless and celebrated. For the first time his reputation had not preceded him. The family had fled together, but they had done so precipitately, amid (as Vladimir had it) “the panic-stricken, gaping suitcases and the whirlwind of old newspapers,” to say nothing of the advancing Germans. All of Véra's papers, and most of her husband's early editions, were stashed in Ilya Fondaminsky's
basement, from which only a small portion would be recovered. Véra was thirty-eight years old, with a six-year-old son,
^*
savings of just under one hundred dollars, and a husband with no long-term job prospects. None of these impediments—it remains to be seen if this made Véra's life more or less pleasant—could blunt Vladimir's essential optimism. “
A miracle has occurred: My wife, my son and I have managed to repeat Columbus's feat,” he wrote an eminent scholar, who he hoped might help him find a university position.

The taxi driver whose integrity cost him the tip of a lifetime deposited the Nabokovs at the apartment of
Natalie Nabokov on May 27, 1940. Nicholas Nabokov's first wife did all in her power to make the new arrivals comfortable, arranging for them to occupy the flat across the hall in her East Sixty-first Street brownstone until the Tolstoy Foundation located a summer sublet on upper Madison Avenue. The irrepressible Altagracia de Jannelli was on the doorstep immediately. Within days of his arrival she escorted her client to Bobbs-Merrill's New York office; she made certain that he paid a second call at the beginning of July, when the firm's Indianapolis-based president was in town. From these visits
Vladimir concluded that the book his onetime publisher would most welcome from him was a mystery story, which, at least initially, he set out to write. By early August he had begun to rail against the publisher's attempts to dictate length, theme, and content of the work;
a Russian friend to whom he mentioned these conversations expressed surprise that anyone would have been so bold with the notoriously defiant Sirin. By the end of the summer, even while Bobbs-Merrill held out hope that Nabokov might produce a novel for their spring list, he had begun to snicker about the “
genteel book, with agreeable protagonists and moral landscapes” that Jannelli expected from him, a recipe on which he would produce a startling variant later. “What I am composing now will hardly satisfy her,” he confessed of the agent, who forbade him to write in Russian, a ban he repeatedly broke. Ultimately Véra was the only beneficiary of Jannelli's resolve. In the fall the agent reassured Bobbs-Merrill that she knew how to wring the tardy manuscript from their author. She was providing him with a typewriter, “
so that his wife may whip it into reading shape.” What Véra did with the shiny new Royal was to keep Jannelli off the doorstep; she found her husband's dogged representative
a perfect nuisance. In mid-November Véra used the newly acquired machine to report to Jannelli
that her husband was making some progress in his work, but that the obligations of earning a living were rather slowing his pace. Jannelli never made another sale for Nabokov. The Royal served Véra for the next twenty-five years.

More than simply literary agents were kept at bay over the summer months. As the New York heat and humidity disagreed with Véra and Dmitri, the family decamped for the Vermont farm of Harvard historian Mikhail Karpovich, their base until mid-September. The Karpoviches' 250-acre property—Nabokov described it affectionately as “
a ram-chakal farmhouse haunted by great sulky porcupines, song-of-Bernadette-smelling skunks, fireflies and a number of good moths”—amounted to a lively Russian colony set amid the mountains of southern Vermont. The hospitality of the learned Karpovich and his huge-hearted wife, Tatiana, was unrivaled; the sprawling farmhouse and its outlying buildings were filled perpetually with visitors, often distinguished ones. As the Karpoviches had elected not to install electricity, running water, or a telephone line, there were no luxuries about the Vermont property beyond the essential ones: animated discussion, the commotion of children, incessant tea-drinking, wild raspberries. Vladimir continued to think of his future “
with a certain horror,” but the operative feeling that summer was one of immense relief. He profited from the moment of repose to commune with the local butterflies. Karpovich's eleven-year-old son, Sergei, remembered the new arrival running about the area with his net, clad only in a pair of shorts; the half-naked Russian made quite an impression on the local farmers. At least some of Véra's day was claimed by the gaggle of children, her own and others'. “
Vladimir Vladimirovich” proved a mouthful for the Karpovich offspring, who took to calling her husband by his patronymic alone. Véra spent her time correcting them. Had they no idea whom they were addressing so carelessly?

From their summer idyll the Nabokovs were gently summoned back to New York by Alexandra Tolstoy. She had spent these months, as she would much of the fall, dispatching letters in all directions on the family's behalf, to those who might offer Vladimir work as well as to those who might advance funds. By September she had arranged for an interview with Nicholas Wreden, the Russian-born manager of the Scribner's bookstore. Vladimir had promised Alexandra Tolstoy that he “would be glad to take any work that would give me and my family a chance for existence,” but returned from Scribner's with a markedly different attitude. Wreden, who proved the immediate salvation to a number of refugees, had proposed that he begin by wrapping packages, from nine to six. The pay was sixty-eight dollars a month. With more amusement than indignation the man whom Tolstoy had
been describing in her letters as the contemporary Russian writer of the greatest promise declared, “
One of the few things that I decidedly do not know how to do is to wrap anything.” Furthermore, the family could not live on sixty-eight dollars a month, especially if he had no time in which to earn additional funds. At the end of a restorative summer he felt doubly besieged, by flu and by anxiety.

In New York the Nabokovs settled at 35 West Eighty-seventh Street, in what Véra remembered as “
a dreadful little flat.” They had two rooms in the brownstone; their telephone was a few flights of stairs away in the doorman's quarters. Daily Véra walked Dmitri to the private school at which Natalie Nabokov had arranged for him to enroll at full scholarship. His English came quickly; Véra was proud to observe that within months of entering the first grade he was “
promoted” to the second. Vladimir began tutoring three older women studying at Columbia, with whom he was pleased. Great lovers of Russia all, they appeared to him to “
brilliantly debunk the émigré preconception of the lacquered emptiness of the American mind.” He volunteered as well at the Museum of Natural History, arranging the Old World Lepidoptera collections. Soon the Tolstoy Foundation's efforts, along with his own, began to bear fruit. He was commissioned to write his first English book reviews; arrangements were made for a series of guest lectures. In December he received an invitation he qualified as his “first success.” A ten-week summer position at Stanford University that Aldanov had dangled before his eyes the previous year in Paris was offered to him for 1941. Dorothy Leuthold, one of the three Columbia students, volunteered to drive the family cross-country, in her new Pontiac.

Early in October Vladimir misplaced a phone number with which his cousin Nicholas had supplied him, further proof, if proof were needed, that telephone numbers proved delusions in his hands. His first meeting with Edmund Wilson was arranged by note. “
Dear Mr. Wilson,” he began, “I would have telephoned myself, but cannot find your number.” The first years in America were more about livelihood than about literature; it was Edmund Wilson more than anyone who helped Nabokov to connect the two. By December the eminent American critic was suggesting—the idea could not have been more comical in retrospect—that the two collaborate on a translation of Pushkin's verse play
Mozart and Salieri
, a translation that would be published in
The New Republic
the following spring. At the same time Véra invited Wilson and his then-wife, Mary McCarthy, to a small party, to be thrown not at the Nabokovs' apartment but at the more comfortable hotel lodgings of their Berlin friends Bertrand and Lisbet Thompson, who had emigrated earlier. The end-of-the-year celebration would be canceled, but
the Nabokov-Wilson correspondence was off and running. Over the next years it proved one as rich in strong opinion, from Nabokov's end, as it was in trade secrets, from Wilson's: How to give your publisher the slip. How to avoid having to review a novel by Thomas Mann. When to wriggle free of an option clause. How to secure a Guggenheim. Where poetry could be made to pay. How to extort an extra one hundred dollars from an editor. How to circumvent “
a man named Ross” who persisted in editing people at
The New Yorker
. Nabokov's immediate concerns were not yet so delicious; 1940 was one of the few literature-free years of his life. At the same time he had never worked as hard as he did that winter, preparing his Stanford classes, writing reviews, filling in at the museum, angling for a position as a guest lecturer.

With Dmitri at school, Véra was free to work again, at least part-time. In this respect the swelled immigrant community in New York proved helpful. In January the lawyer Alexis Goldenweiser put her in touch with a Russian colleague who needed assistance with his foreign correspondence. He offered Véra a nine-to-seven job, which she explained was not feasible. The attorney proposed that she handle his French correspondence only, for which he offered a paltry sum. While she was grateful to Goldenweiser for his recommendation, she made it clear that this remuneration was insufficient. One of her greatest attributes—independent of, but in tandem with, her husband—was her sense of her own worth. For all of the selfless devotion, Véra could never be said to underestimate herself. She should not be working for forty cents an hour, just as her husband should not be writing a mystery novel. In 1941 she was saved by her unwillingness to compromise. Almost immediately a better position turned up, at a
Free French newspaper, the only job other than that for her husband to which she affixed the adjective “fabulous.” Probably she began work at the paper at the end of January.