Vera (38 page)

*
The two facts are related. Véra's having assumed the role she did in Ithaca allowed her husband the time to write as he had not done since the first years of their marriage.

*
Nor did this prevent him from entering into a spirited exchange with Wilson as to where the accent falls in the word “automobile,” metrically speaking.

*
Again this summer the Nabokovs were unwitting characters in someone else's drama. Having spent part of August at a Jackson Hole, Wyoming, guest ranch that was under government surveillance, they made a walk-on role in FBI reports as “
an elderly man and his wife, both of whom spoke with a pronounced accent.” Discreet inquiries were made, in Wyoming and at Cornell, where FBI agents were assured that Nabokov's reputation was excellent, that the family did not qualify as subversives.

*
In one of his periodic assaults on his administrators, he complained in particular of the amount Seneca Street was costing him. The rent was in the vicinity of $150 a month; Nabokov was earning $5000, or after deductions, about $4200 a year. Neither Véra nor Vladimir was spendthrift, but Dmitri's tuition claimed one third of their income, and the couple never lived on anything resembling a budget. The only expense that might have been considered an extravagance was the summer trip west, an annual rite during the Cornell years.

†
He did not overextend himself fitting in at such affairs. On one occasion he turned to a visiting professor to whom he had not been introduced and asked, “
Will you tell me why in the United States they bury their universities in forests?” He liked to regale friends with his story of an encounter with a plump new addition to the faculty who introduced herself with, “
I am the new professor of ice-cream making.”

*
Again Véra fought truth with fact. When Field wrote that Vladimir felt “
he worked for the wages of a provincial peasant,” Véra riposted, “N. did not know how much a peasant earns, especially a ‘provincial peasant.' ” This too was certainly true.

*
To Katharine White after a short editorial tug-of-war Nabokov summed up his mnemonic talents, not the conventional ones for a university professor: “
As you have probably noticed I often make mistakes when recalling names, titles of books, numbers; but I very seldom err when recollecting colors.”

†
When his student showed more interest in dreaming up names for new models of cars—Wouldn't “
Avatar” be lovely?—Dick Keegan conceded defeat. “It's a good thing you don't drive; you'd end up in a ditch,” he informed his pupil. “Touche, Mr. Keegan,” replied Nabokov. Dmitri seconded the motion years later. “
I wouldn't want to see him driving in the mountains, or worse, in the center of Milan, in a moment of artistic inspiration,” he warned an Italian journalist.

*
In this she had a soul mate in Mrs. Thomas Carlyle. Having spent a Sisyphean day silencing the world for her husband's sake,
Jane Carlyle continued to do so in her dreams.

*
As is clear from his
Lolita
screenplay, it was his belief that houses are struck by lightning and burn to the ground, a conviction that, given his past, was perhaps not unreasonable. Hotels proved no less combustible in his imagination once he had settled in one.

*
Nabokov's editor for the 1947
Bend Sinister
, Allen Tate, had left Henry Holt and Company in early 1948, having fought valiantly for the novel and—before leaving—having confidentially advised Nabokov on what terms, if any at all, he should sell Holt his next book.

†
As Nabokov recounted the skirmishes in part,
The New Yorker
had a habit of eliminating a favored word or two of his prose, because they were a “family magazine,” or because the magazine “
pessimistically thought that an unusual term might bother some of its less brainy readers. In the latter case, Mr. Nabokov did not always give in, and this resulted in some spirited fights.” This was aside from what he quaintly referred to as “the question of the corrected grammar.” It was also well after an early tussle that had so disturbed him—the manuscript in question became “Portrait of My Uncle”—that he claimed he was tempted to give up writing. At one such juncture he howled that he would prefer not to be published in the magazine at all to appearing in “
so carefully mutilated” a form.

*
Nabokov would doubtless not have entered into a contract had he learned as much. He was told he was denied the award because he was not exactly
a “beginning” writer, for whom the fellowship had been established.

*
He had used the device before, in several variations. Zina is evoked several times before her appearance in
The Gift
, even included in a plural “we” well before we know who inhabits that pronoun with our narrator.

†
In 1966 Alfred Appel pointed out this inconsistency to Nabokov, who
shrugged it off. The offstage address was not yet part of the text when the pages appeared, in their early form, in a June 1948
New Yorker
.

*
To great narrative effect another of Nabokov's women hides under her married name. Mrs. Richard F. Schiller dies on page four of
Lolita
, though hundreds of pages have to turn before the first-time reader understands why he should have retained that information.

†
She was hardly the first woman to do so.
Madame Chateaubriand performed the same service for her husband, who reworked her memories as his own.
Dorothy Wordsworth's journals have been called an offering to her brother.

*
These did not always meet with satisfactory results. For her sister-in-law she had copied out Vladimir's recent poems, “
but the author found that they were illegible, so it's better that I not send them, rather, I'll bang them out on the typewriter when it's fixed.”

*
So quiet was the publication that in speaking to the couple years later, Cass Canfield lamented that Harper had not had a chance to publish the memoir. “
But you did,” protested the Nabokovs.

†
Well aware of his sentiments, Harry Levin added a line to his congratulatory note on the publication of
Conclusive Evidence:
“
Incidentally, I glanced at your cousin's book, and found it somewhat inconclusive.”

*
In 1951 or 1952 he had told Marc Szeftel, who had heard from mutual friends about “The Enchanter,” that he was at work on an American version of that manuscript. Earlier he had promised Szeftel a glimpse of the novella, with the warning, “
Remember, it is not for kids!” He never made good on the promise.

*
Lena had taken the opposite position in proposing to call. “
I would like to call you one of these days. It's expensive, but I would like to indulge myself, since one can say more by phone in two minutes than one can in 50 letters.”

†
He had read Cervantes in three languages, but never in Spanish. He was doubtless further handicapped by the fact that he would not be able to savage the novel's translator.

*
His students were more puzzled than impressed. Thornton Wilder, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author, had taught the course the previous spring. He had made no such claims.

†
Generally Nabokov's lectures were better received at Cornell than at Harvard, where the campus culture was more formal.

‡
Nabokov had been told to expect an enrollment of 400, which in his memory grew to 600. Attendance may have been higher, but the
official enrollment at mid-semester was 387.

*
The evidence suggests that the Nabokovs were more careful with Tomsky than with Sarton's dishes. Generally the couple were not regarded as model tenants.

*
After a while Véra began to cross out the “Department of Russian Literature” when using the letterhead. Vladimir was more likely to let it stand, sometimes with a little marginal snort: “
Now without Russian.” The fictional department lived on through the stationery well into the 1950s.

†
In the Russian Literature courses, which were smaller, she sat facing Nabokov, often in the front row, sometimes in the last.

‡
Holding the glasses aloft she made a dramatic entrance into the lecture hall: “
Oh, yes, yes, yes,” exulted Nabokov, smiling, and thanking her profusely.

*
In some courses the ages got younger as the semester progressed. Was anyone out there
listening?

*
One alumnus-turned-critic teased her later, when PBS planned a series with Christopher Plummer delivering Nabokov's lectures. “
But who is going to play you? If realism is to be achieved,
someone
must play ‘the assistant,' ” contended Alfred Appel, to whom Vanessa Redgrave seemed the obvious choice.

*
This did not prevent Nabokov from
complaining that he had 270 students, and therefore 270 bluebooks to grade.

*
One writer skewered by Hippius was the sixteen-year-old poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, whose romantic verse Hippius memorably deconstructed before his classmates.

†
The literature-loving English majors occasionally proved more immune to his charm. To several of the brightest he
appeared superficial, as was perhaps to be expected of a professor who savored Tolstoy's lawn tennis game. Many were discouraged from taking his course, considered a class for dilettantes within the department.

*
When much was at stake, he could cozy up to a light switch. In Alfred Appel's fond recollection, on a midwinter afternoon when the heads had begun bobbing the
amphitheater lights burst on—for Pushkin, for Gogol, for Chekhov—the bright spots in the Russian literary firmament. The dramatic release of the window shade was of course reserved for Tolstoy.

*
That the students were unaware of this was a tribute to his delivery. Neither an architecture student who audited the course twice, nor a particularly attentive pre-med, nor a favored art student noticed. This despite Nabokov's confident assertion that the alert students knew full well he was reading.

*
Did he dress in the dark? Where did he shop? Such were the mysteries probed by one student whose attention to detail on the page was much applauded by her professor.

†
Nabokov's apparel stood in distinct contrast to the pipe-and-English-tweeds look generally favored by the humanities faculty. From the first he had cut a rumpled figure, liberally interpreting Cornell's predominately tie-and-jacket dress code.

The Doppelgänger subject is a frighful bore
.

—N
ABOKOV
,
S
TRONG OPINIONS