Vera (39 page)

For the silent partner, she could have a very loud voice. Elena Levin laughs when asked if Vladimir deferred to his wife in conversation. “
No one ever had to defer to Véra, in conversation or otherwise,” she contends. Outside the classroom Professor Nabokov's assistant was quick to assert herself. Wilson found Véra rerouting him to an argument about poetry “
with a certain deadliness”; when she spoke directly to the world she could do so with near-brutal force. The Cornell faculty—and especially the occasional Cornell landlord—were among the first to discover as much. The fall 1952 semester was spent in a newly constructed glass-fronted home at 106 Hampton Road, a house about which Véra had a semester's worth of questions. Mercifully, there were no fleas, but what to do about the
intrusive moonlight? (Professor and Mrs. Wiegandt, having only barely moved in themselves, suggested she hang curtains, or at least sheets.) Herbert Wiegandt had a few complaints of his own, which he straightforwardly presented to Vladimir in a February 10, 1953, letter, after the Nabokovs had decamped to Cambridge. Most of all he was concerned with damage that had been done to the newly laid kitchen linoleum, and with a missing carving set. By return mail he had his explanation. “
We never used your silver. We know nothing about that carving set. We did not wash the tiles in your downstairs bathroom with any hard or other solution,” riposted Véra, as Vladimir, adding: “And we did nothing to encourage the ‘curling' of your linoleum.”

What passed for conversation with most academics and their wives could, depending on the Company, amount with the Nabokovs to provocation. In the spring of 1958 Professor and Mrs. William Moulton invited the couple with Eric Blackhall, a visiting professor of German Literature, and a college dean, for cocktails. Véra kicked off the afternoon by delivering a virulent attack on the Wilhelm Busch album lying on a table in the Moultons' living room, in her opinion a prime example of German cruelty. Ultimately Jenni Moulton managed to salvage the conversation, and to lead the new professor toward Véra on the davenport. She asked after his field. “
Goethe,” replied Blackhall. “I consider
Faust
one of the shallowest plays ever written,” declared Véra, as much to the visitor's astonishment as to her husband's manifest delight. She seemed to enjoy disconcerting people. She asked a twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor
how he could possibly stand those new French authors and, for that matter, how he could teach them. Indictment struck the young scholar as her modus operandi. It is impossible to say if she had learned this gauntlet-flinging from her husband, who greeted colleagues with salvos like these, delivered for the delectation of French scholar Jean-Jacques Demorest: “
To your knowledge, did Stendhal ever pen a decent sentence?” “Does anyone worth reading in France still believe that that fellow Dostoevski could write?” “Do you think your country will ever again beget authors as perfect as Bossuet and Chateaubriand?” Véra knew her eristic assaults greatly amused her husband, who smiled benevolently upon them, as he did whenever an interlocutor unwittingly stumbled on the ambushes of his wife's pet peeves. She could “
irritate the intelligent and puzzle the nincompoops” as well as he. (She was actually far harder on the intelligent than on the nincompoops.) And the Nabokovs could do so in concert.
Not only was Auden emphatically denounced at one side of the room by Véra and later, in the same terms, by Vladimir, but the couple had a synchronized go as well at
Jane Austen, whose importance, they argued from opposite ends of a dinner table, had been ridiculously inflated. Any number of nineteenth-century French writers could be counted as her equal. And this at the home of the head of Cornell's Creative Writing program.

By the early 1950s Véra's understanding of academic life, her sense of her husband's caprices were ingrained enough that—while she seems never to have voluntarily spoken for him—she did not hesitate to edit or silence him. He depended on her for this service.
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As much as she admired, and shared,
her husband's sinewy convictions, she evinced periodic discomfort at their airing. On one such occasion she expressed relief that he had enjoyed himself in a public forum, “
and therefore was amusing, brilliant and—thank God—did not say what he thinks of some famous contemporaries.” The attacks were clearly a form of amusement to both Nabokovs, a means by which to spice up life in “udder-conscious and udderly boring Cornell,” a place they felt overly tame. But Véra more carefully observed the limits.
^*
She
counseled a little mercy when her husband was too stern with an aspiring writer in his office. He administered a home botany exam to a young relative, who failed it miserably. “You know, Mitya doesn't know anything,” Vladimir shrugged, in the great-nephew's presence. “Don't pay attention to him, he's an old crank,” Véra assured the humiliated teenager. And she toned down her husband's ebullience, which could be as robust as her indignation, enough so to drown out even her strong voice. Clare's plucking at the sleeve of Sebastian Knight in a helpless effort to control his laughter in a London theater prefigures the same scene at Cornell. The critic Alfred Appel recalled an Ithaca viewing of
Beat the Devil
, at which half the audience was laughing at the movie, the other half laughing at Nabokov laughing. Véra “murmured
‘Volodya!'
a few times, but then gave up, as it became clear that two comic fields had been established in the theater.”

Both Nabokovs were quick to seize on the perceived slight. One colleague felt that Vladimir “
teetered always on the thin edge of unendurable insult.” Insecurity is in part the immigrant's lot, the price of deciphering a new culture; Véra had had a head start in this respect. Woe to the correspondent who hinted that she had perhaps mixed up her tsars. “
I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am a Russian woman, and quite sure of the sequence of Russian Tsars and the dates of their reign,” came the tart response. “I am equally well informed regarding my husband's family and its antecedents,” she added, correcting her correspondent's version of Russian history, which she found deficient. No one could fire off an “Incidentally” with quite the force of Véra, who accomplished with these killer adverbs what her husband could with a pair of heart-stopping—“(picnic, lightning)”—parentheses. The inchoate sense of grievance, the grudge-holding, was something of a Slonim family trait. In the summer of 1950, Véra's older sister proposed sending some well-bred Swedish friends on a visit to Ithaca. Véra responded that she and Vladimir were insanely busy, that they had no time even to see
their own acquaintances. Additionally she asked that Lena refrain from sending her presents of any kind; the Nabokovs were straining to keep their possessions to a minimum, on account of the frequent moves. This she said directly, no more or less so than she did anything else. She suspected that Lena needed to “show off her family” and attempted to fob off the Swedes on Sonia, then in New York. Lena countered that she was only trying to do her friends a favor. She was well past the point in life where she needed to display her family; her sister's phrase proved that she knew nothing of her existence, or its hardships. And she had no interest whatever in speaking with Sonia, who had insulted Lena's husband in 1932.
^*
Véra and Lena did not speak—or communicate—for the next nine years.

It is difficult to say which came first: Véra's serving as picador to her husband's matador, or the discomfort some Cornell faculty members felt in the couple's presence. The synchronized teaching did nothing to endear them. It was so expertly handled it appeared to have been rehearsed. Even those who admired the performance begrudged Nabokov his assistant; Szeftel noted in his journal that Véra was reading her husband's bluebooks “in another selfless show of devotion.” Resentment of Véra accumulated in equal proportion to the mystique. The faculty—acutely aware that Nabokov had no Ph.D., no graduate students, few seminars, and, by the mid-fifties, enviably high enrollments—chafed at the husband-and-wife routine. When Nabokov was under consideration for a job elsewhere, a former colleague at that institution discouraged the idea. “Don't bother hiring him;
she
does all the work,” he warned. Nabokov himself did nothing to check this kind of sniping. He told his students Ph.D. stood for “Department of Philistines.” He treated even his own performances flippantly. When a colleague with whom he was friendly insisted on attending one of his lectures he conceded, “Well all right, if you want to be a masochist about it.” Other Ithaca wives were asked point-blank why they could not be more like Véra, held up as the gold standard. This did nothing to win her friends, had she wanted them. It was felt she had no need for confidantes because she was so close to her husband; her reverence was as objectionable as his irreverence. Well before the advent of
Lolita
, Nabokov was respected but not universally liked by his colleagues; some faculty members crossed the street to avoid him. Within the department, his course was so much discouraged that one English major concluded there must be something illicit about it. There was reason to perceive slights. In the land of the
footnoters, as Bishop had called them, Nabokov was a man apart. Véra was from outer space.

The cultural divide was considerable. Ithaca, and Cornell, are to a great extent America. The place is scenic and civilized but also remote, tucked inaccessibly behind the Adirondacks. To the Nabokovs the university's agricultural origins were more apparent than its academic prowess. For all of its distinguished professors, Cornell was a loose-limbed institution with a model forest, a fish hatchery, a pig farm. The rail connection was poor and the air service not much better. As Véra explained to a visiting relative, “Our only airline (The Mohawk) pounces on every pretext to cancel flights—on holidays, weekends, rainy days, etc.”
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After all she had lived through, Ithaca's calm, its parochialism, may have been a relief, but the land of the sterling carving set, the hypersensitive linoleum, also felt unfamiliar. Nabokov reveled in his new medium. His object was to enrich the magic potion of his new language as earlier he had arranged things so as not to dilute his first one. He went out of his way to attract to his flypaper mind every nuance of American life. (To Jean Bruneau, an assistant professor of French Literature, he explained his motives differently. With a glint in his eye, he warned that publication of his new novel would scandalize America in its savage attack on the American language.) At all times the couple were aware of more than a renter's distance between them and what those around them considered the real world.
^†
They took to showing off some of the artifacts they discovered in the rented stage sets to visitors; they appeared to be playacting at their American life. The exotica was of great use to Nabokov—who could have imagined the Mexican knickknacks, the pink toilet-cover furs?—but less charming to Véra who, in the time-honored immigrant way, could not help but being astonished, and horrified, by Americans. As for American schools, they were all poor, even the most expensive ones.

Some of the ambivalence showed. When Leo Peltenburg died in 1955, his middle daughter wrote Véra with the news. Acknowledging previous reports from Ithaca, she opined: “I think Vera your husband and your son are glad that they found a new home country in the U.S. As to you I am not so sure.” Much of Véra's animus was directed not to the man in the street, but to
fellow academics, who should have known better. Her litmus test of good taste was recognition of her husband's genius. So long as the owner of a roadside motel remained more impressed with a published author than did the Harvard professor who failed to hire him, her respect was reserved only for the hotelier. Lena Massalsky was to say that after twenty-six years in Sweden she could not decipher the local mores; Véra had more trouble with the tolerating than with the deciphering. While Vladimir had long noted that the non-Russian could never hope to understand the “lyrical plaintiveness that colors the Russian soul,” someone like Véra could never be expected to appreciate the wide-open expansiveness of the American soul. A middle-aged man's obsession with a twelve-year-old girl was one thing. What Véra could not comprehend was the publisher's wife who, at an early encounter, blurted out the details of her messy emotional life, or the publisher who discussed his sentimental travails within a taxi driver's earshot. She addressed only two words, and an exclamation point, to this subject. “Amazing Americans!” she declared. It all seemed to her like something out of a bad novel—something by John O'Hara, or James Gould Cozzens.

Some of her strongest feelings were reserved for politics. As early as 1948 she expressed a desire to participate in local politics and wondered how to go about doing so. Was there an office of some kind she could run for, she wondered, outraged by a Town of Ithaca ruling on secondary school education. (She was teaching at the Cascadilla School at the time.) Her husband dissuaded her from getting involved, at least on the local level. “It's dangerous,” he counseled, as indeed it would have been—for him. She was frustrated that she had not been able to vote in the 1948 elections; she had not lived in Ithaca for the requisite six months. She met with the same trouble in 1952, when the Harvard semester interfered with the residency requirement. Again in 1956 the lack of a permanent address worked against her, as the Nabokovs had spent a sabbatical spring in Cambridge and an itinerant summer. Véra considered these regulations unfair; she was nothing if not exquisitely sensitive to her privileges. Only in 1964, when she was no longer living in America, did she vote in a U.S. election. Vladimir never voted.

She warmed quickly to political discourse. From the Hampton Road house she fired off a letter to the
Cornell Daily Sun
on December 12, 1952. An editorial in the previous day's college paper had rallied to the defense of Professor Owen Lattimore, the prominent China expert whom McCarthy had labeled a top Soviet agent. Lattimore was something of a hero to the intellectual establishment; moreover, in twelve brutal days of testimony earlier in the year, Senator Patrick A. McCarran's Internal Security Subcommittee had been unable to establish any kind of case against the Johns Hopkins professor.
Véra drew the
Sun's
attention to Lattimore's activities from 1944 on, citing chapter and verse. She had read all of his work. To her mind the case against the Sinologist was airtight: He had unquestionably advanced the Soviets' hold on China. She felt “the two McSenators” were undermining their own efforts by branding “everybody left of Thomas Dewey” as a Communist, but regretted not the sullied reputations, only the fact that the senators' zealotry allowed the Communists room to hide.
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She specified that her communication was intended to set the matter straight, not for publication. (It did not appear in the paper.) The Cold War assumed great—if sometimes awkward—proportions in her mind. In his 1951 diary Nabokov recorded his wife's prediction: “She also says that if there is a war with Russia, it will start in Alaska. We shall see those awful little maps in newspaper[s], with horribly energetic, blackly curving arrows pointing to Whitehorse, or to Le Pas.” Given what she had lived through, she could be forgiven for too quickly transposing the past on the future. Both Nabokovs read E. B. White's
Charlotte's Web
at the end of 1952, when the Korean War was at its height. Afterward Vladimir wrote Katharine White: “We both loved Andy's book. Véra says she wishes he could find some relative of Charlotte and persuade her to make a nice big web for all of us informing the silly Asians that this is a Terrific and Humble country, and not to be slaughtered and eaten.”