Vera (62 page)

Every few months a new Nabokov edition appeared in one major market or another, which meant that every few months a new typo materialized
somewhere in the world. (Between the 1962 publication of
Pale Fire
and the 1974 publication of
Look at the Harlequins!
a new Nabokov title appeared in America every year but one.) When an unfortunate misprint crept into a British edition of
Speak, Memory
in 1967 Véra wrote of her husband's distress: “
He says that the criminal printer should be made to set MEA CULPA in italic diamond a thousand and one times.” He could not get over the tenacity of these creatures, sprouting in one edition after another, “
like a tenacious ancestral wart.” Both Vladimir and Dmitri remembered Véra's consoling them on the appearance of these indignities as among her greatest acts of humanity. The misprints were to life in Montreux as the rattlers had been to the American West; Véra wielded only her typewriter in self-defense. At times she appeared to be struggling single-handedly to keep the world from tumbling into a state of “
glossological disarray.”

Generally she held people—herself especially—to the standards of her husband's literature, standards to which few of us, and even fewer publishers, rise. It was her fervent and unreasonable conviction that books should be accurately translated, properly printed, appropriately jacketed, aggressively marketed, energetically advertised.
Was it really too much to ask of the publishers who acquired her husband's titles that they
read
the books in question? To her fell the futile job of deciphering royalty statements; she seemed to believe that these should be intelligible and should arrive punctually. Her volumes on this subject are as poignant as they are pointed. In desperation she appealed to George Weidenfeld himself when no one else in his firm could provide satisfaction regarding what she considered his firm's highly approximate accounting. “
My dear George,” she concluded her petition, “would it not be possible for you to get somehow organized in this respect?” Three years later Weidenfeld's accounting continued to mystify; Véra was still composing treatises on the subject. At last in 1970 she handed on the baton. “
It irks me to irk you with this as I am aware that ordinarily you can't be expected to look into bookkeeping matters but I really don't know what course to follow since Véra has given up in despair,” pleaded Vladimir. It has been noted that women are accustomed to tending to
chores that are repetitive in nature, tasks that are undone almost as soon as they are accomplished. The pursuit of the accurate royalty statement, of the carefully proofread manuscript, were not the Sisyphean labors those who first observed this phenomenon had in mind. But they constituted the dusting and vacuuming of Véra Nabokov's life.

Probably much to her regret, the details mattered. She was of the school that recognized the comma as a point of honor. This was not something universally understood. In November 1962, she wrote Minton with the triumphant
news that Mondadori were going back to press for their twentieth printing of
Lolita. Pale Fire
was a bestseller in America. On the other hand,
shouldn't the book charged to VN's
Lolita
statement be charged instead against his
Pale Fire
earnings? A problematic translation immediately qualified as “hopeless” or “a disaster.” One such fiasco was the rendering into French by Elena Sikorski's son, Vladimir, of
Strong Opinions
.
The “disaster” was redeemed in the course of two weekends' work. These missteps might have appeared as so many tempests in teapots, but as another keen-eyed miniaturist observed, “
If you live in a teapot, a tempest may be a very uncomfortable thing.”

Repeatedly Véra trumpeted her husband's battle cry: He was supremely indifferent to criticism but cared deeply, fervently, about his publishers' commitments to his volumes.
^*
Few writers have carped so eloquently, or have had the luxury of doing so symphonically. When Véra deplored Putnam's thrift during her 1966 visit to New York, Minton reprimanded her, “
Véra, this amounts to an author telling his publisher how to publish his works.” She did not disagree with that analysis. Nor did she believe that Minton had knocked himself out advertising
Despair
. She was convinced that in many cases she herself could sell foreign or subsidiary rights in a work more advantageously than could a publisher's languid rights department; she spent a great deal of time negotiating for the return of these rights. Only occasionally did she prove the publishers wrong. Nothing more came of
Pnin's
television and movie rights in Véra's hands than in Doubleday's, though she could easily envision Peter Sellers, or Jacques Tati, in the title role.

She too made mistakes, and was the first to admit as much. (Sometimes she did so in perfect slang: “
Oh dear, I think I made a boo-boo,” she informed an associate when in her eighties.) She made no secret of the fact that her files were not in the best of order; Jacqueline Callier did her best with the collections of agreements and statements that had been traveling about in cartons, some on and off for decades. And Véra remained a master at begging indulgence for her husband's dilatoriness. “
I must again apologize to you for my husband's casual approach to correspondence,” wrote the woman who must have been most mortified to have to do so. He had promised to read his correspondent's letter as soon as he could. Three months had elapsed in the meantime. Véra extended the customary round of excuses to the publisher
who was reissuing Nabokov in Russian, for covert distribution behind the Iron Curtain. (The couple
relished the image of the books sailing down from the heavens, each with its own miniature parachute.) Every time she broached the subject of which title the firm might issue next, Vladimir responded, “
Yes, of course. But let me think which,” and then failed to make a decision.

As early as 1963 Véra reported that her husband was working at a frantic clip, perennially in the shadow of a new deadline. But no one in the household felt the pressure of time quite as acutely as did she, who in Dmitri's estimation could not bear for a minute to be wasted.
A 1969 reporter engaged the Nabokovs in a conversation about their favorite comic strips, which they read religiously. Vladimir's favorites were
Buzz Sawyer
and
Rex Morgan, M.D
. The couple found
Peanuts
“coy” and skipped
Li'l Abner
. Véra professed her admiration for
Dennis the Menace
, because it had only one frame. The reporter concluded this was because she was so keenly efficient. On a later occasion her husband groused about his interminable voyage on the slow train from Lausanne to Montreux, usually no more than a twenty-minute trip. “
That is the difference between you and me. I would wait for the next express train, while you'll take the local just because it's there,” Véra interjected.
^*

The dance of the pronouns evolved, on the page, from a proficient Ithaca one-step to an adroit international quickstep. It allowed more latitude in needling publishers. I don't remember if I wrote you that I should like such-and-such, Vladimir could state, genuinely; Véra had been the one to make the demand in the first place. The two voices allowed Nabokov to comport himself—Dr. Jekyll arrived at the same conclusion—as if “
man is not truly one, but truly two.” Véra could voice her husband's strident opinion, adding reasonably that she was sorry he felt so strongly on the subject, but he did. Or she could render a remark twice as cutting, appending her outrage to her husband's. There was ample reason why Nabokov's correspondents began to imagine the Russian master hurling thunderbolts down from his aerie on a Swiss mountaintop, when actually he lived in a valley. In 1967 Alfred Appel published a two-part review of
Speak, Memory
in
The New Republic
. Véra allowed
that if ever Vladimir were to break his rule against thanking critics, Appel's brilliant essay would surely provide the occasion. “
This is cheating a little, as you may notice,” she added parenthetically. Together the Nabokovs were able to work a dynamic that was familiar from the fictions, the unsettling dance of the
seemingly omniscient narrator and the character caught in his drama who begs us not to believe a word he says. (It should be said that Nabokov was equally adept at playing both roles himself.
Friends had long complained that he winked at his interlocutor on the rare occasion when he spoke the truth.) In 1966 Véra conveyed her husband's comments to Andrew Field, who two years later became Nabokov's first biographer: “
But he adds that ‘generally speaking' his ‘memory is poor and faulty.' (I disagree.)”

With his wife at his side, Nabokov could speak in the first person plural. And because so frequently the correspondence is not
with
Nabokov but
about
Nabokov, a whole other being was created in the mid-1960s—a monument called VN, someone who is not even Nabokov. In large part this distant, unapproachable VN was Véra Nabokov's construct. How else could Nabokov have established his statuesque other self? “VN does not admire the novel in question” sounds different from the same statement expressed in the first person. Vladimir himself delighted in explaining that the living, breathing, breakfasting Nabokov was but the poor relation of the writer, only too happy to refer to himself as “
the person I usually impersonate in Montreux.” (Others agreed. When his likeness loomed large at newsstands in 1969, Wilson complained to a mutual friend: “
Have you seen Volodya Nabokov on the cover of
Newsweek?
He looks like some model who had been hired to pose as Volodya Vladimir Nabokov.” Having witnessed the posing over the years, Jason Epstein concluded: “
It is a false idea to imagine a real Nabokov.”) The editor replying to Véra's letter about her eminent husband had little choice but to refer to “VN”—or to stumble over his second-person pronouns. Vladimir might compose a letter in the first person about the proliferation of typos in a British edition; quoting him precisely, Véra conveyed his distress in the third person, essentially allowing the sovereign presence to melt into the background. With her assistance, the real Vladimir Nabokov disappeared into Swiss air; it was as if Thomas Pynchon were to enter the federal witnessprotection program. Vladimir was the person, VN the author. One came to visit VN, as Alfred Appel did in 1970, but one attended to all of Vladimir's whims, as Véra thanked Appel for doing after the visit.

Initially the disappearing act was devised for efficiency's sake. By the 1960s, Nabokov risked drowning twice: in the business of publishing, and in the admiration of the fans and scholars. Once again the couple were on the
lam. Summer addresses were imparted, confidentially, to the few who needed them. Véra explained that for literature's sake, they were doing their utmost to
go into hiding. When traveling she felt it necessary “
to dissimulate our presence from amiable strangers who might be
de passage
and want to have a look at V.” She groaned that there was no place to hide. Fan mail turned up under the doors to their rooms. The Montreux Palace was mentioned in a 1967 piece; the result was droves of strangers on the doorstep. “
It's just like some miserable Yasnaya Polyana [Tolstoy's estate] around here,” she sighed. (One reporter agreed. It seemed Nabokov drew more people to Switzerland than the banks and the Alps combined.) She felt that photographers and interviewers tore him away from his work at every juncture.
Worse yet, she had to convince him to see them. Or at least those of them he should see; the requests were incessant. “
If he had the time he would never be given a chance to stop talking,” Véra grumbled. A steady stream of “
strangers and half-strangers” arrived on the doorstep.
^*

Nabokov delighted in the smoke and mirrors, informing his publishers when they might best reach his wife by phone, drafting “her” letters in the first person. “
He made a great show of hiding behind Véra,” remembers a nephew, who observed the routine extended to the most mundane matters. From behind his oversized menu, protectively angled as a shield, Nabokov appealed, “Véra, what am I going to eat?” He had long thought of himself in the third person, or as a collection of splintered selves; Véra's collusion allowed him to live that way. The arrangement was as convoluted as it was cumbersome. Louba Schirman communicated solely with Véra but understood the decisions to be joint. “
She does the arguing, and he does the deciding,” inferred one visitor. A prickly exchange resulted when Véra questioned the agent Swifty Lazar's ability to extricate Vladimir from a contract, adding that she was inquiring on his behalf. “
I think it's almost amusing that you resort to saying ‘this is what my husband asks' when you think you're going to be a little harsh with me. Frankly I love both of you very much and admire you very much so it doesn't matter which of the Nabokovs have [sic] a complaint,” Lazar rebuked her affectionately. Véra headed straight for the bush. Starchly she informed the agent that she was not in the habit of using her husband's name when she needed to be harsh: “
Far from it. Vladimir detests
to go into details and would rather have me do whatever I can without consulting him, but when things take a serious turn, he takes time out to consider a business matter, arrives at a decision, and withdraws again, and then I have nothing to do but carry out his decision.” She fell victim to a kind of Carrollian paradox, laboring with all her might to efface herself, managing only to appear larger as a result. A 1968 letter to George Weidenfeld went out in two parts, the first ostensibly composed by Véra. “
From here on, the letter is dictated by Vladimir,” she wrote partway through the jointly signed document. She had typed most but not all of her husband's contribution, which included the line, “As my husband has no agent who would stand up for him, I must play that role.”