Vera (70 page)

There was of course a certain disingenuousness in the don't-shoot-the-messenger-missives. Her husband's words were immortal, hers were to be thrown away. “
I don't think about my letters, write them anyhow and they are not fit to be quoted. Incidental information that I impart is not meant to be treated as anything absolute. Not fit for footnotes,” she cautioned Boyd. When her words were taken at face value, when she was cited, she availed herself of a ferocious instinct to disavow. No one, it seemed, could get his facts straight. In 1971 she
denied every remark ascribed to her in a scrupulously researched
New York Times Magazine
piece. She engaged in a veritable cult of denials. She swore up and down that she had never said a single word Boyd quoted her as saying; she abjured all marginal notes, even those in her firm hand; she went so far as to deny to a reporter that she was proud of Dmitri. Appel watched her renounce statements he had heard with his own ears. She asked him to delete a comment she had made about Gina Lollobrigida from his manuscript of
Nabokov's Dark Cinema:
“
I am sorry to bother you with this but I really hate to appear to be insulting poor Lollobrigida and I never, ever, ever made the remark ascribed to me!”
^*
The objections were all the more heated the closer they approached truth, as Boyd noted when Véra attempted to wriggle free of Zina Mertz. She attempted to refute the entire Irina Guadanini affair and had gone so far as drafting a letter to that effect—until, wrangling with his conscience, Boyd broke the news that the love letters had survived. She remained elusive even after having admitted to him
that she was well hidden.
He felt she would have denied she was the “you” of
Speak, Memory
if she could have.

At Cornell the Polish princess who had accompanied Nabokov to class had been silent. In Montreux the woman over whose patronymic her Russian correspondents routinely stumbled was anything but.
^*
This only allowed greater room for misunderstanding. She went blithely on her way, letting the counterfeit versions of Véra Nabokov pile up while the original remained unknown. She seemed to feel she could will someone to believe she cast no shadow, or, if he noticed an angular black shape trailing behind her, that that shadow was not hers. She remained a bafflement to the biographer. Having given him next to nothing to go on, she rebuked Boyd, sounding a little wounded, that she “
was surprised by my reflection in your mirror.” Nabokov wanted what every writer wants: to exist solely in his prose. This was to be their mutual fate. It was Vladimir's blessing, Véra's misfortune. In any language her letters were terse; they arrived in place of her husband's; she haggled over money where he did not;
her eyes never left her husband in interviews; she would not deign to explain herself. In short she was a shrewish, controlling, dragon lady, and she was holding her husband hostage in Montreux. The biographer abhors a vacuum.

For many years she was unaware of the ill will. It took her some time to see that a shy, overworked, morbidly private, highly principled woman could appear prickly, humorless, aloof, and instransigent. For the most part she did not care. She laughed with Sonia at the assertion that she was “
sharp-witted.” Doubtless this read to her as a compliment. Less flattering was the description Edmund Wilson provided in
Upstate
, published in 1971. Before the book of recollections was published Wilson had written Vladimir to say that he trusted the account would do nothing to “
again impair our personal relations.” Since the two had been feuding publicly since 1965 over matters Vladimir considered as much personal as professional, it is unlikely anything could have done so.
^‡
Véra's charms had always been lost on Wilson, who now
published an uncharitable account of his May 1957 Ithaca visit, in which she appeared prudish, disobliging, belligerent, blinded in her devotion to her own live-in juggernaut. She knew that she was not one of Wilson's favorites but was taken aback all the same to find herself portrayed so unflatteringly. Each Nabokov wrote off the attack as fiction, in his and her own way. Vladimir
bellowed that Wilson's words verged perilously on libel, that the Nabokov of which his former friend wrote was but a fiction. Among much else, his wife's begrudging special attention to anyone other than himself was a matter of pure invention. Véra shrugged the matter off, or at least did a year later, when there was no longer any Edmund Wilson left with whom to spar. “
For my part I did not mind at all the silly things he ascribed to me in UPSTATE,” she wrote Elena Levin. “I was not very close to him. He could not have any idea of my feelings or moods, and never showed particular interest, so that those petty insinuations were like so many signals from a distant and alien planet. There were many things I valued highly in him, and V. was genuinely fond of him. He was nonetheless angry at the silly attack on me.” Her composure would be sorely tried over the next years. She knew as well as anyone that there are stock characters in literature, and that writers' wives—and writers' widows—are among them.

After forty-eight years of marriage, Countess Tolstoy drafted a press release from Yasnaya Polyana announcing that having devoted her entire life to him, she was leaving her husband. (She did not get far. Several months later it was Tolstoy who fled; the story of his defection consumed the front pages.) The same year in her marriage found Véra Nabokov tangling with Andrew Field on her husband's behalf. Field's manuscript arrived in mid-January 1973, poor timing in the extreme. On January 6, the day after Véra's seventy-first birthday, Anna Feigin had died of a sudden heart attack in the Montreux hospital. She was legally blind and practically deaf; the Nabokovs had been caring for her for exactly five years. The emotional loss was rivaled by physical pain for Véra, who was suffering from two slipped discs. She was uncharacteristically vocal about the discomfort, which had plagued her since Christmas and would continue through February, admitting that the French phrase
“deux vertébres écrasés”
much
better conveyed the torture of her condition than the English. (The Nabokovs' illnesses were by and large occupational hazards. Vladimir twisted his thumb picking up a dictionary; he pulled out his back lifting a case of books—“
second-rate books,” more insultingly.
Véra's eyes, wrists, right arm, and back caused her the most trouble. Cribbing from his own lectures, VN held in the 1972
Transparent Things
that the spine is “
the true reader's main organ”; it was almost too appropriate that Véra's should crumple.) The discomfort was such that she was barely able to fold herself into a taxi—with Anna Feigin's
dame de compagnie
, in imitation ermine, and with Vladimir carrying Véra's handbag—to attend to the formalities. Véra was too ill to attend the cremation, at which Sonia joined Vladimir. The loss of the relative with whom the family's fortunes and misfortunes had been so much entwined for nearly a half century was deeply unsettling. Vladimir woke from his sleep the night before the funeral in an “
angry panic,” having dreamed that he and Véra had been separated at an Italian railway station. He had lost her to a departing train. Two nights later he sat up in bed and saw a set of guillotines in the shadows under the window in his room. He had just enough time before the image faded to wonder if Véra was being “prepared” next door.

Field's manuscript arrived the following week. The original plan had been for Véra to read through the pages first, but she returned from a hospital stay only at the end of January, by which time Vladimir had already begun his review. He pronounced the manuscript “
cretinous.” In discomfort of all kinds, Véra annotated the chronicle as she read; between them the Nabokovs produced 181 pages of comments on a 670-page manuscript, a process that consumed the better part of a month. Husband and wife submitted their general comments to the biographer in separate letters, along with a long list of matters of fact to which they expected him to attend. Véra's six-page missive went out on March 10. She was primarily disturbed by the flattened image of her husband she found on the page:

Vladimir made the same point differently. He existed only on the preprepared page. He disassociated himself from the lame words he may—or may not—have let fall in conversation. A monumental ego doing his best to obliterate the self, he had long contested he was a dreary character, of uninteresting habits and few friends. These assertions sounded different when
they came from Véra, as did the account of her husband's Parisian affair, which she was assigned to address as well. A husband's infidelity always sounds different in a wife's retelling; this wife essentially shrugged off the events of 1937.

The review made for an arduous and infuriating exercise, and the opening skirmish in what became a protracted war. Ever the obscurantist, Véra did herself no favors. Field attempted to deny she was “a guardian harpy” and was asked to excise the reference. He was not allowed to assert that she loved her husband. (As Vivian Crespi observed of Véra, “
She so often put her worst foot forward due to shyness.”) At the end of May Field delivered a revised manuscript, which did nothing to pacify Vladimir; by December biographer and subject were off speaking terms. In Véra's view a hideous year's labor had yielded a biography “
which teems with factual errors, snide insinuations and blunders that Field refuses to correct after having promised, when starting the job, to publish nothing that VN would not approve.” A full-dress legal battle ensued, the manuscript hurtling back and forth between publisher and lawyer over the course of four years. Véra read the final version upon its 1977 publication.
By page two she had disputed Field's physical description of her husband, of the sitting room of the apartment, his report on how VN took his coffee. With his statement that the marriage was as intricate and as essential as the work she had no quibble.

She was well enough to travel by the end of May, when the couple set off for Italy, on a vacation that disappeared under a deluge of letters and tax forms. Moreover, the McGraw-Hill contract had been good for five years and was up for renewal; Véra was under some pressure to set her thoughts on the matter to paper. “
This still is not the long letter on the McGraw-Hill employment agreement which I am slowly composing but cannot complete because of the ever more baffling monetary situation and also because the complexities and diversity of the details to be tackled leave me breathless whenever I try to look at them all at once. So I write down something different every now and then but know that I still do not have a proper picture of the entire situation,” she apologized to the lawyers. She was weary, and gave up ground in the negotiation. Her personal correspondence came to a halt. At the end of the summer she was moving at a reduced speed, and felt miserably behind in everything. Two weeks later the Rowohlt translators arrived for their last weeklong
Ada
session; they conferred every evening until seven. As ever Véra's concern was for her husband, who was working flat-out on a new novel—it was to be
Look at the Harlequins!
—from which he could not be separated. She was practically beside herself. “
I know that he doesn't need to work so much, that it's bad for him, but I don't know what to do,” she wrote
Dmitri, adding that she felt herself impossibly beleaguered. Even the letters she most wanted to answer sat sometimes for four months. “
We can only plead the appalling pressure of work that obliterated all sense of time,” she apologized to Simon Karlinsky, who had attempted to intervene with Field.

Field was the most conspicuous of the shadowgraphers in 1973 but not the only one. In Paris Irina Guadanini continued to pine for Nabokov, as she had since 1937. She kept a file on him nearly until her death in 1976, clipping even Véra's photos from the paper. Less fond of Véra, and more vocal, was Zinaida Shakhovskoy, still licking her wounds from the near-encounter at the Gallimard party in 1959. Shakhovskoy had known the Nabokovs since the early 1930s and was happy to distort most of the intervening years to her own uses. Slowly it came out that the two women had had an unpleasant conversation in Paris, before the war. But in Shakhovskoy's eyes Véra's offenses were legion. First and foremost, the Nabokovs appeared intolerably happy. “
It has not been an unhappy marriage then?” an interviewer inquired. Vladimir won no new friends by replying, “That is the understatement of the century.” This was clearly a hoax. How could it be otherwise when Véra so effectively shooed visitors away, when her husband had been renowned in the emigration for his amorous conquests? Among their countrymen the trouble went beyond jealousy. The sense was that Véra did not want Russians around. And as Rosalind Wilson, Edmund's daughter, observed of Véra's profile in a certain community: “
High-born Russian ladies of Tsarist times are hopeless snobs about Russian ladies they consider bourgeoise.” That Véra was celebrated and supreme in Montreux was all the more unpardonable, in the eyes of an ex-aristocrat, for her not having been born so.