Vera (2 page)

This is the story of a woman, a man, and a marriage, a threesome that adds up any number of ways. For Véra and Vladimir Nabokov the arithmetic was simple: The elements amounted to a single entity. “
There is only one real number: One,” argues a doubly fictional character at the center of Nabokov's first English-language novel.
Other writers came in pairs, recalls a long-term publisher, but none with the Nabokovs' intensity. They were the ultimate portmanteau couple. “
It was as close a marriage as I was ever present at,” remembers William Maxwell, speaking for countless others.
Even her detractors held that Véra Nabokov participated in her husband's work to an unprecedented degree. And that was in the Russian league, in which the competition is fierce.

The Nabokovs came—and went—as a couple. Most people never saw him without her. Not only were they inseparable but their sentences fused, on the page and in person. They shared a datebook. Their handwritings invade each other's notebooks; he would begin from one end, she from the other. Three years into the marriage Vladimir apologized to his mother for writing her in pencil; Véra was in the next room correcting proofs, with what was presumably the couple's only pen. Thirty-five years later Véra lodged the same complaint. She was writing in pencil because her pen always seemed to be in use somewhere. Only as she came to the end of her letter did her husband return it to her. They did the biographer no favors: They spent very little time apart. Why could they not be like Louise Colet and Flaubert, one
hundred letters and only six visits in over a year and a half? The Nabokovs' struck many as one of the great love stories.

Who was she? “
She was just a wife,” remembered a publisher with whom she corresponded, on her husband's behalf, for three decades. “
She was the international champion in the Wife-of-Writer Competition, adding intelligence to the usual equation,” recalled a friend. “
She was the Saint Sebastian of wives,” concluded another. Whoever she was, when it came to self-display she favored the negative comparison. She was not a Russian aristocrat. She was not her husband's first fiancée. She was decidedly not—on this point she was emphatic—a
lady driver. She was no Dark Lady of the Sonnets; she neither wrote the books nor starred in them. She appears in only one
credited cameo in the fiction. Appropriately, she makes her entrance attempting to coax a black cat out of hiding. Lolita was always Dolores on the dotted line; Véra Nabokov
was
the dotted line, a walking ellipsis. “
She was a Polish princess, wasn't she?” asked a translator who worked with her closely. One publisher was under the impression that she was French.
Several of her husband's students knew her to be a German countess. A fair number of her correspondents got her patronymic wrong. Her husband's chroniclers, working in her lifetime, had no choice but to
write around her.

Nabokov thought he would be remembered for two works—his
Eugene Onegin
translation and
Lolita
—one of which Véra had suggested, the other of which she had salvaged.
The two projects that meant the most to him in the later years were a Russian translation of
Lolita
and the revised edition of
Speak, Memory
. Véra collaborated on the first and contributed to the second. The original Nabokovian, she was a full creative partner in everything her husband did. She had a need to do something great with her life. And as he made clear from the start, Nabokov had a very great need of her. Lawyers, publishers, relatives, colleagues, friends, agreed on one point: “
He would have been nowhere without her.” Her marriage put her in the spotlight; her nature made her drift toward the shadows. As did some of her responsibilities, which demanded silence. Nabokov spoke fondly of having composed in the car, “
the only place in America with no noise and no draft.” Véra was the one who parked him there, under a tree, in the remote western outposts he so loved. And then obligingly disappeared from the picture.

To one person she remained always hugely visible. Nabokov was supremely conscious of her presence. He
lit up around his wife; he played off of her. The two comported themselves as if they
shared a secret. With visitors later in life they resembled nothing so much as two children plotting, in code, about how much they dared tell the adults. One Cornell colleague went so far as to use the “u” word: “
He was the most uxorious man I have ever met.”
Nabokov thought his wife discerning, wise, whimsical, and much else as well. In 1949 he registered his disapproval of the object of a student's affection, whom he did not consider a raving beauty. But beauty isn't everything, protested the Cornellian. “
Mr. Keegan, Mr. Keegan, that's just a conceit we carry on with. Beauty
is
everything,” Professor Nabokov assured him.
An American admirer sought out the couple in Italy during the summer of 1967. They were walking down a mountain trail, butterfly nets in hand. Nabokov was jubilant. Earlier in the day, he had sighted a rare species, precisely the one he had been looking for. He had gone back for his wife of forty-two years. He wanted her to be with him when he made his capture.

His image was flattering, but so was the image he saw reflected back at him. One of the discarded titles within the works was “
Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror”; in Nabokov's case, the mirror was to be found in his wife's brilliant blue eyes. The illusion stands prominently at the center of the highly refractive literature, as it does at the center of the marriage. Nabokov reveled in being a figment of Véra's imagination, which is no wonder, given who she thought he was. When she met him she felt that he was the greatest writer of his generation; to that single truth she held strong for sixty-eight years, as if to compensate for all the loss and the turmoil, the accidents of history. She did all in her power to see to it that he existed not in time, only in art, thus sparing him the fate of so many of his characters, imprisoned by their various passions. The genius went into the work, not the life—something Véra Nabokov had to explain regularly to family members, whose letters to her husband were turned over to her to be answered. This resulted in understandable confusion about authorship, which grew worse over the years.

It has been said that the Nabokovs “
refined their marriage to a work of art.” Both partners wrung an immense amount of creative mileage from it. In singular ways this was as true in Berlin in the 1920s as it was in upstate New York in the 1950s and Switzerland in the 1970s. After the advent of
Lolita
, the public Nabokov, the voice of Nabokov, was Véra's. We are accustomed to husbands silencing wives, but here was a wife silencing, editing, speaking for,
creating
, her husband. In many ways, the distant, unapproachable, irreproachable “VN” was her construct. To begin to pry the couple apart is to see what lay beneath the monument, the figure in the carpet.

Véra Nabokov—she added the accent when she arrived in America, so that the name would be pronounced to rhyme with “dare ah”—was an eminent woman because she was married to an eminent man, more exactly a man whom she helped to achieve eminence. She is important for what she reveals about her husband. Which is a very great deal; the marriage was at the heart of his existence. It defined them both. It
shaped his work. The keen-eyed
Saul Steinberg may have put it best: “
It would be difficult to write about Véra without mentioning Vladimir. But it would be impossible to write about Vladimir without mentioning Véra.” Hers was a life lived in the margins, but then—as Nabokov teaches us—sometimes the commentary
is
the story.

This volume is not one of literary criticism. From the earliest years to the final days, Véra Nabokov's was a life steeped in literature, for which she had a supremely sensitive ear, a prodigious memory, and a near-religious appreciation. But she was not a writer. She was just a wife.

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Véra Nabokov neither wrote her memoirs nor considered doing so. Even at the end of her long life, she remained the world's least likely candidate to set down the confessions of a white widowed female. (She did keep a diary of one girl's fortunes, but the girl was Lolita.) When asked how she had met the man to whom she had been married for fifty-two years she begged the question, with varying degrees of geniality. “
I don't remember” was the stock response, a perfectly transparent statement coming from the woman who could recite volumes of her husband's verse by heart. At another time she parried with: “
Who are you, the KGB?” One of the few trusted scholars cornered her. Here is your husband's account of the events of May 8, 1923; do you care to elaborate? “
No,” shot back Mrs. Nabokov. In the biographer's ears rang the sound of the portcullis crashing down. For all anyone knew shehad been
born
Mrs. Nabokov.

Which she had not. Vladimir Nabokov's version, delivered more or less consistently, was that he had met the last of his fiancées in Germany.
^*
“I met
my wife, Véra Slonim, at one of the émigré charity balls in Berlin at which it was fashionable for Russian young ladies to sell punch, books, flowers, and toys,” he stated plainly. When a biographer noted as much, adding that Nabokov left shortly thereafter for the south of France, Mrs. Nabokov went to work in the margins. “
All this is rot,” she offered by way of corrective. Of Nabokov's 1923 trip to France another scholar observed: “
While there he wrote once to a girl named Véra Slonim whom he had met at a charity ball before leaving.” Coolly Mrs. Nabokov announced that this single sentence bulged with three untruths, which she made no effort to identify.

In all likelihood the ball was a “
 ‘reminiscence'… born many years later” on the part of Nabokov, who anointed May 8 as the day on which he had met his wife-to-be. A lavish dance
was
held in Berlin—one of those “
organized by society ladies and attended by the German elite and numerous members of the diplomatic corps,” in Véra's more glamorous description, and which both future Nabokovs were in the habit of attending—but on May 9. These balls took place with regular succession; Nabokov had met a previous fiancée at one such benefit.
^*
Ultimately we are left to weigh his expert fumbling of dates against Véra's equally expert denial of what may in truth very well have happened; the scale tips in neither direction. Between the husband's burnishing of facts and the wife's sweeping of those facts under the carpet, much is possible. “
But without these fairy tales the world would not be real,” proclaimed Nabokov, who could not resist the later temptation to
confide in a visiting publisher that he and Véra had met and fallen instantly in love when they were thirteen or fourteen and summering with their families in Switzerland. (He was writing
Ada
at the time of the confession.)