Vera (27 page)

Mrs. Downey was understandably misled by the question. In Cambridge Nabokov returned to the magic world of his microscope; if Véra disapproved she waited some time to intervene. It had not been long since she had typed a line stating that Gogol had become a great artist when “
he really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss.” The letters are
studded with wails about the difficulty of changing languages, of keeping the Sirin inside at bay, of the clumsiness of feeling his way in English.
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The butterfly work must have been doubly appealing, once as passion, again as refuge: The language of science is beautifully constant. The discipline was an all-consuming one, however. Nabokov later admitted that after the MCZ he was never to touch a microscope, “
knowing that if I did, I would drown again in its bright well.” Véra threw out a lifeline just after the New Year. On January 3, 1944, her husband wrote Wilson: “
Véra has had a serious conversation with me in regard to my novel. Having sulkily pulled it out from under my butterfly manuscripts I discovered two things, first it was good, and second that the beginning some twenty pages at least could be typed and submitted.” He promised that this would be done quickly and it was: “I, or rather Véra, have-has typed out already ten pages of
The Person from Porlock,”
he reported days later. By mid-month thirty-seven pages of what was to become
Bend Sinister
went off to Wilson.

Progress on the novel slowed after the initial burst. The teaching schedule interfered, but mostly the butterflies were to blame. Nabokov knew his habit was costing his family, too. “
I am devoting too much time to entomology (up to 14 hours per day) and although I am doing in this line something of far-reaching scientific importance I sometimes feel like a drunkard who in his moments of lucidity realizes that he is missing all sorts of wonderful opportunities,” he admitted. On account of his passion he had grossly neglected his finances.
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The jovial comments did not fall on deaf ears; a Russian writers' bureau arranged for several hundred dollars to be advanced him that spring. He talked about retiring from the MCZ, something he would not do until the fall of 1947. Meanwhile a sort of compromise was worked out, one Vladimir described to Hessen on the twenty-first anniversary of meeting Véra: “
It's Sunday today, and as usual on this day, I am staying in bed since I know—and Véra knows—that if I get up I will stealthily make my way to the Museum. It's particularly pleasant working there on Sundays.” Cambridge friends who remembered Véra waiting on her husband while he sat propped up in bed remarked on her humble devotion. At those times she appears, however, to have had him precisely where she wanted him.

She succeeded less well in keeping the financial anxiety at bay than she
did the bill collector. (The rent on Craigie Circle alone was sixty dollars a month, or three-fourths of Nabokov's museum salary.) Shortly after the move to Cambridge Véra began to give private language lessons, as she did intermittently over the next years. One of her
less willing victims was the eleven-year-old daughter of Wellesley professor Isabel Stephens, eager to help the family financially. In 1944 Dmitri was enrolled at the Dexter School, in Brookline, for which he had a partial scholarship; Véra paid off a portion of the private school tuition with secretarial work. That year she took a position in the Department of Romance Languages at Harvard, where she assisted a French and a German professor on a part-time basis. Again the job proved short-lived, either because the permanent secretary
returned from leave, as Véra asserted later, or, more likely, as she wrote at the time, because the position “
was incompatible with everything else, since V. is busy all day and needs a lot done for him and he needs help with a lot of things.” By 1947, when a
Harvard library position was offered her, she would not even pause before responding that she was unqualified for the job. By that time she had found full-time work, at home.

Her job expanded in 1945, when Wellesley suggested that Nabokov teach a course in Russian literature in translation. From the Stanford summer he knew how much preparation this would entail; he had no trouble resisting the offer. Véra prevailed upon him to accept it,
promising to write the lectures herself.
Sparing her husband the necessity of looking up dates or biographical details, which she knew he found tedious, she compiled a concise history of Russian literature.
Together the two rewrote some thirty lectures, which Nabokov delivered twice a week at Wellesley; these proved part of the repertoire for nearly fifteen years, ultimately part of the published repertoire. At the top of a talk on romanticism, Véra queried: “
Volodia, would it be too involved to say … that, while during the Middle Ages every facet of human nature was dulled and all the contents of it kept frozen like a Bird's Eye peach, it took roughly speaking four centuries to defreeze it?” She wrote a great number of pages on the Russian poets, all subsumed in Vladimir's lectures. “
A little tartly,” she acknowledged that her husband had reworked the lectures so many times that not a word of her original texts remained.

Finances kept the Nabokovs close to Cambridge between 1943 and the summer of 1947, when they were able again to head west, to Colorado. During those years Vladimir pursued a number of avenues to supplement—or replace—his Wellesley wages. He asked to be sent on a second lecturing tour at the end of the 1944 academic year; he flirted with film work. Véra made his Hollywood ambitions perfectly clear in a 1947 letter to an agent interested in the rights to
Bend Sinister:
“
My husband wishes me to add, however, that,
being a novelist and not a picture man, he is more interested in the financial side of a possible sale than in the quality of a possible picture.” Nabokov continued to hope that Harvard might notice his presence in their backyard and exploded with frustration when they did not; Wellesley car-poolers
remembered him fulminating about this injustice from the backseat. (Both he and Véra were vocal about their disdain for the Slavists at Harvard and Yale, which did nothing to improve his chances at either institution.) In 1946 he was briefly considered for a vacancy at the head of Vassar's Russian program, but was rejected,
allegedly on the grounds that he was a prima donna. He energetically pursued the possibility of heading up a Russian unit for the newly created Voice of America, a position his cousin Nicholas mentioned initially, and ultimately took for himself.
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Nothing came of any of these opportunities, although Vladimir was put under contract at
The New Yorker
in June of 1944. That summer found the family vacationing in Wellesley, taking their meals at a private home near campus. Rationing only accentuated the deprivations they already felt. A Wellesley physics professor who joined them at mealtimes remembered
Vladimir's ill humor—he was decidedly not where he wanted to be in August, when
Bend Sinister
failed to convince an early reader—but mostly the professor remembered Véra's unease. She seemed poised to anticipate her husband's displeasure. Certainly she knew how to tone down his attacks. In a letter that went out over her name, Véra alerted a magazine editor to her husband's low, and frank, opinion of Soviet poets. After a fair amount of vitriol was spilled, she stepped out from behind the typewriter: “
I think he would have used milder expressions if he were not down with the flu.” This was wishful thinking, as other letters on the subject attest. More often she did not temper her husband's remarks, and the thunderbolts sailed.
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She had already begun to serve as his emissary. At the end of 1943, she had traveled to New York for the day; Vladimir had sent her to see Wilson, with whom she discussed her husband's fraying relationship with Laughlin.
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By early 1945, she had begun to teach in her husband's stead at Wellesley when he was not well enough to do so. A less endearing habit was Vladimir's tendency to slough off other people's enthusiasms on his wife. If someone began to effuse about a new novel or play, Nabokov sidestepped their accounts with a cursory, “
Tell it to Véra.” He did not feel he needed to be burdened with other people's impressions. In an arrangement that evidently suited both partners in the marriage and clearly amused at least one, Véra began to lend her husband something more valuable than a willing ear. In May of 1944 Nabokov visited Cornell University for the first time, not yet aware that his American odyssey was to end in Ithaca, New York. From the train home he wrote George and Sonia Hessen. He was alone, but the letter bears a postscript, ostensibly from Véra. In his wife's hand Nabokov had added: “
Véra sends you both sincere regards. (I have long been imitating Véra's handwriting!)”

After a burst of enthusiasm, Knopf rejected the new novel in 1945. By that year Véra had assumed Vladimir's correspondence with the interested editor, beginning her first letter as she would countless others, “
My husband has turned over to me your letter for an answer.” The missive reporting that she would send on the novel's first chapters before the end of the week is signed “Mrs. V. Nabokov”—but in Vladimir's hand. This reverse mitosis was not always perfectly neat; occasionally the two tripped over each other on the page. Véra wrote a foreign agent about a contract her husband had signed and had asked her to return;
Vladimir accidentally signed the letter himself. She had by now found an English-language voice, but seemed still reluctant to step out from the wings. The self-effacement was extreme enough to be telling—and to be recounting a very different story. In the fall of 1946 Edmund Wilson was in Cambridge and took the Nabokovs to dinner, after which the three paid the Levins a visit. Wilson reported on the evening to Elena Thornton, about to become his fourth wife: “
Véra is wonderful with Volodya: she writes all his lectures, types his manuscripts, and handles all his publishing arrangements. She also echoes all his opinions—something which would end by making me rather uncomfortable but which seems to suit Nabokov perfectly.”

Why would a strong-willed, independent-minded woman now in comfortable command of the English language—she soon noticed that
Anglicisms were creeping into her French—second all of her husband's opinions? She did so only more passionately as the years went by; in the late 1950s a colleague spoke with Véra at a
crowded faculty party about Auden, then crossed the room to hear Vladimir expound the same (dim) views, in precisely the same terms. In no course that Nabokov taught did Dostoyevsky ever earn a
grade above a C minus; he fared no better with Véra. The only person who argued more violently than Nabokov for the novel for art's sake was his wife. Most of the time Véra believed simply that he was right. She had lived with his arguments for a long time; the two had
similar tastes from the beginning. (She could disagree, vociferously, but only with company before whom it was safe to do so. Véra detested the work of George Eliot, which her husband defended on a private occasion. “
Now why did I marry you?” wailed Véra. He was no more indulgent than she when their judgments failed to coincide. “
Good Heavens, how could you like
that?”
he would cry.) With Wilson there was a certain amount of circling the wagons. Wilson was as tenacious a debator as Nabokov, happy to agree provisionally, only to reopen the discussion hours later; early on Nabokov compared him affectionately to the
psoriasis on his elbow. Véra was no less obstinate. In some cases the beliefs were initially hers, seconded by her husband. Nabokov would dismiss
Doctor Zhivago
, applaud the works of Robbe-Grillet, register perfect indifference to Robert Musil, based on his wife's evaluations. Her heightened sense of dignity had some bearing as well on the undivided front. So too did her confidence in her husband's genius. When Wilson found he could not muster for
Bend Sinister
the enthusiasm he had felt for Nabokov's earlier work, it was to Véra he apologized. He hoped
she would forgive him. If anything, she made a stronger case for her husband than he did himself. So convinced was Nabokov of his enormous talent he did a less than enticing job promoting it. He insisted he was squeamish about selling himself, incapable of arranging his own affairs. This was not entirely true, but it was a convenient case to make. Véra, who had as much conviction but a different stake, willingly stepped in.

The Nabokovs' views—strong opinions in Vladimir's case, nearly religious convictions in Véra's—were not the prevailing ones in America, or in Cambridge, in the early 1940s. At Wellesley Nabokov could not find a kind word for the art produced by the Soviet state, America's ally at the time; he was asked to tone down his remarks. He made no secret of his belief that one ought to learn Russian not to understand
what Stalin thought of war but what Tolstoy did. He evinced no enthusiasm for “Uncle Joe,” no sympathy for America's allies on the Eastern Front. Neither Nabokov hesitated to express unfashionable views about the USSR, which shocked people; Vladimir and Edmund Wilson
fought like cocks on the subject.
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A degree of subtlety
was required to understand that the Nabokovs' disdain had nothing to do with sterling silver samovars and everything to do with art and freedom; that subtlety was not in great supply in the 1940s, when the couple were as often as not cast as White Russians. It was difficult for an American—it was
difficult even for Wilson—to fathom that a Russian could be neither for the Soviets nor for the Tsar.

For good but not always comprehensible reasons, the Nabokovs took the unpopular stand after the war that helping Germany back to its feet should not constitute an American priority. In December 1945, Dmitri's school made a collection of used clothing to be sent to German children. Vladimir explained why his son would not be allowed to participate in the clothing drive: “
When I have to choose between giving for a Greek, Czech, French, Belgian, Chinese, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian, Jewish or German child, I shall not choose the latter one,” he proclaimed, in a statement that shows every sign of having been drafted by Véra. At no time could forgiveness be counted as one of her fortes, and it certainly was not as word of the fates of family and friends left in Europe began to filter back to Cambridge. That news had a vast effect on the totalitarian hell depicted in
Bend
, a novel that Nabokov described as being related in tone to
Invitation
, though “
even more catastrophic and ebullient.” Into its skewed world he had folded many of the nightmarish frustrations, and much of the pain, of the previous decade. He hoped to portray in the book the defiant vigor of the free mind even in the midst of oppression; as if to pry open the cage, the author—a representative of divine power—subtly intervenes at the end of the novel. Unlike
Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister
is permeated with a sense of vulnerability, of the fragility of life and love. Ilya Fondaminsky and Sergei Nabokov had perished; Véra's sister Sonia had made a harrowing, last-minute escape from France via North Africa; Vladimir's younger brother, Kirill Nabokov, had been arrested but had talked himself free; friends had spent years in labor camps. Nabokov swore that if his
hate for the Germans could increase it would, but that it had already reached its limit. Véra went further: “
I don't understand for the life of me why everyone is suddenly in a rush to help the ‘poor' Germans, without whom Europe supposedly can't survive: Oh, it would, and how!”
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