Vera (35 page)

She could express this frustration to her sister-in-law, an ocean away. In Ithaca she had no one to whom she could speak openly about these or any other concerns, with the exception of Morris Bishop's wife, Alison. (That fondness did nothing to preclude her heading off an inquiring biographer fifteen years later with the categorical, “
We had no close, really close friends at Cornell.”) She confided her hopes, her qualms, her excitement about the new manuscript to no one, even while her husband
boasted regularly to a colleague that he was at work on a new novel that would get him kicked out of America, as—quite differently than he imagined—was to be the case.
^*
Véra was always circumspect, but was so especially about what she was reading in the early 1950s. These were staid times in a provincial place. Over the summer she had even less of an opportunity to share her concerns. Véra and Dmitri by turns drove Vladimir across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas to Telluride, Colorado, a destination they reached on June 30. This was the family vacation Vladimir claimed he had bungled for the sake of his butterflies. At the end of July Dmitri set off on his own; his parents spent the remainder of the summer in perfect isolation, surrounded by wildlife, on a ranch in West Yellowstone, Montana. They returned to a smaller, more comfortable home in Ithaca, at 623 Highland Road. There were no regrets about the move, as the “
dreadfully drafty dacha”—their landlord had returned to find Véra had stuffed all the keyholes full of cotton wads—had proved ruinously expensive. Moreover, on Highland Road there were no boarders, a breed Véra generally disliked and with which the Nabokovs had had nearly as much luck as would Charlotte Haze. Véra described three of the East Seneca Street four: “
One was a professor and an inveterate drunkard, another was completely crazy (he's currently in the crazy house), and the police
are looking for another of them now. He only stayed a week and passed himself off as something entirely different from what he was.” It was a lineup into which Humbert Humbert could have slipped comfortably.

The fourth Ithaca winter must have felt more temperate, as the couple knew it would be an abbreviated one. Karpovich had arranged for Vladimir to replace him at Harvard for the spring semester, a move that put Véra near the close friends whom—even to the intruding biographer—she did acknowledge. In addition to the older women who had been Vladimir's Wellesley colleagues, Cambridge meant Elena Levin, the Karpoviches, the Wilsons, and ultimately a few other couples to whom the Levins introduced them. Even in those highly evolved circles Véra had no confidante, as her husband had in Wilson, no advocate like Katharine White. She was difficult to get to know, unforthcoming about herself, vociferous in her opinions, an off-putting combination. With those she did not like she did not bother with phatic conversation. She had a great deal in common with Elena Levin, eleven years her junior, a brilliant reader and a devoted faculty wife. The Levins' household gods were the Nabokovs': Joyce, Proust, Flaubert. Yet even with Elena—whom Véra saw regularly in the spring of 1952, and with whom she corresponded for the rest of her life—there was something less than a meeting of the minds. Repeatedly the Levins discovered what could be called the reverse side of Véra's obsessive devotion to Vladimir: She could be uncompromising, prickly, blinded by single-mindedness. Véra had for so long steeled herself against the world's indifference, its occasional hostility, that she seemed unequipped to respond to its welcome; the pride proved not so much a chink in the armor as a kind of armor itself. It left her, in Cambridge company, with no discernible sense of humor, seemingly self-righteous, priggish, proud. “
You know, Véra, if you weren't Jewish you'd be a Fascist,” one Harvard friend exploded, cringing at her intolerance. Quickly Elena Levin learned she could not invite the Nabokovs with other colleagues. He buffooned, and she was combative, overly eager to remind the assembled guests of her husband's greatness. Wilson remarked on the same quality later:

Even allowing for his dim view of the Nabokovs' marriage—so different in number and nature from his own—there was some truth in Wilson's statement. Véra had no particular expectations for herself but she had outsized ones for her husband. The vaulting, vicarious ambition isolated her.

Generally she had little need to confide in anyone other than her husband and, in time, Dmitri. She did not feel it necessary to set her anxieties, her disappointments, to paper; she had no inclination to dwell on these matters. She had been in irregular touch with her sister Sonia, now a United Nations translator in New York, and with her elder sister, Lena, a translator in Sweden, but for the most part those correspondences amounted to catalogues of Dmitri's and Vladimir's triumphs. When Lena offered to phone her—the two had not heard each other's voice since the mid-1930s—Véra discouraged the idea. There was so little one could say in a brief, long-distance conversation. She claimed
a long, “newsy” letter would be far preferable, failing to acknowledge that she rarely had the time to write one.
^*
To Anna Feigin she did address her monetary anxieties, as Vladimir had in the Berlin years; nearly until the time of her death, Anna Feigin remained the family's unlikely financial adviser. She now counseled the Cambridge-based Véra not to worry about their various material setbacks. They had always managed before. Somehow they would again.

So little need did Véra have of the world that the appointments in the diary she and her husband jointly kept appear to have been with Gogol, Pushkin, Fet, rather than with living persons. These were the subjects of Nabokov's Harvard lectures, the schedule for which she devised for him. He was teaching three courses: the second half of Karpovich's Modern Russian Literature course (
one student thought Karpovich must be an awfully good friend to assume the soporific first years of the course and leave Nabokov the entire nineteenth century); his own course on Pushkin; and, against his will, a section of Humanities 2, Harvard's version of Cornell's European Literature course. Again he had had to be bribed and bullied into the assignment, at least in part because the reading list included
Candide
and
Don Quixote
, the latter of which he had neither read in the original nor taught.
^†
He and John H. Finley, Jr., the eminent Greek scholar who taught the first half of the large course, went a few rounds to determine how Nabokov could make peace with the idea. The deaf ear Vladimir turned to these entreaties manifested itself
as a blind eye; he could not seem to decipher Finley's long, handwritten response of July 23, 1951. Dutifully Véra typed out Finley's letter, so that her husband might reply to it. The classicist ultimately won his case with an assist from Harry Levin, who reminded Nabokov that he could doubtless count on at least an additional thousand dollars were he to take on Humanities 2, an amount that—with a few curricular compromises, all of them titles of Harvard's choosing—he could probably parlay into fifteen hundred.

The titles did not much matter. Nabokov's 1952 section of Humanities 2 began with an announcement along these lines: “
There are two great writers in English for whom English was not the native language, the first and the lesser of whom was Joseph Conrad. The second is I.”
^*
The showmanship at times appeared a substitute for scholarship and
did not universally charm the Memorial Hall audience. One student found it offensive that Nabokov presented
Don Quixote
in terms of
how he would have written the book—then went on to discuss how he would improve upon it.
Another disapproved of the visiting professor's devoting an entire class to a discussion of whether
Anna Karenina
should or should not be translated with the final “a” in English.
And was it truly necessary for Nabokov's assistant to spell out Austen's name on the blackboard? In the Russian Literature course he greatly enjoyed teaching the work of Sirin,
revealing only late in the semester that Sirin was he, or that he was Sirin. The section men who graded for him in Humanities 2 found it odd that they saw so little of him. The puns were dreadful.

Véra heard none of these grumblings and clearly liked what she did hear.
^†
She felt a real—and well-justified—sense of triumph that spring. A little more than a decade after the arrival in America, both Dmitri and Vladimir were Harvard men. This mattered; Véra had consistently described Wellesley and Cornell as being among the finest American universities. She glowingly described her husband's Humanities 2 lectures. “
V. is giving
grandiose
lectures, in an enormous auditorium,” she exulted, in a letter Vladimir read before it was mailed. “540 registered students … intently listen and applaud after each meeting of the course. (After the lecture on
Don Quixote
applause; after the lecture on
Bleak House
, the same; on Tuesday he begins
Dead Souls
.)”
^‡
Her husband's pride was her own, as can be heard in this midwinter report: While Vladimir was growing tired of his lectures, “he
is obviously taking great pleasure in the increasing glory and respect which he feels here. (In our boondock Ithaca there simply wasn't anyone capable of understanding who had joined the ranks of their ‘faculty.')” She did not even bother to pretend to be speaking for him when she added that she was thrilled to be around people who knew her husband's work by heart.

After the first two Cambridge weeks the Nabokovs moved into the congenial clapboard home of May Sarton, tucked away on narrow Maynard Street, ten minutes from campus. With the house came the first in a short series of rented pets, a tiger cat named Tom Jones, rechristened “Tomsky” by the Nabokovs. (In a charming example of her slightly synthetic English, Véra remembered Tomsky as “
a gutter cat.”) She took great delight in the antics of the affectionate animal, who took as much delight in her husband. “
When V. reads and writes while lying on the sofa he pounces on his stomach, pounds a bit with his paws, and curls up on him,” Véra noted. At the end of the semester, just as the couple were beginning to set their sights on the drive West, Tomsky came home limping. He would not eat; Véra felt his nose, which was hot and dry. In detail she reported to Sarton on their trips to the hospital, first to admit Tomsky, the next day to visit him. He turned out to be suffering from several infected bites. After a three-day hospital stay the animal was discharged. “
He was much thinner, very hungry and very clean, the white spots dazzling white, and he was quite recovered from his woes,” Véra announced happily.
^*
The dedication she showed Tomsky was perfectly consistent with her character, but the woman who bent down repeatedly to gauge the temperature of a cat's nose was not often in evidence. A few students inadvertently found the way to her heart. At the end of Humanities 2 one admiring senior asked her to pass on to Professor Nabokov his compliments on the course. He was rewarded with a most dazzling smile. “
But you must, you
must
tell him yourself,” Véra pleaded. This remained always a direct route to her affection. Later at Cornell, a colleague of Nabokov's introduced him to a student who had attended every one of his European Literature lectures although he was not enrolled in the course. Beaming, Vladimir led the student directly to Véra, for whom he
made him repeat each of his kind words.

She was more reserved on the subject of her son's lectures. She took to attending William Langer's History of European Diplomacy course, a class in which Dmitri was enrolled. The two happily sat together in the large lecture hall, or did whenever possible.
Langer was a punctual man; the doors to his
classroom closed promptly at the top of the hour. On several occasions mother and son regarded each other forlornly through the window of a locked door. It is unclear whether Véra attended the course because its subject intrigued her—Langer's expertise was in Russian and Middle Eastern studies, two areas about which she felt passionately—or because Dmitri's absenteeism worried her. In any event, Langer's were the only lectures outside the Literature Department she appears to have heard. At Cornell she attended a vast number of courses, but they were without exception taught by the same professor, the one whose letters she typed, edited, and wrote, on the letterhead of a nonexistent department.
^*

In a later attempt to urge his own meticulousness on an editor, Nabokov referred to “
the double-dotted ‘i'.” Nothing could have better described the arrangement that began in Goldwin Smith Hall late in the 1940s and continued there for nearly a decade.
As early as the second Cornell semester, throughout the Harvard interlude, and until the departure from academia in 1958, he arrived for class with his assistant in tow. The assistant trailed a few steps behind him on campus; often she appeared at Goldwin Smith Hall on his arm. She carried his briefcase, and opened any doors that stood in his way. In the classroom she placed his notes on the lectern. She helped him off with his coat before half-removing her own. In the European Literature course, she sat either in the front row of the lecture hall or, more often, in a chair on the dais, to the professor's left.
Her eyes rarely left him.
^†
If he dropped a piece of chalk she retrieved it; if he needed a page number or a quotation she provided it. Otherwise she had no speaking role during the lecture. After class she erased the blackboard.
She lingered at the podium while Nabokov answered questions. When he forgot his glasses she was dispatched on a search-and-rescue mission: The professor labored uncomfortably from memory until her return.
^‡
She rarely missed a class, although she did occasionally teach one, and she often proctored exams alone. All
administrative affairs
were delegated to her. The man who spoke so often of his own isolation was one of the most accompanied loners of all time; at Cornell especially he was in the constant company of his assistant.