Vera (36 page)

In the classroom the act was a perfectly synchronized one. Nabokov might near a certain quotation and the assistant, as if animated by some kind of “brain-bridge,” would rise from her seat to offer the appropriate notes, to extend the appropriate page, to sketch the appropriate diagram. Promptly she responded to his cues. “My assistant will now move the blackboard to the other side of the room,” the professor would command. “My assistant will now pass out the bluebooks.” “Perhaps my assistant could find the page for me.” “My assistant will now draw an oval-faced woman”—this was Emma Bovary—“on the board.” And the assistant—whom Nabokov addressed as “Darling” outside of the classroom—would do so. The stage directions do not figure in the published lectures. (The routine was a little different in the Russian Literature classes, in which the assistant audibly served as prompter and aide-mémoire, and committed
sophisticated diagrams—scanning matrixes for Tyutchev—to the board.) A smile played visibly on her lips when he discussed Anna Karenina's skating outfit, attire he described as having been made of “
rubberized tweed.” A smile must have played on her lips too when he announced that he had read
Anna Karenina
for the first time at the age of six, but that his wife had done so at the age of three.
^*
We do not know how, if at all, she reacted when he discussed Anna and Vronski's dreaming in unison, about which he observed, “
This monogrammatic interconnection of two individual brain-patterns is not unknown in so-called real life.” Occasionally the assistant rerouted an errant lecture; she might cut off an off-color aside with a glance, or prompt a line with a nod. For the most part she sat straight-faced and straight-backed in her chair, a huge, unexplained, and intimidating presence. And despite her attempts to remain faceless, a face was now fitted to her by a decade's worth of Russian Literature and European Literature students. Even before the most spellbinding lecturer, a roomful of red-blooded undergraduates is sure to engage in a game of Find-What-the-Sailor-Has-Hidden. Her identity was by no means obvious. One gifted student was shocked when—having written an essay so stellar it precipitated an invitation to his professor's home—
the mask dropped, and he found himself being introduced to “Mrs. Nabokov.” Revolution and migration had already dissolved several identities. In the Cornell classroom a new one constituted itself, seemingly without any active participation on Véra's part.

These were the most public years of the Nabokovs' lives; Véra could not
have failed to realize that her presence in the classroom would be as much remarked upon as her husband's shredding Dostoyevsky in front of two hundred undergraduates, his trampling Freud, his dismissal of that great realist writer “Upton Lewis,” his suggestion that the Rinehart translation of
Madame Bovary
was so bad the job must have been done by the arch-philistine Homais himself. For the most part the tirades proved the stuff of enchantment; the slurs were savored long after the course was forgotten. The corrections to the translations
proved more memorable than the books. Much that took place in the room was unforgettable. It was “
quite a performance on her part as well,” remembered a graduate student who sat in on the European Literature course in 1958. The assistant was deemed
as legendary, as mesmerizing a presence as Professor Nabokov.
^*
“
Everybody was fascinated by her,” recalled Alison Bishop. And yet no one agreed on exactly what to make of her.
One student winced at Professor Nabokov's treatment of his flunky, which struck her as downright exploitative. A group of Cornellians thought her so severe they referred to her as the
Gray Eagle. Another class dubbed her
the Countess. She was radiant, regal, elegance personified, a head-turner, “
the most beautiful middle-aged woman I have ever set eyes on.” She was a waif, dowdy, half-starved, the Wicked Witch of the West. She was German. She was a princess. She was a ballerina. Whoever she was, she was “mnemogenic”—as Nabokov had written of Clare in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
—“
subtly endowed with the gift of being remembered.”

What was Véra Nabokov doing in her husband's classroom, lecture after lecture? Nabokov had no graduate degree but was by inclination a master of specificity; the naturalist-professor instructed his students to dissect literature with a scientist's care. Which is precisely what they did in explicating the scene before them:

• Mrs. Nabokov was there to remind us we were in the presence of greatness, and should not abuse that privilege with our inattention.
  
• Nabokov had a heart condition, and she was at hand with a phial of medicine to jump up at a moment's notice.
  
• That wasn't his wife, that was his mother.
  
• She was there because Nabokov was allergic to chalk dust, and because he didn't like his handwriting.
  
• To shoo away the coeds.
  
• Because she was his encyclopedia, if ever he forgot anything.
  
• Because he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth—and no memory of it after it did—so she had to write it all down so that he would remember what to ask on the exams.
  
• He was blind, and she was the Seeing Eye dog, which explained why they always arrived arm in arm.
  
• She was intended as living proof that he had a fan club.
  
• She graded his performance, in order to review it with him in the evenings.
  
• We all knew that she was a ventriloquist.
  
• She had a gun in her purse, and was there to defend him.
  

No one was certain who marked the exams; a few students admitted that they made a practice of smiling at Mrs. Nabokov in the hope that their
geniality might register in their grades.
Initially she waded through the bluebooks before her husband. Later she alone graded the examinations, unbeknownst to the 1958 senior who could not refrain from
adding a panegyric to the professor's luminous assistant to the back of his bluebook. (It was returned without comment.) By 1951 she was remunerated for her efforts. To his department chairman Nabokov wrote just before 1953 fall midterms: “
I estimate that I shall need at least $70 to pay my assistant for grading the papers since there are 231 students in 311 [Masters of European Literature] and 36 in 325 [Russian Literature in Translation].”
^*
He anticipated that an additional $90 would be necessary in January, for finals. It was a little coy not to have named names, or perhaps it was not coy in the least, as Véra wrote this letter herself.

As the reputation of the European Literature course grew, so did its enrollment. By the spring of 1954 Professor Nabokov—or someone in his household—was requesting that “
my assistant, Mrs. V. Nabokov,” be credited with 130 hours' work. That was a brutal amount of time to spend deciphering the handwritings of anxious undergraduates. Véra must have been relieved when, toward the end of the decade, the university provided a teaching assistant for the course. She herself was terrifically exacting, but not an ogre of a grader. Henry Steck, a graduate student in the Department of Government, took on the job in 1958.
He spent five days reviewing some two hundred bluebooks, which he evaluated according to a rigorous scale. After reading each exam several times, he delivered the bundle to Professor
Nabokov's office, hoping finally to have a word with the great man. Mrs. Nabokov met him at the door, standing like a sentinel between Steck and her husband. She took the exams, immediately raised all the grades to the eighties, and sent Steck on his way. Another assistant met with a warmer welcome. When she graded for the course in 1957, M. Travis Lane was asked to compile a collection of student bloopers, which she was invited to share with the Nabokovs at their home, over a glass of sherry. She remembered Véra's emitting a musical laugh, as well she must have when she learned that her husband the stickler had met his match in a humorist. To the question: “
What was the pattern of Anna Karenina's wallpaper?” one luminary had replied, “little railroad trains.”

Even when she was not acting the sentinel at the door, Véra allowed her husband to speak in the first person plural, which seemed so much more naturally to accommodate his pronouncements. She reserved the same right for herself. The impressive student to whom a not very impressive exam was returned was told: “We thought you would do better than that.
We
had confidence in you.” A student suffering from an eye problem returned her bluebook to Professor Nabokov's office with an apologetic, “
I have written with some difficulty.” Witheringly Véra replied, “And it looks as if we will read it with some difficulty.” An aspiring novelist slipped his manuscript to the professor, who read a few pages and agreed to discuss the text. Véra was the one to do so, from the far end of her husband's office. As she spoke, remembered Steve Katz, sunk low in Nabokov's armchair, “
he leaned over me like the tallest dentist in the world, and occasionally supported her presentation by a word or phrase.”

Nabokov was a mesmerizing lecturer, but part of the charm was in the tart condescension, the well-honed insult. The students who noted this were clear-eyed. He was simply pitching “
way, way over our crew-cut heads,” concluded one. Nabokov provided a perfect summation of his attitude toward academe in an October 1956 letter to Hessen: “
I write you while proctoring exams, the empty heads are bowed down. I see it is impossible to write; they keep asking me questions.” Before him two hundred students squirmed in midterm agony as they racked their brains for wallpaper patterns. Certain things clearly felt
beneath his dignity, as was suggested by Véra's habit of proctoring exams and keeping office hours.
He grumbled that he did not see why Sirin should have to lecture on Joyce, a complaint to which only one other person in Ithaca, New York, would have been sympathetic. Nabokov and his assistant both felt he should be on the syllabus and not behind the podium, a sense that set them apart from the Cornell colleagues. “
I am too little of an academic professor to teach subjects that I dislike,” Nabokov proclaimed,
which may explain why Véra prepared much of his Dostoyevsky talk for him. She wrote its first draft, at the very least. She was the one who explained how Dostoyevsky, working under constant stress and in a hurry, hired and then married his stenographer, “
a woman full of devotion and practical sense. With her help he met his deadlines and gradually extricated himself from the financial mess he had been in.” Much of the repertoire consisted of the pieces on which Véra had worked at Wellesley; the libretto of the Ithaca years is more clearly discernible, if only because she neglected to throw out the draft pages, in which her sizable contribution can be read. Some of her lines are embedded in the Joyce lecture as well, for which she did the library work. Only to this extent was she her husband's ventriloquist.

Nabokov did not teach literature as it had been taught in America before or as it has been taught since. For one thing he taught Gogol's “The Greatcoat,” Tolstoy's
Anna Karenin
, Proust's
The Walk by Swann's Place
, Dostoyevsky's
Memoirs from a Mousehole
. He consulted his own dictionary of literary terms. There was the “parallel interruption,” the “perry,” the “knight's move,” the “sifting agent,” the “special dimple.” He had no use for plot or psychology; he taught that literature was in the images, not the ideas. Very little was sacred. In this he upheld the legacy of one of his own esteemed Petersburg teachers, the Symbolist poet V. V. Hippius, who was said to teach “
not literature but the far more interesting science of literary spite.”
^*
Nabokov was known, vaguely, as a writer, by the mid-1950s as the creator of
Pnin
, by the end of the decade as the author of
Lolita
, more conspicuously as the man who annually filled the Goldwin Smith amphitheater to capacity crowds when he lectured on
Madame Bovary
from the Sunday comics; who taught “The Metamorphosis” with the assistance of his favorite newspaper, the
Daily News
. The eccentricities rather than his literary reputation accounted for his legend. By the time he left Cornell, his European Literature course was among the most popular on campus.

He also taught his students how to read. More even than did the English majors, the government students, the home economics majors, the pre-meds, the mathematicians, the engineers found he was to change their lives.
^†
“
He savored words, drew vibrant word pictures, and made reading great books a joy for me and my husband to this day,” remembers Supreme Court Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. What even the good readers did not entirely realize at the time was that on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between noon and 12:50, in the guise of teaching several hundred undergraduates how to parse Proust, Flaubert, Tolstoy, as he filled Goldwin Smith C with his booming baritone, he was teaching them
how to read Nabokov. Caress the details, he directed. Art is a deception; the great artist a deceiver. Read for the tingle, the shiver up the spine. Do not read but—here he feigned a stutter—re-re-read a book. Look at the harlequins. Véra was in that amphitheater every day though no one needed to absorb the lesson less: She was already the world champion Nabokov reader. Surely she must have been a little bored on hearing for the fifth or sixth time that the moral message of
Anna Karenina
lay in the metaphysical love of Kitty and Levin, “
on willingness for self-sacrifice, on mutual respect.” If she showed no signs of stirring in her chair, save to shoot a disparaging look at the inattentive student, to reprimand the one who had absentmindedly
lit up a cigarette, it was because the lectures sounded like something other than lectures to her. Later a Cornell colleague observed that when Mrs. Nabokov had been obliged to teach in her husband's stead she had altered not a word of his texts. In the margin eighty-four-year-old Véra chastised him. But of course she had not changed a thing! Had he not understood that her husband had been a perfectionist, that each lecture constituted a work of art? So much did she believe this that she quibbled equally with the colleague's assessment that when teaching in her husband's stead she delivered “
as good a piece of merchandise as Nabokov the master himself.”