Vera (59 page)

To the work he
had
written, the critics responded as had his Cornell students. Half were seduced, half peevishly puzzled. Orville Prescott was this time joined in his dismissal of the book by the
Times's
Sunday reviewer, who found
Pale Fire
refreshing but suspected it had been
more fun to write than it was to read. Mary McCarthy proved one of the most articulate admirers, concluding in her
New Republic
review:

Véra acknowledged that the majority of the symbols McCarthy had found in the book were of her own making, but could only have revised her opinion of “
that evil woman” at this time. Her personal favorite was Donald Malcolm's glowing piece in
The New Yorker
, a more general reading of the novel, and a more general embrace of its author.

Vladimir himself had little use for the commotion. The man who had sworn nearly a decade earlier that no Switzerlands could lure him away from the canyons of Arizona was now impatient with the fanfare, dreaming of the Swiss Alps. “
In general the atmosphere, heady and exhilarating though it is, reflects on his nerves, and I will be glad to set sail on the 20th,” Véra declared
a few days into the stay, sounding as short as she ever would with the nervefrayed celebrity. (She could have pressed the case further. Recalled one friend, “
VN could be like a cornered rhino when he was in a bad mood.”) He was spared the sight of his likeness on the cover of
Newsweek
, which appeared on newsstands as the couple sailed back to Europe, and similarly escaped France just as a
Paris-Match
cover story went on sale. Reporters trailed the couple through their summer wanderings, in Zermatt, and later in the hills a few miles above Cannes. They caused quite a commotion in sedate, traffic-free Zermatt, where a six-man team arrived from the BBC to film an interview. Gleefully Véra observed that they followed Vladimir all over, “
mostly in cabs, unpacking, putting up cameras and mikes, repacking, moving to another location, and all the time shooting pictures of V. catching butterflies or talking, this occasion, I am afraid, became for many tourists the highlight of their stay here. They followed in droves! And one little old lady (not this one) did her best trying to get into the picture.” While not being pursued by the press the couple spent long hours correcting the French page proofs of
Pnin
, which they pronounced the worst translation with which they had ever wrestled.

After New York, and Zermatt, and France, the return to Montreux felt to Véra
like coming home, but she lived still in a state of semiflux. She began to talk of a long stay, as opposed to a return to the United States, admitting that she was out of touch with most everyone she had known in Cambridge. A year later she described the perch on Lake Léman—it consisted then of two small apartments and an extra room—more in terms of default than affection: “It still is not a ‘home' where one could be completely ‘
chez soi.
' But it has so many advantages that we hesitate to change.” She was perfectly happy to concede that the lodgings were ideal, that hotel life was awfully convenient, that Montreux was “one of the most beautiful places on Earth,” but not that they had made a permanent commitment to the place. “
Where we'll settle permanently we haven't yet decided. Maybe in Palm Springs, California,” she suggested as the years slipped by, and well after she had advised Paul, Weiss to base all financial plans on their remaining Swiss residents.

There would be only one additional joint trip to America, in the spring of 1964. After a decade's work,
Eugene Onegin
was nearing publication;
The Harvard Advocate
prevailed upon Nabokov to speak in Cambridge, at the university. Or had done so before suddenly falling silent: In March Vladimir nearly canceled the engagement when his hosts failed to convey the specifics of the visit. Véra appealed to him to be patient. For all her rigorousness she proved more and more the voice of moderation, signaling to her husband when she thought his words might offend, softening them for public consumption.
(In 1961 a Cornellian, then working at Simon & Schuster, had sent her former professor an advance copy of
Catch-22
. Véra was delegated to transmit Nabokov's response. “
This book is a torrent of trash, the automatic produce of a prolix typewriter,” she proclaimed, although she had been asked to deem it “dialogical diarrhea.”) She had other concerns throughout the 1964 American stay, a one-month visit that began with a public reading at the Ninety-second Street YMHA in New York. The Nabokovs lunched on March 25 with the head of the Poetry Center and his assistant, for whom Vladimir performed his analysis of
Anna Karenin(a
), speaking in his customary fully rounded paragraphs. He was nervous about the upcoming evening, but expansive. He described his writing process: He handed on to Véra his cards to be typed and critiqued; she provided her analyses over dinner. If she thought something did not work, he explained, he would revise it, and she would retype it. “
I do a lot of typing,” Véra offered quietly. At her request, a chair was set up in the wings, from which she observed her husband's splendid performance. The audience was his from the moment he
opened his mouth.

The mink Véra wore throughout that trip seemed so inconsistent with the Véra Nabokov of the black cloth overcoats that few friends noticed that the woman inside the fur coat was not entirely herself either. In Cambridge Filippa Rolf, whom the Nabokovs met for tea, caught on immediately. Véra held herself so stiffly she seemed on the verge of toppling over. Elena Levin observed as much that evening, when she threw a small party for the Nabokovs' before the reading. She saw that Véra was ashen, lacking in all vivacity. Since the arrival she had been suffering severe abdominal pains, discomfort she admitted to no one apart from Sonia, which left her some explaining to do afterward; she finally allowed that she had been ill continually since November 1963. In New York the doctors had found nothing amiss and prescribed tranquilizers; she had been heavily sedated in Cambridge. Elena Levin—who sat next to Véra in the ideally uncomfortable Sanders Theater while onstage Levin introduced Nabokov at what was to be his last public reading—thought her behavior heroic, although she, too, had no explanation until later. Véra spent her thirty-ninth wedding anniversary in bed, at Hampshire House, in New York, from which she thanked the Levins for all they had done. She was well enough on April 20 to smoke out the political leanings of a visitor: Arthur Luce Klein picked up the Nabokovs on Central Park South early that rainy Monday to drive them to the sound studio where Vladimir was to make a
Lolita
recording. Véra profited from the rush hour traffic to interview Klein, a former Berkeley professor, about his politics.
Why had he not signed the university's loyalty oath? She drilled him
mercilessly, the three of them wedged tightly together in the front seat of Klein's beat-up car, the rain pelting down, the traffic going nowhere.

On April 21, in New York, she managed to stand tall at the Bollingen reception, looking, it was remembered,
sensationally beautiful; it was after this event that she memorably produced her pistol for Saul Steinberg. After five years of hairsplitting, second-guessing, triple-checking, the 1,945-page, four-volume
Onegin
book was at last scheduled for late June publication. To the dismay of many readers, Nabokov had rendered the most sacred work of Russian literature into English in loose iambic form, preserving Pushkin's fourteen-line stanzas but sacrificing rhyme to meaning. Observing that others had wrongheadedly sacrificed meaning to rhyme, Véra stood familiar ground. To an interested foreign publisher,
she billed the work as the first actual
translation
of
Onegin
into English.

Several weeks before the Bollingen reception the Nabokovs had made their last trip to Ithaca, by train, where they spent three days rummaging through the items in storage. Much about the portrayals of their arrival at Owego station speaks to Véra's vocation of the next years. In Field's 1977 account the regal couple emerge from the dingy Erie-Lackawanna, Véra more magnificent than ever. Her husband instantly claps for a porter; of which, needless to say, there is none for hundreds of miles. Boyd pulls the camera back to reveal that it was Morris Bishop who—meeting the couple at the station—observed this grand-ducal gesture, so wholly incongruent with the surroundings, proof that the Nabokovs and America were no longer speaking the same language. Told of this interpretation later, both Nabokovs collapsed in fits of laughter. Dollying the camera back still farther, they maintained that the porter-summoning had been performed solely for Bishop's benefit.
^*
It was, claimed Vladimir, an entirely self-conscious gesture, calculated to raise the eyebrows of their closest American friends. They were this time players on their own stage. The performance paralleled the
couple's general attitude to America, a country on which they had set their sights since 1923, for which they had held out such great expectations, which Nabokov had so lovingly, cunningly, dissected, and from which they now distanced themselves, all the better to work their special effects. Optically the relationship corresponded to the study Lewis Carroll's Guard makes of Alice, “
first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera glass.” The remarks, elucidations, magnifications of the next years were delivered always with an eye on the full house.

Two days after the 1964 Bollingen reception the Nabokovs sailed home. Véra was ill on the boat, in bed most of the day on her return. A long series of tests and diets depleted what remained of her energy; she spent much of May in a diagnostic clinic, where it was determined her problem was not parasites, as she had suspected, and where she was operated on early in June. Her physician, who billed the surgery as exploratory, took the liberty of performing a hysterectomy without prior permission.
Véra was livid, but no less discreet for her anger. She told everyone—Anna Feigin and Sonia included—that the doctors had found nothing of interest, settling finally on an appendectomy. In this respect she was fortunate there was no medical personnel in the family. “
Don't you dare work,” Sonia ordered from New York, but from the Geneva clinic, in longhand, Véra managed a steady stream of correspondence. Sonia could not understand why neither Dmitri nor Vladimir had written her
before
the operation; as Véra observed with only a trace of resentment later, “
When I am ill nobody writes any letters in this house.” She spent the summer recovering. It had all been, she announced finally, inaccurately, “
Much ado about (practically) nothing.”

After the 1964 trip, a coda to a prior life, Nabokov never again set foot in America. Nor would the author of
Pnin
and
Lolita
ever again set a novel in America, or at least in a recognizable America. An America trip was planned for the spring of 1969—“
What we won't do for Ada's sake,” grumbled Véra—but ill health intervened again. The lens of her left eye detached slightly, putting pressure on the retina. She spent a week of April flat on her back in a Geneva clinic, miserable not only about her condition, for which complete immobility was prescribed, but about the canceled trip. (Vladimir was to be honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in which he had refused membership years before.) “
It was unpleasant,” she admitted, with the understatement she always reserved for such matters, “because there were constant lightning flashes in my eye.” From the clinic she apologized for not having been able to prevail upon her husband to make the trip without her. She felt terrible about having spoiled the visit for everyone, herself.
included.
^*
The recovery was protracted, not much hurried by the fact that Véra was back at her typewriter by mid-May. She spent the summer correcting the German translation of
Invitation to a Beheading
for Rowohlt's August deadline, which she met, although the eye bothered her throughout. Vladimir reported on Véra's condition to the publisher eagerly awaiting a visit from him—
Ada
was the first new novel since
Pale Fire
—concluding, “
And of course I would never dream of going alone.” Dmitri typed the letter, which very well could have been phrased, “And of course I would never dream of leaving Véra,” but was not. Nor would Véra have expected it to be.

The protestations that they intended to return to America grew no quieter;
editors were asked to specify in their press materials that their author was traveling, not living, in Europe. Véra requested that an interviewer revise his text accordingly. “
He does not intend to perpetuate his stay in Europe and would not like it to appear that he does,” she wrote, speaking for their mutual subject. The temporary address remained in force for the rest of their lives; the Montreux Palace lent a whole new meaning to “émigré literature.” It was a luxurious address, though as those few who ascended from the palatial salons below to the Nabokovs' sixth-floor quarters observed, the rabbit warren of rooms in the old wing resembled nothing so much as a Berlin boardinghouse, if one with a glorious view of Lake Léman.
All looked as if it could be packed in a minute. The effect was something of a mixed metaphor, that of passing from the operatic set of a Visconti film up five flights into the Victorian quarters of Sherlock Holmes. The metaphor was muddled further by the couple's habits: In their luxury hotel, along working-class hours, the Nabokovs essentially lived the bohemian life Vladimir had craved since 1924, when he claimed to need nothing more than a spot of sunshine on the floor, a bottle of ink, and Véra.