Vera (61 page)

9
LOOK AT THE MASKS

Vermeer was her favorite painter; he could have been her patron saint. Véra Nabokov's life in Montreux had about it all the stilled intensity of the Dutch master's canvases. The drama was interior; it was private; it was passionate; it was hushed. And to a great extent it consisted—aside from meals and a regular walk with her husband, an evening chess or Scrabble game, more television than was generally acknowledged, a skeletal social life—of the drama of a woman intently alone in a room with a piece of paper.
^*
Moreover, there was a certain correlation between Véra's deft compositions of the 1960s and Vermeer's masterly ones of the 1660s. The reverence with which Vermeer could invest any scene was hers. No one would have agreed more
quickly that whole worlds balanced on the microscopic detail, that shadows may opt not to follow the laws of nature. She shared the Dutch master's obsession with perspective, with the crucial angle from which the exterior world approaches the private realm. Had the alpine chough on the balcony pressed his yellow beak to the Nabokov's sixth-floor windowpanes on a given nonsummer morning, he would have found them breakfasting together; Véra reading the mail to Vladimir; or at work, Véra at the desk in the living room, or in her blue-and-white bedroom. Before lunch the couple walked together; afterward, Vladimir might nap, Véra returned to her desk. Madame Furrer came to cook; as of 1962 Jacqueline Callier spent several afternoons a week typing and filing. Dinner was preceded by the “
exchange of impressions”; Vladimir
read passages to his wife. After dinner, even with the infrequent guest who was entertained in the suite and not below in the formal dining rooms, Véra excused herself to write a few more letters. It was the
impression of most visitors that she worked from the time she woke to the time she went to bed. Her labor alone culminated in a delusional mirror trick worthy of
Despair:
So wed was she to the desk, and so seldom was Vladimir—who wrote in bed, or standing at his lectern, or in the bath—at his, that word went out via
the Montreux tradespeople that Mrs. Nabokov was her husband's ghostwriter.

Her intention was less to conceal herself than her husband. She was complicit in this sleight of hand, but the engineer rather than the prime architect of it. (As an astute friend put it, Vladimir had more important things to do than to
poison himself with business.) “
I don't know why but VN's literary affairs seem always to be so dreadfully complicated,” Véra asserted, apologetic for having buried an editor in a flurry of contradictory letters. The affairs
were
complicated and always had been; even Nabokov's short reviewing histories were fraught. His copyright situations were often nightmarish. The couple's expectations made matters worse. Their demands were nearly too much for the international publishing community. (Vladimir blithely referred to his “
gay tussles with publishers” but could well afford to; Véra was the one who tussled.) The aggravations were often familiar ones. While Nabokov wrangled publicly with Girodias, Véra continued, undaunted, to explore the legal channels behind the scene. To Louba Schirman, her new Russian-born, Paris-based lawyer for the case, she outlined in late 1964 the long and rocky road with Girodias, whom she remained intent on discarding. She felt he and his lawyers had cleverly “
managed to turn the tables on us on two occasions when Olympia was quite obviously at fault.” She did not like to be outwitted; she was furious that they had temporarily dropped their case and intent on the agreement's being annulled. It was settled at last in
April 1967, by which time Véra had been tangling with Girodias almost exactly as long as her father had battled the St. Petersburg authorities on his residency case, but with more satisfactory results.
^*

Not all of the predicaments were of such long standing. At the end of 1962, George Weidenfeld proposed to Vladimir that he prepare a picture book of European butterflies, to which Vladimir readily consented. Three years later, despite the many hours he had devoted to the project, little had come of it. In September 1965 Véra was charged with conveying to Weidenfeld her husband's irritation with the volume, which “
had remained constantly in his thoughts greatly interfering with his other projects.” He wanted nothing more to do with the nonbook; he also expected payment for the hours he had invested in it. As she finished her peremptory letter, Weidenfeld called from London. Vladimir asked her to explain the matter by phone, and to mail the document, so that the publisher might have his position in writing. To Weidenfeld Véra appealed regularly, as she had in the past appealed to Epstein and Minton, and as her husband had once appealed to Wilson, with all kinds of literary SOS's. Plaintively she went to him with a most vexing matter in 1968:

She became something of an accidental expert on copyright law.

In large part the appalling (monstrous, disastrous) correspondence stemmed from Vladimir's thundering international success, as a result of which the work was misread, pirated, appropriated. Copies of
Lolita
purportedly appeared in Frankfurt with dirty pictures inserted in the book. Véra ran interference with Mexican lawyers, Greek lawyers, Israeli lawyers, Swiss lawyers. The letters to Ergaz sound often like military dispatches; in a paragraph, Véra would veer from the Bengalese to the Lebanese front. She corresponded with the interviewers; she replied to those who sent chess problems;
she answered the admirers, the dissertation writers, the autograph seekers, the courageous friends of Soviet admirers, the would-be translators, the critics, the synesthetics. She composed the thousands of letters saying sorry, no, he is much too busy, he doesn't remember, he would love to write the article but can't, the book was planned but never written, he never takes a political position, he believes the symbols you have identified are your own. In exchange for her efforts she secured the lasting resentment of those who had written the husband but received a response—very often not the one they hoped for—from the wife.
Even Katharine White took the arrangement amiss, concluding that Véra was not only answering her husband's mail but imitating his butterfly-signatures as well. (White was mistaken.) And, too, Véra performed her share of about-faces on Vladimir's account. A cookbook compiler was informed that Vladimir had nothing to add to her volume, as his interest in food was limited to its consumption. Something moved him to change his mind, and to set to paper his winning recipe for soft-boiled eggs.
^*
Véra dutifully sent it on. Nabokov
poked fun at those writers who left behind prolix correspondences, seemingly without realizing he was one of them, the only difference being that his letters consisted principally of someone else's words.

Her facility for languages was in many respects a curse. Who else would have been bothered to translate a Dutch review of
The Gift
for her 1965 scrapbook? To read her husband in Italian was to discover that he was mistranslated in Italian. It was her job to make sure that the pink clouds described by her husband as “
flamingoes” did not mutate into Flemish-painted ones, as they did in one French rendering. She did not find these missteps as amusing as she had found those in the Cornell bluebooks. As the early books were translated—and reworked—in English, as the newer titles were published abroad, as the original Russian works were reissued, the proofs rained down from every direction. Nabokov began
Ada
in February 1965; both Nabokovs felt that anything that took him from the new work qualified as a distraction. Work on the 1969 German
Invitation to a Beheading
was complicated not only by Véra's eye trouble that summer, but by her fear that—while her German was strong enough to detect deviations, inaccuracies, infelicities—
it was not rich enough for her to suggest alternate phrasings. None of these editions consumed as much time and mental energy as the Russian version
of
Lolita
, a work Nabokov prepared not for Soviet publication but as a defensive check against his future mistranslator. The tennis player who had spent his glory years on a squash court protesting that his tennis was stronger still, he was shocked in the early 1960s to discover that squash was now his game. Véra contributed a great deal to the Russian language manuscripts, as her husband acknowledged.
He found her heavy corrections disillusioning.

The couple spent their 1964 Christmas vacation in rainy Italy, coaxing
Lolita
into Russian. Vladimir's ear was better, and lustier; Véra's Russian was by now deeply infiltrated by English and no longer, strictly speaking, Russian, much less Soviet Russian, in the same way that her husband's English was not English but a divine version thereof. (The modern world posed a difficulty to both Nabokovs in their native language. They struggled valiantly over terms like “glove compartment,” or “hitchhiker,” for which there is a perfectly good Russian word, but had not been when Véra and Vladimir learned their Russian.)
^*
Work continued, intermittently, through the fall of 1965, Nabokov concluding from the exercise that the English language could be trusted to do things the Russian language could not, and that the converse was equally true. The care taken with these reworkings was not underestimated by close and bilingual readers, of which there were a few: When
Lolita
made her Russian-language debut, Clarence Brown noted that the difference between Nabokov's recasting of his works into other languages and ordinary translation was “
like the little abyss between zero and one.”
^†
When the Library of Congress asked Nabokov if he might render the Gettysburg Address into Russian he practically responded with his own rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” adding that he had always thought Lincoln's speech a work of art. The result is in Véra's hand; Vladimir put
Ada
aside to tackle the most difficult turns of phrase, entrusting the rest of the job to his wife. “
Incidentally, not having a Russian typewriter here, I wrote the translation in longhand,” he explained to the library, sending on the page in Véra's hand. He waived the honorarium but requested translating credit.