Vera (63 page)

It was no wonder that Véra appeared to have some trouble discerning where she ended and her husband began. “
While they keep us informed of the new developments, there are a number of permissions they gave before we put our foot (feet?) down,” she wrote Field uncertainly. Nearly forty years after her husband had defined true love to his sister with the Siamese twin analogy, Véra wrote, “
We have runny noses and blow them (in unison) but decided to go out today.” A few years later they had merged more directly: “
We have been ill with a cold ever since Christmas,” Véra reported in 1968. By the end of the decade the matter appeared settled: “
I ask you to bear in mind that we have a poor mind for legal expressions,” she contended, sounding like a reconfigured (and delusional) hero of “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster.” Given the speed with which she was writing and the volume of paper that crossed her desk, it comes as no surprise that she blundered occasionally in her correspondence. And given the nature of the beast, it was logical that she should trip most often over the pronouns.
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A letter ostensibly written and clearly
signed by Vladimir carried this postscript: “
Would you please order 10 copies of the Nabokov issue on my husband's account?” So accustomed was Véra to disassociating herself from her text that she might write of VN: “
He has asked his son to work on this.” A payment could be sent to her husband at “his address,” wrote a woman named Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, who appeared to share that domicile. She almost seemed to forget who she was, although she was not so inconspicuous in the eyes of her correspondents. In a richly Nabokovian double twist of identities, Vladimir complained to Rowohlt. In his previous letter—“signed by my wife”—he had
specifically requested his payment for a television adaptation. “Today I receive a check from the Hamburger Sparkasse for $1393.61 made out to my wife's name. This won't do,” he admonished, returning the payment.

“
It is hard to be happy when one's husband is a mirage, a peripatetic legerdemain of a man, a deception of all five senses,” Nabokov had written of another conjurer's less loyal wife. Véra seemed to have no difficulty with the idea. She was happy to sit at VN's side while he protested that he had no real existence, that he was a mirage, an illusion, a masked performer, a mere shadow of his writing self, a “
lone wolf,” a “
lone lamb.” She had more difficulty orchestrating her own disappearance. No one who has written so much has ever been as eager to deny responsibility for so many lines. VN declared that his books alone were his identity papers; Véra repudiated the letters she both wrote and signed. She distanced herself even from her own prose style. When Doussia Ergaz took umbrage at two dispatches by which her feelings had been badly hurt, Véra asked the agent if her husband's frank style of expressing himself in English was perhaps to blame. The prose—as well as the frankness—was hers. And the track-covering continued off the page. The journalist who noted that something had been accomplished after consultation between the two Nabokovs—the observation mirrored the “
flurry of confabulation between the Shades” in
Pale Fire
—was asked by Véra to delete the remark.
She found it embarrassing. The same fate befell George Feifer, when he submitted his 1974
Daily Express
interview text. From the list of predicate nominatives following his wife's name Nabokov struck “typist” and “editor,” claiming that she had not typed for him since 1960 nor edited anything, statements that were both untrue. Elsewhere he requested that Feifer change “she says” to “he says,” reattributing to himself a remark his wife had made. It may have been the most profitable appropriation of a partner's voice since
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
had made its author famous, landing Gertrude Stein on the bestseller lists.

Véra was intent on having it both ways. She raised Being Mrs. Nabokov to a science and an art and then pretended that such a person did not exist. Even her husband realized the futility, and the fallaciousness, of her effort. With Field they discussed Véra's place in her husband's story. “
Darling, why don't you say something? Why?” implored Vladimir. “I don't think I should be represented,” replied the woman whose first literary efforts had been renderings of someone else's prose. “You can't help but be represented! We're too far gone! It's too late!” exploded her husband, tears of laughter raining down his face. Over the next decade, as the focus on the woman at Nabokov's side intensified, Véra scurried for cover, comporting herself like a reverse
sphinx: This one seemed poised to tear limbs from those who might guess her riddle. This proved true in the smallest instance as well as in the bigger picture. For Rowohlt she checked every word of the German translations made by the highly meticulous Dieter Zimmer. In 1965 Zimmer submitted a draft of a short story; Véra made several corrections in the handling of the guns in the pages. “
So I was surprised to learn that you have done quite a bit of pistol shooting,” Zimmer deduced gratefully. Véra did nothing to indulge his curiosity, maintaining that she had altered the text for accuracy's sake. This was the same woman who had written the
Swiss Police Ministry months earlier to inquire about pistol permits for Spain. Her husband intended to collect butterflies in isolated regions, which she had heard could be dangerous. What papers would she need to travel internationally with a firearm?

Vladimir made a sensational discovery in 1965: We do not speak as we write. After a highly amusing, very forthcoming few days with Channel Thirteen's Robert Hughes, he had this to say about the transcript of their talk:

In future there would be no “spontaneous rot.” Questions would be written out and submitted in advance, answers composed on paper and revised only with VN's consent. This elaborate stage management allowed the “real” Nabokov to retreat even further. It also created a good deal of homework in the Nabokov household.
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Véra, who sat by her husband's side through each interview—in most cases she had already played the role of the host, reading through the questions and timing her husband's answers—had to convince Vladimir to submit to the inquisitions. She found them exhausting herself but knew their value; some version of her husband needed to be presented to the world.

The face Nabokov put on that individual was not necessarily the real one. Nor was the face he put on Véra. He was
equally capable of boasting
that his wife had the best sense of humor of any woman he had ever met as he was of lamenting that she had none. Was it not a terrible pity that a great clown like himself should be married to someone who never laughed, he asked a journalist?
His wife was his memory; his wife was incapable of keeping figures and dates in her head. She did not seem to care; the perfect magician's assistant, she could be sawed in half with no loss of dignity or composure. She refused only to concede that the magician
had
an assistant. To admit that he did so was to admit that some kind of sleight of hand was being worked. She was not going to reveal her husband's tricks. Every artist is a great deceiver, Nabokov reminds us. And Nabokov was a very great artist.

How, insofar as she recognized her expanded role, did Véra feel about it? She had difficulty admitting to the weight of her responsibilities. Nowhere is the coyness more evident than in her correspondence with Lisbet Thompson, her oldest friend—the two couples had met in Berlin in 1926—and one of the closest. Temperamentally the two women had a good deal in common: A German Jew several years Véra's elder, Lisbet described herself as a pessimist who had often been proved right. The Thompson marriage fell out along lines similar to the Nabokovs': Lisbet felt that her husband was perfectly sanguine, and that that essential optimism was the reason he had achieved so much in his life. Hers too had been an itinerant life with a brilliant man. A great favorite of Vladimir's, Bertrand Thompson was polymathic even by Nabokovian standards. Having earned a law degree before he was old enough to practice in his native California, he started all over again with a Harvard economics degree. He taught at Harvard Business School in its early years, then moved on to an illustrious, international career in consulting. He made a fortune, most of which he lost in 1929; in 1937 the Thompsons were chauffeuring the Nabokovs around the Riviera in their aging Studebaker. Having worked with the French Air Ministry before the fall of France, Thompson returned to the United States, to study biochemistry. By the 1960s, he was conducting cancer research in a Uruguyan lab. Begun on the Nestorstrasse in Berlin, the friendship with the Thompsons had been renewed in Paris, Nice, New York, Palo Alto, Lugano—Vladimir referred to it as “
a kind of rich and varicoloured archipelago”—but by the 1960s consisted almost exclusively of letters.

With other friends Véra might apologize for her delay in writing but
rarely allowed apology to veer into complaint. With Lisbet she was more expansive. Here she is in 1963, as close to the edge as she appears to have ventured:

At the end of the same letter she suggested the Thompsons consider a move to Switzerland: “In a way it is such a quiet restful life.” Lisbet responded to this quiet rebellion as promptly as the Uruguyan mails allowed. She had so often in the past seen Véra overburdened and so often wished that her fortunes might change. Now at last they had, and she was only working harder as a result. This distressed Lisbet. Why did she not hire more help? She said all of this out of love, as Véra well knew. Lisbet was the kind of friend who most admired in Vladimir's
Eugene Onegin
the line in which he thanked his wife. Instantly Véra retreated; the subject was dropped for a year or so. In 1964 Véra reported only, as she had done before, that her attempts to use a secretary had not been much good. (Jacqueline Callier was in place but Véra was naturally slow to delegate. She found she could type faster than she could dictate, and believed that most of her letters could not be written by anyone else. “
But I still hope to get better organized one day,” she vowed.) She was more at her ease singing the praises of the mud treatments to which she had submitted in Italy at the end of the year than she was dwelling on the wrist pains that had sent her to Abano in the first place. She highly recommended the treatments to Lisbet, at least initially. A year later, the pains returned. She was deeply solicitous of her friend's health and tight-lipped about her own, admitting only that her wrists ached, that she felt unwell, that medical tests were inconclusive. Finally in March 1966 she proved more forthcoming:

Things only got worse. The next letter was delayed by a “madhouse” of interviewers, publishers, TV reporters, who had followed the Nabokovs all over Italy, something of a feat on the part of the press. In the course of their wanderings, Véra negotiated a clause in a Putnam's contract from each town. Summer had been taxing enough, “
but since our return to Montreux it has been really too much for both of us,” she confessed in the fall, exhausted, unwell, and dreading the trip she was about to make to New York. In January, 1967 she was hospitalized, a misadventure on which she reported foggily. Lisbet chastised her, about her vagueness regarding her health, as about her stubbornness in rising to publishers' impatient demands. Of course they all looked forward to a new book of Vladimir's, but surely Véra's health did not need to be compromised in the process?

Véra issued an immediate retraction. It was important to her that Lisbet understand how minimal was her own contribution, how utterly mechanical was her work. There was no further mention of messy business decisions sloughed off by demanding husbands: