Vera (64 page)

To make matters worse, she was again typing a manuscript herself. Having felt that the original sagged in the middle, Vladimir had reworked too much of
King, Queen, Knave
to have it transcribed by a secretary. He had written the novel twice; Véra was now typing it for the second time. She went out of her way to specify that her involvement fell short of that of Clare in
Sebastian Knight:
“I am not ‘working on it' as you so nicely put it, only typing as he dictates,” she chided Lisbet, who wisely let the matter rest there. The behavior was consistent with her stressing how unqualified she was for the job. Twenty-five years after protesting that she was by no means a Sévigne, she told Sylvia Berkman that she was a very poor letter-writer, had been all her life, and had done little else for three or four decades.

Did she in truth resent the work? Most friends and visitors never saw a hint that she felt it anything but a privilege to assist VN; the honor of serving him seemed to obliterate the thousand inconceniences. Even Jacqueline Callier recognized that Véra had a
firm sense of self-importance, in which she delighted.
Véra was always surprised when she learned that someone did not work. She felt she had been raised to. And Vladimir was a man as supremely difficult to resist as VN was an honor to serve. Véra was dispatched on a Montreux errand with these lines: “
Ah, sweet socks! So tenderly woolly! Nothing in a nylon blend (so
nasty
, and which irritate the leg)! Size 46, and the usual length, i.e., not to the knee, but not too short. Ah, socks! 2 pairs.” Dmitri felt that his mother was disgruntled only by the nonsense chores, by the constant struggle to thwart the incompetents. He felt she would have much preferred to read, and “to [make] little jottings of her own,” than to tend to business matters. She had begun an independent project in the early 1950s, having in Ithaca researched a connection between La Motte-Fouqué and Pushkin, to which she returned only in her eighties. Her literary instinct, if not her aspiration, had clearly survived. In 1963 she composed a rather melodramatic piece of Russian poetry; it may have been in response to a challenge issued by her husband. Either because there was a story behind the verse or because she treasured the composition on its own merits, she held on to it. As always the practical backbone shines through. Véra wrote her middling lines on the back of the 1963 McDonnell Aircraft Report to Shareholders.

She continued to read widely. Nabokov boasted of her uncanny instinct for fishing the sole worthwhile title from a voluminous carton of publisher's freebies. She took the
Saturday Review's
1962 test, “Your Literary I.Q.,” and outscored VN by a long shot; she had no difficulty recognizing the work of Giraudoux or Disraeli or Walpole. Her reading was less canonical, even while she believed James Bond to be the creation of a man named “Fletcher.” She was a great fan of Michaël Arlen's
The Green Hat
and of his son's limpid memoir,
Exiles
. In 1965 she agreed to keep an eye out for English-language works that might be of interest to Ledig Rowohlt, who could not have realized how recondite were her tastes. The sole title she appears to have proposed to him was Richard Hakluyt's
Voyages
, the volume of explorers' logbooks thought to have inspired
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. (It had been republished that year.) She continued to serve as a clearinghouse for her husband, recommending to him Nadezhda Mandelstam's
Hope Against Hope
, which she read shortly after its 1970 translation into English. Both Nabokovs admired Edmund White's first novel,
Forgetting Elena;
Véra astonished its author when she met him years later and recited whole passages by heart.
^*
Not everything merited this much attention. She found Bellow's
Herzog
“
a disaster,” boring in the extreme. Moreover she found it anti-Semitic, providing a novel definition of that term. “I know many Jews, including my own family, and never saw anybody or anything even remotely like his Jews and his ‘Jewish' atmosphere,” she huffed. An Italian friend recommended Pratolini, Soldati, and Gadda, all of whom Véra deemed mediocre, unimportant. “Where are the worth while books?” she asked. She was perhaps fortunate not to have found more of them; she did not often have time to indulge her tastes. “
I'm sending Volodya three Russian newspapers,” Anna Feigin wrote from New York in the early 1960s, “and for you I'm sending the Steel Report.
Read it.”
She did, though not with any abiding passion. Friends teased her about her interest in the market, but the lists of the Nabokovs' securities are in Vladimir's hand, not Véra's.

A few people teased her about the long hours at her desk. “
You mustn't apologize for being behind in VN's correspondence,” Alfred Appel assured Véra in the early seventies. “There is only one solution. Go on strike for better working conditions and hours. Walk in front of the Montreux Palace with a picket sign, something along the order of ‘VN unfair to auxiliary services.' It would certainly have one kind of effect or another.”

Véra never tired of informing those who requested his presence that her husband was unavailable, but that were he to consider their invitation, his honorarium would be ten times as high as that they proposed.
^*
This was part of the assignment; she was a good sport; she played her part to perfection. One need not strain to hear VN chuckling in the background. Still, when the man who claimed to have no interest in prizes save for those with cash purses attached got wind of the fact that Minton felt he was in no need of money, the Putnam's relationship began to falter. Véra was detailed to settle the matter. In explaining her husband's discontent
she went out of her way to be clear about the authorship of her letter to Minton. Vladimir had dictated various demands; from a certain point in the document, he had proposed what he wanted said but not how to say it. What both Nabokovs were saying was that
they wanted more money and better publicity for Vladimir's books; Minton countered with a thinly veiled threat to undermine the tax plan they had so diligently worked out. Briefly Véra put herself—and her husband—in the hands of a William Morris agent, who was to exact an improved offer from Minton, and simultaneously, to pursue an unsolicited offer. An English-language edition of the revamped
King, Queen, Knave
was the book immediately in question. Next was
Ada
, of which Nabokov would say only, confidentially, that it was highly erotic, and that “
it does not belong in any category though roughly it is the story of three people, two sisters and their halfbrother, with two love stories, one of which lasts from pubescence to happy old age.”

By 1967 it was clear to the Nabokovs that the relationship with Putnam's was not destined to endure to any sort of old age. Of the many suitors who presented themselves McGraw-Hill distinguished itself in its devotion—a young editor of whom the couple thought highly was dispatched to Genoa in April to handle the advance work with Véra—and in its clever tax planning. Véra could be a little cloak-and-daggerish about the business arrangements: In October 1967 she advised Weidenfeld, “
The project of which you know seems to be developing well, and in complete secrecy.” Her approach to this negotiation was in all ways telling; she was most herself when representing someone else. McGraw-Hill made its offer—$250,000 for eleven books, past and future, with a plump 17½ percent royalty—in a letter addressed to both Nabokovs in July.
^*
Véra responded to the generous offer with an unorthodox demand, as shocking to the
Paul, Weiss lawyers as it was to McGraw-Hill. She insisted that a cost-of-living provision be inserted into the contract. Iseman outlined the traditional wisdom on the subject for Véra at least nine times: With inflation, book prices rise, and royalties with them. Mrs. Nabokov, however, explained herself in a confidential letter to her distinguished counsel:

She was adamant on the subject. Her husband's lawyers had not been in Petersburg in the nineteen-tens or Berlin in the twenties. Véra had. She was accustomed to the bottom falling out of her world. For Nabokov, this left a mark on the fiction; for his wife the trapdoors were very real. She had made the same request of Irving Lazar, who claimed he had had to
consult an economics text to fathom her meaning. She was felt to be bracing herself for the wildly improbable.

The lawyers who believed Véra bizarrely preoccupied with her cost-of-living increases in 1967 thought her positively clairvoyant several years later. “
It goes without saying that McGraw-Hill—unlike Mrs. Nabokov—never dreamed in 1968 that the United States would suddenly be in a double-digit inflation situation,” they chortled in the mid-1970s. They pitied McGraw's CFO, dressed down by Harold McGraw for having agreed to such an outlandish provision. Véra
knew she had been ridiculed, and felt vindicated when she learned that her husband's publisher was laughing less loudly. The language proved highly lucrative, all the more so because McGraw-Hill inadvertently based their calculations on the 1967 price index instead of the 1968 index. Nor was this the only odd request that past misadventures induced her to make. “This is a
very private question
from VN to you,” she wrote Iseman. Could there be an escape clause somewhere in the contract, in the event that the relationship proved unsatisfactory? She, or both Nabokovs, felt skittish about making such a long-term commitment. Not that Véra was willing to admit as much. “If you see your way of broaching this subject without offending McGraw-Hill, please do so. But, of course, it should come
from you
rather than from VN,” she directed Iseman.

By late fall it became clear that someone would need to travel to New York to finalize the McGraw-Hill arrangements.
^*
Vladimir was devoting twelve-hour days to
Ada
, working at what Véra estimated was three times his usual speed. It was clear she would travel alone; Elena Sikorski filled in at the Palace. Véra booked a room at the Pierre Hotel, which put her a block from Natalie Nabokov's old apartment, where she had arrived, with an uncertain grasp of American decimal points, twenty-seven years earlier. That address
was in some ways closer to the negotiation at hand than was the Pierre's. On December 1, she met for a drink in the hotel bar with Iseman; McGraw-Hill's Edward Booher, the president of the book company; and John Cady, the senior vice president of the overall corporation. A number of details remained to be worked out at the table, where Iseman found himself pushing further than he would have dared, stiffened by Véra's gaze. At one juncture he asked that they step outside together; he wanted to make it at least
appear
that they were conferring. It seemed to him that his client knew better than he how far he could go. From the experience Iseman concluded that Véra was one of the finest natural negotiators he had ever known. To his colleagues he described the extraordinary experience a few days later:

Under the new agreement all three Nabokovs were to receive an annual salary as employees of Coramen, a Delaware corporation. Cady was the wizard behind the ingenious arrangement; he had set up the corporation well before, knowing he would use it when the right author came along.
^*
He was tickled finally to have found his man. In the process Véra acquired a title for the first time. She was president of Coramen, a company whose name was consistent with its utility. Nabokov had cited the word in
Pale Fire
as an example of “
choral and sculptured”—and near-meaningless—beauty.