Vera (68 page)

Montreux made of them fervent Americans. Véra lost no time in canceling the 1967 Chamonix vacation to protest France's military withdrawal from NATO. She was perfectly happy to explain her disgust with de Gaulle's belligerence toward the United States to the Hotel Savoy, which forwarded the letter to
Le Figaro
, where it appeared in print. She did the same to the real estate agent who had located a Corsican property for the Nabokovs and who was informed in late 1967 that they were doing everything in their power to boycott French goods. “
We simply
could
not buy anything in France or from France at this time!” she explained forcefully. Their patriotism increased the
distance between the Nabokovs and many of their Stateside friends. “
We are not with you on Viet Nam,” Véra alerted the Bishops, who were of the opinion that the U.S. government was acting abominably. “Perhaps living abroad gives us a different perspective. Nothing could be worse than this war, but we honestly do not see what the President or any one else can do about it. Leave the country and the entire Far East to the Communists? People do not want to see that it is Russia that is fighting against the U.S. in Viet Nam. Without Russia the North would have been beaten ages ago. This is a life and death struggle against Communism, not just a little war somewhere at the other end of the world, alas.” It had long been her conviction that Communists responded only to extreme measures; many of the Americans who visited Montreux—scholars, editors, and journalists, they were almost by definition liberals—felt her to be of the Bomb Hanoi school. (These were what Vladimir referred to as “
dumb intellectuals,” of which he counted more than a few among their friends.) The Nabokovs were delighted by the Soviet-Chinese border skirmish in 1969; they would heartily approve a war between those two countries. They were all for Nixon in 1972, convinced that McGovern was “
an irresponsible demagogue,” in a position to do infinite harm to America. Nothing quite incited Véra's wrath as much as the student demonstrations. Most of her anger on this front she directed to Elena Levin who, in Cambridge, was in the thick of events, and whom Véra must have assumed to be of a similar mind; Elena too knew that the Russian Revolution had rumbled first through the universities. Véra was outraged that the Harvard faculty had not been more severe with its protestors. She was all for civil rights, but “hooligans” should be arrested—for good. The 1969 Cornell commencement exercises were led by Morris Bishop, who used his gold-and-silver mace to whack a disrupting protestor in the ribs and off the platform.
^*
From the sidelines, three thousand miles away, Véra cheered.

She attributed most of America's troubles to an ill-advised liberalism. “
Oh, dear Lena, if only there had never been that ‘progressive education' fad; if only they hadn't laughed off the Communist plot to destroy the American educational system and pervert the younger generation, but taken it seriously when they should have; if only Timothy O'Leary had been prosecuted as a criminal,” read one 1969 Levin dispatch. Were the letter not in Russian—and in prerevolutionary orthography—its sentiments would have read very differently.
Vladimir had just declined an invitation to return to Cornell; the day after doing so the newspaper had arrived with a photo of student protestors leaving the Ithaca administration building, where they had pressed their demands at gunpoint. “
We didn't regret that we declined,” Véra reported. She was immovable in these convictions, not that she often encountered anyone willing to argue with her. Jason Epstein might have; his
New York Review
pieces had so offended the Nabokovs that they had removed him from his post as literary trustee.
^*
“
We are the senior authorities in judging the Communist utopia, and nobody is going to tell us anything new,” Véra swore to Elena Levin, who all the same remained a more open-minded senior authority. Vladimir too was more subtle in his thinking, but did not entirely live in this world. He routinely asked after the fuss over Wintergate. What had “
that Mr. Watergate fellow” done to get himself into such a scrape? As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. saw it, VN simply
did not have a political mind at all.

Véra's politics continued as ever to color her literary judgments. She responded as would be expected to a bestselling work by a violent black Marxist radical, otherwise known as
Soul on Ice:
“
When I see a cute young woman, a tourist from America, dressed in the latest fashion, sitting on the train and reading (with awe) that rapist Cleaver's book, I feel compelled to ask her whether she is capable of thinking, capable of thinking at all, and why she is reading that garbage.” Her historical judgments hewed to the same unbending principles. Even the wise Simon Karlinsky could not make her see the merits of Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the greatest poets of the emigration, and for that matter, a woman who had combined marriage, motherhood, and a literary career. Tsvetaeva had been no worse off than the rest of the émigrés and had been as well published as anyone, argued Véra, speaking for both Nabokovs. “
In her letters there is a constantly recurring whining note which is not exactly endearing,” she added. More importantly, Tsvetaeva was an artist, and therefore perceptive. How could she not have known, in the cramped quarters in which they lived, that her husband was a Soviet agent? Later Véra cited a more serious offense, when Karlinsky himself began to sound a little tired of the poet:

Neither Nabokov would brook any criticism of America. “
The Germans are usually quite right when they hate Germany,” Véra proclaimed unapologetically, persuaded history was on her side. “The Americans are
never
right when they hate America.” It was she who conveyed her husband's disapproval of Gallimard's cover design for their edition of
Pnin
, which stood Professor Pnin on an American flag:

The America Véra so valiantly defended—from their Montreux perch both Nabokovs held it to be the
center of the world—had about as much relation to the real America as it did to the America of
Ada
, in which there is a non-stop Geneva—Phoenix flight. Reports of racial unrest from Anna Feigin, from Sonia, from other correspondents, summoned up a too-familiar set of images. As the Nabokovs saw it, New York was burning.
They were afraid to return, claiming that it was too dangerous to do so in the late 1960s. “
I keep receiving warnings from friends that under no circumstances should one venture out in the evening alone,” Véra wrote Crespi, who had reported that New York was no longer what it once had been. They remained intently focused on America, plying emissaries for the latest news,
the latest scuttlebutt—Was Jason Epstein corrupting American youth? Was the eminent scholar who had visited earlier gay? What was Mr. Pynch-ON like? Was it true about Joyce Maynard and J. D. Salinger?—and yet wholly out of touch with the country, separated by a set of preconceptions formed decades earlier.

In Switzerland Véra's sense of propriety functioned as a final moat, after politics and geography. (In the contest with politics, propriety won out. Mason bestowed upon Nabokov a red, white, and blue tie, featuring Uncle Sam. On the inside it said “
Fuck Communism.” Véra was not amused.) When Minton visited with the woman who became his second wife, Véra arranged for
separate bedrooms for the two at opposite ends of the hotel. She nearly fainted when Irving Lazar, on a Montreux visit, embraced her warmly, addressing her by her first name; the two had corresponded for
more than a decade. She was similarly long in recovering from the effrontery of the unknown woman in the hotel elevator who had wished her a good evening. She expected people to know their stations and admired those who did. She made exceptions for those whose devotion to her husband's work was so great it presumably clouded their grasp of etiquette or their good taste. “
I don't like your shirts at all,” she advised a biographer, whose style was less formal than hers. He only guffawed. Véra seemed pleased by his nonreaction. She had herself no gift for, nor any inclination toward, ingratiating herself.

Nor had she any expectation of being understood. She insisted she had no part in the story, no stake in how it was told. This was more a diminished expectation of the world than of herself. She knew well that the transparency was a pose, that some of the most arresting canvases ever painted, seemingly crystalline worlds, are rich in deceptions. Using the husband for whom she was meant to be fronting as cover, she engaged in her own game of hide-andseek. This did not mean she was not there. There is no swelling of pride when Véra noted that her husband would like a particular volume—after the move to Switzerland, this was true of every volume—to carry, as a dedication, “To Véra.” But as Dmitri understood, those two words meant the world to her. She banished herself with the resolve of someone who knows how very present she is. “
The more you leave me out, Mr. Boyd, the closer to truth you will be,” Véra insisted. In the course of the same conversation, she conceded, despite Boyd's taste in shirts and without deigning to elaborate, “I am always there, but well hidden.”