Vera (71 page)

She was of course something far more objectionable still. It was Véra who paid the price for Vladimir's exogamy. Old friends still wrote to say that while they were enthralled by
Pnin, Lolita, Ada
, they could not help mourning the fact that Vladimir had parted with Russian prose. Véra was held responsible for his defection, just as, biographically speaking, she often took the bullet meant for her husband. Nabokov's early readers, the old family friends, waited in vain for him to return to his real themes, to their passions, to novels of the heart and not the mind. For him to have escaped all the schools who liked to claim him was one thing, but this was the Homeland calling. Quite obviously, the “foreign influence” was to blame. Shakhovskoy saw Véra where
Pale Fire's
Kinbote saw Sibyl Shade, reviewing her husband's pages and artfully excising everything connected with his luscious Zemblan theme from the manuscript. If it were not for Véra, Vladimir would be jolly and forthcoming and gregarious and spiritual, and most important, he would write in Russian. That he was by nature discerning in the
company he kept, and jealous with his time, and bored by most of the polemics that consumed émigré society, and a champion grudge-holder
^*
—that he
enjoyed
playing cat-and-mouse games with his reader—meant nothing if there was a Jewish wife in the picture. In a word, he had been “
Jewified.”

In Paris Shakhovskoy made herself an active clearinghouse for all the noxious comments occasioned by envy, linguistic resentment, and unsettled scores. Véra's cardinal sins began with the 1932 morning in Kolbsheim, when she had reminded Shakhovskoy's mother that she did not celebrate a saint's day. She had answered correspondence in her husband's stead; she had suggested her husband write
Lolita
for commercial gain; she had coddled Dmitri; she had sent back her hot consommé in the Palace dining room; she was a mythmaker. Shakhovskoy went so far as to assert that Véra had nearly been her husband's coauthor, acknowledging that in her efforts she had outstripped all the other Russian literary wives. As the pantheon included Sonya Tolstoy and Anna Dostoyevsky, this was some feat. The taller pedestal only made her more vulnerable to attack. Into this mix of admiration and resentment Shakhovskoy stirred a fair, and potent, quantity of prejudice.
^†
The charges were the usual ones, this side of well-poisoning: The Nabokovs surrounded themselves with Jews. Véra was tightfisted, and made her husband miserly. They were cunning. They were ambitious. They were rich.
Asked if he would ever travel to Russia, Vladimir had replied, to the Soviet Union, no, to Israel, yes. Generally this is the wrong thing to say within earshot of someone who subscribes to racial stereotype.

Even as Vladimir published
Strong Opinions
, a volume of comments and crotchets meant to brick up any chinks in the walls of his fortress reputation, Shakhovskoy began quietly sandblasting away. In 1973 Véra believed Field to be her greatest headache, but that was only because she had not read a Paris-based Russian periodical called
The New Review
. Its June issue carried Shakhovskoy's “The Desert,” a short story about the acclaimed writer Walden, a name the Russian reader recognizes immediately as a variation on “Wladimir.” Celebrated as much for his genius as for his arrogance, Walden has lived for years in temporary accommodations and resides finally in a luxury hotel. His daughter is beautiful and spoiled and an amateur actress, making
a film in Italy. For years Walden's wife has done everything for him, from ordering his meals in restaurants to arranging his interviews. Now he is to face a young scholar alone for the first time; his wife has died six weeks earlier. Her photo sits on the table in the apartment: “
Her blue eyes seemed transparent, her thin lips were compressed, and her thin-nosed sharp face bore the mask of the refined arrogance which she considered the mark of aristocracy specifically because she did not belong to the aristocracy.” Walden's thoughts drift back to a great love, a fiancée of his youth, the perfect embodiment of all Slavic ideals, a simple-hearted girl whose father had advised against the marriage. And he is overwhelmed by emotion, by the sudden realization that he has lost his entire empire, that the dead wife, “under the pretense of caring for him and liberating him from his cares,” has instead sapped him of his strengths:

His works were soulless. He has turned to ice, in person and on the page.
^*
Overwhelmed by his memories of the past, by the realization that once, long before, he had been alive, in love, radiant, surrounded by friends, “he suddenly felt like removing the forcibly placed mask that had already overgrown his actual face.” Rising from his chair he defies the pale eyes that stare out at him from their frame. Fearfully but decisively, he relegates the photo to a drawer. He is flooded with relief.

Only when the story found its way into an anthology later did “The Desert” come to Véra's attention. So transparent were its references that a reviewer referred to the “Swiss hotel” in which Walden lives, although the country of his residence appears nowhere in the story. Elena Sikorski read the story in 1978 and lost no time in firing off an outraged letter to its author. She predicted that Véra Evseevna—“
like a true aristocrat in spirit, if not in estate”—would not even dignify the Princess's screed with her attention. She underestimated the force of Véra's inattention. She was livid that her sister-in-law had leapt into the fray, all the more so after reading her letter. “Why
did you find it necessary to defend me?” she reprimanded her. A birthday plant arrived from Elena the same week; petulantly Véra informed her that she would not even thank her for the present. She was less certain of how to proceed in 1979, when Shakhovskoy published a Russian-language biography of Nabokov, a work that offered up a similar effigy of Véra, this time as nonfiction.
^*

“
Without drawing a portrait of Véra Evseevna myself I will say only that virtually all the printed descriptions I have read of her strike me as wholly or seriously wanting,” conceded Field, in a line that provoked no marginal eruptions. Véra doubtless agreed, with one possible exception. Throughout the latter half of 1973 Nabokov was at work on the new novel for which McGraw-Hill was waiting impatiently, having scheduled the book for the fall of the following year. He finished
Look at the Harlequins!
in April 1974, days after his seventy-fifth birthday, which the couple celebrated quietly in Montreux with George Weidenfeld. The forced march left both Nabokovs winded. Véra did all she could to put off visitors until May, to allow her husband a chance to catch his breath; the weather was damp, aggravating his neuralgia and the rheumatism in her neck and shoulders.
Pressured for a description from which he might draft catalogue copy, editor Fred Hills was informed that the book was a love story, spanning fifty years and several continents. It is in fact another novel masquerading as a memoir, in which a latticework of truth occasionally flashes provocatively from beneath the luscious overgrowth of a thousand fragrant fictions. Vadim Vadimovich is an émigré novelist with whom Vladimir Vladimirovich shares a birthday and a backlist, as well as a taste for soft-boiled eggs. He is thought by his compatriots to be arrogant, unsocial, a traitor to the Russian language. He has great success with women, four of whom consent to marry him. The most succulent bloom of his variegated love life is a prepubescent girl; this time the
nymphet is his biological daughter. If ever a book was written to confound a “matter-of-fact, father-of-muck, mucking biograffitist,” this is it; Nabokov seems to have set out to prove that no one could travesty his life as elaborately as the man inside that life.

Vladimir had enjoyed pulling Field's leg about his previous wives and now gave full rein to the idea, providing a familiar catalogue of Nabokovian women. Wife number one speaks no Russian, is cruel, and disloyal; wife number two is dismally stupid, prudish, forgetful, and a poor typist. Both die before their time, freakishly sacrificed to the plot. Wife number three is a willing sexual partner but volatile, an inattentive reader, a lover of middlebrow literature, and ultimately faithless. The twenty-seven-year-old whom Vadim Vadimovich meets when he is seventy proves the “
ultimate and immortal one.” She is again “You,” as was Véra in
Speak, Memory
. As in that memoir, she appears well before her entrance into the novel. That entrance is made in a fashion far more appropriate to the relationship it calls to mind than was the evening encounter on a Berlin bridge: On an American college campus “You” comes upon Vadim Vadimovich as gravity conspires against him and the folder under his arm spills its contents onto the campus walkway. She helps him to order his papers. She knows the whole radiant oeuvre, having studied the early work in photocopies. She disapproves of the smell of liquor on his breath. She addresses a sheet of paper as if it were an animate object. She identifies a butterfly, in gorgeous Russian. And she does this nimbly, animatedly, decisively, all at once, exactly as Véra did everything.

A “
turquoise temple-vein” glistens under the late arrival's translucent skin; Vladimir had nuzzled a blue one in a letter to Véra. Zina's is alternately blue or turquoise in
The Gift
. When asked to read a manuscript attentively, You snaps—sounding almost too much like Véra—“
I read everything attentively.” This VV decides retroactively to dedicate his early works in their English editions to You.
^*
He
slams the door shut in the face of the prying biographer in precisely the words he used in
Speak, Memory
, when writing of the other “You,” the real-life Mrs. Nabokov; we are not to know what she, what he, what the two of them, know. “Your delicate fingers” of
Speak, Memory
are here “
your dear delicate hand.” Her mask is a fictionally inspired one, a pair of harlequin sunglasses, a
Lolita
legacy Véra had modeled for a photographer in Montreux. In a gratifying case of life imitating art imitating life, You makes faint crosses in the margins of Vadim's manuscript cards, ostensibly the book we hold in our hands. What should appear on the manuscript
pages of
Look at the Harlequins!
but Véra's faint little querying crosses. You turns everything in Vadim's life around, quite an achievement, given his particular spatial disability. It is a peculiar tribute to someone who has deprived the book's author of a language and a life and was holding him hostage in a foreign country.

When pressed to name her favorites among her husband's works, Véra generally cited
Pale Fire.
^*
Whether she felt exposed or not, she allowed herself the rare luxury of an extravagant opinion about
Look at the Harlequins!
Where
Transparent Things
had been “adorable” and
Ada
had been “wonderful,” she raved about the new novel, which she positively loved. Vladimir suspected that reviewers of
Harlequins
might fail to share that rapture. On October 1 he composed a Russian poem, dedicated to Véra. His harlequins would be ill appreciated, he predicted, “
dubbed jesterly and deceptive.” Véra alone would properly grasp and appreciate their—and his—kaleidoscopic virtues. He was right; the book struck many as self-indulgent, as if Nabokov had penned a Festschrift to himself. It seemed a kind of dead-end novel, a work in which a high-octane writer was noisily spinning his wheels. The general sense was that VN should, well, get out more. “
To say it plainly, the book strikes me as the production of an imagination paralyzed by vanity,” opined Anatole Broyard in the
Times
. Where Shakhovskoy had credited Véra with having stifled her husband, reviewers began to suspect Switzerland. Even some of Nabokov's best readers believed the isolation was taking
a toll on the work. They had a point. Where the rest of the oeuvre is involute, the last works feel ingrown,
Harlequins
perhaps most of all. “
This is the novel to end all of Nabokov's novels—or at least one hopes so,” declared a less-than-smitten Peter Ackroyd in London. He could not have known his statement to be to some measure prophetic.

“
Here we are at last my darling,” Vladimir wrote Véra in Russian, illustrating the dates April 15, 1925, and April 15, 1975, with a splendid, shimmering butterfly. For years he had reminded himself of his wedding date by posting the prepared agenda book sticker
“Aujourd'hui, c'est notre anniversaire de
mariage”
in his datebook. (Generally he was sensitive to anniversaries. On May 8, 1963, he had scrawled, “
40 years since Véra and I met.” On the same day he noted that the tailor was to mark up her fur coat.)
^*
The April date must have been particularly significant to the author of
Ada
, to the writer who has been called America's
great artist in nostalgia. Véra was aware of the fifteenth of April as well, although she usually forgot her birthday, which Vladimir very touchingly remembered. The extent to which the life and the work were inseparable in her mind—and the extent to which she was ill equipped to discuss the former—is clear in the only mention she made of that golden date in her correspondence. Just after the anniversary she wrote the Paris lawyer Louba Schirman, who was exploring possibilities of a film adaptation of
Mary
. Véra was pleased with the idea, as she was particularly fond of that novel. “
Incidentally,
Mashen'ka
[Mary] was written in the first year of our marriage of which we celebrated the 50th anniversary this April 15. That makes the book fifty years old,” she extrapolated. It was an odd way of putting it: That also made the marriage fifty years old. She spent at least part of that anniversary at her desk. On April 15, 1975, she replied to an admirer who confessed to having relieved the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe of their copy of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, having found an inscribed volume in the stacks. She had removed it to her home for better care, replacing the library gem with a fresh copy. On her husband's behalf, a chuckle in her voice, Véra wrote: “
Though basically a law-abiding citizen he cannot help condoning your little crime.”