Vera (73 page)

The remarkable thing about Véra Nabokov's life after Nabokov was not how much but how little it changed. Since 1923 she had not posited herself at the center of her own existence. She showed no sign of doing so now. “
A book lives longer than a girl,” Vladimir had noted, speaking of the two Madame Bovarys. His widow took comfort in the fact that a book also outlives its author. A month after his death she was back at her desk, soliciting publishing advice, asking Schirman what course of action she should pursue against a public appraisal of Vladimir's work that he had found objectionable. She was still not up to receiving guests. At the end of the month she
packed Dmitri off for a vacation in San Remo. She knew he was cruelly wounded by their loss. The previous year when Vladimir had fallen in his room she had attempted to break his fall but proved no match for his weight; her spine had been injured as a result, and was now crooked in two places, giving her a biggish hump. Her right arm refused to function properly—it was “
half an invalid in its own right,” she declared—which made the letter-writing more of an ordeal than ever. She had no choice but to dictate her words to Madame Callier. She avoided social calls as much out of self-consciousness as out of any kind of emotional frailty. Over and over she explained that she had grown hunchbacked. Ultimately she would be as bent over as
a question mark.

While she was indifferent to how the world perceived her, she was not without her vanity. In March 1978 Alison Bishop traveled to Europe, where her daughter, now Alison Jolly, was living. The one thing she wanted to do before returning to Ithaca was to see Véra again. Véra was oddly reluctant to see the surviving member of the couple who had been their intimates at Cornell; Alison was left with the feeling that she was inflicting herself on an old friend. Ultimately it was agreed that the three would meet for a quiet dinner in the Montreux apartment. Alison Bishop was herself eighty-one and crippled by knee trouble; it required some effort on her part to wade through the vast hotel lobby and down the corridors leading to the elevator to the sixth floor. Véra received the two Bishop women in the apartment all in black. The curtains were drawn, and the lights turned down low; her radiant face and the sweep of white hair appeared to float magically, a semi-shimmer in the darkness. The twisted back was barely visible. Dinner was wheeled in quickly, evidently so that the visit could be brief. Any fears she may have had about the reunion were quickly dispelled. The conversation sparkled, and Véra's joy was evident. There was much laughter. When the younger Alison
asked if she had fallen, Véra shrugged and replied that it been her husband who fell. The shoulder had hurt a great deal, but no longer gave her any pain.
^*
As they rose to leave, one of the Alisons could not help but tell Véra how extraordinarily beautiful she was. “Oh, you don't find me so ugly then?” she asked, touched and surprised, and alluding to the hump. It could only have weighed all the heavier on a woman whose carriage had been for decades so utterly exemplary. The deformation made no difference; Véra remained in the mind of Alison Bishop Jolly
the most beautiful woman she had ever known.

For the most part and with few exceptions, she resisted callers. She was as always inundated with work. In the first year without VN she checked the French translation of
Look at the Harlequins!
—she was quite happy with the results—and devoted her time to polishing a collection of Russian poems, to be published by the Proffers' Ardis Publishers. She contributed a brief, dispassionate preface to the collection as well, one line of which, stressing the presence of the otherworldly in VN's work, would set Nabokov studies off in a new direction. The regular housekeeping affairs proved as complex as ever: VN had five publishers in France alone. On top of this came the estaterelated details. The complications were the usual ones. “
I have received from the I.R.S. an answer to a letter I never sent them,” Véra complained toward the end of 1978. She felt she was living under the sword of Damocles in the perennial anticipation of staggering legal and tax bills.
^†
The evaluation of the estate was complicated by the volume of paper with which she lived; she nearly begged Iseman not to ask her to provide a detailed incentory. “
We have been living here for almost 17 years, in a very small apartment, and every drawer, every trunk and lots of cases are filled with papers, most of which have no value at all and have not been destroyed for the only reason that the task of taking everything out and sorting it was too much for me.” The bulk of it was of little value, she added, having been written by her.

For leisure she read about the Old Masters, primarily Vermeer and Georges de La Tour; this was
one of her favorite pastimes. She was at her desk no fewer than six hours a day, as prosaic as ever in her reports. But a note of pathos sounds just beneath the lacquer-hard surface. She thanked Loo for having come all the way to Montreux to see her in the spring of 1978; she was
deeply touched by the publishers who offered to visit. She
sounded almost surprised when someone from the distant past wrote her. She seemed to live in expectation of being forgotten, was pleased when she discovered that was not. (At their ends, friends like the Christiansens hesitated to write, worried they were presuming, and were just as taken aback by Véra's heartfelt responses. Somehow it never seemed to occur to anyone that she actually enjoyed receiving mail, which she did.) There was almost
a note of entreaty to the letters, thought Elena Levin. “
Don't forget me,” Véra implored the Appels. She remained as plainspoken as ever. In 1983 she wrote Alfred Appel, “
I do hope you will visit Europe some day before I leave it for good.”

She never tired of telling friends that the work kept her sane, healthy, happy. At the same time she continued in her quiet protests. At eighty-one, still spending full days at her desk (her writing desk had become her writing armchair), she was
still insisting she lacked all epistolary gifts. Sylvia Berkman asked if Véra might write something about Vladimir, a question she was not alone in posing; Véra replied that
neither her Russian nor her English was strong enough. She was not to be a writing widow, like Fanny Stevenson or Anna Dostoyevsky, not even a faux writing widow, like Florence Hardy, whose name went on the so-called biography her husband had written of himself, and dictated to his wife, before his death. She did not care to have the last word. While she admired Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of a marriage that was in many respects similar to her own under radically different circumstances, she expressed no desire to emulate Mrs. Mandelstam. Nor did she subscribe to any kind of widows' network. There was no being tigresses together; there was no consulting on publishing procedures, as there had been between Countess Tolstoy and Mrs. Dostoyevsky. She would read Carl Proffer's 1987
The Widows of Russia
, a work on the women who upheld and fostered and transmitted a literature, but if she saw anything familiar in the text, or in its cast of committed, culture-preserving characters, she offered no reflections on it. She had always held herself apart, insisted, as much as her husband, on the supremacy of the individual. Given the work in which she had so deeply immersed herself for five decades, that sense was understandable. Less easy to grasp was the diffidence, which had for so many years been read as arrogance. She was inundated with requests for meetings, interviews, opinions, by those who wanted to talk about literature, or just talk: “
Since they cannot talk to V. they ask if they can talk to me (
faute de mieux).”
And this, she added, after she had done everything in her power, all her life, to avoid meeting new people.

Much of the late 1970s were consumed by yet another translation effort. Having corrected
Speak, Memory
in German,
Look at the Harlequins!
in
French, her husband's poetry in Italian, she undertook a translation of
Pale Fire
into Russian. She backed into the project accidentally, having agreed to check the work of a young poet, commissioned by the Proffers. The task was arduous—William Buckley remarked that he would have thought such a rendering impossible, but had long known “
that nothing is impossible for you”—but not as arduous as were the battles with the original translator. To her horror Véra determined that he had no sense of her husband's work, little grasp of English, and a disastrous conception of Russian, especially literary Russian. After a number of rounds she gave up on his version, retranslating the novel herself from beginning to end, finishing only in 1982. Years into the project, with only about seventy pages to go, she felt no great sense of triumph. If she compared her work with the original she was maddeningly disheartened. “
But at least it is all exact,” she consoled herself.

The manner in which credit was negotiated for the work is instructive. Initially, Véra had no intention of lending her name to the project. Given the amount of time she dedicated to the task, she later agreed to a line indicating that the translation had been made under her supervision. When the Russian
Pale Fire
was inadvertently announced without any mention of her contribution, she felt honor-bound to assert herself. She had proposed a shared credit so as to spare the poet's feelings; now her own had been badly hurt. She regretted having been so “
stupidly generous” in the first place. Having spent years correcting someone else's “illiteracies and errors,” she insisted on sole credit. It was as if she were willing to step forward only out of spite. “
I have now decided to be ruthless,” she warned the Proffers. She was adamant about this formulation, as a bibliographer who later stumbled discovered. He was duly notified that all mention of the poet must disappear. “
This is very important to me,” Véra stressed.

The
Pale Fire
translation was but one of many projects competing for her attention. More so than ever before, she was her husband's representative, the quicksilver mediator between a divine sensibility and its earthly interpreters. It had long been her job to set translators, cover artists, royalty departments, journalists, on the straight and narrow. She did so all the more stringently now. She admitted that she was perhaps a bit more pious than was necessary, but did not see how she could act differently. Only Vladimir could have granted special dispensations, and he was not around to do so. She doubted he would want a poem of his to appear in an anthology alongside a mystical salute to Lenin.
And when in doubt, she explained to the volume's editor, her rule was to abstain. She apologized to an editor for her punctiliousness: “
You may find my corrections to be only details,” she explained, “but style consists of details.” VN had held that style alone should constitute a writer's biography;
only in this respect was Véra writing her husband's story. In preparing his Cornell lectures for publication she subscribed to a simple rule, citing a case her father had spoken about that had clearly much impressed her.
A Roman author had requested in his will that nothing whatever be added to his work. On the other hand, his heirs should feel free to eliminate whatever they liked. She remained as always alert to the misprint, the slight, the inaccuracy, the mangled line, the lapse of logic. Nothing escaped her vigilance, as John Updike discovered when he submitted his introduction to the first volume of lectures. It was returned to him with Véra's three incisive pages of notes. (Her seventeenth point: “A personal request: Could you please take me out of the article?”) “
What an impressively clear mind and style she has,” Updike commented, revising his pages.

With her directness and literalism, Véra labored to preserve the poetry and mystery—to her mind
the two essential aspects—of her husband's work. The indignities piled up, as they always had, but now she faced them alone, or with the help of Dmitri, who spent part of the year in Montreux, and who since the mid-1970s had been translating his father's work into Italian. How could
The Defense
's British paperbacker even dream of putting such a pseudomodern abomination on the cover? She agreed the work of a young Russian writer was promising but
wished he did not imitate her husband quite so much. She battled as ferociously, as directly, on the page as she had a half century earlier; if she had not been the original Zina Mertz, she had certainly inherited her idiosyncratic directness. “
No one else—not students, colleagues here, Nabokov scholars elsewhere—returns a critical serve with such force,” Boyd wrote, thanking Véra for her comments on his pages. When George Hessen published his memoirs she commented that she had always known of his deep affection for Vladimir but had been touched to see it in print. What she had not known was what a dreadful writer Hessen was. In 1979 Harry Levin reviewed
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters
in
The New York Review of Books
. “
I was not going to say anything about Harry's article about
The Letters
, but I like to be quite frank, and so perhaps I had better say that the article distressed me very much,” Véra wrote Elena. It was a year and a half before she explained her indignation.