Vera (66 page)

Véra was graceful in her defeats, though often visibly vexed with her husband. Along with the fact-keeping and fiction-quashing came a fair amount of straightforward conversational disciplining. As the stream of visitors to Montreux observed, the act came to consist of Vladimir verging into the off-color, the provocative, Véra reining him in, Vladimir complying like the errant schoolboy. He seemed to be playing not so much to his visitor as to his wife's amused—or not so amused—tolerance. Late in the 1960s, Jason Epstein was walking north across the Place de la Concorde in Paris when he heard a familiar Harry Truman twang, a booming midwestern laugh. It was Vladimir. Over a drink at the Meurice, Vladimir went on to relate to his liberal friend and former editor his
deep affection for Nixon. Véra interceded, clearly embarrassed. Vladimir glowed as she did so, the naughty boy who enjoys the mess being swabbed up around him. When he announced to a visitor
that he had decided to return to Russian prose for good, he was dismayed to see that his
wife did not flinch. That was the point of the exercise. On some occasions when he made inflammatory remarks but could not coax Véra out of her corner he still obtained the reaction he was after. The 1969
Time
researcher noted that after one particularly tasteless comment she looked as if she would
like to choke her husband. It was certainly one way to tease her out.

Filippa Rolf found another. The Cambridge-based poet had engaged in a steady correspondence with Véra since the Nice visit that had so changed her life; Véra had hardly been able to keep up with the torrent of letters. Generally she waded her way past the more personal comments but was at times provoked into taking a stand. In early 1962 when she had written about the visit of Rolf's Swedish friend she took a very firm stand indeed. She believed the relationship “
imprudent and unwise,” adding that Vladimir was in full agreement with her. “
Do you
always
do
exactly
what is expected from you? You are the best actress any director could dream of,” Rolf remonstrated, a legitimate question phrased less delicately than it might have been. Véra ignored the outburst. A month earlier she had asked Rolf if she might see her way clear to translating
Pale Fire
, a request she did not rescind even after these insolent comments. She could not have been pleased to hear later that Rolf had “smuggled” both Nabokovs into a short story but gracefully assured the self-appointed protégée that “
we trust completely in your discretion and good taste.” Equably she continued to dispense professional advice, encouraging Rolf to focus on the drama on the page instead of that in Harvard Square, not to brood about Life and Love. In response to that brief and cordial statement she received, late in April 1963, a suicide note: “
Goodbye. You are the only one I have ever loved or ever will love.”

The communication may have been unexpected but Rolf's fixation on both Nabokovs, her mental unrest, and her difficulty in acclimating to America had long been obvious. Véra and Elena Levin had exchanged numerous letters on the subject. Véra treated the April missive as she did most threats that did not offend her honor: she gave it a wide berth. In October she was writing sympathetically about Rolf's new book of verse, which her publisher had rejected, and about the Nabokovs' abiding confidence that Rolf should undertake the
Pale Fire
translation. That Véra, in her eminent, stiff-upper-lip sanity, would have preferred to have waltzed past the suicide note and its personal overtures makes sense. That she felt the proper therapy for someone on the brink of mental illness might be to lock her up with a fictional madman's fantasies would seem either a lapse of logic or an overdose of the stuff. She did all she could to limit her contact with Rolf during the
1964 Cambridge visit and claimed to do so again in December of that year, when Rolf traveled to Europe for a quiet visit with the couple, in the course of which they reviewed her translating progress. They also bought her a coat, an act that would not have impressed on Rolf any burgeoning rift in the relationship. Véra could not seem to wean herself from the idea that she had found, for all the complications, the ideal Swedish translator for her husband's work. And Rolf could not seem to get past the idea that the Nabokovs had
banished her to an inhospitable place, which they had made all the more inhospitable by writing the Levins in advance of her very private sexual habits. Véra appeared—hers had been the fist that pounded the table for emphasis—the prime culprit. Her assuredness, her invincibility, seemed to egg Rolf on.

By 1965 she was bombarding the couple with drafts of the story she had written about them, “
an act of vandalism,” she confessed, but one she labored obsessively to perfect. The Nabokovs did not flinch. At the time Vladimir wrote glowingly on Rolf's behalf to
The New Yorker
. Véra defended her energetically to Lena, in Sweden, with “
She is one of the most gifted women we have ever met.” Of another draft she wrote that Rolf could indeed publish the story if she liked, with two minor changes. She went out of her way to make it clear that the request was Vladimir's, although the lines in question concerned her. She herself was wholly indifferent.
^*
Of course nothing could have been further from the truth, as the highly perceptive Rolf would have known. She seems to have been incited by Véra's protests, determined to force her to drop the mask. At times the correspondence reads like a feral attempt to scare Mrs. Nabokov out of the bushes; in May 1966 Rolf taunted Véra by saying that she knew Nabokov's works were, all of them, letters to his dream of a wife, from whom she expected an autobiography. A hint of exasperation crept into the correspondence only a year later, when Véra sidestepped again, deferring to Vladimir in her communication. “
My husband has been terribly busy and simply could not keep track of the revisions of your story and the story of your revisions,” she wrote stiffly. A whole collection of rambling letters had arrived in the interim. Increasingly these proved to be sardonic, half-lucid documents penned in a spidery script that wound itself around the page, in and out of several languages en route. For all of the madness in the fictions, Véra's encounters with mental illness were few. She continued to describe the demands of her life to Rolf—the Rowohlt translators
had just left, dissecting
Pale Fire
line by line had been debilitating, the correspondence only grew and grew—as if she could somehow will the correspondence back on to neutral, rational ground.

In 1969, when the letters, postcards, and telegrams amounted to some twenty communications a month and when Rolf's insolence had devolved into brute obscenity, Véra turned to Paul, Weiss for help. She was obviously rattled; her June letter to the firm is a jumble of pronouns. She did not seem to know if she was writing as herself, her husband (“
In the middle 60s I surrendered to her eager desire of translating into Swedish one of my longest and most difficult novels …”), or both of them. Since November of the previous year they had chosen not to answer Rolf's unsettling letters, about her obsessive adoration of, or her ripening hatred for, them; Rolf continued to insist the Nabokovs were characters in her own work. Véra read and approved the Paul, Weiss missive, to which Rolf contemptuously replied that she could not and would not discontinue her correspondence with the couple. The rain of mail in Montreux tripled. Véra issued her own ultimatum at the end of July, setting out her version of the relationship in a document that makes clear that the meticulous, too, can disfigure history. Her summary was supremely lucid,
perfectly truthful, highly inaccurate. Véra failed to acknowledge that the Nice invitation had been anything but casual; that Rolf had clipped Swedish reviews at her request and been a great help in the Wahlström fiasco; that the Nabokovs had in any way enjoyed what Véra now termed her “endless visit”; that they had in large part set the agenda. Rolf was not, and never had been, a friend. Her habit of advertising her lesbianism was shameless. She was abusing the considerable talent with which she had been born. Furthermore, and in perhaps the worst instance of impertinence, she had never been granted permission to address either Nabokov by his or her given name.

Only toward the spring of 1970 did Rolf's Cambridge friends discover what she had been up to; the Nabokovs were not the only recipients of the aberrant spiralgrams. A devoted friend saw that she be taken to a hospital, where she spent a
much-needed month. She was later diagnosed as having suffered a psychotic episode of paranoid megalomania, for which therapy and complete rest were prescribed. She recovered, and published her first English prose in
Partisan Review
soon after. The Nabokovs continued to receive two communications from her a day. In 1978, she was mailing regular letters and compositions to Véra, along with poems through which she laced references to the Nabokovs, a theme with which she never finished. In August of that year Rolf was diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer and died within weeks; word of her death must have reached Switzerland but left no
record there. The entire episode proved a drain on the already taxed resources in Montreux, where such a premium was placed on the rational that Véra was able to say of a brilliant, temperate summer day that “
the weather has finally come to its senses.”
^*
Rolf had been one of the few to challenge her to drop her mask, to speak, as herself, with a near-stranger. Véra tried to claim the whole saga was a madman's fantasy, which was not true. Having long evaded the credit, in this case she dodged all personal responsibility as well. The strategy worked less well with people than with literature.

At the beginning of October 1967, Phyllis and Ken Christiansen, Vladimir's Museum of Comparative Zoology assistant and her entomologist husband, passed through Montreux. They were delighted to see the boy for whom Phyllis (then Phyllis Smith) had occasionally baby-sat in Cambridge, now a dashing six-foot-five-inch professional singer. To their astonishment they found Véra virtually unchanged. They were all the more taken aback when she asked about the cocker spaniel Phyllis had owned twenty years before, by name. The Nabokovs had forgotten nothing, and over Sunday lunch (tournedos, strawberries) plied Phyllis with questions about her family, whom they had known through the museum. In particular they expressed concern for her thirty-six-year-old sister, with whom Phyllis had had a troubled relationship, and who had since been diagnosed as mentally ill. Vladimir returned persistently to the subject, probing for the cause of the disorder. Phyllis was so startled by the interest, and by the line of direct questioning, that she felt she fumbled the answers. It is unlikely that the close interrogation of 1967 had anything to do with the flurry of mail then arriving from Filippa Rolf. But it was abundantly clear that the Nabokovs did understand—and could summon compassion for—those grappling with their balance. The visit was an altogether charmed one, from both sides. The Christiansens remarked especially on the continued adoration of husband and wife. Vladimir still called Véra “Darling”; as another visitor observed, there was
nothing remotely casual about his use of the appellation. In the lounge after lunch he spooned sugar into his coffee but missed the cup. A small mountain of crystal balanced neatly on his loafer. Impishly Véra broke
the news: “Darling, you have just sweetened your shoe.” Her husband roared with laughter.

Filippa Rolf was not the only visitor who thought the Nabokovs lonely in their European exile, which she assumed was the reason she had been invited to Nice. Martha Duffy, the
Time
researcher who flew to Montreux for the 1969 cover story, found them
constantly on the brink of loneliness as well. Nina Appel felt the
loneliness seeping out of them at all times. Philippe Halsman, who had photographed VN in 1966, asked as much directly. “
No, we do not feel lonesome. We have the run of the hotel, and peace,” Véra assured him, grousing instead about the weather, more intractable even than the worst of her husband's publishers. She seems to have had a point. The Nabokovs were, after all, a couple who could have a rollicking good time alone with a couple of dictionaries. Vladimir's sister Elena, widowed in 1958, visited biweekly from Geneva; she agreed that Véra would have been
entirely happy on a desert island with Vladimir. Which she for the most part was. Off-season the 350-room Palace was empty—some twenty guests flitted among its hallways and salons—with a kind of
Last Year at Marienbad
feel to it. Regular visits from Dmitri, to whom Véra spoke by telephone several times a week, were equally vital. Asked about his social circle, Vladimir
provided a short list, beginning with tufted ducks, crested grebes, and the characters in his new novel. He told Wilson, who visited Montreux for the first time and the Nabokovs for the last time in 1964, that they saw almost no one in the winter, which kept his mind uncluttered.