Vera (69 page)

10
THE LAND BEYOND THE VEIL

As her seventieth birthday approached, Véra
had the distinct sense that time—the medium outside of which she allowed her husband to live, so that he might tame, cheat, abolish, deny it in his art—had suddenly accelerated. There were so many new editions of his work that she had lost track; she
could not answer the question when Lazar asked if
Despair
had been published in paperback. Two days after Christmas 1971, she mailed Andrew Field her corrections to the bibliography he was preparing: “
I apologize for this disjointed bit of work. I cannot convey to you the atmosphere of incessant interruptions in which I have to work, the condition of my desk flooded with unanswered and half-answered mail etc. etc.” All her holidays were now busman's holidays. It was fortunate that, as Dmitri observed, “
her attention span for pure amusement was quite limited.” The industrious Goldenweiser professed envy of her “phenomenal capacity for work.” Nabokov said that his pencils outlasted his erasers but Véra's were sorry little two-inch stubs, worn down to the ferrules, keeling under the weight of their add-on erasers.

Primarily because of Anna Feigin, the two Nabokovs occasionally traveled separately from Montreux, Vladimir decamping first, Véra following once she had seen to her cousin's needs. In early April 1970, just before their forty-fifth wedding anniversary, they were separated for a week. Vladimir
traveled alone to Taormina, where Véra was to meet him. He was in search of butterflies,
sun, and salvation from American tourists, who considered him their property. From Sicily he picked up the correspondence where he had left it years earlier, writing his wife daily, reprising his themes of the 1920s. Had she found the note he had slipped into her suitcase? He had found their restaurant, the one they remembered with such affection from the 1960 visit. He was utterly in love with Taormina, and had nearly bought a villa (“
8 rooms, 3 baths, 20 olives”). He was bored without her. He could not resist the old temptation of coining a new endearment with each letter. She was his “golden-voiced angel.” A
New York Times
reporter called about a visit; Vladimir put him off until Véra's arrival, when the three could explore the local lepidoptera together. He had bought her a present. He held tenaciously to her being with him on their anniversary, a sentiment he expressed in a trilingual sentence, days before her arrival on the fifteenth, when her favorite orchids were delivered to her room. He was sorry to see the correspondence end. By August he was composing love poems to her again.

Nineteen-seventy was the year of translating mercilessly. It began with Vladimir reworking Michaël Glenny's version of
Mary
, Nabokov's first novel, to which he did not feel Glenny had done justice. (For his part, Glenny concluded the author to be “
some kind of lexicomaniac.”) The couple spent Easter week in Rome, during which time Véra was in constant touch with Mondadori, who had brought out and hastily withdrawn an Italian
Ada
. If the Milan-based editor would consent to travel to Rome with the book's translator and a fat English-Italian dictionary, the Nabokovs would be willing to consecrate several evenings to all three of them, Véra offered, in French. She took careful notes of the phone conversation that followed this proposal. The Mondadori editor assured her that “
it did not matter for Italian readers if [the] translation has some howlers.” Véra rejoined that it did for the author. Although there was no further contact with Mondadori, the Nabokovs occasionally attempted to rework the text themselves over the summer. They made minimal progress, as Vladimir
threw up his arms in despair each time they sat down to check a passage or two. (As well he should have: Five years later the original defective translation was back on sale in Italy.) At the end of the year he noted in his diary that Dmitri had reworked some two-thirds of
Glory
into English. “
The rest heroically translated by Véra, the entire thing corrected by me, an excruciating task that took 3 months to complete with a few interruptions. Last Russian novel, thank God,” he added, a sentiment his wife could only have shared. Not that that was her salvation. Two years later she was badgering Mondadori again, this time on
Glory'
s account. She had discovered thirteen serious errors in the first
twelve pages of the Italian edition. These tribulations led VN to an inevitable conclusion: “
All writers should write in English.”

Not unrelatedly, 1970 proved something of a banner year financially. The taxes about which Vladimir carped so vocally were considerable; he pronounced them “shocking.” Véra assumed all blame for the situation. She had made provisions for only about half the amount her husband actually earned that year. “
Lack of imagination on my part,” she quipped in a letter to Paul, Weiss, inquiring as to how, if at all, the damage might be minimized after the fact. She proposed a rather novel interpretation of foreign rights income, one, alas, that counsel was not convinced would be acceptable to the IRS. There was nothing whatever lacking in her imagination. She was moreover befuddled by Putnam's accounting. “
I wonder what other writers (or their wives) do to keep these things in order. I feel sadly incompetent,” she lamented.

The paper threatened to bury her—the
folders and files cluttered most surfaces of the Montreux apartment, where the overflow of office files occupied her bedroom—but the intrusions she most resisted, or most attempted to resist, were the human ones. In 1970 she counseled Dmitri that a crucial lesson in life was learning to push people away without offending them. There were simply not enough hours in a day. She had additional reason to have resisted the callers; no one who knew her well thought her extroverted. In the spring of 1970, after a trip to London, McGraw-Hill's executive editor and director of subsidiary rights, Beverly Jane Loo, stopped in at the Montreux Palace. A poised and tough negotiator, Loo was not known in the industry as a shrinking violet. All the same she changed her clothes four times before the initial meeting, settling finally on a classic glen plaid suit, in which she paced nervously by the lake. In the lounge a half hour before the appointed time she found Vladimir, who greeted her warmly; he may have been told she was Chinese, as he recognized her immediately. Explained Nabokov to the woman with whom his wife had been corresponding and speaking regularly: “
Oh Miss Loo, it's so good to meet you at last. I'm sorry Véra isn't here, but she's very nervous about meeting you. She thinks of you as
la Formidable.”
When Véra came down she ordered a whiskey, neat. Loo was stunned, and said as much. “I thought all Americans drank whiskey,” Véra explained quietly. The two
formidables
became fast friends, joking later about their mutual apprehension. Véra had already requested that all McGraw-Hill paper—she had been writing various members of the firm as often as four letters a day—be channeled through Loo, who took to visiting once or twice a year, and who became one of the two New York publishers to whom Véra signed her letters with love.

Beverly Loo kept a small menagerie in and near New York: a dog, four
cats, and a horse. Véra displayed photos of them in the Montreux apartment and sent warm regards to them in her letters. Asked why the Nabokovs did not keep an animal, Vladimir told Loo he was unwilling to share Véra with anyone, even a pet. (Given that response and the couple's general demeanor, she was surprised to discover they had a son.) Loo lunched one day with the Nabokovs in early 1976, after which the three moved to the salon for coffee. Between courses, Vladimir excused himself. He was not feeling well, and promised to rejoin the two women in the lounge. He had brought down his wooden box of notecards to impress his progress on their visitor, lunching with the cards on the floor beside his chair. Uncharacteristically, he forgot the box when he left the table. The maître d' came running into the lounge to return the cards to Véra, who smiled at Loo. “Let's play a little joke,” she suggested, wedging the box behind the visitor on her plush armchair. By the time Vladimir returned the cards had vanished. “Oh, VN, you took the box upstairs with you, didn't you?” Véra asked off-handedly. Her husband flashed red and began to sputter. He seemed on the verge of a heart attack. The panic was contagious; Véra and Loo scrambled to produce the box, waving it excitedly in the air. The genial conjurer rebounded splendidly. Slyly he assured his wife, “I was just trying to scare you.”

The select few for whom she might have cooked scrambled eggs in the apartment—the other half of the repertoire remained a family secret—came too seldom. She missed neither America nor campus life, but did long for a few friends. Véra protested regularly that she did not hear from Elena Levin as often as she would like, sounding slightly hurt. “
I don't know if you ever remember us but we do remember you—affectionately,” she wrote on her 1970 Christmas card. Wistfulness crept into her voice as the decade wore on, not enough to move her to revise her opinion of Solzhenitsyn, whom Elena admired and Véra dismissed as third-rate, but enough to make clear her affection: “
How sadly we regret that you do not come to Europe; or if you do, never to Switzerland; or, if you do, never to Montreux! Please
do
do it!” she implored the Levins. More stunning was the concession she made in early 1975 to Barbara Epstein, who had written from
The New York Review
to see if she might tempt Vladimir into a review. “
We still have not given up hope that at some time in a not too distant future we may have the pleasure of seeing you and Jason again. We shall not discuss Viet Nam or anything political, and shall have a wonderful time together,” Véra promised, having delivered the news that her husband was far too busy to consider Epstein's assignment. She was at once deeply concerned, and deeply serious, about friends' children. Were they happy? Were they in love? Were they in good schools, i.e., those with old-fashioned curricula?

The Véra of the tender emotions did not for a minute disagree with the assertion that she was charged with representing her husband's anger. The letters to Ergaz are strung together with protests that VN was distressed, furious, enervated, perplexed, resentful, offended, incensed.
“ ‘
Le doux M. Nabokov' n'est pas toujours doux,”
Véra warned the French agent on one occasion. If she first performed a little jig of do-I-have-to-Volodya? it has been lost to posterity. It seems unlikely; she was generally as angry as he, often more so. As early as January 1971, Andrew Field began to notice resistance on the part of his subject; he and Vladimir exchanged no unpleasant words. That dialogue was entrusted to Véra, “
acting as plenipotentiary,” in a phone call between hotels. A good year later she sounded still a reluctant (or naïve) plenipotentiary. Surely Field could not resent her for having typed what her husband dictated.