Vera (30 page)

*
Dmitri provided an additional cause for concern. Raised tri- and quadrilingually, Vladimir and Véra had done all they could in the emigration to shelter their son from French and German for the sake of his Russian. He arrived in America speaking no English.

*
The blazer had never looked better. “Everything looked elegant on him,” remembers Elena Levin, who was meeting someone she had regarded as a master since the publication of
Mary. The Atlantic's
Edward Weeks made a similar observation: “
He just had to walk into the room and the girls looked around—the clothes didn't make any difference.”

*
He was not yet his own translator: “Cloud, Castle, Lake” was rendered into English by Peter Pertzov, whom Altagracia de Jannelli had located years earlier.

*
Of a collecting trip in Wyoming's Bridger-Teton National Forest in 1952, Nabokov reported: “
On a slope near Togwotee Pass at timberline I had the pleasure of discovering a strain of
C. meadi
with albinic females. The species was anything but common there, but of the dozen females or so seen or caught as many as three were albinic. Of these my wife and I took two, hers a dull white similar to
hecla ‘pallida'
, mine slightly tinged with peach.” Véra's version of the story was a little different. “
I also caught a white female of
Colias meadi
, which nobody seems to have taken before me, and the existence of which most lepidopterists doubted or denied. My husband also took a whitish female, but mine is all white,” she advised friends.

†
Only a handful of students registered for Nabokov's courses, although a number of interested faculty and auditors from the community attended as well.

*
Translation was never a subject on which Nabokov minced words—or liked to see words minced. Of the available edition of Gogol's “The Overcoat” he declared: “
The existing translation is vileness and an embarrassment.” His work on Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev did not go unacknowledged; much of it was published in 1944 as
Three Russian Poets
.

†
This was not everyone's recollection. Cyril Bryner, Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies and a young teacher in the department in 1941, remembered that “
Nabokov lost as many as he won, and was not a happy loser.”

*
Such snipes were to persist long after 1941. So foreign was Nabokov's English to the tried-and-true stuff that Vita Sackville-West would sniff of
Lolita:
“
I don't know what language it was originally written in.… it is not even bad American and certainly is not good English.”

†
The novel, published officially on December 12, 1941, went out with a long endorsement from Wilson comparing Nabokov with Proust, Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, and Gogol—and yet terming him a true original. Kay Boyle, in
The New Republic
, welcomed the book more warmly than had the
Times
, pronouncing it “
a delight to read.”

*
The
general feeling at
The New Yorker
was that Nabokov had learned his English from reading a dictionary. After the publication of
Lolita
, he delighted in telling an interviewer that his English came to him
direct from
Webster's
.

*
In this torture she was far from alone. When Isabel Stephens, a Wellesley Education professor who was the Nabokovs' neighbor in Cambridge, filled out her 1946 faculty questionnaire, she listed three occupations under “Special projects carried on outside of the department”: “
Marketing, washing, ironing.” Under “Interesting plans for the future,” Stephens wrote: “Hoping to get a cleaning woman two days a week.”

†
Having been peremptorily denied a meeting with Nabokov twenty-eight years later, one potential benefactor indignantly produced Vladimir's letter of December 16, 1941, so as to refresh his “phenomenal memory.”

*
Briefly her husband caught the fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the Man of Steel's wedding night.

*
The phenomenon had a literary parallel, articulated by Nabokov: “
Vinteuil is accepted by everybody in this provincial town of Combray as a vague crank dabbling in music, and neither Swann nor the boy Marcel realizes that in reality the music is tremendously famous in Paris.… As already remarked, Proust is intensely interested in the various masks under which the same person appears to various other persons.” And, too, Ada will prickle at “
the insufficiency of her brother's fame.”

*
“
Then again, only
humans
are capable of absentmindedness,” we are reminded in
The Enchanter
.

*
Only in the fall of 1944, when a department would be formed of which Nabokov was chairman and sole member, would he be known officially as “Lecturer in Russian.”

*
As with most things, Nabokov's definition was his own. “
An eccentric,” he wrote, “is a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the average citizen does not even notice.” By this definition he was married to an eccentric and the father of one as well.

*
“The urge to write is sometimes terrific, but as I cannot do it in Russian I do not do it at all,” Nabokov grumbled in November 1945. Only in 1946 did he report that he had begun to feel “
acclimated” to the English language.

†
He knew that the scientific work made him unpopular for other reasons. “
I have long since grown accustomed to the repulsive, slippery smile that runs across the faces of my Russian friends in New York when the conversation turns to entomology. In their conceptions, any fool who has written a ‘work' on history or economics is a ‘scholar,' ” he griped.

*
Confusion between the cousins continued. The
rumor around the VOA office was that the personnel office had intended to offer the post to Vladimir and hired the wrong Nabokov. The FBI could not keep the two Russians straight. Nicholas's photo ran even with Vladimir's obituary.

†
To Philip Vaudrin, at Oxford University Press in 1947: “
Since you are asking me what I think of these translations, I believe that what you want is my frank opinion. Here it is. These translations are absolutely terrible. I cannot imagine how a firm of your standing could have been induced to publish such trash. They are caricatures of the originals, couched in execrable English, with all the cliches typical of graphomania. Moreover, the author does not always understand the sense of the Russian lines. Last but not least, his choice of pieces is in the worst taste.” The book in question was an anthology of poetry,
The Wagon of Life
, Sir Cecil Kisch, translator.

*
Even after this encounter Wilson got Véra's name wrong, sending love to “
Sonya.” Probably he was thinking of the wife of their mutual friend, Roman Grynberg.

*
Having heard enough sympathy for the Bolsheviks,
Nabokov divided the Russian emigration into five easy categories: (1) those still crying over the lost furniture, (2) the anti-Semites, (3) idiots, (4) philistines and profiteers, (5) decent and freedom-loving people, or what remained of the tattered Russian intelligentsia.

*
To Colonel Joseph I. Greene, who was arranging for a German translation of
Bend Sinister
in 1948 as part of an educational program, she wrote that she hoped the book might prove instructive but confided her belief that “
knowing the Germans as we do, we cannot help entertaining some doubts as to their susceptibility to re-education.”

*
Kelly had been fascinated by Vladimir from the start. “
She treated him like royalty,” recalled a student in Kelly's 1941 dorm, who had reason to remember him: The Claflin Hall girls had not been allowed to be seated at dinner until Nabokov arrived at the faculty table, which he generally did less than promptly.

*
The FBI also found no reason to believe them anything other than perfectly loyal Americans.

*
The actual words were: “
I hope this helps. It is only meant, of course, to help you penetrate the actual words of the passage and find an equivalent for them. Otherwise it is all my own and my husband would not want it, I think, to enter your text.”

*
Original even in his less alluring moments, Nabokov wrote Wilson, “
Incidentally I vomited into the telephone which I think has never been done before.” The account of the hospital stay constitutes in itself a small masterpiece.

*
Generally the body count in Nabokov's classrooms was high. He took pleasure in slaughtering Gorki and Hemingway at Wellesley; he wrote later of killing off Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Occasionally a student proved a casualty, as was the case with one 1944 Wellesley freshman. On hearing her name on the first day of class Nabokov began jumping about the room, waving his arms madly. “
Do you have any idea what that
means?”
he asked, scrawling it on the board, analyzing its composite pieces, making buzzing circles in the air, and thoroughly humiliating the student in the process. “I think he forgot there was a person there,” remembered the Wellesley alumna, who never went back to class. Her name means “mosquito” in Russian.

*
Images that Peebles thought born of the campus romance indeed appeared later, but also preceded it. A similar cloak-wrapping turns up in a 1934 poem, “How I Love You.”

*
She was correct to a degree.
Mrs. Horton later recollected that Nabokov refused to offer an introduction to modern Russian literature and drama, which he wrote off as Bolshevik nonsense. Other members of the faculty felt this material deserved a place in the curriculum. There is evidence as well that Nabokov
rather frightened the dean with whom he had the most frequent dealings, who did not know what to make of him. Which was not unusual; he made some of the most eminent people in his field uncomfortable. He acknowledged as much in
Ada
, in which another V.V. notes that plodding academic administrations tend to prefer “
the safe drabness of an academic mediocrity to the suspect sparkle of a V.V.”

†
Believer in overt destiny though Nabokov was, Cornell had to knock a few times before attracting his attention. The offer was not his first from the university. In November 1943 he had been asked “to help prepare Army Trainees by instructing them on various themes in Russian history,” an idea he found unappealing. Various
foreglimmers had preceded this, in 1939, 1941, and 1942. He had read at Cornell in May of 1944.

‡
One person who was not so alarmed was Wilson, who wrote a mutual friend of Vladimir's illness: “
I did not take it so seriously at that time as he wanted us to believe because I know him to be a hypochondriac.”

One thing is essential: Whenever talented people approach art with the sole idea of serving it sincerely to the utmost measure of their ability, the result is always gratfying
.

—N
ABOKOV
,
L
ECTURES ON
R
USSIAN
L
ITERATURE