Vera (65 page)

The news that Nabokov had defected from Putnam's for a quarter million dollars—in a deal sealed by a handshake between Mrs. Nabokov and the publisher's executives—appeared in the papers only on January 12, by which time Véra was long back in Montreux. She offered no comment on the negotiation that had so impressed the others at the table. When congratulated on the terms of the deal she did what any half-discreet person would have done: She protested that the numbers had been greatly exaggerated by the press,
which they were not. Her delight can be read only in her comments about Minton. With glee she reported that he was “in a state of mourning,” “
in a rage,” “nearly hysterical,” about her husband's defection. (
Minton was none of these things, being an astute businessman, and having made less money with each subsequent Nabokov title since
Lolita
. Vladimir nonetheless took to calling him “
Badminton.” Véra's correspondence with Minton ended with teeth clenched on both sides.)

There was no time for prolonged celebration in any event. The Nabokovs succumbed to their mutual flu just after Christmas and, still suffering from it, braced themselves for a small army of January visitors. Alfred Appel and his wife visited in midmonth. Sonia Slonim followed, after which a team of Rowohlt translators descended with their dictionaries on the Palace. Over the course of a week the Nabokovs vetted the German translation of
Pale Fire
. The hotel put a small, spartan salon at their disposal, in which everyone sat with a copy of the original work on his lap as a Rowohlt secretary read slowly through the German text, line by line.
^*
Véra signaled often that something was amiss. A spirited discussion would follow, Véra speaking German when she needed to suggest an alternate phrasing, otherwise confining herself to English. It was clear to the translators that she had been designated to speak for her husband, who would often tease her at the outset of these marathon sessions, as if coaxing her out of her corner, priming her to talk. Afterward he entertained the visitors with garbled French and Italian translations. The strain of the long days on the Nabokovs was clear to the Rowohlt team, who returned in 1973 and 1974 to devote a series of ten-day sessions to
Ada
. The drill was more complicated yet when the Italians came, as they did in November 1969 for their
Ada
. Mondadori's general director knew no English, nor Vladimir any Italian. “
Everything,” reported Véra, “went over a French bridge.”

It would have been easy for someone in that Palace salon to conclude that the two Nabokovs constituted the same sort of “twinned genius-ego” Vladimir had described in
Ada
, a rollicking meditation on time and space, richly allusive, swarming with slights, all of it braided through a particularly happy, particularly long-lived, and perfectly incestuous love affair. Blinding in its mirror-play, the novel is ostensibly written by Van Veen, acrobat-aesthete-philosopher, with textual interpolations by Ada Veen, his sister, his
peer, and the perpetual if not permanent object of his affection. It did not help that Ada was her own Department of Recollection, playing on the page the role Véra played in the life, questioning the accuracy of Van's recall, appending Russian-speckled comments of her own, laboring to keep their history pure. Nor did it help that the Nabokovs, as much married as Kitty and Levin, seemed to conduct their marriage with the furtiveness of Anna and Vronsky. It is no great surprise that the novel tangled itself up with the reality; it was generally difficult to ignore Véra's presence in light of Ada, described by Appel—who knew them both well—as “
not only Veen's muse, desire, tormentor and alter ego, but his severest critic and collaborator as well.” The overlapping, intergrading entity termed “Vaniada” in the novel was not so far from the real-life “Vervolodya,” the most intimate of VN's doubles, one that delighted in its own brand of “
sun-and-shade games.” Ada and Van rework a translation of John Shade's verse just as Véra and Vladimir reworked that of Shade's maker.
One reviewer read the work as an alchemical conflation of the Tamara of
Speak, Memory
and Nabokov's famously long and happy marriage. If nothing else, what was true of Van was true of Vladimir: All temptations aside, he
could not live one day without this particular woman. Nor was there any question that the Nabokovs were engaged in their own trilingual game of total recall. The temptation to see Véra in the novel was irresistible, especially for those who had not found her in
Lolita
, especially given the name on the dedication page, especially given the supremely self-referential character of the work itself.

Of course Ada is not Véra, but the ferocity with which Vladimir charged at the reviewer—even the friendly reviewer—who found traces of her in the work seemed suspect. He tackled the critic who said as much in
The New York Review of Books
. “
What the hell, Sir, do you know about my married life?” he challenged Matthew Hodgart, who had the good grace to issue the demanded apology.
^*
John Updike saw more than art and ardor in Ada: “
She is also, in a dimension or two, Nabokov's wife Véra, his constant collaboratrice and the invariable dedicatee of his works.… I suspect that many of the details in this novel double as personal communication between husband and wife; some of the bothersomely exact dates, for instance, must be, to use a favorite word of our author, ‘fatidic.' ”
Updike's wrist was lightly slapped. He was hitting a nail upon its head in his last observation, although it would be Brian Boyd who, palpating the tender ground later, learned to parse the denials. Speaking after her husband's death, Véra voiced her discomfort with an observation Boyd made regarding dates in the novel, which she suggested
he omit. “
But there are many birthdays commemorated in
Ada,”
he objected. “I know,” she replied, waltzing neatly around the fact that her birthday figures prominently and meaningfully in the novel. No one ever dared ask her if there was something in the twinned genius motif, what she made of the novel-as-dialogue, the woman who claims her ideas to be the “mimotypes” of another's. Had they done so they would doubtless have been rewarded with another of Véra's dazzling non sequiturs. But Ada likes snakes, she might have responded—as she had noted that
Zina was only half-Jewish—therefore, she is not I. Earlier she had listened carefully as VN described to a journalist her intercepting him on his way to the incinerator with the partial manuscript of
Lolita
. “
I don't remember that. Did I?” she asked vaguely. She could not possibly have forgotten. Of course, as Nabokov reminds us in
Ada
, if people remembered the same things, they would not be different people.

A long-awaited novel,
Ada
was greeted in 1969 mostly with extravagant praise from reviewers, more than some of them later wished they had showered on the novel. Appel reviewed the book glowingly on the cover of
The New York Times Book Review
, although he had disliked it on his first reading, finding it overly precious. He came around to the belief that he had written his review in a state of starstruck intoxication, from which he later awoke—to the conviction that Nabokov in his
Ada
period was but a step away from Joyce in the period of
Finnegans Wake
, a novel Nabokov dismissed as a “
petrified superpun.” British reviewers came more directly to a negative appraisal, referring to the seven-hundred-page volume as
Nabokov's Waterloo, alleging that language had perhaps too facilely triumphed over imagination.
Ada
is a ravishingly beautiful piece of writing; it can also fairly be said to be a flabby novel, in which the acrobatic commingling of centuries and nationalities works less well than that of the human limbs. All the same the May 1969 publication landed Nabokov on the cover of
Time
, a place where the magazine's editor had long hoped to see him; VN was hailed as “
the greatest living American novelist.” Briefly
Ada
battled
The Love Machine, Portnoy's Complaint
, and
The Godfather
on the summer bestseller lists, where it remained for five months, an overweight and off-putting tome selling, to McGraw-Hill's relief and delight, “
like six-packs of Budweiser in July.”

Véra was less willing to underwrite the fictions that leapt out of her husband's mouth than those he committed to the page. One interviewer noted
that nothing—least of all the truth—could stand between VN and a good story. He vaulted at a good pun, or a fertile coincidence, from a mile away. The interviewer did not reckon on Véra, a one-woman Department of Corrections, who—at the risk of inviting back the specter of
Ada
—assisted Vladimir as much in his efforts to order and reorder the past. Nabokov had been happy to inform Filippa Rolf that he had played at the magnificent, mirrored halls of the Hotel Negresco as a child in 1905—at least until Véra pointed out that the hotel had not yet been built. He summoned
the same synthetic nostalgia for the Continental in Paris, the only establishment at which the couple had been able to find a room in 1959, but which VN jovially declared he had chosen for sentimental reasons, having visited the hotel in 1906, which was perhaps true as well. For the ninety-ninth time Véra might listen to his lurid tale of the Belgian cannibal, rolling her eyes. She reserved
a half-bemused smile for her husband at such moments, as if astonished that he could still be trotting out this outrageous repertoire. The cannibal story was no more true today than it had been in the 1930s, she objected. When Vladimir began to discourse on Mozart, she reminded him he knew nothing about the subject. Quietly and with good humor she corrected him in front of an interviewer: He did not weigh eighty-five kilos, but eighty-nine. And when he bragged that his Russian Scrabble scores hovered between four hundred and five hundred points, Véra pointed out that “five hundred is barely possible,” a statement with which Vladimir heartily agreed, being the first to confess to a hyperbole addiction.

He was as eager to make use of his wife's credibility as he was, for the sake of a good story, to steamroll past it. In Cambridge he had had a habit of
spinning a yarn that was patently false, then bolstering its veracity by insisting that he had told Véra all about it, as if his having done so constituted irrefutable proof. Véra could not always have been pleased to squash these tall tales. In front of Nina and Alfred Appel she did so reluctantly. At the Palace her husband shared with an acquaintance the story of the Appels having met in his class, edging their way closer to each other as the semester progressed until—by
Anna Karenina
, and under his spell—they had practically emerged as Mr. and Mrs. Appel. Sadly, Appel demurred. The future Mrs. Appel had taken the course in 1954–55, while he had done so the previous year. Vladimir looked helplessly to Véra for corroboration. Slowly and solemnly, like an Old Testament judge, she shook her head no. Vladimir shrugged, and slumped a bit. “
Well, it's a beautiful story anyway,” he concluded. It should have happened that way, just as there should have been a charity ball on May 8, 1923, when he had met an enchanting masked woman for the first time.

“
Véra has a much better memory than I do,” Nabokov boasted, trusting
himself to it completely. He lived in manifest if occasionally ill-humored deference to his wife's ability to summon details from the past. As the man who had now revisited his own autobiography—one hundred pages of new material, photographs, and an index were added to the book in 1966—well knew, his recall was faulty.
^*
He wished Véra had made him write more down when he was younger, a statement that made his wife growl, with what sounds to have been the foot-stamping frustration of someone who had tried to do precisely that. William Buckley Jr., who met the Nabokovs in the 1970s, found the corroborating almost a tic. Vladimir's
conversation was studded with regular “Isn't that right, Véra?”s. As often as not, the answer was “Almost.” Not for a second would she have failed to reply honestly, so long as the question was impersonal. Nor would she hesitate to intrude on the narratives. In the course of a dinner with the Appels the Nabokovs wound up in a hearty disagreement about the definition of
“ananas”
in Russian. Was it pineapple or banana? As soon as her table manners allowed, Véra bolted upstairs to settle the matter. After a few moments she returned from her consultation with the dictionary; she did not have time to open her mouth before her husband boomed, “
Defeat. I recognize the posture of defeat.” Véra smiled. “I can always tell when she knows she's wrong,” he trilled in jolly triumph. These miniature intellectual tournaments were standard fare, the good-natured rivalry between a man who thought his wife's Russian stupendous and a woman who thought her husband's without equal. Nabokov folded this minor contest into
Ada
.