UK Vera review
Jorn Barger
www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Thursday-Times/timbooboo01007.html?999
Ian McIntyre admires the intelligence, spirit and devotion of Véra
Nabokov - and the skill of her biographer
She saved Lolita from the flames
VÉRA Portrait of a Marriage By Stacy Schiff Picador, £25
ISBN 0 330 37674 8
Special offer: Order from The Times Bookshop for £22 (free p&p in
the UK). Telephone 0870 160 80 80
NOEL COWARD was a lousy agony aunt. The stage wasn't all that bad. What
he should really have warned Mrs Worthington about were the horrors
awaiting her daughter should she marry a writer. Jane Carlyle, Countess
Tolstoy, Emily Tennyson - the line of those who might be subpoenaed as
witnesses for the prosecution would stretch twice round the courthouse
building. Would Mrs Vladimir Nabokov be of their number? Her husband
was certainly, in Stacy Schiff's words, "a man of titanic
self-absorption". She compares him with one of his own minor
characters: "he loved himself with a passionate and completely
reciprocated love". [end of gibberish zone, resume speed]
Véra Slonim married Nabokov in 1925 in Berlin - a penniless big fish in
the small pool of the Russian emigration. He was hailed by some as a
new Turgenev, but three decades passed before Lolita established him as
the most controversial author since D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller.
Years earlier, when he decided to burn the manuscript, it was Véra who
snatched it from the fire.
The transition from writing in Russian had not been easy - he saw
himself as "a champion figure skater switching to roller skates". An
early American reviewer pronounced his English "interesting in a Walt
Disney sort of way". His wife had no doubt that he was the greatest
writer of his generation. "Writing is Vladimir's life work, and he has
many things he wants to say. As for me, I am trying to help him."
She was formidably equipped to do so (exception made of her domestic
skills - "As a housekeeper I'm not bad but disgusting"). Schiff
catalogues the guises in which she appeared to his Cornell students -
"disciple, bodyguard, secretary-protector, handmaiden, buffer, monitor,
quotation-finder, groupie, advance man, professional understudy,
nursemaid, courtier."
Her eyes were a startling blue. To George Weidenfeld she was a
Giacometti drawing come to life. There were those who found her
priggish and intolerant: "You know, Véra," a Harvard friend burst out,
"if you weren't Jewish you'd be a fascist." She didn't much mind what
people thought - self-effacing, fiercely independent, she was concerned
only with the task she had assumed. "She was the international champion
in the Wife-of-the-Writer Competition," writes Schiff, "adding
intelligence to the usual equation."
She was alarmingly well-read. When she and Nabokov attempted The
Saturday Review's "Your Literary I.Q." she had much the higher score.
Her likes and dislikes were firmly rooted. She admired Bossuet and
Evelyn Waugh and considered Solzhenitsyn third-rate. Unwary visitors
could find themselves disconcertingly catechised: "To your knowledge,
did Stendhal ever pen a decent sentence?"
Schiff describes the Nabokovs as "the ultimate portmanteau couple" and
her book is something of a portmanteau, too: two biographies for the
price of one and a portrait of a marriage thrown in. She is one of
those no-nonsense writers who assume that their readers own a
dictionary, and that if they are not familiar with words like "eristic"
or "exogamy" they can look them up. In spite of occasional angularities
of style ("at no time could forgiveness be accounted one of her
fortes") this is a rich and subtle book.
It is also, at times, very moving. An American admirer who sought out
the Nabokovs in Italy in the 1960s came across them on a mountain
trail, butterfly nets in hand. "Nabokov was jubilant. Earlier in the
day he had sighted a rare species. He had gone back for his wife of 42
years. He wanted her to be with him when he made his capture."
When Vladimir died, a nurse in the Lausanne clinic tried to comfort the
new widow with a clumsy embrace. Véra repelled her with icy reserve:
"S'il vous plaît, Madame." But to her son she said: "Let's rent an
airplane and crash."
She lived on for 15 years, reading about her beloved Vermeer, attending
to the complexities of Nabokov's estate. There was no great occasion to
re-read his work; she largely knew it by heart. She destroyed her
letters to him, but preserved all his. "I need so little," he had
written in one of them before they were married, "a bottle of ink, and
a spot of sunshine on the floor - oh, and you. But the last isn't a
small thing at all."
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