 | Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff, was published in April 1999 by Random House. (Jacket photo: Philippe Halsman © Halsman Estate) |
An Interview with Stacy Schiff
Yes, I did recognize the humorous tone of the "just a wife" comment
and find the combined two sentences that conclude the introduction
to Véra "She was not a writer. She was just a wife." hilarious.
Most of the wives I know from that generation might just as easily
merit that classification. One of the many accomplishments of Véra
is its sensitive depiction of the many-sided complexities of the wife role
as traditionally defined and artfully executed by Véra Nabokov.
I too cringed a bit for the Nabokovs when reading things that had they
been alive, one or the other would surely have denied. There are many places
in the book where you knowingly and bravely risk censure
from the grave. Indeed the mere act of writing a biography about Véra
Nabokov might in itself be considered treasonous ("...the more you leave
me out Mr. Boyd, the closer to the truth you will be.")
Véra Nabokov seems to me like the lion-dog stationed outside of a Buddhist Temple,
protecting and guarding the deity within. She/they spent a lifetime erecting this
monument. Did you in any way feel compunction in tearing it down?
As for her cringing, I cringed when reading her denials of various comments
the documents clearly proved she had made. If she were going to deny the
truth she would deny anything; I couldn't be influenced by what she would or
would not approve. In a few instances I did leave things out of the book that
she would have been grateful to me for omitting, but I left them out to
my own relief, not to hers. Remember that while Véra indeed told Brian he
would be more truthful if he left her out, she also confessed to him later
that she was everywhere. Only well-hidden.
I had only two tiny glimmers of Véra's approval, and I seized upon them.
Shortly after her marriage she had argued that a whole volume could be written
on the influence, the inspiration a wife brings to bear on her literary
husband. This read to me as an invitation. In the l970s VN assured Field
that his wife was well aware that someone, someday would attempt a screed
called "VERA!". That was fine with her, so long as she was not alive to see
it. Only the truly demented biographer could find consolation in this.
And I did.
Throughout the book, we encounter a Véra whose talents as writer were
either subsumed or diverted by those of her husband's. What remains from the
business and personal correspondence reflects not a creative writer but an
astutely critical one, especially in regard to Nabokov's work.
One of Véra's many compensations for the Herculean
task of managing the family's business and household matters
must have been requests from Nabokov for favors such
as the one you quote on page 314:
Dmitri Nabokov has also commented on the humor and artistry of these
inter-family notes. Did you, while researching Véra , encounter
further examples of this genre?
All of Nabokov's American works and many of his Russian ones were
famously dedicated "To Véra." Your biography illuminates these
inscriptions and colorizes the watermark that Nabokov
suggested we look for in all of his books. Were you ever tempted
to call the book "To Véra" and how did you finally decide on the
simple yet expanding title Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portait of a
Marriage?
One of the strangest accounts you present in Véra is that of
the, in the end, disastrous relationship between the Nabokovs and
a young Swedish poet named Filippa Rolf. Tinged with madness,
haunting, dark, sad, revealing, her suicide attempts and final death
from kidney cancer, rest uneasily on the text. As the Nabokovs
inform Rolf in Véra , "they did not normally lavish this kind of
attention on an acolyte." Why do you suppose they were originally so
drawn to her?
The novelist Lore Segal described Rolf to me as "dazzling." Segal also
reminded me that Rolf would have been doubly attractive to the Nabokovs; Rolf's
talent combined with a ferocious admiration for the work of VN, which she
had read attentively. She would have struck a familiar chord in that
household, having proved herself a talented poet in a little-read language.
Remember that the episode of ill health came only later.
Legend had it that Véra, upon encountering Vladimir at the
backyard incinerator, burning one by one the pages of Lolita,
intervened to prevent this atrocity. In Véra you note that you
were able to locate an eyewitness; a student who was
happening past the Nabokov's house at the time. What path led you to
Dick Keegan and what was it like as a biographer, to hear a firsthand account of this previously uncorroborated story?
Finally in the Barbadette materials in Paris I found an admission on Véra's
part that she had saved the manuscript from the flames. This seemed like a long way
to go to confirm a story I should simply have taken at face value in the
first place. At the same time it told me something else: The Barbadette
conversation postdated the Gilliatt one. Which meant that Véra was equally
capable of breezing past the truth as she was of revealing it.
I no longer remember who put me in touch with Dick Keegan.
He and I spoke several times, at length, about his last year at Cornell,
which was the Nabokovs' first. That conversation speaks to the plight of the
blinkered biographer. Over several months we discussed Keegan's chauffering
VN to campus; his procuring VN cigarettes; Véra interrogating him about
whether he had done so; Véra's grading papers; Keegan's attempts to teach VN
to drive; VN's analysis of Keegan's girlfriend (not pretty enough). And then
one fine day Dick said something like, "Oh, did I ever tell you about Nabby
trying to burn his manuscript?"
Immediate chills down the spine. And disbelief: Dick and I had spoken so
many times it was easier to believe he was pulling my leg than that this had
simply failed to come up. But it is true that I had not once to thought to
ask if he'd witnessed a backyard fire. It was also true that everything that
Dick reported--including the classroom lines he remembered of VN's--checked out. For example this tidbit, that didn't make it into the book:
Keegan was getting visibly antsy at the end of one seminar, as the class was
running over and he was meant to be at a Student Council meeting. VN stopped
in mid-lecture: "Relax, Mr. Keegan. I am almost at an end and, I assure you,
the governed will still be ungoverned when you get to your meeting."
Many wander casually into the Nabokovs' realm,
never to return. I suppose, since Véra has only just been published,
it is premature to ask, but how does a biographer follow a Nabokov?
Should I recover, my instinct is to go someplace very, very different--away from a marriage,
probably even away from modern literature. But you see how ineptly I
predicted the future last time.
Copyright © 1999 by Stacy Schiff
Suellen Stringer-Hye can be reached by e-mail.
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
page two of two
If there were such a thing as active censure from the grave, there would
be no biography. I can't think of a single volume that would fail to make its
subject squirm, as we all do when being described by others, with admiration
or enmity. How often do we want to destroy our own photographs? So far
as the "monument" goes, I didn't feel I was tearing it down. I felt I was
surveying it as one does any remarkable, and highly artistic edifice. Véra may or may not
have approved of that exposure, but then again, she could never have seen that
monument as the outsider does.
You make a good point. This too was VN's gain, the gain of a man who had
observed just before his marriage that the only jealousy as sharp as
that between two women is the jealousy one maker of literature feels for
another. And that the most corrosive envy of all is that a woman feels for a
maker of literature. Véra knew that VN was not only in his own league, but in
his own realm, doubtless another reason the marriage worked as well as it did.
Had she had more time to exercise her strengths she would have been--she
would have despised these analogies--more a Diana Trilling than a Mary
McCarthy.
"Ah sweet socks! So tenderly wooly! Nothing in a nylon blend
(so nasty, and which irritate the leg!) Size 46, and the usual
length, i.e., not to the knee but not too short. Ah socks! 2
pairs."
The petition for the socks was a favorite of mine, but yes, there were
plenty of playful glimmers in the requests VN made of Véra. There were also
pure commands: "These pages in triplicate." "Verify epigraph." "Look
somewhere in the beginning of the last volume towards the end, I think."
"Finish the canto no higher than the middle of the page." Time was short;
the work pressed; Véra needed no buttering up. I suppose the lines that felt
to me the most tender were those of the renewed correspondence of the l960s,
when the couple were separated for brief periods. And the most weighty were
the modest carbonic smudge a visitor glimpsed on the rubber-banded stack of
index cards that became Pale Fire. In the right-hand corner of the first
card VN early on scrawled, "To Véra."
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) jumped out at me early on. Typographically it
spoke volumes: There was this regal, upright, Old World script above and in
contrast to the typewritten line, to which Véra had added the
parentheses, as if to mute the potency of the alias. The construct was
entirely hers; she came to it only gradually.
It seemed to me to say a good deal about how she thought about herself.
And I thought it pointed nicely, and
quietly, to the fact that the book was about a woman but more largely about a
marriage, which generally involves (at least) two people.
From what I've gathered, it would have been difficult not to have been
drawn to Filippa Rolf, at least at the time the Nabokovs met her. She was
brilliant; she was attractive; she conformed to VN's definition of the true
eccentric ("a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the
average citizen does not even notice"); she was comfortable in l5 languages;
literarily speaking, her household gods were those of the Nabokovs. She was
able to discourse spontaneously on Chenier.
So glad you asked. I assumed at the outset that the Lolita-burning was a
piece of Nabokopocrypha. It made an awfully good story after all, right up
there with the publisher who had advised VN to turn Lolita into a boy, or the
bomb that had obliterated the rue Boileau apartment. I knew there had been
no incinerator at the East Seneca Street house. And Véra had denied that the
fire had taken place, or had at least protested in the l967 Gilliatt
interview that she had no memory of its having done so. Which meant that I
had to establish that the episode had--or worse, hadn't--taken place.
At the moment I am more or less bereft ("without a subject,
without this master passion, the world is the biographer's desert; he feels
his mind enfeebled," was how Catherine Drinker Bowen put it); for whatever reason
the withdrawal is more difficult this time.
[ excerpts from the book ]
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