Subject
: UK Vera review (fwd)
Date
Body
----
From: Earl Sampson <esampson@cu.campuscwix.net>
I forward, as is, a Sunday Times review of the Vera biography, as posted
to the newsgroup alt.books.nabokov.
--------------
Jorn Barger wrote:
> [warning-- first paragraph makes little or no sense]
>
> 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."
>
> --
From: Earl Sampson <esampson@cu.campuscwix.net>
I forward, as is, a Sunday Times review of the Vera biography, as posted
to the newsgroup alt.books.nabokov.
--------------
Jorn Barger wrote:
> [warning-- first paragraph makes little or no sense]
>
> 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."
>
> --