Subject: stacy schiff's vera
From: "Brian Boyd" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 14:03:43 +1200

For those of you whose e-mail cannot handle attachments, here is an partially formatted version of Brian Boyd's May 15 Globe and Mail (Toronto) review of Stacy Schiff's Vera.

http://globeandmail.com/

                   Handmaid to genius
                   Vladimir Nabokov's wife Véra, the great novelist's
                   life-long enabler, finally comes into her own.
                   Stacy Schiff's biography, though full of
                   fresh vignettes, is short on understanding.
                   VÉRA: (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

                   Saturday, May 15, 1999
                   BRIAN BOYD

                   By Stacy Schiff 
                   Random, 456 pages 

                   Stacy Schiff's Véra is not so much a biography of Véra Nabokov as a supplementary life of Vladimir Nabokov which focuses whenever it can -- and Véra herself, with her sense of privacy, ensured that that was as rarely as possible -- on Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov.

                   Eight ninths of the book covers Véra's years with Nabokov, while the remaining fraction skims through her 35 years before and after VN, the vital years of her youth and her role in age as guardian of her husband's legacy.

                   Yet if Schiff found it difficult to show Véra's life except when intertwined with VN's, there were opportunities. Since literature was at the centre of Véra's life, why does Schiff not mention that Véra wrote poetry from the age of 10 or 11 until after the Russian revolution? Why is there nothing of her last snatches of schooling, in Moscow and Odessa, no reference to her youthful socialism (quickly dispelled by the Bolshevik coup), nothing of the visit to her school of the lame commissar for education whom Nabokov recreates so vividly in The Defense from Véra's memories?

                   In terms of Véra's years as keeper of the flame, should there not be some assessment of her most important literary effort, her translation of Pale Fire into Russian -- and why should we be told that she contemplated translating Ada into Italian when it was Russian she had in mind? Véra's first chapter begins, "Véra Nabokov neither wrote her memoirs nor considered doing so." But after Nabokov's death Véra did consider writing a memoir of her husband, only to decide she had neither the Russian nor the English she would need.

                   But we should be grateful for what is in the book. Véra's strength lies in the vast range of interviews conducted by Schiff, an American writer who divides her time between New York and Edmonton, and who won awards for her 1995 biography Saint-Exupéry. To find information about Véra Nabokov at all, Schiff had to cast her net wide. Unfortunately, she often uses her catch rather indiscriminately, perhaps naively, perhaps unconsciously preferring an implausible, almost certainly erroneous, patch of colour to the plain outline of the truth. Her method preserves valuable fresh                    vignettes of V and V, but offers far less understanding of writer or wife, or the relationship between them.

                   Unlike Véra, Schiff has a dim view, in both senses, of Nabokov's character and oeuvre. Writing about Nikolay Gogol, Nabokov's study of the man he calls the "greatest artist" and "the strangest prose-poet" Russia has yet produced, she confines herself to her chief convictions about Nabokov's work, that it is self-obsessed (in this case, that it tells us more about Nabokov than Gogol) and full of pet peeves. It is hard to recognize in Schiff's report what Elizabeth Hardwick calls "one of the best books ever written by one author about another," or the book that has done more than any other to boost Gogol's reputation in the English-speaking world. Her comments on Nabokov's work as a lepidopterist show that, unlike Véra, she has not made the slightest effort to understand it.

                   She sees Nabokov's character as boastful and self-obsessed, and his wife as strident in her claims for his stature, but she does not try to analyze their situation or compare it with others. Martin Amis has recently contrasted Joyce and Nabokov, and, despite his admiration for Ulysses, has named Nabokov his novelist of the century. If Amis is right, or even anywhere near right -- and critical opinion seems to be tipping his way -- then for instance the Nabokovs' unease in their years at Cornell University, on which Schiff dwells, seems natural. Joyce sponged on others, while living extravagantly and basking in his fame; Nabokov held down a full-time academic job to support his wife and son and a sister he did not care for, while living very modestly. He had to put up with the fact that no one around him knew he had written what many think is the Russian novel of the century, The Gift, and had to snatch time to write what some would come to judge the English-language novel of the century, Lolita. 

        No wonder he felt irritated by his academic commitments, no wonder Véra could not help (however unwisely) voicing her sense of her husband's standing. Schiff never really explains the paradox of Véra's fierce pride and fierce self-effacement. Before she first put herself in Nabokov's way, Véra was convinced of his literary genius, and utterly sure both of her own powers as a reader and of the paltriness of her powers as a writer compared with his gifts. Where Joyce liked the fact that his wife, Nora, had no understanding of his work, Nabokov enjoyed writing for Véra as his first and best reader, and for all her natural complaints about the workload his fame brought, she was proud to do all she could to leave him all the time possible to create.

                   Schiff knows this, even if she does not explain it well (she might have quoted Véra: "Let me explain that I am writing my husband's letters because he writes other things in the meanwhile"), but she seems to feel a need to impugn Nabokov for the efforts Véra made on his behalf. Schiff asks: "Did she enjoy driving, or was she again the victim of her own competence?" Even in her eighties, Véra's eyes lit up when she recalled the trips out West: " 'I loved driving the car,' she recollected, a smile spreading across her face." Why then suggest that "again" she may have been a victim?

                   Schiff naturally begins by asserting Véra's contribution to her husband's life and work. No one would disagree: She was wife and mother, manager and chauffeur, assistant, secretary and agent, working almost but never quite as hard as Nabokov to allow him to produce as much as he did. But that does not suffice for Schiff, who sounds closer to advertising than analysis when she claims that features central to Nabokov's work -- his love for detail, his interest in the beyond -- enter his life when Véra does.

                   She can maintain this only because she does not know Nabokov's untranslated early works (scores of his poems, a play, the essay on Rupert Brooke), which show these features well developed before Nabokov met Véra. Indeed, it seems a fatal flaw that Schiff cannot read Russian, the main language of a woman whose life was literature. But even apart from her mistakes here and elsewhere in Russian and in Russian history, how can Schiff possibly maintain that someone who tried to publish his first butterfly article at 10 needed Véra to awaken him to detail?

                   Alas, I suspect, only because she is more interested in making a bold claim for Véra than in the truth. She declares that Nabokov rated the Russian Lolita and the revised Speak, Memory as "the two projects that meant the most to him in the later years. Véra collaborated on the first and contributed to the second." But when we turn to the source Schiff refers to, what Nabokov actually wrote in his diary was that he had just shipped the Russian Lolita to his publisher and was recorrecting Speak, Memory: "These are two things I have been longing to do for the past 10 years." In other words, he had spent the previous 10 years on several major projects * the Eugene Onegin translation, Pale Fire, an aborted Butterflies of Europe, the first attempts at Ada -- and now has at last found the time for two attractive minor tasks, and that is all.

                   Schiff writes with what may pass for verve but often lapses into fatuity ("Ithaca, and Cornell, are to a great extent America") or murk ("These, though, were friendships as bibliography. A few relationships reached beyond art"). She fails to think of what the reader needs to know, spoiling a marvellous anecdote, for instance, by writing that Nabokov "administered an ambulatory Latin exam" when she means that he asked a stranger tagging along with him if he could identify the butterflies that passed them by. For some reason she often avoids naming people, and even some of the Nabokov works to which she is referring.

                   Stacy Schiff asked at an early stage whether I thought there was a biography to be written of Véra Nabokov. Although I did not want to seem to be protecting my territory, I had to answer no. She has proved me wrong; but this is not the biography Véra deserves. 

                   Brian Boyd saw Véra Nabokov every day for a year and a half while writing the standard biography of Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). He has written books on Nabokov's Pale Fire and Ada and edited Nabokov's English fiction, memoirs and butterfly writings. He is professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

                   Related Reading

                   Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, by Vladimir Nabokov, Everyman's Library, 320 pages. Nabokov's memoir of his Russian youth is one of the great autobiographies of the century -- no, make that one of the great books. This lovely reissue contains the previously unpublished 16th chapter, a pseudo-review comparing the present book to the non-existent memoir When Lilacs Last (a reference to Walt Whitman's poem on Lincoln's death). Brian Boyd's incisive introduction                  further complements an overwhelming work of radiant prose and passionate remembrance.