Vladimir Nabokov's letters to Véra at AWF15

                    


Fascinating, but another time, please spare us the actor!

I've never seen it on the list of ways that little New Zealand punches above its weight, but it should be there, that the foremost Nabokov scholar in the world is our own Brian Boyd, graduate of the University of Canterbury, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland. Prof. Boyd has written two award-winning biographies of the man (The Russian Years and The American Years), a book on Ada, a book on Pale Fire, edited Nabokov's collected works for the Library of America, and for another publisher Nabokov's unpublished and uncollected writings, written the introduction to the centennial edition of Nabokov's memoir Speak Memory, published a collection of essays and personal reflections on Nabokov (Stalking Nabokov), just off the top of my head, and was now here before us as co-editor of Letters to Véra, a collection of Nabokov's correspondence to his wife, from 1923 when they met until his death in 1977.

He's also the person who taught me to say Na-bo'-kov instead of  Na'-bo-kov. It promised well! And on top of that, we were going to have Michael Hurst on hand reading excerpts from the letters!

We crowded in to the Upper NZI Room, and out filed Prof. Boyd, Jan Cronin, his colleague in the English Dept. at the University of Auckland who was chairing the session, and... surprise! not Michael Hurst! He had not been able to make it, and was being replaced by another actor, Stephen L.

The first question was a surprise as well.

"Tell us about his love life? Was it different from our assumptions?"

"Our assumptions"? I looked around. Did we have assumptions about the love life of Vladimir Nabokov? Such as? Puzzling? Irreverent? Cerebral?

As it turns out, Nabokov's love life was, once he met her, really all about Véra. During their more than fifty years together, she was his first reader, his typist, his editor, his researcher, his confidante, and his love for her, as expressed in the letters which make up this book, was tender and rapturous.

Nabokov met Véra in 1923 in Berlin, where his family, in exile from Bolshevik Russia, had ended up, in the large Russian émigré community which had formed there. He was 24, and beginning to make a name for himself as a poet and translator, under the pseudonym V. Sirin.

Their paths first crossed at a charity ball, but the encounter which would change both their lives came later. Out walking one evening, Nabokov was approached by a woman wearing a black satin carnival-type mask. That woman was Véra, who had decided that Nabokov was the greatest hope of Russian Literature, and was playing the "high class stalker",  according to Boyd, "high-class" in that she never took her mask off during their conversation, apparently because she did not want him to be influenced by her beauty as she recited verses of the poetry of V. Sirin to him. And that was how the two met, both in some way disguised. Nabokov readers will recognise a favourite theme.

He wrote a poem asking "Are you my fate?" and yes, she was. He did, however, have a trip to France already planned, and it was from there that he wrote his first letter to her.

Stephen L got to his feet, and read.

“I won’t hide it: I’m so unused to being – well, understood, perhaps – so unused to it, that in the very first minutes of our meeting I thought: this is a joke, a masquerade trick… But then… And there are things that are hard to talk about – you rub off their marvellous pollen with the touch of a word…”

How exquisite is that, "You rub off their marvellous pollen"? Unfortunately Stephen L. had decided to play it as he would a pompous provincial in a Chekhov play. As I listened unbelievingly, he puffed out his chest and thundered,

"I will be in Berlin (beat) on the 10th (beat, beat), or the 11th!"

Gulp, and back to Prof. Boyd's narrative. "He and she always believed that fate was trying to push them together... They had a very romantic sense of their relationship, all the way through."

There were difficult times, too. When in France in 1937, looking for a job, for a way to get his family out of Nazi Berlin (all the more important as Véra was Jewish), Nabokov fell into an affair with an aspiring young Italian poet, Irina Guadanini. Véra apparently hears rumours. We hear from Stephen.

"Not a word from you yet my love!" trumpets Stephen, all in one breath. A long pause, and he resumes in a low, disconsolate register. "Maybe tomorrow."

Then we're back to the trumpet charge. "Can't write more today!" A long pause, and again, the sad, descending tone. "They're coming to take me out. I have to go to a party."

We moved on to the story of Boyd's relationship with Véra Nabokov, which started after she saw his PhD thesis and invited him to visit her in Montreux, where the Nabokovs had made their home after the publication of Lolita. The first suggestion was that he catalogue her husband's archives, but eventually the idea of a biography came up. He got a fellowship and went back to Montreux, spending 18 months with Véra, at that point in her eighties. He saw her every day. She never stopped calling him Mr Boyd.

He knew she had Nabokov's letters to her, though she had destroyed hers to him, and seeing them was one of the enticements which had led him to accept her invitation to work on a biography. But Véra would never let him see them or hold them, she would only read them into his tape recorder as he sat near by, leaving some personal parts, some endearments, out.

Dmitri Nabokov, their son and translator of many of his father's works, tried to help. "He was in a wheel chair [not from breaking his neck in one of his Ferraris, he had recovered from that, but from complications from diabetes]. He was a big man, he had been an opera singer, a mountaineer. He said, Search! You can search anywhere in the apartment! So I did. I found lots of things, but I couldn't find the letters!" He had to go back to using the transcripts of the readings Véra had done. Only after her death did he get to see the letters.

Time for a reading. This one ends with a hail-fellow-well-met "Hugs!" followed by a long pause, and finally a throaty, prayer-like "and adoration, V." If you know me and you ran into me at the Festival, you probably heard me imitate this. A lot of people did!

Nabokov wrote Véra every day he was away from her, during the whole time of their marriage. And, according to Boyd, "She wrote back about one in five times".

Too, says Boyd, the letters show some new sides of the great author. "He is enchanted by animals and children... Here, just let me read a couple of parts of his letters where he talks about animals."

And it's a fine reading! We can actually hear Nabokov's voice. Was this a Nabokovian ploy on Prof. Boyd's part, to present it as but a whim of the moment?

Alas, we had to return to Stephen L., for a final reading not devoid of irony.

“I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it,” Nabokov wrote, and Stephen L. read.

I'm on the request list for the book. The lyricism and wit of the letters may have been hard to catch at the session, but I've since read some excerpts online, including ten splendid ones posted by the Thought Catalog site under the title "Love letters that will make you swoon". Maria Popova compares them to Frida Kahlo's letters to Diego Rivera, or the letters between Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis.

What is next for the doyen of Nabokov studies? "I want to do a book on Lolita, because I don't think any of us understand Lolita as Nabokov intended us to understand it." I'll be on the request list for that one, too.

My favourite of the stories Brian Boyd told us was the one about how Véra, aged 85 while she and he were working on the letters, was so deaf as to render some conversations difficult, especially if you add on the New Zealand accent, which she apparently had great difficulty understanding. At one point, he was talking about butterflies -- as he pointed out, surely not an uncommon word for a conversation about her noted lepidopterist husband.

"She kept understanding me to be saying 'paradise'. After two or three rounds of 'Butterflies,' 'Paradise?', 'No, butterflies!', 'Paradise?', Dmitri finally rolled his wheelchair over and boomed at her "BUT-TA-FLIES!"


 



-- Karen

AWRF 2012: Why Lyrics Matter: Brian Boyd

Simon Comber is a singer/songwriter and a member of the Readers Services Team based at Central City Library. He knows that lyrics matter but was curious to hear Brian Boyd's thoughts on why they do. He reports:
 
Iain Sharp chaired a discussion with New Zealand's (and the world's) leading Vladimir Nabokov expert Brian Boyd. Sharp expressed concern at the start that trying to do justice to the sheer scope of Boyd's expertise and accomplishments in a mere hour was going to be a tall order, and sure enough, by the end of the talk the topic suggested by the event's title had scarcely been touched upon, with the final question from an audience member being "Er, Brian. Why do lyrics matter?" This is hardly a quibble though, as it was none the less a treat to hear Boyd talking about his formative years and how his passion for the work of Nabokov had evolved.

Having moved with his family from Belfast to New Zealand at a young age, Boyd found himself working at a bookstore set up by his parents in Palmerston North. He remembers reshelving Lolita when he was 12, which lead to him read it for the first time. He didn't really "get it", but his interest was again piqued when he saw Nabokov on the cover of Time Magazine (May 23, 1969, his razor sharp biographer's memory recalled) and Boyd, inspired by Nabokov's fascinating interview answers, went and got Pale Fire out of the local library. Reading that, he contended, was "the most exciting literary experience of my life." His interest and obsession with one of the twentieth century's great authors only grew from there, with Boyd writing a thesis on the novel Ada whilst studying at Toronto University on a scholarship.

Since then Boyd has completed a key two volume biography on Nabokov, (among involvement in writing and editing many other books on the man), spent longer than any man should annotating Ada (view his work so far here: http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/), and also written two recent books on his interest in the human tendency toward pattern recognition, and shaping our experiences through art into fictional narratives. As Boyd amusingly put it: "Why does a successful species spend so much time telling each other stories that both sides know are untrue?"

He also discussed briefly his interest in the phenomenon that had helped shape his most recent book Why Lyrics Last that whilst Shakespeare's sonnets are the most successful collection of lyrics in western literary history, very few readers managed to read them all due to the collections lack of that overarching narrative humans seem to so strongly desire (though he noted some critics did perceive a narrative thread.) By then our time was up, and with great marketing savvy Boyd suggested that to really get to grasps with the contentions in his recent book you were just going to have to purchase it.

Speak, Memoir title!

Considerations on those of Nabokov, Violet Trefusis, and Sarah Bernhardt's leading man

"It has been rated the greatest of autobiographies, but since such judgements depend so much on the criteria we bring to them, I will call it only the most artistic of autobiographies... it fuses truth to detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, an acute awareness of time with intimations of timelessness."

I encountered this heady description of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography in Stalking Nabokov, Brian Boyd's new book about the forty years he has spent pursuing, as a passionate reader and as the world's foremost Nabokov scholar, the great lepidopterist and author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada. Why did I never read this book, I was immediately asking myself.

I ordered myself in a copy -- it turned out to be the Everyman's Library centenary edition of 1999 with Brian Boyd's introduction -- and as I picked it up, I remembered. It was the title which had put me off! Speak, Memory. So stilted, so bloodless.

But look at that! There was Nabokov in his foreword telling us that Speak, Memory was not the title he had chosen. He had wanted Speak, Mnemosyne, an invocation to the goddess of memory and inventor of language and words. Now this is a phrase which resonates. I loved it! But the publishers did not, on the grounds, Nabokov says, that 'little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce.'

What? Little old ladies? On the authority of having inherited the Classical Greek textbook which my great-grandmother (who would have been in her seventies during the period in question) had used during her grammar school days, I figure that in the 1950s little old ladies were probably one of the very few population-types who would have known to pronounce Mnemosyne.

Coming up with a good memoir title is evidently not as easy as it looks. Humourists do well: I love Jules Feiffer's Backing into Forward, and SJ Perelman's The Hindsight Saga, which I'm not sure if he used or just quipped that he ought to, is up there too. Actually all Perelman's books have great titles, another favourite of mine being Under the Spreading Atrophy. The painter Jacqueline Fahey told me that this American humourist, whom Bill Maher called "the greatest wordsmith America ever produced", will play a key role in the upcoming Part Two of her memoirs. Part One, by the way, was Something for the birds, quite a good title as well, especially if you have ever seen her thickly-forested Hansel and Gretel home in Grey Lynn.

Memoir titles have also been the inspiration for some memorable wisecracks after the fact. Here are two of my favourites, from a couple of famously witty women.

1. Women have been kind ... of dumb 
 
When the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt left for her second “farewell tour” of America, aged sixty-six, she took with her a new leading man, who was also her new lover, twenty-seven-year-old Lou Tellegen. The son of a Dutch general and a Greek dancer, Tellegen had left home at 15, supposedly with his father's mistress in tow, and subsequently been a prize fighter, trapeze artist, champion fencer, murderer (so he said), gambler and gigolo, before trying acting -- or at any rate leading-manship -- with Bernhardt, after a brief apprenticeship with the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse. He was famed for having the body of a Greek god, and had posed for a number of sculptors, including Rodin, who used him for his statue Eternel printemps.

Tellegen arrived on the scene in time to star opposite Bernhardt in her two silent films, Camille and Queen Elizabeth, in which he played Essex to her Elizabeth (the age difference was just about the same as the real-life love story). Here's a clip of the film from youtube, in which Bernhardt emotes fantastically as Tellegen, as her executed lover, lies perfectly still, Greek profile well on view. Keep in mind that the film was made one hundred years ago (1912) and you can love it.




After a taste of the roar of the crowd in America, Tellegen left Bernhardt in order to follow his own star to Hollywood, where he became a silent film actor with the nickname "The Great Lover". He also became the lover, and then husband, of the great opera diva Geraldine Ferrar, and when that story ended, of a movie actress or two. Not uncoincidentally, things began to falter for him. The arrival of sound ruined his career as a film star, and age, drink and drugs his personal career as a lover. He wrote a memoir and called it Women have been kind. In her review of it in Vanity Fair, Dorothy Parker said the title should have been Women have been kind... of dumb.

One day shortly before his 50th birthday, he shaved, touched up his face with a bit of powder, and put an end to it all by stabbing himself seven times with a pair of golden scissors (engraved with his name, yet), surrounded by newspaper clippings of his career. I’m not sure if any of the tabloids which reported these details saw fit to note Lou Tellegen's prescient star turn, years before in London, in a theatrical version of The Portrait of Dorian Gray he produced himself.
 
2. Here lies Mrs. Trefusis
 
I spent many years in Florence as a member by marriage of a large Italian, sorry, Florentine, family, most particularly large in there being a great number of uncles. One of them, my husband's favourite, was a handsome and witty man who had earned himself a place in high society through these attributes, as well as from being a good hand at cards and a passable tennis player. He married an American heiress who had previously been married to a Neapolitan aristocrat, if I remember correctly a Count, and I used to love looking through the pages of their old guest book, where names like Cyrus Sulzberger and Hamish Hamilton rubbed shoulders with the names of various posh Florentine families.

I don't remember ever seeing the name of Violet Trefusis, who lived out her old age in Florence as the chatelaine of Villa L'Ombrellino, but I do remember that there was a family saying which would be delivered with gusto when, for instance, you'd just agreed to a third helping of food, "Like Mrs. Trefusis, who never refuses".

What Mrs Trefusis never refused was passion. You can read about her great love story with Vita Sackville-West (famed for having been immortalised by Virginia Woolf in Orlando) in the book Vita's son Nigel Nicolson wrote about his parents called Portrait of a marriage. It lasted from 1918 to 1921, three exalted years during which the lovers had no scruples about exhibiting their affair, going dining and dancing in London and Paris, Vita dressed as a soldier named "Julian" and Violet as Julian's girlfriend "Lushka". Later there were other lovers, such as Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune and wife of the homosexual Prince Edmond de Polignac, who introduced Violet to the Parisian beau-monde.

Mrs. Trefusis called her memoirs, which were published in 1952, Don't look round. The Times Literary Supplement called the book "unreliable"; while on her part, Nancy Mitford, who had run with the same London-Paris-Florence crowd, suggested a better title would have been Here lies Mrs. Trefusis.

--Karen

You can read Brian Boyd's introduction to Speak, Memory on the Random House website