Who would be a writer's wife? The job is a combination of helpmeet, nursemaid, PR executive, guardian of the flame, defender of the faith and, of course, surrogate mother. Friends pity you, fans resent you, researchers believe you are hiding something, party-givers think your name is Guest, and publishers know you only as She (when my first book was published, my venerable and absent-minded editor introduced me and my wife to a colleague as "Long Lankin, and . . ." - with a desperate look - "and Mrs Lankin!"). In the lean years you scrimp and save, keeping a brave face rigidly in place; then, if affluence comes, you discover that your previously dependent charge has turned overnight into Philip Larkin's "shit in the shuttered chateau" who parts out his day "Between bathing and booze and birds", leaving you to do the accounts and answer the mail.
Vera Nabokov was a special variety of the breed. When the writer first encountered her one evening on a bridge in Berlin, she was wearing a black velvet mask, and for the rest of their lives together, and even after her husband's death, she determindedly kept herself, in Stacy Schiff's closing words, "hidden in full sight". If her secretiveness is not quite the mystery Ms Schiff makes it out to be - the biographer had a book to write, after all - still there is something uncanny about this handsome, stately, relentlessly dignified woman's absolute refusal to step forward into the light.
She had the determination, the icy hauteur and, above all, the vigilance over her husband's reputation shared by Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, the spouse of Nabokov's contemporary, Samuel Beckett. (The story is told of Suzanne that in a drinking session after a first night in London, the reviews in the early editions came through, and were not favourable; one of the actors sought to console the playwright and his wife by saying that probably the critics had not understood the play, at which Suzanne flashed back: "I should hope not!")
While Beckett was as retiring as his wife, Vladimir Nabokov took a faintly repulsive delight in himself, his work and, eventually, his fame. He loved his wife deeply, but his love for himself was deeper still. Unlike most writers - and emphatically unlike Beckett - he seems genuinely to have found his own work, even his earliest efforts, a source of endless wonder and joy. He was almost childlike in his fondness for himself and what he did - asked by a literary magazine "What is your view of contemporary literature?" he answered "Very nice, from up here, thank you" - and if the slightest quiver of doubt were to threaten, Vera was there to smooth it away. They were not so much a mutual admiration society as a fan club consisting of two members, one of whom happened also to be the object of veneration. Although they doted on him, their only child, Dmitri, must have felt always a little neglected, as he watched both parents leaning lovingly over the cradle of Vladimir's art. "She and I are my best audience," Nabokov said in 1966. "I should say my main audience."
Nabokov, as he never tired of reminding people, was a Russian aristocrat, the spoilt son of a liberal, land-owning father and a dreamy, poetically minded and beautiful mother. Vera (she added the accent when she moved to America) Slonim was a bourgeois, and, as she never tired of reminding people, a Jew. Her father had failed in business, leaving the family adrift and bestowing on his daughter the hard gifts of resourcefulness, determination and spiky pride. However, if she was tough, she was far from insensitive. She had, in her husband's words, a "capacity to wonder at trifles" that greatly appealed to this artist for whom no trifle was too small that it could not be cut into a shimmering jewel.
They were married in 1925, in Berlin, where they were both living in exile. They were in mourning for the lost Russia of their childhoods, and loathed those who had taken it from them; they disliked Germany, too, and the Germans. The rise of Nazism drove them to Paris, and eventually the United States, where, no doubt to the surprise of both of them, they found a land that was more than merely a place of refuge. "The Germans are usually right when they hate Germany," Vera declared in later years. "The Americans are never right when they hate America."
But life for them in America, too, was hand-to-mouth for many years. Nabokov wrote his novels in the expectation that he would never make a living from them. What living he managed to make came from teaching at various universities, including Wellesley college for women (cf. Beardsley College in Lolita), where he flirted with the students, and sometimes more than flirted, though there is no evidence that he conducted real affairs. "He did like young girls," said one of his "crushes", Katherine Reese Peebles - a name that even Nabokov could not have invented - "just not little girls."
The one known affair, and one that had briefly threatened the Nabokov marriage, was with Irina Guadanini, whom he met in Paris in 1936, and with whom he subsequently fell in love. Eventually he confessed this clandestine passion to Vera, saying afterwards that the night of the revelation had been, save for the evening when his father was assassinated at a political meeting in St Petersburg, the most horrible night of his life. As Stacy Schiff laconically observes, "For Vera it could only have been the most horrible, without exception."
As for Vera herself, she was flawlessly monogamous. In the end Vladimir scuttled back to the safety of the nest, and Irina was dropped. She never got over the affair, and when she read Lolita she declared it was about her; wishful thinking, surely - no novel is ever "about" anybody.
Was it Vladimir's roving eye - and, if reports are to be believed, even more adventurously roving hands - that kept Vera immovably by his side throughout the American years? He was in his prime, a handsome and Europeanly romantic figure who bent on all the women that he met, or at least all the good-looking ones, an Old World charm backed up by boyish helplessness - he never could master the machinery of everyday life, such as tin-openers, typewriters - that must have been irresistible. They were an inseparable pair, the "double-dotted i" that was VN, a composite of them both. They wrote letters under each other's names, and kept a diary together; in America Vera attended all of Vladimir's classes, her silverwhite hair a permanent marker in the front row. Students speculated about her; some said she was Professor Nabokov's armed guard, a description which was closer to the truth than probably many of them realised, for she did carry a gun - a Browning .38 for preference - and was certainly determined enough to have used it, had the need arisen; as their friend Jason Epstein remarked, with no doubt intentional ambiguity, "She really had him [Vladimir] covered."
FINANCIAL success came to them late - Vera was 56 when Lolita was finally published, to worldwide acclaim - but when it did, era she was more than ready for it. They moved back to Europe, and settled in Switzerland, in a large suite on the top floor of the Montreux Palace Hotel. They had been adrift all their lives - as a boy, Dmitri was asked where he lived, and replied: "In little houses by the road," an answer in which Lolita's voice is clearly to be heard - and the hotel suite, too, was regarded as no more than another stopping place on their endless slow itinerary over the world's surface. However, they stayed there until the end. Vladimir died in Montreux, in 1977. As always, Vera was a model of self-control; she told her sister-in-law, who wished to visit her, "please, no tears, no wails, none of that". On their return from the funeral, however, her son heard her say: "Let's rent an airplane and crash."
Almost every novel Nabokov wrote he dedicated "To Vera". He said: "Most of my works have been dedicated to my wife and her picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflected colour in the inner mirrors of my books." Vera firmly told Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer: "The more you leave me out, Mr Boyd, the closer to the truth you will be," while of her husband's work she said: "I am always there, but well hidden." Stacy Schiff has done a service that would probably have horrified Vera Nabokov, but her book is as elegant, as respectful, and as loving, as even this strange, masked woman could have hoped for.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times