Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  It was inevitable that Véra should have learned of the affair; it was not conducted with any great discretion. Probably it would have raised few eyebrows had it not been for Véra’s reputation as her husband’s second, or had Vladimir been better liked. Few believed him capable of living without his wife. Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity. Marc Slonim, an émigré editor in Paris at the time and a distant relative of Véra’s, commented that very few women aside from Véra would be able to tolerate Nabokov’s monomaniacal approach to literature. “Were his hands to be cut off, he would learn to write with his mouth,” Slonim quoted him as having boasted. How many women would allow someone else’s obsession to dominate their lives? This truth was hardly lost on Vladimir, for whom it now constituted an indescribable torture. He could not live without Irina—the longing for her was unlike anything he had ever known—but at the same time his fourteen years with Véra had been utterly “cloudless.” He wrote Irina in June that he and Véra knew each other’s faintest nuances. A week later he celebrated the splendid rapport he enjoyed with his lover. He could not live without her, felt it beyond his strength to swear off her. The choice he had to make seemed to him impossible, especially given Dmitri. This letter he mailed unsigned. The strain was such that he felt he was going out of his mind.

  As if leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest, he had passed through Czechoslovakia in May sending furtive signals back to Paris. He arranged for Irina to write him at a post office address in Prague, under his grand-mother’s maiden name.* The Czech weeks had been weeks of perfect duplicity. It was agony pretending to Véra that all was on the former secure footing. On the other hand, he was delighted to inform Irina that Fate had provided them with a lovely ruse: Gallimard had bought Despair, and he would be able to claim he needed to meet with his French publisher alone. He posted an anodyne letter to Irina and Madame Kokoshkin, clearly a smokescreen. He slipped outside to write of his longing; it was “indescribable, unprecedented.” He stole a few minutes at the post office, at the stationery store, addresses he did not normally frequent. He wrote from a park bench in Franzenbad and carried his letter “around like a bomb in his jacket until he could post it.” He dragged his heels about leaving for Marienbad, where he had been expected days earlier. (It was something of a miracle that he could write a short story under the circumstances, which he did in forty-eight hours at Marienbad. Then again, “Cloud, Castle, Lake” is very much the story of a man wedged between two realities, a pleasure trip that proves a torture, and a happiness that, once sighted, cannot be grasped.) Meanwhile he denied over and over to Véra what was true. He felt terrible deceiving her, especially since her health was poor. On one pretext or another she inquired after Irina daily. “You always have something derisive to say about everyone else, why not about Irina?” she chided. Nabokov reported on these interrogations to Irina, who noted in her diary that Véra was tormenting her lover. There were plenty of additional questions. He could not shake off his sordid sense of deceit, the vulgar banality of his situation. It would be years before he uttered the phrase, but he was discovering firsthand what Emma Bovary appeared to have taught him later: Adultery was a perfectly conventional way of rising above the conventional. He could not condone his behavior, could not forgive himself for having sullied what he saw as his fourteen impeccable years with Véra. He was a great distance away from his 1920s endorsement of “radiant truthfulness.” Never had he sounded so much like one of his characters, brought down by his passion, unable to escape his own private abyss, heartrendingly separated from his own self-image. He resembled himself—or at least his idea of himself—about as much as Felix does Hermann in Despair, that portrait of the artist in a cracked mirror.

  What was to be done? In the immediate very little, save for Vladimir to lead a double life and for Véra to continue to probe. During their four-day stopover in Paris he conducted an extraordinary amount of business with Gallimard. After a month’s separation, the reunion with Irina was electrifying. Nabokov felt that he had never waited for anyone as he waited for her on July 1. He had been paralyzed by fear that she might not appear at their late-night rendezvous. “I love you more than anything on earth,” he wrote in her notebook, having stopped by to see her when she was out. When he headed for the Riviera with Véra and Dmitri he left Irina with a notepad on which she could cross off the days until his return, exactly as Véra had done for him in the past. Generally the letters sound painfully like those he had written his wife fourteen years earlier. He wrote of preordained compatability; he marveled over the commonality of their impressions; he felt his lover’s handling of him flawless. (For the more mortal among us there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion.) Ten days later Véra exacted his confession, which in no way put an end to the love letters. If anything, Nabokov yearned for Irina even more desperately than he had in Czechoslovakia. Nothing slaked his desire. He begged her to be faithful to him, though he realized this was not entirely fair. He pleaded for longer letters. He promised they would be together early in the fall. As if to prove his point, he had left a change of clothes at her apartment.

  Véra’s response to the affair was to blame herself. She felt she had neglected her husband because of the daunting task of caring for a child and on account of the unbearably difficult material conditions under which they had lived in Berlin. Vladimir explained as much to Irina, reporting that his wife was now doing all she could to make up for her inattention. “Her smile kills me,” he declared miserably, late in July. Nor did Véra so much as mention Irina after the confession. “I know what she is thinking,” Vladimir brooded. “She is convincing herself and me (without words) that you are a hallucination.” It was a familiar strategy: Vigorous denial was at times Véra’s only form of acknowledgment. Irina’s mother was not surprised; days earlier she had predicted that Véra would “bamboozle her husband and not let him go.” Her calm was true to her nature but also constituted an apt torture. In a Paris-bound letter, Vladimir wrote that the situation was all the more frightening because relations with Véra appeared perfectly even-keeled. He feared he was forgetting Irina. Late in July the Nabokovs moved to a two-room apartment across from their hotel, from which they followed a tunnel to the beach. From the woods above Cannes Vladimir confessed that he thought his wife probably knew of his continued correspondence, but that he felt so madly sorry for her that he did not dare conduct it openly. In this he was well advised, as he had promised to terminate the exchange.

  In August, presumably when Véra discovered that her husband was still writing his lover—Irina received four letters in the first ten days of the month—storms broke out on the home front. Vladimir described such tempests that he feared he would end in the madhouse. Véra vehemently denied later that these battles had ever raged. She offered to prove under oath that these scenes—which her husband deplored, and which Irina and her mother duly recorded in their diaries—had never taken place. Vladimir had nothing to gain from inventing such things, and was brutally honest in his letters to Paris. Had he wanted to break with Irina, he could have done so without eliciting her sympathy; it is unimaginable that voices were not raised. There is powerful evidence as well that Véra threatened to take Dmitri from his father. One quality was more dear to her even than her devotion to truth, however. Her husband’s undignified behavior was one thing, her own quite another. She was far too proud to admit that most of August passed in a spasm of violent arguments.

  Irina countered by offering to go away somewhere, anywhere, with Vladimir. When next she heard from him he announced that Véra had forced him to end the affair. He would not be writing again. This put Irina on the first train to Cannes, on or about September 9. On the morning of her arrival she headed directly to the Nabokovs’ apartment and waited outside until she was able to intercept Vladimir on his way to the beach with Dmitri. He made a date to meet her later in the day, in a public garden.* As t
hey strolled toward the port that afternoon, he explained that he loved her but could not bring himself to slam the door on the rest of his life. He begged her to be patient but remained noncommittal. Irina left the following day for Italy, brokenhearted, near-suicidal, convinced that Véra had somehow hoodwinked Vladimir back into the marriage. She attended a reading he gave in Paris at the end of the following year, but never saw him again.

  She did not disappear as quietly as Vladimir (and Véra) might have hoped, however. She never entirely recovered from the affair; Nabokov remained the great love of her life.† She predicted that he would deceive again, as soon as he had the chance, all the while protesting that his marriage was impeccable. She wrote poems to their star-crossed love for the next four decades; she kept an extensive notebook of Nabokov clippings, parallel to the one kept by Véra. In the 1960s she wrote a flagrantly autobiographical short story about the relationship and the meetings in Cannes, called “The Tunnel.” It is liberally sprinkled with quotes from Vladimir’s 1937 letters; its epigraphs are taken in part from Sirin’s poetry. The lovers know from the start that their affair is doomed; the hero of the story refers to his passion as the “shipwreck of his entire life.” He begs for his lover’s patience while he attempts to extricate himself from his marriage, which, on leaving the city for the Riviera, he is unable to do. His mistress meanwhile worships the imprint his head has left on her pillow, the abandoned cigarette butt in the ashtray. “Gradually something alien, foreign began to penetrate his letters,” which arrive less and less frequently. On the Riviera the heroine accosts her lover, on the beach, with his little girl. He makes a date to meet her later in the day in a public garden. As they stroll toward the port that afternoon, he explains that he loves her but cannot bring himself to slam the door on the rest of his life. He begs her to be patient but remains noncommittal; somehow they will manage to see each other again in the fall. At nightfall the heroine passes by his house, where she feels she should call to demand her happiness. A woman’s shadow deters her. At the entrance to the train tunnel she throws herself on the tracks.

  “The Tunnel” was not the only piece of literature to follow this debacle. For the latter half of 1937 Nabokov was at work on Chapters 3 and 5 of The Gift, a novel that has been described as his ode to fidelity. The story of an artist as a young man, the book reads like a hymn of gratitude to a woman who in nearly every imaginable way resembles Véra. Zina is easily the single most appealing woman in his fiction; even Véra, who spent her time distancing herself from Zina, defended the character’s purity and moral authority.* Vladimir appears to have been perfectly aware of the chasm that separated the reality of his fiction from the fiction of his reality. In June he had told Irina that he had written foolishly about faithfulness. Later he reported that he was finishing a chapter, but assured his lover it was not the one about Zina, instead the one on his hero’s biographical labors. Véra was battling a figure who was dangerously, splendidly flesh and blood, but Irina was playing a far more arduous game, having to run competition with a rival who existed partly in prose.

  The Nabokovs spent a quiet winter, in Cannes and in Menton, with Vladimir writing furiously. On the financial front they had received a reprieve in September, when news arrived that Bobbs-Merrill had offered six hundred dollars for Laughter in the Dark. The Indianapolis textbook firm was to be Nabokov’s first American publisher. For the second time he put The Gift aside to rework a book; this one he simultaneously translated and reworked, rendering it more commercial.* Véra could not have been in any hurry to return to Paris, where her husband’s deception was common knowledge in the Russian community. She spent time alone with her Berlin friend Lisbet Thompson and her scientist-husband Bertrand in Menton that summer; there is no indication that she mentioned the affair. Whether she spoke of it or not—and the evidence points to her having had an admirable ability to face the truth, even if she kept that truth to herself—she could not have helped developing a new vigilance. She had learned one lesson, and may have learned substantially more. To Irina, Vladimir had confessed that he had had a series of fleeting affairs—a German girl met by chance in the Grunewald; a French girl for four nights in 1933; a tragic woman with exquisite eyes; a former student who had propositioned him; and three or four other meaningless encounters. He listed these to prove to Irina that she was in a category of her own. He does not appear to have mentioned the earlier transgressions to Véra.† As with all things she had a firm sense of priorities; among the fiancées only one caused her any dismay, the one with whom she had the most in common. She asked a biographer to omit from his inventory of ex-fiancées only the name of Eva Lubrzynska, the fashionable and highly accomplished Polish Jew whom fate threw several times in Vladimir’s direction, and with whom he had resumed his affair after a chance encounter at a charity ball in 1919 or 1920. Véra bristled visibly when Eva’s activities—she married the son of the architect Sir Edward Luytens—were reported on later. The Irina Guadanini affair proved Véra’s rule of thumb, a lesson her husband had learned from Gogol: Leave out only the crucial parts. Until confronted with the fact that her husband’s 1937 letters to Irina had survived, she was ready to deny that any such affair had ever taken place. And she went further, in her clear but misleading way. When asked to choose several personal letters from her husband for a volume of published correspondence, she selected four adoring missives, all dating from the months of the Guadanini affair—a bold, unblinking strike on all other versions of their story.

  Nabokov worked steadily on The Gift through the winter. It was to be the novel from whose autobiographical tones he had the most difficult time extricating himself. (In 1938 he admitted to having lent his hero a few of his own traits. Over the years they became fewer.) On its American publication in 1963 the book was hailed by Stephen Spender as “autobiography thinly disguised, and repudiated (of course) by the author.” A sumptuous weave of fiction, memory, and biography, the work manages to defy not only novelistic form but novelistic dimension as well; it is a gorgeously textured Möbius strip of a book, which would remain one of both Véra and Vladimir’s favorites.* While it has been read as an acknowledgment by Nabokov of his enormous debt to Véra, it is equally possible that he wrote of Fyodor and Zina’s perfect rapport, of her confidence and unerring support for his talent, as a way of reminding himself of what the marriage represented. Toward the end of the book a young girl who rouses in Fyodor a familiar brand of “hopeless desire” makes a fleeting appearance. He recognizes in her something of Zina’s golden presence; he also watches her walk off. Nabokov’s portrait of an artist concludes with a crescendo of emotion—an affirmation of melting happiness—that happens to coincide exactly with what would have been a renewed commitment to the marriage. As he was finishing the book, he wrote to Irina to ask that she return his letters. He claimed—in this Irina’s mother felt Véra was dictating—that they contained mostly fictions.†

  Does Zina mirror Véra, or did Véra begin to mirror Zina? It is true that Véra wrote her mother-in-law of Nabokov’s work just as Zina articulates her ambitions for Fyodor; that Véra’s relief at her husband’s not speaking his mind about his contemporaries sounds like Zina’s fears plagiarized. Zina shudders with indignation at the attacks of Fyodor’s critics, just as Véra did. And while Véra never recognized herself in Zina—or ever admitted doing so—she naturally enough assumed her place. When a critic presented his reading of the novel’s last page, Véra responded with a long protest, a disclaimer that only demonstrated how entangled she was with Zina’s time and place. In the emigration it hardly mattered whether life imitated art or art imitated life: People reacted to Véra Nabokov as if she were Zina Mertz, that “alien, sullen young lady,” a girl with character, who “looked down her nose at everything.” “Everyone lived in fear of her temperament,” one of the Nabokovs’ good friends admitted, though it is unclear if that friend was speaking of the real woman or of the counterfeit version. It was as if Nabokov wrote Véra back into his li
fe. Perhaps he was not so much assuaging his wife’s fears as convincing himself. The last chapter of The Gift was written in January 1938. A letter went out to Irina in February. She did not open it.

  4

  Véra spent part of the difficult summer of 1937 translating Invitation to a Beheading into English. This was done at the request of Altagracia de Jannelli, a New York literary agent who had taken an interest in Nabokov’s work and who was responsible for the September sale of Laughter in the Dark. As for the rough translation Véra was making, “I want this at once,” Jannelli urged. The saucy redhead—whom Vladimir addressed as “Mr.” for the first three years of their association—rivaled Véra when it came to her devotion to Vladimir’s work. A small volume of Nabokov rejection letters had accumulated in her files before Bobbs-Merrill took on Laughter; Jannelli expected at least sixty publishers to writhe when the novel was published, in the spring of 1938. So tenacious was she that she often made repeated assaults on the same house. While she flogged Nabokov in New York, she served as a one-woman advertisement for America, writing spirited hymns to the openness of American society, the wonders of air-conditioning, the efficiency with which business matters were concluded. Moreover, America was the only country in which an author stood to make any kind of real money. She was frustrated that her talented client did not see her point, beside herself when she learned he had left Paris for the wilderness of southern France, where cables barely penetrated. She prayed he would not write her next from Abyssinia. (In the meantime, she must have had the time of her life drafting a cover letter to accompany the Bobbs-Merrill author’s questionnaire Vladimir returned that fall. To the question: “What is your favorite book?” he named in first place, “The book I shall write some day.”) The Nabokovs were in no danger of leaving for Abyssinia. As Vladimir observed late that summer, “Our situation is particularly disgusting now, we’ve never been so broke before, and this slow death doesn’t seem to upset or even worry anyone.” In the spring the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff responded to a dire SOS with a generous twenty-five hundred francs, repayable whenever fortune permitted.