by Stacy Schiff
Years later, in reconstructing the happier moments of the fall, Vladimir worked in part again from Véra’s memories. She recalled Dmitri’s fascination with the treasures amassed on the Cannes beach, at midday:
The smooth bits of glass licked by the sea to translucence, sometimes to complete transparency, green mostly, though some pink, and one (the gem of the collection) a beautiful dark amethyst. That collection comprised too bits of patterned pottery, and once in a while chance would have a complete little pattern preserved on a small chip, smoothed out to roundness and silkiness by the sea water. And sometimes you would help chance and complete the design.
She had no idea how far her husband would carry that idea. Tumbled through Nabokov’s imagination the stones emerged brighter still:
And among the candy-like blobs of sea-licked glass—lemon, cherry, peppermint—and the banded pebbles, and the little fluted shells with lustered insides, sometimes small bits of pottery, still beautiful in glaze and color, turned up.… I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore …
The weather was glorious; Vladimir reported that nude sunbathing was possible as late as November. He and Véra appeared very much back on their earlier footing. In January, as he was putting the finishing touches on The Gift, they both fell sick. Vladimir wrote Jannelli that he had had bronchitis for a month “and now it is my wife’s turn.” They sounded again like the Siamese twins he had described to his sister in 1925.
They moved around a great deal after the New Year, from Menton, where they were settled when the Germans marched into Austria; to Moulinet, in the hills high above Menton; west to Cap d’Antibes, in August. Rooms were not easy to come by, and Véra spent much time writing hotels about vacancies. She was delighted to be in the mountains at Moulinet, noting rather whimsically that the fields were dotted as much with flowers as with little military tents.* Nabokov wrote prodigiously—two plays, The Event and The Waltz Invention date from 1938—but continued to pour nearly as much of his energies into the campaign to land a steady job as into the campaign to write the book he had described in his Bobbs-Merrill author’s questionnaire. At no time was the family’s future as uncertain as it was now, even before it became clear that France would not qualify as a long-term home.
It has been noted that Nabokov might just as easily have become a major French writer as a major English-language one.* In the previous two years he had written a much-praised article on Pushkin as well as the story “Mademoiselle O” in French; one of the greatest Russian-language novels of the century; shards of an autobiography in English. He later documented the fantastic congealing of Hyde inside Jekyll for his students; his own partial metamorphosis of 1938 would have been infinitely more difficult to chart. And the family’s hold on the planet was so tenuous that a gust could have pushed them in any direction. Jannelli was agitating for a move to America, pressuring Bobbs-Merrill into writing a letter for Nabokov in April, to help him gain entry into the United States.† This birthday present—affidavits were worth their weight in gold at the time—went unacknowledged; throughout 1938, his sights remained trained on London. Perhaps sensitive to the perception that her husband had somehow evaded active military service, Véra held later that the migration to America had been planned before the outbreak of war, but the path was in truth more circuitous. Nabokov might well have become a French writer, but in 1938 and 1939 he devoted more of his energies to becoming a British academic.
On Bastille Day 1938, from a shabby mountain hotel in Moulinet, he found himself conjuring with a different set of tribulations than he had the previous year. Bobbs-Merrill’s reader had not taken to The Gift, deeming it “dazzlingly brilliant” and therefore entirely without promise for the American market. Jannelli had forwarded the report to the Riviera, where her author rose energetically to his own defense. He could not believe that an astute reader could fail to notice the inherent logic to the book. And how could a publisher’s representative have missed the fact that the entire story was “threaded on my hero’s love romance (Fate’s underground work being shown)”? He swatted away Jannelli’s suggestion that he write a book with some human interest, just as a year earlier he had swatted away an editor’s suggestion that he open himself up emotionally on the page. If Véra disagreed with him on either count she said nothing; she would object frankly enough to ideas for novels or stories—none of which was ever to be written—but those vetoes were immune to market conditions. In May she had partly translated and typed a letter to Jannelli from her husband’s dictation: “I schall [sic] never, never, never write novels solving ‘modern problems’ or picturing ‘the world unrest.’ I am neither Upton Sinclair nor Sinclair Lewis.” Meanwhile they were slowly starving. Fyodor asks Zina to put her trust in fantasy alone; it made for a thinning diet. Nabokov proved unrepentant when he learned over the summer that Bobbs-Merrill had passed on their option to translate his other titles. By this time Laughter—for which its author had had high cinematic hopes—had been rejected by every major Hollywood studio as well.
Only in August did he obtain a carte d’identité, legalizing his stay in France, though not granting him the right to work; the vast German migration of the mid-1930s had severely taxed the French sympathy for foreigners. It was some weeks still before the family was able to head to Paris, where the publishing contacts were. The city did not look as scenic in 1938 as it had two years earlier, when Vladimir had written Véra of the great esteem in which his work was held, of the “Eiffel Tower standing in its lace pantaloons with ants of light scurrying up and down its spine.” Nor was it anything more than a way station. Mournfully Vladimir concluded that they were in Paris for an indeterminate period of time “because there is nowhere else to go (and more importantly, no means by which to go there).” They settled in a studio apartment on the rue de Saigon, steps from the Bois de Boulogne. This put them near the edge of Russian Paris; the neighboring sixteenth arrondissement was, as Véra put it, “the residence of most Russian refugees—at least, of the greater part of the intelligentsia.” In that apartment, on the edge of one world perched precariously on the edge of another, her husband began his first English-language novel. He had spoken English as a child; he had been schooled at Cambridge. When it came to writing in English he had practiced on himself, setting aside The Gift to translate Despair for Hutchinson, again to rewrite Laughter for Bobbs-Merrill. Whatever country the family were to settle in, the lucrative market was clearly not the Russian one. The conversion seems to have come about naturally, although on one occasion Nabokov told a reliable witness that Véra had encouraged him to make the leap. Her handwriting can be found all over the manuscript of Sebastian Knight, but for all their merit these corrections cannot be said to render her husband’s English more fluid.
For the next decade he would complain bitterly, humorously, of the handicap he suffered writing in English, “a champion figure skater switching to roller skates.” Véra put it differently. Not only had her husband “switched from a very special and complex brand of Russian, all his own, which he had perfected over the years into something unique and peculiar to him, a true ‘thing of beauty,’ ” he had embraced “an English which he then proceeded to wield and bend to his will until it, too, became under his pen something it had never been before in its melody and flexibility.” She concluded that what he had done was to have substituted for his passionate affair with the Russian language un mariage de raison which “as it sometimes happens with a mariage de raison—became in turn a tender love affair.” (Dismissing the meanings she well knew would be read into her analysis, she warned, “This phrase does not—repeat not—apply to VN’s and my marriage.” Sebastian Knight is doubtless the greatest English-language novel to have been written on a bidet, a statement that says as much about the discomfort of Nabokov’s nationally fragmented selves—here was his s
panking new English hammered into shape on a suitcase laid across that ultimately European fixture—as it did about the family’s material situation.* Vladimir would have been unaware that in at least one technical respect he fell into an exile’s tradition. On the other side of Paris twenty years earlier, James Joyce had finished Ulysses, on a suitcase balanced across an armchair.
Whatever handicap his second language proved, Nabokov’s English did nothing to slow him down. He wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight—an ingeniously constructed novel and, as The Gift had been, another play on the art of biography—in two months, completing it at the end of January 1939. The narrator’s search for the truth about his dead half brother, the writer Sebastian Knight, the novel is resplendent not so much in its language as in its reflections and deceptions and illusions.† The work bears no hints of the family’s material distress, of the gathering clouds of war; it is one of Nabokov’s most playful books. Boyd has located a shadow of Irina Guadanini lurking in its corners, those corners the fictional biographee does not want explored. Certainly Sebastian Knight ventures where Nabokov did not, leaving his Véra-like Clare for the Other Woman, with predictable results. Sebastian’s brother can think of no other author so eager to blind his reader with the harsh light of personal truth in the prismatic lens of the novel; readers of Sebastian Knight can name one. It is notable, though not enough so to call in the Viennese delegation, that all refracting aside, the two most focused pictures of Véra in her husband’s art come to us back to back, in The Gift and Sebastian Knight, just after the only time in the marriage he considered leaving her. As for more concrete halls of mirrors, Véra typed in 1938 the lines about Clare’s life having been subsumed, fourteen years earlier, by the “pages slipped into the slit and rolled out again alive with black and violet words.” In those violet words her husband bestowed on Clare one of his wife’s favorites, the poetry of Donne.* For Christmas 1938, he bestowed on Véra a handsome hardcover edition of The Love Poems of John Donne.
A darker shadow lurking in the corners of the novel may be that cast by Nabokov’s own brother Sergei.† Ten and a half months younger than Nabokov, Sergei had suffered as much from his parents’ inattention as Vladimir had profited from the same parents’ adulation. Sergei was a great number of things his brother could not easily abide: a stutterer, a music lover, a homosexual, and, as of 1926, a practicing Catholic.‡ Although they had been at Cambridge together the two were not close. Only in Paris did they see each other regularly, and that contact was tempered by hesitation on both sides. Sergei was of the small school who continued to regret that Vladimir had not married the splendid Svetlana.§ He reported a great deal of squabbling in the Nabokov household; he found Véra prickly, the visits awkward. Generally he believed Véra to have been an unfortunate, and domineering, influence on his brother. Sergei may have tipped his hand a little, proving that in life as in fiction there are limits to the truths one brother can posit about another: To his eye Dmitri was not only spoiled, but frightfully Jewishlooking. “Thank God that they got out of Germany,” he confided in Elena. “They would have had a difficult time, and right now it would be utterly ghastly.”
Familial relations exhibited signs of strain on the other side as well. Véra’s sister Sonia was in Paris, as she had been since the late 1920s. She held a lucrative job as a secretary and translator, in seven languages. (She had managed to obtain elusive working papers in years when they were more readily available, and with the help of her eventual employer.) Both Nabokovs found Sonia tiring—she had an elevated sense of self-importance—and spent a minimal amount of time with her. She could be either perfectly charming or immensely difficult. Her 1932 marriage had lasted eight months, after which her husband—lucratively employed at the time of the courtship but by 1935 a member of the Normandie’s kitchen staff—had left her. Sonia divorced him and never remarried, although she was, in Véra’s understated phrase, “always a good dresser,” and rarely lacked for company. Lena had remained in Berlin, where, having converted to Catholicism, she had been able to work until being stripped of her papers in 1937. Her 1930 marriage to Prince Nikolai Massalsky also proved unhappy, and she had left her husband before their son Michaël was born, in July of 1938. She was consequently alone in Germany, and although she appeared to be Princess Elena Massalsky, she was equally well a Jew with no citizenship. Hounded by friends of Nabokov’s father’s assassin, she was twice interrogated by the Gestapo. At some time after November of 1938, when the Jewish shopwindows shattered so loudly in Berlin, the Nabokovs appealed to Zinaida Shakhovskoy, in Brussels. Somewhat abashed, Vladimir wrote to plead Lena’s case: Could Shakhovskoy help in any way to get his sister-in-law out of Germany? There was little she could do; ultimately Lena managed to escape to Finland. (Through the fall of 1938 Véra swapped herbal cures with Shakhovskoy, whom she recruited as well for some matchmaking. She also thanked her profusely for the hand-me-down dress. It was gorgeous. Sounding like a woman few would meet, Véra wrote: “Now I feel like going to a ball—I haven’t been for so long!”) Of greater immediate concern to the couple, Vladimir’s mother was sick and penniless in Prague. Hitler’s advances made a visit impossible. In March Nabokov sent a cry for assistance to Alexandra Tolstoy, the novelist’s youngest daughter and head of a New York—based refugee organization. His financial situation having gone from wretched to catastrophic, he could do nothing for his mother, who was suffering from pleurisy. Could the Tolstoy Foundation lend a hand? With Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia that month she lost her pension, her only source of income. At the end of March her condition worsened. She was taken to a hospital, which no one in the family could afford.
With an eye on lectureships that were said to be available that year at Leeds and at Sheffield, Vladimir traveled twice to London in the spring of 1939. For months before his April departure Véra had been searching for a two-room apartment in Paris; until London the three of them shared a cramped room at the not very aptly named Hotel Royal Versailles, a run-down institution that lent its lobby to a 1939 short story. Vladimir’s quarters in London were infinitely more congenial; he lodged with the family of a former Russian diplomat, whose bathtub and butler he could not stop exclaiming over. He lobbied all the right parties for teaching positions, collecting letters of reference as he made his way around town. Bitterly he complained to Véra that he had no talent for this kind of self-promotion, an assessment with which she agreed. He papered London with copies of Sebastian Knight. He called on his Cambridge mentors for advice. He made an effort to sparkle as much as he could socially, but this was decidedly not his sport. He felt as if he were idiotically feeling his way in the dark.
Véra’s side of the correspondence can be read clearly in her husband’s responses. “No—emphatically, I’m NOT a man about town,” he fumed on April 17, after he had written one too many times about his tennis games, the trips to the British Museum’s entomological division, the butler-administered breakfasts in bed. There was a limit to how much business could be conducted on a Sunday morning in London. He collared people ceaselessly; there was no cause for his wife’s alarm. He had spoken with everyone she suggested and had even been in touch with her old friends the Rodziankos, though he was less optimistic than she that they could help. Her concern for their future was crystal clear. He agreed entirely that on his return and in anticipation of a teaching position he would do nothing but write in English about Russian literature. He was doing all in his power, to the best of his capabilities. At the same time, he wrote on their fourteenth wedding anniversary, he was prepared to face a possible disappointment, and wanted her to be as well. He was vexed by her dark hints about the future, though whatever anger he felt when he began a letter generally dissipated—in Véra’s case anyway—by the third paragraph. She was disturbed by and envious of his social rounds; she did not believe he was really making much of an effort. As she had not been earlier, she was now entirely powerless herself to support the family. And in his correspondences of
the last few years her husband had been complaining of having become “criminally absent-minded”; she shuddered to think he might prove so now, when so much was at stake. Hers was the frustration of the capable, the brand Diana Trilling described as that of the woman with the fine sense of direction who must “yield to the male navigator determined to drive us a hundred miles out of our way.”
One thing Véra was determined to avoid was another summer of 1937. She seeded her husband’s belongings with little notes; he was delighted to have worn his tuxedo on a night he might not otherwise have done so, as he found a message from Véra in the pocket. And she was forthright about her fears, much to her husband’s dismay. Surely she had to believe that “our love, and everything, is NOW always and absolutely safe.” As a result he garlanded the name of every woman he met with unflattering adjectives. An actress friend of his host’s was “old and fat—I’m pointing that out just in case—although if she were young and thin it wouldn’t change things.” He had eyes, he insisted, only for Véra. During these two trips, in April and June, he spent a good deal of time with Eva Luytens and her family. For the most part he managed the reports on his visits with his ex-fiancée tactfully. Eva was not attractive, she was not up to her husband’s caliber. He repeated an observation Eva had made: In the end she—Jewish, and five years his senior—had married a non-Jew six years her junior. Her ex-fiancé had married a Jew. Fate had had its way all the same. If Véra did not bristle when she read that her husband had borrowed money from Eva she must have done so when she heard that Eva had produced a leatherbound volume of Vladimir’s verse, much of it about her. (Worse, their author deemed some of it good.) She could not have been happy to have read that her husband had considered Eva’s offer of hand-me-down dresses.
