A Left-Handed Woman by Judith Thurman

Author:Judith Thurman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

He goes on to relate his dinner with Amalia and Zenzinov, his consumption of an eggnog, their arrival, by cab, at the “packed” hall on the Rue Las Cases, and the fatigue induced by having to smile at so many admirers. He loses track of their names, but he does record the gratifying presence of important writers and “thousands” of ladies—“in a word, everyone.” When the reading finally gets under way, he opens his briefcase—a “very nice” one borrowed from a friend—and spreads out his papers. After a sip of water from a handy carafe, he begins to recite. The acoustics are “magnificent,” and every poem is greeted with rapturous applause. The account continues for four pages.

There is little doubt that Mrs. Nabokov took a keen interest in her husband’s every triumph, toothache, and fried egg. But it is also possible to imagine that, in bleak moments, she tired of his endearments (“my little sunshine”), bridled at his pet names (“lumpikin”), and resented the ostentation of a love that can be hard to distinguish from self-infatuation (“It’s as if in your soul there is a prepared spot for every one of my thoughts”).

We will never know, however, what Véra felt. She systematically destroyed her own letters to Vladimir, and even blacked out the lines she had added on their postcards to his mother. At best, she was a fitful correspondent. Vladimir’s frustration with her epistolary reticence is a constant theme—“Pussykins, you write disgustingly rarely to me.” Boyd marvels at Nabokov’s tolerance “of what many in his position might have seen as a failure of … reciprocity.”

Failures in a marriage, however, tend to be reciprocal. “When I think about you, I get so happy and light,” Vladimir exults to Véra in 1926, “and since I think about you always, I am always happy and light.” He surrenders to this trance of buoyancy at a moment when Véra, a newlywed, has been sent to a sanatorium—against her will, it seems—to recover from depression and weight loss. In response to a “sad little letter” in which she seems to have begged for release from her incarceration, he tells her, “Understand this, my love, none of us wants to see you till you’re completely well and rested. I beg you, my love, for my sake shrug off all that gloom … Think what I must feel knowing things are bad for you.”

Nabokov’s uxorious complacence reaches its low point in the spring of 1937, the “darkest and most painful” year of the marriage, as Boyd puts it. Vladimir’s sexual charisma was legendary, and Véra was aware of his womanizing before she married him, thanks, in part, to a list of some thirty paramours he had provided, on her father’s letterhead, early in their courtship. She had caught him on the rebound, four months after the end of his engagement to a rich beauty of seventeen. (The girl’s parents had become alarmed at Nabokov’s prospects and, evidently, at his morals; he had shared his diary with their daughter, who hurled it across the room.

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