Vera (20 page)

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 life. 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.

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.

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:

She had no idea how far her husband would carry that idea. Tumbled through Nabokov's imagination the stones emerged brighter still:

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.