Vera (9 page)

2
THE ROMANTIC AGE

Here is what she must have known by the time she married him: That he was the most gifted Russian writer of his generation. That he was a man of titanic self-absorption. That he had a certain knack for falling in love. That he had an equivalent lack of ability for taming the practical world. How much of this she knew when she fell in love with him is unclear. On only one aspect of the appeal did she offer comment: “
Don't you think it was more his verse than his face that attracted?” she asked rhetorically. That the verse could have eclipsed the rest of the package says a good deal about Véra Slonim's commitment to literature; twenty-four-year-old Nabokov, lithe and still dapper and aristocratic-looking, left an impression. Women flocked to him. In the minutes that had elapsed between Svetlana's retreat from the scene and Véra Slonim's appearance on it, at least three women had laid claim to his time, if not his heart. Those names did not figure on the list of conquests he drew up for Véra in the early days of their courtship, a list on which twenty-eight names precede Svetlana's.
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(The roll call is composed on a piece
of Evsei Slonim's letterhead.) He felt he could tell her everything, and appears to have done so, with happier results than those he had achieved with Svetlana Siewert. At no time was Nabokov shy about his string of overlapping conquests, explaining in 1970 why he did not want two stressed in particular: “
I've had many more love affairs (before my marriage) than suspected by my biographers.” He
regretted, though, the artistic energy those adventures may have cost him, especially in light of the emotional return. Of Véra Slonim's prior romantic history we know nothing, save that—if she arranged to meet a man alone on a dark street for what were plainly extraliterary reasons—there presumably was one.

She was not particularly happy in 1923, and may have been entirely miserable. Her discontent reverberates throughout Nabokov's letters. In the same missive in which he wrote that he could not commit a word to the page without hearing how she would pronounce it, he swore that what he most wanted was to provide her with a sense of well-being, “
hardly an ordinary happiness.” There was reason for her to be dispirited at home, though even later in life Véra Nabokov asserted that she had a tendency to focus on the
negative side of things. That habit was obvious in the first months of the relationship, when Vladimir asked her not to deprive him of his faith in their future together, repeatedly assured her that their separations were not enjoyable for him, begged her not to resent his absences or second-guess his feelings. At times his fascination with her prickliness—he had written that she was made of “tiny, sharp arrows” and that he loved each one of them—wore thin. Was she trying to make him fall out of love with her? If she had fallen out of love with him he wished she would say so directly: “Sincerity above all!” he swore. “
At first I decided to just send you a blank sheet of paper with little question marks in the middle, but then I didn't feel like wasting the stamp,” he wrote from Prague, puzzled and a little hurt by her silence. She tortured herself and consequently tortured him. Did she not understand that life without her was unbearable? He acutely felt her “sharp corners,” which he found difficult to navigate. “
I feel pain from your corners / Love me without hesitation / Without these numerous torments / Do not abbreviate the encounters / Or dream up any separations,” he entreated, in an untitled and unpublished poem.

Possibly Véra was taking a page from the international handbook of intellectual coquetry. Had she had any inkling of what lay ahead for the woman who was to marry V. Sirin, she might well have hesitated for a moment
now. One thing is certain: She did not share her future husband's genius for happiness. Her evasions wrought rhapsodic tributes from him: “
You see,” he averred, “I am speaking with you like King Solomon.” Only in these protests of devotion can we read of Véra's hesitation; at some indeterminate point between 1925 and her death she destroyed her letters to Nabokov. Discretion does not seem to have been at issue so much as merit. His words, even the private ones, had a
value for posterity. She felt strongly that hers did not. She disowned her literary work as well, shrugging off the
Rul
pieces as juvenilia. The woman who saved every shred of her husband's published work kept no copies of her own translations. She was certain she would disapprove of them if ever she reread them, which she did not. (They are exact, but not inspired.)

Nabokov made no secret of his feelings about women writers—
a symptom of provincial literature, he asserted—and Véra may have been sensitive to this prejudice.
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She was neither the first nor the last woman to renounce her literary aspirations on falling in love with a writer.
Boyd feels she could have been a writer of talent had she chosen to be, but believed so fervently in Nabokov's gift that she felt she could accomplish more by assisting him than she might have on her own. Nabokov's 1924 description, written on a day when he was overjoyed not to have to chastise Véra for her silence and could instead acknowledge a “
stellar” communication, reveals all we know of her letters of the 1920s: “You know, we are awfully like one another. In letters, for example: We both love to (1) unobtrusively insert foreign words, (2) quote from our favorite books, (3) translate our impressions from one sense (sense of sight, for example) into the impressions of another sense (sense of taste, for example), (4) ask forgiveness at the end for some imaginary nonsense, and in many other ways.”

Véra Slonim's ability to transfer the observations of one sense into the vocabulary of another—what is properly known as
synesthesia and often manifests itself as “colored hearing”—must have delighted her future husband. The synesthetic cannot help seeing the world differently; for both Nabokovs, letters on the page, words in midair, appeared in Technicolor instead of black and white. The ability can be a burden as much as a luxury: Two people gifted with synesthesia fall into each other's arms as two people with photographic memories might, or two young heirs to legendary fortunes,
or—in Berlin of the early 1920s—two people who believed the recent earthquake in Japan to be the result of the Jewish/Masonic conspiracy. Two synesthetics might have a thorny discussion over breakfast as to the color of Monday, the taste of E-flat. They might commit a poem to memory chromatically; they might recognize the silhouettes of numbers. The trait is genetic—Nabokov had inherited it from his mother, from whom Véra felt his artistic sensibility generally derived—and the couple passed it on to their own son, although it predominates in females. Nabokov was fascinated to discover that while his palette differed from Véra's, nature occasionally blended colors. His “m,” for example, was pink (
pink flannel, to be exact); Véra's was blue; their son's pinkish-blue.

Or so he liked to believe. Sharing this information decades later with a visitor, he was interrupted by Véra, who gently attempted to set the record straight. Her “m” was strawberry-colored. “
She spoils everything by saying she sees it in strawberry,” grumbled her husband, demonstrating another truth about synesthetics: Their recall is so perfect that its defects tend to be those of perception rather than of fact. Nothing is lost on the synesthetic, for whom reality—and in Véra Slonim's case, the printed page—bears an added dimension.
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For the Nabokovs it amounted to their own private
son et lumière
. Musical notes appear to have had no optical effect on Véra, however, as they do on many gifted with colored hearing and as they would on her son, for whom the key of a piece of music adds a shade as well. (Véra did enjoy music although her husband did not, chromatically or on any other level.) But she was well equipped to appreciate the hues of her husband's supersaturated prose. She would have understood perfectly Clare Bishop's insistence in
Sebastian Knight
that a title “
must convey the colour of the book—not its subject.” For his part Nabokov
delighted in the luminosity of Véra's handwriting, her voice, her walk, tinted like the sky at dawn. Explaining the halos he and his wife saw on the page, he noted that Véra's differed from his own. “
She has different colors. And I don't think they are quite as bright as mine. Or are they?” he asked. “You don't want them to be,” she needled him. As quick as she may have been to efface herself on most fronts, the one thing she could not make disappear was her pride. Often it was the only thing she left behind; it was this Cheshire Cat's smile.

From the start Nabokov extolled Véra's acuity, her intuition. No trifle escaped her attention. Like Clare, with whom she shares other qualities, Véra “
possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art
than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier.” Nabokov marveled over her later analysis of their American neighborhood: “
Véra says that the top of the west face of the Hopkins' house, corner of our street and Quarry St., ressembles [sic] a skull (quite easy to see, the dormer is the snub nose, the windows on both sides are the sockets, and old Hopkins is eighty) and that the front of the Millers' house is strikingly like James Joyce … well it's hard to explain, but it's there.” She was a stickler for detail; no one who has read her husband can underestimate what that was worth. This “
capacity to wonder at trifles” was for Nabokov the mark of a kind of genius, as much as was the ability to discern the connections between things. Véra was the kind of woman who came back from the hairdresser to report that
sitting under the dryer had been like watching a silent movie. She was the most demanding kind of reader. If the historians of the Weimar years, eager to convey the sense of chaos that backed the artistically efflorescent life in Berlin, were to mention a general strike on page 20, then a streetcar had better not be said to be running on page 22. “All seemed on verge of collapse,” declared one scholar, commenting on these Berlin years, when the country had recovered from the hyperinflation but when its society still lay in tatters. Véra corrected him. “It now seems as if
everything then seemed …,” she scrawled in his margin.

Of his literary gift Nabokov was not always as certain as he would later claim—Véra
acknowledged privately that there had been doubts and failures and griefs along the way—but he had no quibbles with himself. He was the eldest and favorite of a family of three boys and two girls; his parents were said by some to have
coddled him, by others to have deified him. He had been raised to believe that he stood at the center of an exquisitely opulent universe (his was the brand of prerevolutionary childhood in which it was possible to speak of “
the smallest and oldest of our gardeners”), and that pride was something that he carried with him long after both that universe and its opulence had vanished. He had what can only be termed an entirely robust sense of self. “
All Nabokovs are selfish,” explains his sister Elena Sikorski, who recognized her brother's privileged position without rancor, but acknowledges that it cost others in the family dearly. He might just as well have been speaking of himself when he wrote of a minor character: “
He loved himself with a passionate and completely reciprocated love.”