Nabokov in America (3 page)

As
he had done the year before, Nabokov arranged to give readings in Brussels and Antwerp. Another event would follow in Paris, in early February, on the rue Las Cases; it would be a smash success, a joyous celebration—he had passionate fans in Paris, many of them women, some of whom delighted in quoting his poetry back to him. Though there were dissenting voices, V. Sirin—his nom de plume in the emigration (he was also known by his own name)—was acknowledged as a brilliant writer and possible heir to the tradition of Pushkin and Lermontov and Tolstoy and Chekhov. Those who dissented from this view included fellow writers, some of them his contemporaries, some his envious elders—for instance, Ivan Bunin, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in ’33, whose relations with the flash youngster were bantering but brittle, but in any case—to return to Paris early in ’37 was to be treated as a kind of hero, as the coming idol.

Between mid-January, when he left his wife, and the third week of May, when he reunited with her, Nabokov
wrote her once a day
³
, sometimes twice, without fail. His letters are immensely tender. “My darling, my joy,” he addresses her in February, after the Paris reading; and then in April,

My life, my love
⁴
,
it is twelve years today
[since our wedding]. And on this very day
Despair
has been published, and
The Gift
appears in
Annales Contemporaines
… . The lunch at the villa of Henry Church (… an American millionaire with a splendid boil on his nape … with a literature-addicted wife of German extraction) turned out remarkably well… . I was much “feted” and was in great form… . I got on swimmingly with Joyce’s publisher Sylvia Beach, who might help considerably with the publication of
Despair
in case Gallimard and Albin Michel
ne marcheront pas
… . My darling, I love you. The story about my little one … is enchanting. [Dmitri had been trained to recite lines from Pushkin.]
My love, my love
, how long it’s been since you’ve stood before me… . I embrace you, my joy, my tired little thing.

The mix of endearments, of droll descriptors (“boil on his nape”), of crowing over literary advances, is very Nabokov. Perhaps needless to say, he was having an affair. Véra could sense it; then some busybody sent her a letter revealing the identity of the home wrecker, one Irina Guadanini, a Russian divorcée who worked as a dog groomer. Guadanini was one of those women who could recite Sirin by the foot
or the yard. Nabokov denied all—as the envied new writer, he was the subject of malicious gossip on all sides, he maintained. His daily letters to his wife did not cease, nor did they become any less tender; they were a
pack of lies
⁵
.

A Jewish woman with a two-year-old, near-penniless in Hitler’s Berlin: surely Véra’s situation was desperate, in the year when the Buchenwald concentration camp opened near Weimar, in the year of the
Entartete Kunst
, the “Degenerate Art” show that featured many Jews, yet Véra did not hasten to join her husband in the South of France, as he urged her to. Instead she concocted a journey in the wrong direction, eastward to Prague, where Nabokov’s mother lived on a small pension. Madame Nabokov had never seen her grandson, and this might be her last chance.

In fulfilling this pressing duty to her mother-in-law, Véra tormented her errant husband, who was already half-mad with guilt. He was unwilling to give up the affair, though, to abandon La Guadanini, a witty woman who,
to judge by a story
⁶
she published twenty-five years later, was in the grip of the most transporting love of her life. Vladimir developed psoriasis—it had troubled him before at times of intolerable stress. In the end he took the train to Prague. He saw his mother for the last time; she saw her grandson for the first and last time.
The crisis
⁷
in the marriage did not abate for months. Only in mid-July, when they were in Cannes, temporarily beyond the reach of the Nazis, did Nabokov fully confess his infidelity, thus allowing the catastrophe to proceed toward a climax. (He continued to write to Guadanini, who showed up one day at the beach, begging him to come away with her; he painfully, reluctantly spurned her.)

He had been a lothario before his marriage—this Véra knew. There had been twenty-eight youthful seductions, and in the early years of the marriage he continued to prowl, almost certainly without telling his wife. (“
Berlin is very fine
⁸
right now,” he wrote a friend in ’34, “thanks to the spring, which is particularly juicy … and I, like a dog, am driven wild by all sorts of … scents.”) Here the rampant philandering stopped, however. The Guadanini affair was too punishing, too savage. His proud and fascinating wife, she whose depths of cleverness and devotion are but suggested by the way she fought back, drawing the frazzled fool of a husband away from liberty in Western Europe, in a geographical direction that flirted with disaster: this was not a wife to abandon, though she might appear wan and worn after ten years on small allowance, after having given birth and having lost a
second child
⁹
(probably) the year before the crisis. Though Véra’s biographer, Schiff, says that “the last dalliance was not that with Irina Guadanini in 1937 any more than the last cigarette was that of 1945,” when Nabokov gave up smoking four or five packs per day, this was categorically
not a marriage
¹⁰
that would ever again be about infidelity.

France was not Germany, luckily. But France in the late thirties was less than hospitable to someone like Nabokov. Despite being treated like an idol and despite his literary connections, he was unable to work legally, nor did he possess a French
carte d’identité
until August ’38. They avoided Paris, where people gossiped and where Guadanini resided. He gave a reading in the city in late ’38, but for the most part the couple lived in semi-isolation on the Côte d’Azur, in those days a warm alternative to Paris and a place where artists and writers could live on a shoestring. Nabokov wrote and wrote. To say that he escaped the crisis of his marriage and the anguish of putting it back together by diving into work is to overlook his prodigious habit before the crisis; nor did Véra, in the worst passage of her life, fail to complete a translation of
Invitation to a Beheading
, Nabokov’s dreamlike novel of oppression and imprisonment, to show an agent in New York.

In ’34, a different literary agent, in London, had sold British rights to
two other novels
¹¹
,
Camera Obscura
and
Despair
.
*
The English translation of
Camera
appalled Nabokov; it was “
loose, shapeless
¹²
, sloppy,” “full of hackneyed expressions meant to tone down … the tricky passages,” he wrote the publisher, Hutchinson, but, eager to have a book in the bookstores, he let it stand. Three years later, when American rights to
Camera
were sold by the New York agent Altagracia de Jannelli, Nabokov undertook to retranslate it himself, in the process rewriting much of it and giving it a title he thought would appeal to Americans:
Laughter in the Dark
. He was
less than fully confident
¹³
of his English at this point—his arrangement with Hutchinson required them to examine his work, remove any howlers.

French,
Swedish, Czech, and German translations also were in the works. Translations for sale in English-speaking countries were most important, considering the size of the market. Sirin’s books had no existence inside the Soviet Union; the home of his natural readership of millions, where he might have written in his native idiom and had fewer headaches about translation, while dwelling in splendor as the crown prince of the tradition that meant everything to him, the Pushkinian tradition in Russian verse and prose—that homeland of his literary heart was tragically lost to him. It was lost to everybody else, too, of course. There was no “Russia” anymore in which he might have dwelt in safety and joy, and the boldest writers of his generation who had stayed behind were on their way to hurried procedures conducted in the basements of prisons—writers such as Isaac Babel, author of
Red Cavalry
, arrested in ’39 and shot in ’40, and Osip Mandelstam, arrested in ’38 and dead by that December.
Mandelstam’s famous
¹⁴
poem “Epigram Against Stalin,” which compares Stalin’s fingers to worms and his mustache to a cockroach, begins with the phrase “We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,” and surely one thing the poet meant by that line was the lostness of Russia to a generation.

To be busy translating one’s own novels for sale in America was not the worst fate to befall a Russian writer in the thirties. Largely ignorant of American literature, perhaps disdainful of the very concept, Nabokov had a considerable acquaintance with British and Irish literature, Shakespeare and R. L. Stevenson and Joyce being especial favorites. His mother had read him English fairy tales when he was small, and his grip on the language was precocious. As an older boy he was carried away by the books of Mayne Reid, an Irishman who fought in the Mexican-American War and later wrote American Westerns such as
The Scalp Hunters
,
The Rifle Rangers
,
The Death Shot
, and
The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas
. Nabokov claimed that Reid, prolific potboiler maker, had
given him a vision
¹⁵
of the great open range and the vaulting western sky. Here is Reid describing a burned-over prairie in
The Headless Horseman
(1866):

Far as the eye
¹⁶
can reach the country is of one uniform colour—black as Erebus. There is nothing green—not a blade of grass—not a reed nor weed!

It is after the summer solstice. The ripened culms of the
gramineae
, and the stalks of the prairie flowers, have alike crumbled into dust under the devastating breath of fire.

In
front—on the right and left—to the utmost verge of vision extends the scene of desolation. Over it the cerulean sky is changed to a darker blue; the sun, though clear of clouds, seems to scowl rather than shine—as if reciprocating the frown of the earth.

Ignoring the antique poetic touches, we can, indeed,
see
this—and the rollicking Reid is one of those writers who tell us just what their leveled eyes tell them. On the next page,

The landscape
¹⁷
 … has assumed a change; though not for the better. It is still sable as ever, to the verge of the horizon. But the surface is no longer a plain: it
rolls
 … not entirely treeless—though nothing that may be termed a tree is in sight. There have been [trees], before the fire—
algarobias
,
mesquites
, and other of the acacia family—standing solitary, or in copses. Their light pinnate foliage has disappeared like flax before the flame.

In the 1966 edition of
Speak, Memory
, his autobiography, Nabokov says of
The Headless Horseman
, “It has its points.” The mix of realistic evidence plain to the eye with scientific-sounding precision—terms such as
culm
and
pinnate
and
algarobia
, all used correctly—gives satisfaction to a certain sort of boy reader, or to any sort of reader, for that matter. A few pages on, a figure appears out of the burned plain:

Poised … upon the crest of the ridge, horse and man presented a picture… .

A steed, such as might have been ridden by an Arab sheik—blood-bay in colour … with limbs clean as culms [those culms again!] of cane, and hips of elliptical outline, continued into a magnificent tail sweeping rearward … on his back a rider … of noble form and features; habited in the picturesque costume of a Mexican
ranchero
—spencer jacket of velveteen—
calzoneros
laced along the seams—
calzoncillos
of snow-white lawn … around the waist a scarf of scarlet crape; and on his head a hat of black glaze, banded with gold bullion.

This is the novel’s dashing hero, Maurice Gerald (“
Sir
Maurice Gerald,” Nabokov adds in
Speak, Memory
, “as his thrilled bride was to discover at the end of the book”). Reid’s work—seventy-five novels, plus reportage—reveals an enduring concern for matters of costumery. His
heroes are rough and ready, yet in their way also
comme il faut
, and dangerously attractive to women:

Through the curtains
¹⁸
of the travelling carriage he was regarded with glances that spoke of a singular sentiment. For the first time in her life, Louise Poindexter looked upon … a man of heroic mould. Proud might he have been, could he have guessed the interest which his presence was exciting in the breast of the young Creole.

Nabokov notes that he and an older cousin, Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg, acted out whole scenes from Reid, perfecting the insouciant gestures, and while an effort to find the Nabokovian high style prefigured in this boy’s own adventure prose may be going too far—is certainly going too far—there
are
points in common. Fascination with North American geography, with the wide-openness, an invitation to adventure; scientific nomenclature; exotic sensuality; the kind of writerly precision that notes that a cerulean sky looks darker directly overhead. “
The edition I had
¹⁹
,” Nabokov writes, “remains in the stacks of my memory as a puffy book bound in red cloth.” It was a British or an American edition; the important thing was that it was the “unabridged original,” not the “translated and simplified” Russian version that Yuri and other Russian children had to read because their English wasn’t up to the original. The frontispiece of a prairie “has been so long exposed to the blaze of my imagination that it is now completely bleached,” Nabokov adds, then observes, “but miraculously replaced by the real thing … by the view from a ranch you [Véra] and I rented [in 1953] … a cactus-and-yucca waste whence came … the plaintive call of a quail—Gambel’s Quail, I believe.”