Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part III)

This is the third post in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I’ll select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Thurman’s dazzling “Silent Partner” (November 16, 2015).

Thurman is a brilliant critic; “Silent Partner” is one of her best reviews. It’s an examination of Letters to Véra (2015), a volume of Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to his wife. When it appeared in The New Yorker, it bore the tagline “What do Nabokov’s letters conceal?” That expresses Thurman’s critical approach perfectly. She writes,

On the evidence of these letters, no couple ever enjoyed a more perfect complicity. In his very first sentence, Vladimir tells Véra, “I won’t hide it. I’m so unused to being—well, understood.” In 1924, he reflects, “You know, we are terribly alike.” And a few months later: “You and I are so special; the miracles we know, no one knows, and no one loves the way we love.” He was ready to give her “all of my blood.” Through their decades of vicissitudes, he referred to their marriage as “cloudless”—even to his mistress.

Mistress? Yes, Nabokov had a mistress. Thurman goes behind Nabokov’s letters. She refers to Stacy Schiff’s biography of Véra: “What’s going on, we learn from Schiff, is that Nabokov is enjoying torrid sex with his worshipful mistress while lying to his wife about ending the affair.”

Thurman wonders what Véra really thought of her self-obsessed husband. She writes,

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”).

But, as Thurman points out, we’ll never know what Véra really thought because she destroyed all her letters. Why? Thurman concludes her absorbing piece with this speculation:

At the end of this volume, you have to wonder what Véra’s qualms were as she disposed of her letters. She must have had some. The truth of her past would never be complete without them. Was it the act of a morbidly private woman refusing to expose herself—and thus, consciously or not, enshrining her mystique? Or an auto-da-fé that destroyed the evidence of wifely heresy? These questions reverberate in the echo chamber of “Letters to Véra.” “You are my mask,” Nabokov told her.

Masks intrigue Thurman. What do they conceal? In “Silent Partner,” armed with the biographies of Schiff and Brian Boyd, she unmasks the Master.