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. 

Stacy Schiff on Judith Thurman's "A Left-Handed Woman"

Stacy Schiff’s “Writing the Furies” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2022) is an excellent appreciation of Judith Thurman’s writing. It’s a review of Thurman’s new essay collection A Left-Handed Woman. It contains a number of piquant descriptions of Thurman’s style, including “The voice is so exact it can pinch,” “Her prose has high cheekbones,” and “She clambers past received wisdoms like a mountain goat.” That last one made me laugh. 

Is A Left-Handed Woman as good as Thurman’s previous collection, Cleopatra’s Nose (2008)? Schiff doesn’t say directly, but she does make this interesting observation:

A published essay reads differently when it lands between hard covers. It has aged or matured. Sometimes it has gone stale. Its spark may or may not survive. And it has acquired a family. It exists not only in itself but in its resemblances and distinctions. Its siblings may show it up. Tics and preoccupations reveal themselves, as, to varying degrees, does the author herself. For whatever reason, the “I” of Cleopatra’s Nose is more forthcoming than the “I” of A Left-Handed Woman. With time, Thurman has removed herself to the middle distance.

Schiff may be onto something here. My sense is that Thurman’s New Yorker work over the last dozen years or so isn’t as strong as the writing in Cleopatra’s Nose. But, in fairness, that book sets the bar exceedingly high. It’s one of my all-time favorite essay collections: see my appreciation here. 

In her piece, Schiff describes Thurman’s writing as insouciant. She says, “But it is a sly insouciance that so lights up these pages and that makes Thurman’s voice so distinct.” Right there, I think, Schiff nails it; insouciance is the essence of Thurman’s splendid style. What am I waiting for? A Left-Handed Woman is a significant collection by one of The New Yorker’s finest writers. I’m ordering it today. 

November 16, 2015 Issue

Judith Thurman’s "Silent Partner," in this week’s issue, is the fourth review of Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters to Véra that I’ve read. The others are Michael Wood’s "Dear Poochums" (London Review of Books, October 23, 2014), Martin Amis’s "In 'Letters to Véra,' Vladimir Nabokov Writes to His Wife" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, November 10, 2015), and Stacy Schiff’s " 'His Joy, His Life' " (The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2015). Of course, I want to compare them. Amis’s piece is the most adoring. It focuses on Nabokov’s prose:

It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of “Lolita,” “The Enchanter,” dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely ­individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Metro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy.

Schiff concurs: “He sounds unmistakably like himself, if without the polish, the mandarin disdain, the stage-managing. The jewels skitter helter-skelter across the page, from an émigré’s “stoop-shouldered speech” to a 3:00 AM encounter with a “very hungry, very lonely, very professional mosquito,” to a “waiter sweating hailstones.” Wood dissents: “Not much memorable writing though, unless you’re fond of the purpler shades of Nabokov.” Thurman’s opinion is mixed. She says, “The earliest letters, intoxicated with language and desire, are intoxicating to read.” But later in her piece, she writes, “Boyd and Schiff both drew upon these letters for their biographies, so they contain few surprises, except for the revelation—a disconcerting one, for a lover of Nabokov’s fiction—that he could be a bore.”

Of the four reviewers, only Thurman considers what it might’ve been like to actually live with Nabokov. She says,

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”).

Wood, Schiff, and Thurman all note the one-sidedness of the correspondence; Amis seems oblivious to it. Wood writes, “There are no letters from Véra in this book. There are none extant: she got rid of them all.” Schiff says,

In the end all of the correspondence would be his. Somewhere along the line, Véra’s letters disappeared. Dmitri Nabokov maintained that his mother—pathologically private, and well aware who the writer in the household was—destroyed them, although there is no evidence that she did so. It is just as likely that their recipient misplaced them; he was a man in whose hands telephone numbers evaporated, who could lose a book of matches in a tiny room, who might entrust his return ticket to the train conductor. We are left to reconstruct the object of Nabokov’s affection entirely from his side of the correspondence.

Wood and Schiff appear to accept the one-sidedness without question. But Thurman takes a different view. She writes,

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.

I find Thurman’s skepticism refreshing. All four reviews are absorbing. They raise the old question about what bearing, if any, our knowledge of a writer’s private life should have on our appreciation of his or her work. In Nabokov’s case, the answer appears to be that without Véra, he may not have been the writer he was. As Thurman says, “Each of them found a lodestar in the other.”