Daily Archives: January 29, 2012

A Year in Books/Day 27: Vera

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  • Title: Vera [Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov]
  • Author: Stacy Schiff
  • Year Published: 1999/This Edition: 2000 (Modern Library Paperback Edition)
  • Year Purchased: 2002/2003
  • Source: Barnes & Noble Clearance Rack
  • About: Vera Slonim Nabokov was never a writer. Nor, as far as it is known, did she ever harbor that ambition. She was, by a series of disturbing historical circumstances, something of a professional refugee. Although she held a number of jobs, the impossibility-and ultimate imprudence-of separating Vera from her husband and their famous 52-year-marriage jumps starkly from the page. To her husband and posterity’s great good fortune, she quietly trespassed outside the bounds of musedom: it is every bit as impossible to separate Vladimir from his wife and her contributions to his psyche and soul and, eventually, his literature.
  • Motivation: Nabokov, Nabokov, Nabokov! So fantastic, revolutionary, disquieting (eh, I know his opinions on women writers and still I return to his words). This was a literary biography by proxy, in a way, as I knew it would be. The upshot was becoming acquainted with the enigmatic Vera.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 24: “Some things were to be insisted upon, on the other hand. Vera Slonim learned a great number of lessons from her father, only one of which was how to how to hold a thirteen-year-grudge, a lesson she would put to good use.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
    Signature of Vladimir Nabokov

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A Year in Books/Day 26: Door Wide Open

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  • Title: Door Wide Open Jack Kerouac & Joyce Johnson A Beat Love Affair in Letters 1957-1958
  • Author: Introduction and commentary by Joyce Johnson
  • Year Published: 2000 (Penguin Books)

    Signature of Jack Kerouac

    Image via Wikipedia

  • Year Purchased: 2003/2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: When 21-year-old novelist Joyce Johnson (then Glassman) embarked on a relationship with Jack Kerouac, she met all of the surface requirements of non-conformity. In her letters, she made a calculated, mighty effort to match her peripatetic lover’s passionate, friendly detachment; as if writing it down made it so. But her commentary, written in her sixties, reveals the truth of a young woman desperately trying to break free of the gendered emotional conventions of the 1950s.
  • Motivation: I love the intimacy, and sense of immediacy, found in the personal letters of famous people (especially writers and artists). When the correspondence is between one of the leading-and most controversial-icons of his time and one of the few women artistically associated with the Beat Generation, then I’m extra intrigued.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 45: “The need and love Jack finally declared obliterated from my mind any consideration of the consequences of the earthquake. Nor did I take sufficient note of the fact that Jack had written this letter, so different in tone from all the others, during one of the few periods in recent years when he was completely sober. I only knew there suddenly seemed to be a profound change in our relationship. Here were the feelings, the “real” feelings, he had always held back.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8