by Alex Beam
ALSO BY ALEX BEAM
American Crucifixion
Gracefully Insane
A Great Idea at the Time
The Russians Are Coming!
Fellow Travelers
Copyright © 2016 by Alex Beam
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Overlook Press for permission to reprint excerpts from Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Walter Arndt. Translation copyright © 1972 by Walter Arndt. Originally published in 1992 by The Overlook Press, New York, NY (www.overlookpress.com). Reprinted by permission of The Overlook Press. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Beam, Alex, author.
Title: The feud : Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the end of a beautiful friendship / Alex Beam.
Description: New York : Pantheon, 2016. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016019850 (print). LCCN 2016007056 (ebook).
ISBN 9781101870228 (hardback) ISBN 9781101870235 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Friends and associates. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Criticism and interpretation. Wilson, Edmund, 1895–1972—Friends and associates. Wilson, Edmund, 1895–1972—Criticism and interpretation.
BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union. HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century.
Classification: LCC PS3527.A15 (print). LCC PS3527.A15 Z615 2016 (ebook). DDC 818/.5209—dc23.
LC record available at: lccn.loc.gov/2016019850.
Ebook ISBN 9781101870235
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover illustration: Vladimir Nabokov: Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images; Edmund Wilson: Granger, New York City
Cover design by Kelly Blair
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Contents
Cover
Also by Alex Beam
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Beginning
Chapter 2: Such Good Friends
Chapter 3: Sex Doesn’t Sell…Or Does It?
Chapter 4: Whose Mother Is Russia Anyway?
Chapter 5: Meet Eugene Onegin
Chapter 6: What Hath Nabokov Wrought?
Chapter 7: “He Is a Very Old Friend of Mine”
Chapter 8: We Are All Pushkinists Now
Chapter 9: Until Death Do Us Part
Chapter 10: Just Kidding?
Chapter 11: Why?
Chapter 12: As I Was Saying…
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
To my friend, Michael V. Carlisle
Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship. It is painful to consider, that this sublime enjoyment may be impaired or destroyed by innumerable causes, and that there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain.
—SAMUEL JOHNSON, “The Uncertainty of Friendship,” 1758
Introduction
I first learned of the friendship and subsequent feud between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov only a few years ago. A friend of mine had been tracking down Alexander Pushkin’s descendants—there are a few—and mentioned in passing that Wilson and Nabokov had ended a quarter-century-long friendship because of a disagreement over how to translate Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin. I burst out laughing. It was the silliest thing I had ever heard.
I hadn’t known about this famous contretemps because I was eleven years old in 1965, when Wilson trained his guns against his longtime comrade in letters—“a personal friend of Mr. Nabokov…an admirer of much of his work,” as he introduced himself in a salvo of ill-will splattered across the pages of The New York Review of Books. I wasn’t reading the Review, then in its third year of publication, and it certainly wasn’t lying around my parents’ house. I was reading Boys’ Life, what the Russians would call the “organ” of the Boy Scouts of America. I think Vladimir Nabokov, he of the wondrous outdoorsy boyhood, would have approved.
I know a thing or two about Russian language and literature—my harshest readers will confirm that modest count—but I had never read Onegin, and was familiar with only the highest peaks of Nabokov’s astonishing range: Lolita and Speak, Memory. There was a time when college students with literary pretensions read Edmund Wilson, but it wasn’t my time. When I graduated in 1975, Wilson had been dead for three years, with his literary renown and influence already in deep eclipse.
Several years into this project, I laugh less now. Of course the pedantic exchanges between two eminent men of letters still ring silly—is pochuya, which could mean “sensing,” or “sniffing,” a present or past gerund? (Good question!) Did Pushkin know English well enough to read Byron? (Maybe.) But the end of a friendship is always a loss. Especially a friendship so deeply and mutually celebratory as this one. “Edmund was always in a state of joy when Vladimir appeared,” Wilson’s third wife, Mary McCarthy, recalled. “They had an absolute ball together. He loved him.”1 Their correspondence was legendary, full of rambunctious exchanges about literature, gossip, sex in taxicabs, sore gums, and very genuine emotions. “You are one of the few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them,” Nabokov wrote to Wilson eight years into their friendship.2
And then, nothing.
Like so many intimate relationships, this one bore the seeds of its own destruction. In one of his very first letters to his new acquaintance, Wilson scores Nabokov for his punning, which Wilson finds tiresome. But of course it is irrepressible, and will continue throughout his life. Nabokov’s last major novel, Ada—the title itself a pun, alluding to “ardor,” and to the Russian ah, da (oh, yes)—mentions Mr. Eliot’s famous poem, “The Waistline”; and so on, ada infinitum. In many ways the two men proved to be two entirely different and contradictory people, Wilson the erudite literalist and Nabokov the ludist, the fantasist, the trickster king. The opposites attracted, and then they didn’t.
When their friendship ended, much was made of the fact that Wilson never reviewed any of Nabokov’s novels. Indeed Nabokov himself complained in a gift inscription to Wilson, “Why do you never review my works?” But it is very hard to imagine Wilson enjoying, say, The Gift, Nabokov’s favorite of his own Russian novels. The Gift would have infuriated Wilson. It is simultaneously a work of literary criticism, a memoir of the Russian emigration in Germany, and a complicated gloss on Pushkin’s Onegin. The Gift incorporates a novella-length, jocoserious “biography” of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a sacred figure of nineteenth-century socialism whom Nabokov mercilessly lampoons.
It is supremely Nabokovian; a novel, and not a novel. And it ends with a perfectly crafted Onegin stanza, Nabokov’s knowing nod to his favorite Russian writer. That stanza appears on—but I anticipate.
It is equally hard to imagine Nabokov reading, savoring, or even understanding Patriotic Gore, Wilson’s unsentimental, revisionist overview of the literature and the mythopoeia that animated the combatants in America’s Civil War. Wilson spent more than ten years researching the book. It is difficult to envision Nabokov spending even ten minutes perusing its index. When Gore appeared in 1962, Nabokov had already ensconced himself in Switzerland, settled atop a pile of money from the fabulous sales of his novel Lolita. America, and Edmund Wilson, were only faintly visible in his rearview mirror.
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LET ME MAKE two quick points:
Told from such a distance in time, this becomes a story of unequal combat. Nabokov is very much alive in his work, perhaps less on the night table than on the college syllabus, but nonetheless he remains known to millions. Not so Wilson. In the years leading up to his death in 1972, “he was not much read,” his friend Jason Epstein wrote in a heartfelt obituary. Once hailed as the “dean of American letters,” possessed of what the biographer Leon Edel called “a certain Johnsonian celebrity,” Wilson is largely unknown today. When I mentioned Wilson’s name to a participant at a donors’ event at the Boston Public Library, his reply was: “It’s weird how he makes everything about ants.” No, that is Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor and author of The Ants, The Anthill, and Journey to the Ants. Edmund Wilson was someone else entirely.
Second: There seems to be an infectious tendency to “go Nabokovian” when writing about the late, great novelist. Andrew Field, Nabokov’s first biographer, decided not to include an index with his biography, a complicated and annoying homage to his subject, who sometimes bent indexes to his own playful needs. When Wilson’s biographer Jeffrey Meyers wrote about the Nabokov-Wilson feud, he couldn’t resist the easily available pun “when Pushkin came to shovekin.”3 Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, who spent two years translating Onegin with great élan, fell into pun-ditry himself, asserting his right to “poetic lie-sense,” and so on.
I myself succumbed. It is futile to resist the lure of such pseudoverbs as “pedanitifies,” or to ignore the temptation to tack footnote after footnote onto my explanation of Onegin’s scintillating “Pedal Digression.” When I needed to cite an Onegin translation, I quoted from the late Walter Arndt’s version, just because I knew that would irk the Nabokovian shade. Nabokov hated Arndt’s Onegin. I call Vera Nabokov “Vera Nabokova” in part because that is how she signed her name, but also to fingernail-scratch the Elysian blackboard where the Master may currently be lecturing. He inveighed against the feminization of Russian family names, and insisted on teaching Anna Karenin, never Anna Karenina.
These are pure Nabokovian impulses. Literary confrontations were to be pursued in this life and the next. When revising his Onegin translation after Wilson’s death, Nabokov urged his publisher to shake a leg: “I would like to see my edition printed before confronting an irate Pushkin and a grinning E. Wilson beyond the cypress curtain.”
A feud unto death, and beyond. As we shall see, Wilson attacked Nabokov from beyond the grave, affording himself a satisfaction we cannot yet fully appreciate. In the five years that he outlived Wilson, Nabokov, too, tap-danced on his old rival’s tombstone, in a manner unbecoming the international celebrity and self-proclaimed genius that he was. And then Nabokov’s son, Dmitri—but again, I anticipate.
In a famous essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.”
In the case of Nabokov and Wilson, it was.
1
The Beginning
This is how it began. It is worth recording because Vladimir Nabokov would later offer up an alternate version of how he came to be friends with Edmund Wilson.
Wilson knew Nicolas Nabokov (“emotionally extravagant, physically demonstrative, and always late”),1 an émigré composer who achieved some renown in the United States and Europe after fleeing Russia. In 1939 Nabokov rented a house across the street from Wilson in the Cape Cod town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and they inevitably met. Nabokov had written music for the Ballets Russes and the New York Philharmonic. Their shared acquaintances included the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin and W. H. Auden, who had recently moved to the United States.
Wilson would have bearded the charismatic, extroverted composer because he was fascinated by Russia. As with many American intellectuals, the Soviet Union’s “new society,” being built atop the ruins of czarist Russia, entranced him. The Great Depression had laid America low, and Wilson had seen its depredations firsthand. He had visited Russia for a few months in 1935, and had time to study the language while recovering from scarlet fever in an Odessa hospital for six weeks.
Wilson liked Russian language and literature, and he liked Russians, too. So it was the most natural thing in the world that Nicolas Nabokov would reach out to Wilson on behalf of a relative, in a famous August 1940 note.
Nicolas reported that his cousin Vladimir had recently arrived in the United States, and was in dire financial straits. “I await a miracle or I will lose all hope,” Nicolas wrote, quoting Vladimir. “Help,” Nicolas wrote twice, in Russian. “Help, dear Edmund Edmundovich. Do whatever you can.”
Wilson did help. When Vladimir wrote to him from a Russian friend’s summer house in Vermont, Wilson proposed a fall meeting in New York. The two men met in early October, and before the year was out, Wilson, filling in as literary editor of The New Republic, had commissioned a review from Vladimir. Wilson was quickly smitten. “I’m amazed at the excellence of the book reviews he’s been doing for me,” he wrote to his Princeton literature professor and mentor, Christian Gauss. “He is a brilliant fellow.”2 Soon the two men started talking about a joint translation of Alexander Pushkin’s famous “little tragedy,” Mozart and Salieri, which the magazine published in 1941. “It is quite perfect now,” Nabokov wrote to Wilson when he saw the finished product. “You have played your Mozart to my Salieri.”
Wilson boosted more than one Nabokov. He also promoted Nicolas’s career, publishing his music criticism in The New Republic, and helping him place reviews in The Atlantic Monthly. Wilson tried to convince his friend Thornton Wilder to write a libretto for Nicolas, based on Alexander Pushkin’s unfinished novel, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great. When Wilder demurred, Wilson briefly considered taking on the job himself.3
Just six months after their first meeting, Vladimir Nabokov and Wilson were chaffing each other like old pals. Wilson praised Nabokov’s first submissions, but warned him to “refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here.” Wilson had just published To the Finland Station, his classic sympathetic overview of the origins of European and Russian Marxism. He sent his new friend an inscribed copy: “To Vladimir Nabokov, in the hope that this may make him think better of Lenin.”4 Nabokov replied that he had enjoyed parts of the book, but could not stomach Wilson’s treacly depiction of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (“He knew how to talk to the country people…good at chess but did not care about winning”) to pass unnoticed. “Now we come to Ilyitch—and here I itch (sorry),” Nabokov wrote. “Not even the magic of your style has made me like him.” For Nabokov “Leninist reality,” as the Soviets liked to call it, would always be “a pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom.”
A few months later Nicolas Nabokov wrote again to Wilson: “I can’t tell you how endlessly grateful I am for what you have done for the ‘new’ Nabokov. He wrote me an enthusiastic letter about you.” Nicolas addressed his correspondent as “mon cher Huile-son,” a play on the French word for “oil,” and signed his name “Nab O’ Cough.” Punning ran in the family.
—
WHO WAS EDMUND WILSON in 1940? Although history would later reverse their order of importance, he was older—forty-five years old to Nabokov’s forty—more famous, and arguably more accomplished than Vladimir Nabokov at that time. Coincidentally both men’s fathers were prominent jurists. Wilson’s father, a pathologically neurotic lawyer, served as New Jersey’s attorney general under Woodrow Wilson, who supposedly promised to elevate him to the U.S. Supreme Court during his presidency.5 (Nabokov’s grandfather was Russia’s minister of justice under the reformist czar Alexander II, and his father, an expert on the Russian criminal code, served briefly as minister of justice in the breakaway Crimean Republic after the Russian Revolution.) Wilson’s mother, née Helen Kimball, never really warmed to her only child, with whom she often
squabbled about money. She had money. Wilson wanted her to share it with him. She declined. “A woman of limited intelligence, prosaic, self-confident and self-assured,” according to Wilson’s friend and literary executor Leon Edel, “she never read Edmund’s writings.”6 She saddled her russet-haired young child with the nickname “Bunny,” which she liked to repeat in front of his friends. Wilson never much cared for the name. On the final day of her life, Helen Wilson warned her granddaughter Rosalind not to marry a writer “because you’ll never have any money.”7
Wilson had breezed through the Hill School in Pennsylvania and Princeton University, emerging as a remarkably well-educated man. He knew Latin and Greek well and French superbly, and started publishing literary criticism shortly after graduation. His first book, an appreciation of Wallace Stevens and e. e. cummings, appeared when he was twenty-six. At twenty-nine he wrote in his diary: “On the train [to California] I read Sophocles’ Electra in Greek.”8
Like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, he served in the ambulance service during World War I, then returned to New York to launch his career as a journalist and literary critic. He was a gifted talent spotter for a golden age of American letters, promoting the careers of Hemingway, his Princeton classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, with whom he pursued a tempestuous, on-again off-again love affair. Wilson was among the first American critics to champion the “difficult” James Joyce, in his famous overview of modern literature, Axel’s Castle, published in 1931.
The thirty-seven-year-old Edmund Wilson with members of the Delegation for Independent Miners’ Relief Committee, 1932. Wilson is sitting at the left, Malcolm Cowley on the right. (Beinecke Library, Yale University)