by Alex Beam
A few weeks later Nicolas Nabokov reached out to Edmund Wilson on behalf of his cousin. The two men corresponded and met. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
* * *
*1 The Hebrew inscription on Wilson’s headstone in the Wellfleet cemetery reads, “Be strong, be strong, and may we be strengthened,” a phrase traditionally repeated at the end of a Torah reading.
*2 Nabokov’s wife, Vera, owned a small pistol that she often carried in her handbag. Their friend Jason Epstein thinks she intended to protect her husband from the fate that befell his father: “Why else would you sit at the back of every lecture with a gun in your purse? She was prepared to kill the assassin.”
*3 In a sample of their future enmity, Nabokov threw even this compliment back in Wilson’s face: “The ‘miseries, horrors and handicaps’ that he assumes I was subjected to during 40 years, before we first met in New York, are mostly figments of his warped fantasy.”
2
Such Good Friends
While Wilson helped Nabokov professionally, he wasn’t alone. Nabokov had excellent contacts among the Russian émigré intelligentsia who had preceded him to America. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff had been mailing small sums of money to Nabokov in Europe, and sent over a carton of used clothing after the two men became reacquainted in New York.1 But Wilson, a veteran editor, author, and journalist knew the ins and outs of the New York publishing scene better than almost anyone. Like the newly arrived Nabokov, he had serious financial problems, mainly related to his inability to match his perfectly decent income with his sybaritic spending. So he knew that when The Atlantic offered you fifty dollars for a short story, you demanded one hundred. More often than not you would get it.
Wilson commissioned reviews from Nabokov, and introduced him to the editors of Decision magazine, The Yale Review (“a dreary quarterly”), The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker (“write to Wm. Maxwell [fiction editor at The New Yorker] and tell him I suggested your doing so”), and Harper’s Bazaar (“Write to Mary Louise Aswell [editor] and mention Mary [McCarthy] and me”).2 Atlantic editor Edward Weeks, a Trinity-Cambridge product like Nabokov, practically swooned the first time the spritely forty-two-year-old writer sashayed into the downstairs café of the Boston Ritz. Nabokov acted as if he owned the place. “He would come in in a shabby tweed coat,” Weeks recalled, “trousers bulging at the knee, but be quite the most distinguished man in the room, with his perfectly beautiful hazel eyes, his fine brown hair, the élan, the spark….He just had to walk into the room and the girls looked around.”*1
Weeks loved the work, too, uttering the words every writer dreams of hearing: “We are enchanted…this is genius,” he wrote Nabokov after receiving a short-story submission. Wilson also introduced Nabokov to his first American publisher, James Laughlin, the well-born founder of New Directions books. Laughlin published Nabokov’s first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, with a flattering blurb (“absolutely enchanting”) from Wilson. The notoriously tightfisted Laughlin, a scion of the Pittsburgh-based Jones & Laughlin steel fortune, tried to withhold an advance on royalties, but Nabokov—a quick-on-the-uptake student at the Edmund Wilson Academy of Not Taking Sh*t from Publishers—insisted on payment. He won. (The poet Delmore Schwartz was Laughlin’s reader for Knight.) The book appeared eleven days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and sank accordingly.
Laughlin and Nabokov became friends, and the latter gladly accepted an invitation to Laughlin’s ski lodge in Alta, Utah, to pursue his passion for butterfly collecting. Wilson also talked up Nabokov to Random House’s Robert Linscott, best known as William Faulkner’s editor. Linscott filed a memorable “reader’s report” after perusing The Person from Porlock, which Henry Holt would later publish as the novel Bend Sinister: “I first heard of [Nabokov] through Edmund Wilson, who considered him the most brilliant man he has ever met,” Linscott wrote. Wilson “thinks that some day he will write one of the great contemporary novels.”3
Wilson did much more than write letters and telephone editors on Nabokov’s behalf. He liked to socialize, and enjoyed dining, drinking, discussing anything and everything with the Nabokovs and with his wife of the moment—the already famous, and young, and beautiful novelist Mary McCarthy. The families spent Thanksgiving 1941 together at Wilson’s rambling Cape Cod home in Wellfleet, the first of many meetings among the four of them.
The visit provided the occasion for Nabokov’s poem “The Refrigerator Awakes”: “Crash!/And if darkness could sound, it would sound like this giant/Waking up in the torture house, trying to die.” It was the first of dozens of works that Nabokov would place in The New Yorker.
After his summer at Stanford, Nabokov returned to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and started teaching at Wellesley College. The two couples often entertained each other or gathered at the spacious home of the Harvard comparative literature professor Harry Levin, whose Latvian-born wife, Elena, was a gifted writer and Russian translator. Often included in the mix were Wilson’s Cape Cod neighbors Paul and Nina Chavchavadze, close friends who occasionally helped him puzzle through Russian texts.
A complex web of vestigial ties linked the couples. Nina Chavchavadze, for instance, was born a Romanov, the great-granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I, Alexander Pushkin’s nemesis and tormentor.*2 As a young émigrée socialite in England, she had flirted with the handsome Cambridge undergraduate Vladimir Nabokov. Vera Nabokova’s father, a successful businessman under the old regime, had once worked as the steward of the Chavchavadze estate. Mary McCarthy remembered Nabokov “tying himself in knots” over the prospect of meeting Nina again, although no awkwardness occurred between the easygoing Chavchavadzes and the nervous Nabokov. “Once it had happened, he relaxed,” McCarthy told Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd.
Undated photo of Vladimir Nabokov (far right) with a group of Nina Chavchavadze’s friends in Cambridge, England, in the early 1920s. Of royal blood, Nina ended up living next door to Edmund Wilson on Cape Cod. (Courtesy Sasha Chavchavadze)
McCarthy, whom Boyd interviewed near the end of her life, recalled plenty of choice details about the “austere” and “puritanical” Nabokovs, who were living in a modestly furnished apartment in Cambridge at the time. “He was quite anti-alcohol,” McCarthy recalled, “and Vera was even more prohibitionist.” McCarthy, in her late twenties, was trying her best to be a housewife, which prompted some gentle mockery from Nabokov. “He made great fun of my ‘lifestyle,’ ” as we would call it today,” she said in 1985, “which included quite a number of novelties, and he hated novelties.” For example, her cherries jubilee. “He was just horrified by it, he invented pseudonyms for it.”
But he ate it, and enjoyed it.
Later divorced from Wilson after eight stormy years of marriage, McCarthy professed to have been “amazed” by the subsequent falling-out between her former husband and Nabokov. “They had a ball together,” she told Boyd. “Edmund was always in a state of joy when Vladimir appeared, even more so at home than chez eux.”
In 1943 Wilson engineered a Guggenheim Fellowship*3 for Nabokov, who at the time was the rare laureate over the age of forty. Nabokov was temporarily out of work, and scrambling financially. The thank-you note was heartfelt: “Dear Bunny, I got that Guggenheim Fellowship. Thanks, dear friend….I have noticed that whenever you are involved in any of my affairs they are always successful.”
—
A WONDROUS BY-PRODUCT of the early years of the Wilson-Nabokov infatuation was their famous correspondence, which flourished during the 1940s and 1950s. Even during their protracted feud, Nabokov expressed the hope (though not to Wilson) that their letters might someday be collected. After Nabokov’s death, Vera and Elena Wilson recruited Simon Karlinsky, the University of California Slavic literature professor, to edit and annotate the letters, which were printed in two separate editions after new correspondence surfaced during the 1990s. The letters were eloquent enough to form the script for a short, two-pers
on epistolary play, “Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya,” edited by Terry Quinn and performed in selected venues, once with William F. Buckley playing Wilson and Dmitri Nabokov reading the letters written by his father.
The letters sparkle and roam over a beguilingly eclectic array of topics. With whom else could Nabokov share a bilingual play on words, in French and Russian? (“Il fait diablement chaud, ce qui n’est pas khorochaud.” [“It’s devilishly hot, which is not good.”] Khorosho means “good,” or “okay,” in Russian.) Good French meant a lot to Nabokov. He viewed it as the skeleton key to himself, and to his favorite poet. To “write about Pushkin and also about me,” you must know French literature, he once remarked to Karlinksy, who “had” French. Nabokov groused that neither Andrew Field, his first biographer, nor his friend Alfred Appel, who aspired to be his biographer, had a proper grounding in French literature.4
For whom else could Wilson compose a bilingual limerick, alluding to butterfly genitalia?
Our perverse old pisatel’ [writer] Vladimir
Was stroking a butterfly’s femur
“I prefer this,” he said
“To a lady in bed,
Or even a velvet-eyed lemur.”
Wilson was poking fun at Nabokov’s lepidopterical specialty—butterfly genitalia, which he described as “minuscule sculptural hooks, teeth, spurs, etc….visible only under a microscope.”*4
Who else could trade amphisbaenic poems, a literary subgenre named if not invented by Wilson? The amphisbaena was a mythological serpent that had two poison-spitting heads, one at the end of its tail. So Wilson christened a stanza in which the final rhyme was an anagram of the rhyme that ended the previous line, for example:
To the peaks of the nearest Azore
As the sun, a dry vin rosé,
Orange-pink, darkens the pines,
And I startle a pair of snipe.5
This prompted Nabokov’s response, “To E.W. on reading his amphisbaenic poem”:
At first my brain was somewhat numbed
By your somnambulistic numbers, Edmund….
For that matter, who else would read, much less write, pages upon pages about prosody, a subject on which both men considered themselves to be world-class experts? “Once and for all, you should tell yourself that in these questions of prosody—no matter what the language involved—you are wrong, and I am right, always,” Nabokov wrote to Wilson in what was very much not their last word on this deadly subject. Their discussions of English and Russian prosody*5 could fill a book, albeit not this one. Nabokov published a small book on Russian prosody as part of his Onegin translation.
For the first several years of their exchanges, the two men could cheerfully disagree, for instance, on the correct pronunciation of “nihilist.” (Nabokov pronounced the word “NEE-hil-ist,” Wilson “NIE-i-list.”) “Dear Volodya: Nihilist [NI-hilist] is pronounced the way I pronounce it—not NEE-hilist. See any dictionary.”6
Or on the question of lovemaking in taxicabs. Can it be done, and if so, how?
Wilson had been reading one of Nabokov’s Russian novels, Mary, in the original, and noted that the protagonists “are supposed to have had their first étreinte [embrace] on the floor of a taxicab. I don’t think you can have had any actual experience of this kind or you would know that it is not done that way.”
“My dear Bunny,” Nabokov promptly replied. “It could be done, and in fact was done, in Berlin taxi-cabs, models 1920. I remember having interviewed numerous Russian taxi-drivers, fine White Russians all of them, and they all said, yes, that was the correct way. I am afraid I am quite ignorant of the American technique.”7
In their serious exchanges about literature, Nabokov’s wildly heterodox tastes and eccentric judgments quickly established themselves. Dostoyevsky was “a third-rate writer and his fame is incomprehensible.”*6 Nabokov called Henry James “that pale porpoise” and viewed him as a warmed-over Turgenev manqué. T. S. Eliot and Thomas Mann were “fakes,” and when Wilson suggested that his friend include a Jane Austen novel in his Cornell survey course on European literature, Nabokov bridled. “I dislike Jane [Austen],” he informed Wilson, “and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers.” Nabokov reviled Freud, “the Viennese wizard” or “the Viennese quack,” and would later include him in a personal rogues’ gallery of four doctors to be avoided at all costs, the other three being: Zhivago, the protagonist of the Boris Pasternack novel that Nabokov hated; the international humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, about whom even Wilson had his own reservations (“can’t help feeling that there is something phony somewhere”8); and Fidel Castro, who had received an honorary doctorate from Moscow University.
Wilson held strong opinions, too. His daughter, Rosalind, remembered that, even though her father suffered a nervous breakdown in 1929, he also harbored a healthy skepticism about “Dr. Freud.” He complained about “that sort of nerve doctor” who treated him in the sanitarium: “He tried to get me on the couch. But I wouldn’t let him!”9 (Wilson left a different note in his diary: “The sanitarium was boring beyond description—no drinking!”10) Likewise Wilson was no stranger to magniloquent outbursts à la Nabokov: “I have been bored by everything about Spain except Spanish painting,” he once remarked in The New Yorker. “I have made a point of learning no Spanish, and I have never been able to get through Don Quixote….I have never visited Spain or any Hispanic country.”11
Wilson’s fascination with the Russian language often wells up in the correspondence, accompanied by playful attempts to show off for his erudite friend. Wilson liked to include the odd Cyrillic phrase in his letters, and Nabokov often responded with a phrase or two of his own. Wilson’s Russian isn’t of mere academic interest, because when the two men set to fighting, Nabokov asserted, forcefully, that Wilson was a hapless flounderer in the language of Pushkin.*7
To be fair, Wilson was generally aware of his Russian-language shortcomings, but he worked hard on the language, as a hobby. There are numerous handwritten notes and newspaper clippings in Russian sent by Nina Chavchavadze among Wilson’s papers, and family members and friends recall the two of them poring over Russian stories and poetry, with Nina taking Wilson by the hand, as it were. “Nina Chavchavadze and I read Pushkin together two or three times a week,” Wilson wrote to Nabokov in 1942. “I have just discovered how truly awful the Russian numerals are, and it has just about killed any faint hopes I may have had about ever learning to speak the language.”*8 12
The Chavchavadze translation machine didn’t always function perfectly, either. Wilson complained in a 1943 letter to his friend Helen Muchnic, a professor of Russian literature at Smith College, that he was finding Alexander Griboyedov’s classic play Gorye ot Uma (Woe from Wit) “appallingly difficult.” He adds that he appealed to Nina Chavchavadze for help, but “she didn’t understand it at all, either.”13
That same year Wilson published one of his first ruminations on the “true horrors” of the Russian language in the Atlantic Monthly.14 The five verbal aspects; the numerical dates in which every digit is separately declined; the further subdivision of the imperfective: “What, then, is one to do about Russian?” he wails. “One must observe the Russian verbs as the bird-watcher does birds, collect them as the lepidopterist does butterflies”—surely not a random metaphor.
Wilson apparently read enough of Nabokov’s Mary, then available only in Russian, to grasp the finer points of the taxi-coupling scene. On the other hand, he freely admitted to Nabokov in a December 1940 letter, “Your Priglasheniye na Kazn [Invitation to a Beheading] has stumped me. I had better go back to Tolstoy til my Russian is stronger.”15 Reading Tolstoy and Gogol, as he did, in the original is no mean feat, either. Wilson made schoolboy mistakes, muddling the easily confusable words for “Sunday” and “Resurrection”—both would be transliterated Voskreseniye, although they are spelled differently in Russian—and occasionally muffing a participle or a verb ending, as almost all nonnative speakers do. He certainly deserved an A for
effort. Wilson once sent Nabokov a six-line clerihew, in Russian, poking fun at Leo Tolstoy’s pretending to be a peasant. (A clerihew is a short poetic parody, usually of four lines rhymed aabb.) It’s not very good, and not very grammatical, and earned this scathing entry in Nabokov’s private diary: “Bunny Wilson sends me a lame little epigram he wrote in hopelessly bad Russian.”
After 1946 Wilson found himself living with a fluent Russian speaker, his fourth wife, Elena. Nina Chavchavadze introduced the pair. Elena was the granddaughter of the onetime Russian ambassador to Japan and the United States, and the daughter of a woman who left Russia in 1904 to marry a Prussian aristocrat. She Russified Wilson’s existence, in a limited way. “Elena is quietly transforming the house so that parts of it look like Turgenev,” he complained in a 1947 letter to Nabokov. Wilson addressed the introduction of his 1972 book, A Window on Russia, to Elena, recalling that “my Russian was so inadequate when you and I first married that when we tried to communicate in a language that other people could not understand, I spoke so very badly…that we were unable to understand one another.”
While it is true that Nabokov occasionally derided Wilson’s Russian, this is the same man who reached out to Wilson when he was looking for a translator for his most precious Russian-language creation, the novel The Gift. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, had suggested Avrahm Yarmolinsky, whose wife (and translating partner), Babette Deutsch, Nabokov would gleefully anathematize in later years. In any case, they wouldn’t do. “I know of one man who could do it if I helped him with his Russian,” Nabokov wrote, “but I am afraid you have other dogs to beat.”16 Wilson indeed replied that he was too busy, and that checking his uncertain Russian might present as much work as if Nabokov translated the book himself.