by Alex Beam
There is an odd artifact among Nabokov’s papers—a short, newsy letter from Wilson, written entirely in Russian.17 It is brief and chatty, written at about the level of an accomplished second-year language student. Wilson muffs a preposition when alluding to his forthcoming book Patriotic Gore. Otherwise his penmanship is excellent and his grammar is functional. In most classes, he would earn a solid B+.
The early letters also tease out a delicate issue: Wilson’s opinion of Nabokov’s writing. In 1941 Laughlin sent Wilson the proofs of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and as he testified in his blurb, he loved it. “The whole book is brilliantly and beautifully done,” Wilson wrote to Nabokov. “You and Conrad must be the only examples of foreigners succeeding in English in this field.”
The next novel, Bend Sinister, presented a problem. Wilson didn’t like it (“I was rather disappointed”) and told Nabokov as much in a long January 1947 letter. He thought the book was slow: “It doesn’t move with the Pushkinian rapidity that I have always admired in your writing.” More important, he thought Nabokov’s fictional account of life in a soul-crushing dictatorship rang false. “You aren’t good at this kind of subject,” Wilson commented, “which involves questions of politics and social change, because you are totally uninterested in these matters and have never taken the trouble to understand them.”
Having said that, Wilson kept his feelings to himself, and talked the book up to his friend Allen Tate, an editor at Henry Holt, which published Sinister that same year. Nabokov had hoped for a different reaction, and Simon Karlinsky thought Wilson’s lack of enthusiasm evinced a “crack” in the men’s relationship. He may have been right. A small academic subculture has sprung up to prove that Sinister has elements of a tribute to Wilson, and that many of the two men’s heated debates, for example, over Shakespeare’s use of iambs, found their way verbatim into the text.18 Nabokov clearly thought Wilson had missed the point of the book, and had missed the subtle allusions to their friendship. One year after publication he wrote to Wilson about Sinister, “You should read it someday.”19
Wilson loved Nabokov’s next book, Conclusive Evidence, the childhood memoir that would later be republished as Speak, Memory. “The English of Conclusive Evidence is at least as good as Conrad’s,” Wilson wrote to Nabokov, “and has qualities that Conrad could never have managed.”20
These were private comments. Although he did sometimes review books by friends of his—for example, the novelist Dawn Powell and his Princeton classmate, the poet John Peale Bishop—it did not go unnoticed that Wilson never reviewed a book by Nabokov during the first quarter century of their friendship. Elena Levin noticed, and thought that it rankled Nabokov.21 Wilson often made noises about writing an overview of Nabokov. For instance, in 1952 he told Vera that “the time is approaching when I am going to read [Vladimir’s] complete works and write an essay on them that will somewhat annoy him.”22 But the promised tour d’horizon never materialized.
When the Nabokov-Wilson imbroglio boiled over in 1965, Nabokov archly observed that “I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels.” By that time Nabokov was flush with cash and internationally famous as the author of Lolita, one of the best-selling books in the world. It was strictly speaking true that Wilson had not reviewed a Nabokov novel, but he did review Nabokov’s eccentric critique of Nikolai Gogol,*9 his second submission to Laughlin’s fledgling New Directions publishing house, for The New Yorker.
The review says pretty much everything Wilson thought about Nabokov’s writing, with no punch pulled. The praise was sincere. “Mr. Nabokov…is a novelist of the non-realistic sort, and he has written the kind of book which can only be written by one artist about another—an essay which takes its place with the very small body of first-rate criticism of Russian literature in English.”
The criticism was equally direct. “His puns are particularly awful,” and “the reader is also annoyed by the frequent self-indulgence of the author in poses, perversities and vanities…and, along with them, a kind of yapping and snarling in principle at everything connected with the Russian Revolution that sometimes throws the baby out with the blood bath.”23
When he reprinted the review in a 1950 collection, Wilson added one final line that he must have known would irk Nabokov: “In spite of some errors, Mr. Nabokov’s mastery of English almost rivals Joseph Conrad’s.”
Enough with the Conrad already! Nabokov hated the all-too-frequent comparisons with Conrad, who achieved worldwide fame in English, his second language. Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was a Polish seafarer who began his literary career at age thirty-eight, writing in English. Nabokov complained to Wilson about the last line of the Gogol review: “Conrad knew how to handle readymade English better than I, but I know better the other kind.”24 In an interview with the New York Times not long after, Nabokov elaborated on his disdain for Conrad: “It irritates me a little when people compare me to Conrad,” he explained.
Naturally I am not at all displeased in a literary way; that isn’t what I mean. The point is Conrad had never been a Polish writer, he started right in as an English writer. I had had a number of books in Russian before I wrote in English. My books were completely banned in Russia and circulated among the Russian émigrés only. There were millions of them.25
Translation: I am a far more accomplished writer than Conrad. In 1967, when he was internationally famous, Nabokov let his hair down in a Playboy interview: “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, and bottled ships, and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés.”*10 Another trespass: Nabokov would have known that Conrad had praised the work of the famous Russian-to-English translator Constance Garnett, one of Nabokov’s bêtes noires. (“I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit,” he lamented to his publisher Laughlin while puzzling through her version of Gogol’s play The Government Inspector.)
Nabokov might have admired Conrad more had he known that the Anglicized Pole shared his disdain for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. “[Conrad] hated him because he was Russian, because he was mad, and because he was confused,” the Spanish novelist and critic Javier Marias notes in Written Lives, “and the mere mention of his name would provoke a furious outburst.”
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ANDREW FIELD, who spent years with Nabokov researching a snakebit biography, says the letters to Wilson represent Nabokov’s “most protracted and voluminous” correspondence.26 The two men were unashamedly intimate companions. “You are one of the very few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them,” Nabokov wrote to Wilson in 1948, returning a borrowed pair of socks.27
Their early years together had elements of a courtship, thriving on shared discoveries. Nabokov once even tried to jolly Wilson into sampling butterfly collecting: “Try, Bunny,” he wrote. Collecting butterflies “is the noblest sport in the world.” They savored the dialectic of conflicting opinions, but they had many traits in common, too. Neither man could drive. Nabokov must have noticed, and envied, Wilson’s notorious preprinted kiss-off note (“Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read Manuscripts…Broadcast or Appear on Television…Take Part in Writers’ Congresses…Autograph Books for Strangers,”), which gained a certain renown in twentieth-century American letters. He eventually drafted his own version: “Vladimir Nabokov finds it impossible to answer all the kind letters he receives from his readers. He extends his warmest thanks to the many friends and strangers who send him…”
“I was sometimes in doubt as to what kind of role I wanted to play,” Wilson wrote near the end of his life, but “I have never had much real doubt about who or what I was.”28 The same words apply to Vladimir Nabokov.
Both men also shared a pointed disdain for the professorate and its Pecksniffian sensibilities. Nabokov and Wilson each wrote nasty attacks on the academy, Nabokov in his 930-page Onegin “Commentary” and in the novel Pale Fire. Wilson took immense delight in pasquinading the Modern Langu
age Association, the academic ossuary for literary pleasure. (“It publishes a periodical…which contains for the most part unreadable articles on literary problems of very minute or no interest.”29) At the same time, both men kept a Willie Sutton–like eye trained on American universities: That’s where the money was. Nabokov toiled in the academic vineyards for almost two decades, including eleven years as a distinguished professor at Cornell. Wilson, who was neither a good teacher nor a good lecturer, eagerly pursued the top-dollar honoraria occasionally proffered by status-seeking colleges and universities.
“Edmund Wilson regrets…” Perhaps the most infamous three-by-five-inch card in twentieth-century American literature. (Private collection)
For many years Wilson and Nabokov could ask each other almost anything. Just two years into their friendship, Wilson inquired if he might be able to take over Nabokov’s teaching slot at Wellesley College because a promised visiting professorship at Cornell had fallen through. Nabokov diplomatically answered, no, it’s my job.30 A few years later Nabokov broached a similar request (“I should not like to seem to be butting into your own arrangements in any way…”): Could he cover books for The New Yorker when Wilson went on leave? Wilson talked to editor William Shawn, who said he had already penciled in other editors for what Nabokov called “the inter-Wilsonian gaps.”31
Nabokov was duly grateful for Wilson’s entrée into The New Yorker, which not only brought his work to a large and sophisticated audience but also paid well. Nabokov liked the magazine and especially liked his fiction editor, Katharine White. But early in his tenure with the magazine, “a man called Ross started to ‘edit’ ” one of his stories, “and I wrote to Mrs. White telling her that I could not accept any of those ridiculous and exasperating alterations.”32 Harold Ross, who was the magazine’s founder and editor in chief, yielded considerable ground during this dustup after Nabokov threatened to take back his story.
Aware of the magazine’s longing to “iron out” Nabokov’s prose, Wilson sent White a very long letter not only defending his friend’s idiosyncratic style (“How can you people say it is overwritten?”) but also attacking the magazine’s penchant for publishing prissy prose. Nabokov’s story could only seem overwritten “in contrast with the pointless and inane little anecdotes that are turned out by the New Yorker’s processing mill and that the reader forgets two minutes after he reads them—if, indeed, he has even paid attention, at the time his eye was slipping down the column, to what he was reading about.”
Wilson went on to deride “the New Yorker’s idea of style” generally. “The editors are so afraid of anything that is unusual, that is not expected, that they put a premium on insipidity and banality.”33 It was a generous gesture, and both Wilson and Nabokov contributed to the magazine for another quarter century.*11
Wilson loved magic and liked to perform tricks for small children. His eldest daughter titled her memoir of life with him Near the Magician. Nabokov was likewise obsessed with sleight of hand and prestidigitation, most especially in literature, in making things not as they seem. It’s hard to think of a Nabokov creation that isn’t a trick, or a puzzle to be worked out. There is his famous foreword to The Gift, in which he begs the readers of this most autobiographical of novels about Russian émigrés in Germany “not to confuse the designer with the design.” Or the equally well-known Lolita afterword, where he writes that “any comments coming straight from me may strike one—may strike me, in fact—as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book.” Nabokov is the man who preferred to put quotation marks around the word “reality,” for good reason.34
When his mother died in 1951, Wilson inherited a sprawling, beloved old stone house in upstate Talcottville, New York. He had read that one of Casanova’s mistresses memorialized their relationship by etching their names on a windowpane with a diamond. In a stairway of the Talcottville house, Wilson had windowpanes engraved with etched messages from his many famous friends. Using a diamond-pointed pencil, Wilson’s guests W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Dorothy Parker, and the French poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse (Alexis Leger), among others, etched messages for posterity. Nabokov left a brief rhyme in Russian: “There are nights when as soon as I lie down/My bed sails off to Russia.”
In a beautiful passage from his 1972 memoir, Upstate, Wilson recalled that “the pane with the Nabokov poem on the upstairs door to the balcony came out in a beautiful way against the pink background at dawn, looking like a pattern of frost. I called up Volodya and told him this and he came back with one of his inescapable puns: ‘There is an English word for that: rime.’ ”35
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ON MAY 25, 1957, a friend drove Wilson from Talcottville to Ithaca, New York, to visit the Nabokovs. It was an interesting moment in the hosts’ lives. Lolita had appeared in Paris, published in English by Maurice Girodias’s pornography-dabbling Olympia Press. It had achieved a succès de scandale, but not much else, as both England and America had banned its importation. Wilson had read the original manuscript and disliked it. He could comfortably assume that Lolita would fizzle in Europe, where louche books enjoyed a modest half-life, sputtered, and died. There seemed to be little chance that an American publisher would risk a lawsuit and publish a comedy about pedophilia.
At the same time Nabokov was very close to finishing his translation of Eugene Onegin, a sleek little vehicle with a Winnebago-size appendage in tow—the vast, unwieldy 930-page “Commentary.” That, too, could be safely assumed to be box-office death. Who would publish, much less buy, Nabokov’s overstuffed white elephant? He had shown portions of the manuscript to Wilson, who told Helen Muchnic that “the translation is good, I think. He has more or less accepted my method, in the passages I translated, of following the text exactly and writing lines of irregular length, with a metrical base of iambic pentameter.”
This alludes to an Onegin stanza that Wilson translated in his 1936 New Republic article, “In Honor of Pushkin.” Nabokov saw the essay in Wilson’s 1948 collection, The Triple Thinkers, and indeed credited Wilson as “the first to have adopted unrhymed iambics for rendering EO.” Nabokov then pointed out numerous inaccuracies in Wilson’s stanza when Onegin came out in 1964.
During this stay Nabokov challenged Wilson to read aloud from the Russian text of Onegin. The result was disastrous. Wilson botched the very first line, improperly stressing the Russian word for “uncle,” reading “dya-DYA” for “DYA-dya.”36 Nabokov would later recall that Wilson’s “rather endearing little barks…soon had us both in stitches.” But when he later chose to recollect that shared moment, neither man was in a laughing mood.
The two-day visit had the inevitable ups and downs. Wilson reported that the kerfuffle in Paris over Lolita, and the warm reception of the short novel Pnin, serialized in The New Yorker, had lifted Nabokov’s spirits. As did a copy of L’Histoire d’O, the French erotic novel that Wilson had brought along as a house present. “He agreed with me,” Wilson recorded in his journal, “that, trashy though it is, it exercises a certain hypnotic effect.” Vera Nabokova frowned on the two men’s tittering enjoyment of nyeprilichnaya literatura (“indecent literature”) and made sure that Wilson took the book with him when he left. During the visit Wilson and Vera embarked on a lengthy dispute about the meaning of the French adjective fastidieux, which Wilson correctly insisted meant “tiresome” or “boring,” and not “fastidious.” This battle about nothing lingered in the correspondence for several weeks.
In his journal, Wilson wrote, “I always enjoy seeing them,” and added a demurrer: “But there is also something in him rather nasty—the cruelty of the arrogant rich man—that makes him want to humiliate others, and his characters he has completely at his mercy.”
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*1 Wilson, by contrast, was no clotheshorse. In Here at The New Yorker, (1975), Brendan Gill described his colleague as “a short, overweight man in floppy dark clothes, wearing a floppy hat and carrying a floppy briefcase—and one saw at once that of all
the languages he had mastered, dress was the language that concerned him least.”
*2 In her memoir of life with her father, Close to the Magician, Rosalind Wilson remembers Nina as an occasional source of naughty tales: “Anastasia had been a very unpleasant child, pulling the wings off butterflies, par exemple.”
*3 Wilson—presciently?—called them “Googleheims.”
*4 The website atlasobscura.com reports that Harvard’s Peabody Museum has preserved Nabokov’s “ ‘Genitalia Cabinet,’ where hundreds of documents, cigar boxes crammed with butterfly penises, and dried out specimens were all labeled in Nabokov’s elegant handwriting.”
*5 “That corpse of a topic,” as the former Oxford Professor of Poetry Christopher Ricks calls it. Nabokov’s prosodic logorrhea on this subject is ironical, because in a 1930 letter to his brother Kirill, who was writing poetry in Prague, Vladimir explained that “all the schemes of Russian poetry” can be broken down into five simple elements, which he listed in about 150 words. “As you see, this is all simple,” Vladimir wrote, “and can be assimilated in five minutes.” In real life Nabokov probably wrote a thousand pages on the subject.
*6 Nabokov even scorned Dostoyevsky’s famous 1880 speech at the unveiling of a Pushkin monument in Moscow, often credited with enshrining the poet in the Russian literary canon. Nabokov noted that Dostoyevsky bungled some Onegin facts, “which goes to show,” he wrote, “that Dostoyevsky had not really read Eugene Onegin.”