by Alex Beam
Although Lolita was battling heavy weather in the Old World, the United States had moved on from the days when conservative Catholic publicists could pillory “indecent” books. Much-banned books such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, were finding their way, legally, into bookstores. The Supreme Court had recently struck down a Michigan book-banning ordinance. Ironically it was Wilson’s erstwhile friend Felix Frankfurter who opined that for Michigan to outlaw adult books that might hypothetically fall into the hands of children was “to burn the house to roast the pig.” What seemed provocative in 1946 was just another stop on America’s vicarious bed-hop in 1958. Grace Metalious had relocated Hecate County to rock-ribbed New Hampshire, selling one hundred thousand hardcover copies of her steamy best seller, Peyton Place. Furthermore, Lolita was high art; Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Stephen Spender, and any number of equally acculturated worthies said so.16
I doubt anyone would have told Wilson this, and I doubt he would have acknowledged it, but Lolita was a far better book than Hecate County. It was better written, better plotted, and, in parts, hilarious. (“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…we are not sex fiends!”) The novel laughed with itself and poked fun at itself with a gossamer irony that simply wasn’t in Wilson’s literary tool kit.
Hurricane Lolita (from Pale Fire, ll. 679–680: “It was a year of tempests, Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine”) swept across Europe, America, and the world, changing the Nabokovs’ lives forever, and inevitably changing their relations with Edmund Wilson. Wilson acknowledged to Nabokov that the “rampancy of Lolita…seems to have opened the door to other wantons,” meaning that Hecate County would reappear in 1959.17 But it flopped, and Lolita continued to soar, over new countries and over new continents. Wilson could be forgiven for thinking: There but for the errant grace of God go I.
* * *
*1 That was the mature John Updike opining. As a fourteen-year-old boy, Updike checked Hecate out of the Reading, Pennsylvania, public library and savored the gamey bits, his “first and…most vivid glimpse of sex through the window of fiction.” Similarly, teens in the 1960s pawed through Rabbit, Run and Couples, hunting for the “good parts.”
*2 In his memoir, To the Life of the Silver Harbor, Wilson’s son, Reuel, recalled the odd sex advice that his father dispensed: “The sole purpose of love, he pontificated, was marriage and children. Like his Puritan ancestors, and his idol, Leo Tolstoy, my father maintained that the aim of sex was procreation, not recreation.” Reuel knew that this was high Polonian poppycock, and had nothing to do with the way Edmund had chosen to live his life.
*3 In his book Literary Rivals the author Richard Bradford floats the idea that Lolita is a complicated parody-cum-putdown of Wilson’s Hecate County. As evidence, he notes that Humbert Humbert’s first lover was named Annabel, and that Annabel sounds a lot like Anna, the protagonist’s (that is, Wilson’s) working-class lover in Hecate County. Wilson recognized the parody, Bradford writes, and “it was the cause of the end of their friendship.” In a word, no.
*4 The self-effacing Elena Wilson is something of a cipher, known to us mainly through Wilson’s diaries, where he documents their lovemakings, their quarrels, and their occasional European jaunts. Her reaction to Lolita suggests that she had refined literary tastes, and indeed Wilson often praises her judgment in his journals. Aside from a brief, elegant exchange of letters with Vera Nabokova after their husbands’ deaths, little of her writing survives. The exception is a six-thousand-word unpublished manuscript, “My View From the Other Window,” primarily describing her life at Wilson’s Talcottville manse, which she loathed. It’s a well-written, occasionally too-candid (“Edmund…would be sitting on the front porch drunk in the early sunshine”) portrait of life with the Great Man.
*5 Editorial committees all over America were cold-shouldering “Lo.” Wilson’s daughter Rosalind, who worked at the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin, was in the room when “Jack Leggett…asked at an editorial meeting if we would like to see a book by Nabokov about an older man in love with a young girl. We all said no.”
4
Whose Mother Is Russia Anyway?
Lolita dominated the American best-seller lists well into the fall, until Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago displaced it at the number-one spot on the fiction list. Both books lingered near the top of the list for more than a year, creating yet another curious battleground for Nabokov the novelist and Wilson the critic.
Nabokov and Pasternak knew about each other. Russian literature was too small a playing field, and their talents were too large, for them to be strangers. Nabokov often hailed Pasternak as a great poet, “a kind of masculine Emily Dickinson,” albeit one whose style had some rough edges. When the first manuscripts of Doctor Zhivago surfaced in the West, a friend suggested the ideal translator to Pasternak: “a poet, who is completely bilingual: Vladimir Nabokov.” “That won’t work,” Pasternak replied. “He’s too jealous of my wretched position in this country to do it properly.”1
That is a hard comment to parse, because Pasternak had been suffering from censorship and torment through the decades of Joseph Stalin’s rule. He may have had an insight that almost no one shared: that Nabokov would have traded places with him, just to replant his roots in Russian soil.
Nabokov’s conduct vis-à-vis Pasternak and Zhivago was erratic and disgraceful. Aesthetically, he didn’t like the book. One could argue that it was a big, sprawling mess, chronicling the stories of storm-tossed characters pinballing around the canvas of early-twentieth-century Russian and Soviet history. Dr. Yuri Zhivago is a poet hiding from history; his mistress, Lara, is the ineffable soul of Russia; Strelnikov is the self-invented servant of the dialectic; Victor Komarovsky, memorably played by Rod Steiger in the David Lean movie, is a Dostoyevskian titan of evil and manipulation—or is he? It’s a wonderful melodrama about events that Nabokov couldn’t stand to see distorted and stylized. He thought the book was a saccharine, jerry-built overview of a period of Soviet history best remembered for mass terror and government-induced famines. “Dreary conventional stuff…trashy, melodramatic, false and inept” were opinions he tried to keep to himself for much of 1958, not only because it was unseemly to sully a competitor, but also because he knew Pasternak was going through hell in Moscow. The Soviet cultural authorities denounced him as a “pig” and worse.
In October 1958, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Doctor Zhivago leapfrogged over Lolita to the number-one spot on best-seller lists all over the world. The Soviet Writers Union expelled Pasternak and forced him to decline the award. Nabokov, over time, became unhinged on this subject. Whether he saw himself as a more deserving Nobel candidate (probably), whether he resented sharing literary center stage with a fellow Russian whom he regarded as a lesser talent (possibly), or whether he simply thought Zhivago was a bad book (definitely), he began suggesting that Zhivago—far from being a courageous assertion of literary freedom in a prison society—was a piece of Soviet propaganda artfully transplanted to the West.
Both Nabokovs thought the explanation of how Zhivago surfaced in the West was too cute by half: “Any intelligent Russian would see…that the book is pro-Bolshevist and historically false, if only because it ignores the Liberal Revolution of spring, 1917,” Vera wrote to her friend Elena Levin.2 That is, the liberal revolution in which Nabokov’s father played a historic role. QED, the book was a KGB plant.*1 Nabokov went so far as to suggest that Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, had written the manuscript. It’s true that Ivinskaya, an accomplished editor and translator, had helped Pasternak translate some poetry. But she would have been generally unavailable to help with Zhivago, because in 1950 she began a five-year sentence in the gulag. Indeed, she miscarried Pasternak’s child shortly after her arrest and imprisonment. Know them by the company they keep: It was Nabokov and the vestigial Stalinist stooges inside the USSR who pushed the ugly Ivinskaya theory. Nabokov likewise suspected that Al
exander Solzhenitsyn was a KGB cat’s-paw, until the USSR expelled him in 1974.3
Did Nabokov have a mean streak? Definitely, and it became more pronounced as he aged. Where did it come from? His first biographer, Andrew Field, who felt the razor’s edge of Nabokov’s scorn, thought Nabokov was deeply influenced by his literature teacher at the Tenishev school, the Symbolist poet and cynic V. V. Gippius. Gippius was the only schoolteacher whom Nabokov mentioned in his memoirs. Another Tenishev student, the famous poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled that Gippius taught “literary malice,” “a literary posture,” Field writes, “which to a certain extent [Nabokov] has never abandoned.” “There is something bestial about the portrait of Gippius,” the scholar Clarence Brown wrote in his biography of Mandelstam: “Paradoxically the love of literature was nurtured in his students by a man who hated literature, who saw in the length and breadth of its history an ample field for the spitefulness of his nature.”
Nabokov eventually went to war with Field, contesting hundreds of biographical details, including this one: “The Tenishev school’s inflicting Gippius upon me is no reason for your repeating the process,” he wrote.4
By contrast, Wilson embraced Zhivago fervently. His lengthy, laudatory review in The New Yorker, “Dr. Life and his Guardian Angel,” placed Zhivago solidly in the firmament of great works of literature. After some lengthy throat-clearing in which he berated Zhivago’s translators for multiple errors and misconceptions of the Russian language,*2 Wilson finally arrived at his point of departure. Zhivago “is one of the very great books of our time,” he declared. “It is not really a book about Russia,” he continued. “Its main theme is death and resurrection…the author never departed from his Christian ideal of taking every individual seriously as a soul who must be respected.” Wilson jauntily compared Pasternak with Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and James Joyce, and finished his piece with a peroration seldom seen in book reviews then or since:
Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius. May his guardian angel be with him! His book is a great act of faith and art and in the human spirit.
Wilson waxed full-tilt mystical on Zhivago, doubling down on his questionable premise that the novel was a profoundly Christian work, pregnant with religious symbolism, for example, “the five barless windows in the house in Siberia are the five wounds of Jesus.” He went even further in Encounter magazine, alleging that “the more one studies Doctor Zhivago, the more one comes to realise that it is studded with symbols and significant puns, that there is something in it of Finnegans Wake, and something of the cabalistic Zohar, which discovers a whole system of hidden meanings in the text of the Hebrew Bible.”5
Pasternak, who was born Jewish and attended Russian Orthodox services, just shrugged when he read Wilson’s Encounter article. “Whoever has seen such symbols in Doctor Zhivago,” the author wrote to Max Hayward, “has not read my novel.”
Nabokov was well aware of Wilson’s Zhivago-philia. Wilson complained to their mutual friend Roman Grynberg that Nabokov was “behaving rather badly about Pasternak. I have talked to him on the telephone three times lately about other matters and he did nothing but rave about how awful Zhivago was. He wants to be the only Russian novelist in existence. It amuses me to see Zhivago just behind Lolita on the best-seller list, and I am wondering whether Pasternak—as they say about horse-races—may not nose her out.”6
Nabokov kept close watch on the horse race taking place in the bookstores, and with the novels still battling for primacy on the best-seller lists nine months after publication, he goosed Putnam to keep pace with the opposition. “The Zhivago gang is doing its best to prop up the sagging doctor,” he wrote Putnam’s chief, Walter Minton. “Should we not do something in regard to our nymphet?”7
Wilson occasionally mailed Nabokov rubber-band-powered butterflies that would flutter out of envelopes containing their correspondence. Around this time, he sent Nabokov a paper butterfly, with one wing labeled “Lolita” and the other, “Zhivago.” One wonders how that gift was received in Ithaca.8
The Zhivago contretemps cast a chill over the Nabokov-Wilson relationship. The biographer Brian Boyd notes that Nabokov chose this moment to ask James Laughlin, his first American publisher and Wilson’s friend, to delete Wilson’s fulsome blurb from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Laughlin knew as well as anyone that Knight owed its few sales in 1941 to the cachet of Wilson’s endorsement. Boyd writes that Nabokov likewise took umbrage at Wilson’s “writing so ecstatically about Doctor Zhivago while dismissing Lolita before reading it to the end.”
Nabokov wrote to Minton at Putnam to ensure that his new publisher wouldn’t solicit blurbs from Wilson for any of his future books. “Personally, I am against all endorsements,” Nabokov wrote from his perch atop the best-seller lists, “especially the ones that come from old friends. In this case, however, I am prompted to say what I say by my utter disgust with Edmund’s symbolico-social criticism and phoney erudition in regard to Doctor Zhivago.”*3 9
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THEIR DISAGREEMENTS ABOUT Zhivago concerned not only literature but also politics, where the two men’s differences were starting to become more pronounced.
Nabokov vociferously objected to any account of the Russian Revolution that failed to document what he called the post-1905 “social movements” and what American leftists and Soviet propagandists called “bourgeois liberalism” in czarist Russia. Russia had a parliament starting in 1905, and in the same year eliminated prior restraint of the press. (Lenin’s newspaper Pravda became legally available in 1912.) As Nabokov saw it, Russian history was not an all-or-nothing proposition. He felt that historically underinformed Americans always assumed that Trotsky, Lenin & Co. were the only alternative to czarist rule, and that the mystical workings of the dialectic assured that only Nicholas II or the Bolsheviks could have ruled Russia after 1917. Of course he knew differently, because his father, and dozens of influential politicians like him, had tried to bring constitutional democracy to Russia. In addition he knew that Russia had a semifunctioning constitutional democracy for about a decade, before its violent overthrow by Soviet power in 1917.
Wilson viewed himself as an expert on this subject. After all, he had written the book To the Finland Station, which explained to literate Americans the inevitability of Leninist rule. He had visited the Soviet Union—admittedly for only a few months—but he often pointed out that Nabokov knew only the Russia of his remembered childhood, the Russia that hadn’t existed for decades, at the very start of their friendship.
“I do not want to be personal,” is how Nabokov began one of his most didactic political lectures directed at Wilson, a portion of which he reproduced in Speak, Memory:
Your concept of pre-Soviet Russia, of her history and social development, came to you through a pro-Soviet prism. When later on…the pressure of inescapable facts dampened your enthusiasm and dried your sympathy, you somehow did not bother to check your preconceived notions in regard to old Russia while, on the other hand, the glamor of Lenin’s reign retained for you the emotional iridescence which your optimism, idealism and youth had provided. What you now see as a change for the worse (“Stalinism”) is a change for the better in knowledge on your part.
Let me spell that out for you, Nabokov suggested:
Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Lenin’s and Stalin’s regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia…Periodicals of various tendencies and political parties of all possible kinds, legally or illegally, flourished and all parties were represented in the Dumas.10
Wilson wasn’t going to let Lenin go just to please Nabokov. (Mary McCarthy once observed, “It was a mistake for Edmu
nd to like Lenin, but that was the only way he could believe in the Russian Revolution.”) In an essay published in 1949, Wilson wrote that Lenin “was fond of fiction, poetry and the theater, and by no means doctrinaire in his tastes,” citing Lenin’s wife as his source.11 Nabokov thought this was perfect poppycock. “When Lenin says ‘Pushkin,’ ” he wrote, “he is not thinking of our Pushkin, but of an average Russian mixture of a) school manuals, b) Tchaikovsky, c) hackneyed quotations, d) a kind of safe feeling about Pushkin as being ‘simple and ‘classical.’ ”
Entrusted with editing the Nabokov-Wilson correspondence, Simon Karlinsky sided with Nabokov in this argument. In his 1937 essay, “Marxism and Literature,” Wilson wrote that the greatest literary writers of Russia’s early twentieth century were Lenin, Trotsky, and the poet Alexander Blok, also a favorite of Nabokov’s. “Wilson took almost no notice of the remarkable Silver Age of the early twentieth century,” Karlinsky noted, citing the famous literary flowering that included Anton Chekhov, Leonid Andreyev, the Nobel Prizewinner Ivan Bunin, as well as the poets Sergei Esenin, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.12