The Feud

by Alex Beam

  Most convincingly, Gerschenkron indicted Nabokov for meanness of spirit, for failing to celebrate the reflected beauty of Pushkin’s glorious poem in the work of the many scholars who had enriched the collective understanding of Onegin. We know, for instance, that Pushkin enciphered fragments of the unpublished chapter 10. Nabokov had written that “[Pyotr] Morozov easily broke the clumsy code” in question. “This patronizing tone about the major achievement of a scholar,” Gerschenkron wrote, “comes with exceedingly poor grace from a writer who is ever ready to exult over his own little discoveries.”

  This was the critique that Wilson should have written, but could not. Gerschenkron had the Russian, the French, the German, and a Nabokovian self-confidence in his grasp of Onegin. Wilson, who had a nodding, sidewalks-of-Cambridge acquaintance with Gerschenkron, realized this at once. He quickly dashed off a note to the academic:

  [Your article] is the best thing, the only really thoroughgoing study. I tried to do something about it, but, on the Russian end, was not so well equipped as you. I wonder whether Nabokov has seen it. He was furious about my piece. Like all people who play practical jokes and like to make other people ridiculous, he’s always either aggrieved or indignant when anybody tries anything of the kind on him.4

  Nicholas Dawidoff, Gershenkron’s grandson, wrote a brisk and admiring biography of his ancestor, The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World. Describing this incident, Dawidoff pointed out that “Nabokov had made a point of answering and rebutting every last critic of the translation that had taken so many years of his life, but in [Gerschenkron]’s case he did not reply.” Dawidoff quotes the Slavicist and Nabokov specialist Alexander Dolinin saying that “I noticed that all the objections and notions of Gerschenkron were so correct that Nabokov quietly made all of Gerschenkron’s corrections when he put out his second edition of Eugene Onegin.”5

  Nabokov thought that the merciless Gerschenkron takedown might have been a Harvard hit—and that Wilson had his finger near the trigger. Nabokov learned that Wilson had passed the article on to their mutual friend Roman Grynberg for publication in a Russian journal that Grynberg edited. Nabokov to Grynberg, February 1976: “About Gerschenkron: His article is far from innocent (it was written, with the most vulgar grimaces, in defense of Harvard’s [Dmitri] Chizhevsky, whom I ruffled with good reason), and you can tell Wilson from me, that in passing it on he’s a scoundrel.”

  It is probably no coincidence, as the Marxists like to say, that Chizhevsky was a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, alongside Roman Jakobson, who became a Harvard celebrity. Jakobson, like Nabokov a finely honed talent who sprang from an affluent, pre-Revolutionary background, was one of Nabokov’s bêtes noires. At a famous Cambridge dinner party hosted by Harry Levin in 1952, Nabokov forgot, or pretended to forget, Jakobson’s patronymic, a cheap insult in Russian etiquette. That same evening Levin’s young daughter tape-recorded both men reading Pushkin. When Jakobson inflicted his Moscow accent on the Petersburg poet, Nabokov audibly commented, “Eto uzhasno” [“That’s awful”].6

  A few years later Nabokov formally broke with Jakobson while the two men were collaborating on a translation of the folk poem The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Jakobson traveled to the USSR and maintained ties with Soviet academicians, a line that Nabokov refused to cross. “Frankly, I am unable to stomach your little trips to totalitarian countries,” Nabokov wrote in 1957, “even if these trips are prompted by scientific considerations.” “Nabokov was in fact convinced that Jakobson was a communist agent,” according to the biographer Brian Boyd.

  In 1957 Jakobson scotched Nabokov’s chance to become a Harvard professor. When a small groundswell, nurtured in part by Harry Levin, emerged to offer Nabokov tenure in the Slavic Languages and Literature Department, Jakobson, the chairman, uttered the quote heard ’round the Yard: “Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?” Soon afterward Hurricane Lolita blew Nabokov to the Alps, where he became more famous, and richer, than an entire Fellows Table of Harvard professors.

  Nabokov had a vengeful nature, and avenge himself he did. In his 1969 novel, Ada, there appears a hapless academic, “Dr Gerschizhevsky.” “Vivian Darkbloom” ’s footnote explains that “a Slavist’s name gets mixed here with that of Chizhevski, another Slavist.” (Vivian Darkbloom, a famous anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, is also a character in Lolita.) Nabokov had borrowed the names of two of his least favorite scholars—Gerschenkron and Chizhevsky—both of Harvard, and lampooned them in his bestselling book. Chizhevsky, himself the author of an Onegin commentary, had already taken quite a buffeting from Nabokov, who at different moments in his “Commentary” derided Chizhevsky’s work as “careless,” “stumbling,” and “worthless.”

  When The New York Times asked Gerschenkron about his unwilling cameo in Ada, he called it “a small man’s revenge.”

  This is not, to steal Nabokov’s line, the last look we shall take at this dismal scene.

  * * *

  *1 In one of the few letters not printed by the Review (but filed in Wilson’s papers) a Russian instructor from Reed College challenged Wilson’s analysis of pochuya: “This class of perfective adverbial participles ending in –a (-ja) is discussed in [sections] 820–822 of the first volume of Grammatika russkogo jazyka published in 1960 by the Soviet Academy of Sciences.”

  *2 Actually Nabokov was hoping to wage war on two fronts simultaneously; he offered the Encounter rant to Barbara Epstein at The New York Review, but she declined to publish it.

  *3 In a letter to his Bollingen editor William McGuire, Nabokov elaborated on the “private grudge”: “In 1962 Daniels coolly named me as a sponsor when applying for a Guggenheim fellowship. The Foundation asked me for details and I wrote back saying I had never given G.D. the permission to use my name, and that anyway I disapproved of his translation (wretched rhymed paraphrases.)” Whatever his motives, Daniels ridiculed Nabokov’s Onegin, calling out “monstrosities of ‘non-English’ verging on gibberish, outright mistranslations and total lapses of sensitivity.” He mocked Nabokov’s “Man-Dog-Bite Word Order,” for example, “But portends bereavements/the pitiful tune of this dit [sic],” and caught the master in a couple of infelicities that prompted minor changes in the second edition.

  *4 When he republished the “Reply” in a 1973 collection, Nabokov noted that “rememorated” had disappeared from the revised edition of Onegin, “for reasons having nothing to do with the subject of this essay.”

  *5 Nabokov treated Lowell to the Full Vladimir in a memorable New York Review dressing-down in 1969. Olga Carlisle (“Miss Carlisle” to Nabokov, ignoring her marital status), the granddaughter of the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev, had commissioned Lowell to translate Soviet-era poets, reworking her own, literal—that is, Onegin-like—translations. “If this kind of thing becomes an international fashion,” Nabokov fumed, “I can easily imagine Robert Lowell himself finding one of his best poems…adapted in some other country by some eminent, blissfully monolingual foreign poet, assisted by some American expatriate with a not too extensive vocabulary in any language.”

  9

  Until Death Do Us Part

  The epistolary clashes over Onegin had wound down by the end of 1967. Wilson and Nabokov had suspended their correspondence. However, Nabokov did like to scratch the itch. In October 1966, he wrote to Page Stegner, an English professor at Ohio State who was compiling The Portable Nabokov: “You have a perfect right to quote Edmund Wilson on my contempt for ignoramuses but your readers might have liked to be told that…I proved him one.”1 A few months later, Vera asked Stegner to include Vladimir’s Encounter broadside, “Reply to My Critics” in the compendium: “The inclusion of this piece V.N. considers very important because Mr. Wilson furtively continues his personal attacks.”

  Nabokov continued to play his little tricks. In the thick of the Onegin war he was reediting and embellishing his 1951 memoir, Speak, M
emory, which could be counted on to sell thousands more copies now that its author was world famous. In the revision Nabokov compared his childhood inability to capture a rare butterfly to the “absurd oversight” in chess made by the “world-famous grandmaster Wilhelm Edmundson” during a match with the “local amateur and pediatrician, Dr. Schach, who eventually won.” Professor Elizabeth Sweeney deserves credit for solving this intricate puzzle. Schach is a dig at the popular pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and also the German word for “chess” (and the Russian word for “check,” in chess). Noticing that Nabokov’s butterfly has “a white W on its…underside,” Sweeney writes, “invites the careful reader to transpose the syllables of the name ‘Wilhelm Edmundson.’ ”2

  More prosaically, there was no world-famous grandmaster of that name.

  In the Wilson household, Nabokov remained very much on the radar. The two men often laundered their opinions and accusations through their common friend Roman Grynberg, a businessman and publisher who had known and liked both writers since the 1930s. In prebreakup 1962, Wilson shared his opinion of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire with Grynberg, but not with the author. “Have you seen Volodya’s new book?” Wilson inquired. “I read it with amusement, but it seems to me rather silly. Do let me know what you think of it. I expected that the professor would turn out to be the real King and that the commentator would be the assassin; but he doesn’t seem to have had this idea….The book must have been inspired by his own commentary in Onegin.”*1

  Nabokov’s next new novel was Ada, and Wilson again shared his opinion with the Grynbergs. “Have you people read Volodya’s new novel? I am just about to do so. I understand that he takes a nasty crack at me in it.” Indeed he did. Sweeney decoded yet another anti-Wilson dig, this time buried in “Vivian Darkbloom” ’s notes at the end of Ada. Darkbloom explains that the chess player identified as “the Minsk-born Pat Rishin (champion of Underhill and Wilson, S.C.)” is a play on the word “patrician.” Darkbloom further explains: “That epithet [refers] to a popular critic, a would-be expert on Russian as spoken in Minsk and elsewhere.” “Underhill” is a play on Norman Podhoretz’s name; pod gore = “under hill,” approximately. Podhoretz wrote a famous 1958 essay on Wilson, “The Last Patrician.” In their post-Onegin ping-pong in The New York Review, Wilson accused Nabokov of adopting the Belarusian (Minsk) pronunciation of the word “czar.”

  —

  WHY NABOKOV PURSUED his personal attacks is a mystery. The two men’s fortunes had diverged, considerably. The second half of the 1960s was not particularly generous to Wilson, especially by contrast with Nabokov, upon whom fortune continued to smile.

  Wilson’s health had been poor for much of the decade. He had been suffering from gout, exacerbated by too much drinking, since the 1950s. He also developed serious heart problems, diagnosed as angina in the winter of 1961. There were many times during his later years when he had trouble walking, or ended up in a hospital, from which he more than once checked himself out. Getting to sleep was a problem, often resolved by scotch and Nembutal. His deteriorating health hardly interfered with his literary output, however. He reissued several books in the second half of the decade and composed some new ones as well: A Prelude: Characters and Conversations from the Early Years of My Life, taken from his journals, and The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1947–1969, a sequel to his successful 1955 journalism about the archaeological discoveries in Jordan’s Qumran Caves.

  Wilson experienced professional setbacks as well. He could fulminate all he wanted against U.S. imperialism and the taxmen in his 1963 pamphlet, The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, but the IRS was demanding its $70,000 in unpaid taxes.*2 His wife, Elena, appealed to family friend and Kennedy White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who jawboned the IRS into a $25,000 settlement. That applied to back taxes only.3 At one point during the 1960s, the service held a lien on all of Wilson’s literary earnings. He finally bounced the IRS sapajou off his back by auctioning off his papers to Yale and by mortgaging his Talcottville, NY, home.

  On the asset side of the ledger Wilson found himself on the receiving end of several sizable, tax-free literary awards, including the one-thousand-dollar Emerson-Thoreau Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (He complained about the ceremony in his journal, noting that “the dinner and drinks were skimpy, as they are likely to be in Boston.”) He also won the National Book Committee’s five-thousand-dollar National Medal for Literature, and the munificent thirty-thousand-dollar Aspen Award from the Great Books–loving grandees of the Aspen Institute. Wilson’s doctor said his heart couldn’t withstand a trip to Aspen (elevation 7,900 feet), so instead he suffered through a lavish banquet laid on in his honor at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

  Most of the attendees were rich Aspen Institute supporters. Jeffrey Meyers reports that “the oil millionaires who gave the award did not know why he had won it and circulated Who’s Who under the table to find out who he was.”4 A plutocrat’s wife asked if he had written Finlandia. “The whole thing was slightly humiliating,” Wilson recalled.5 And not just for Wilson. His friend Paul Horgan remembered that Wilson “leaped for the check, crying out, ‘Tax-free! Tax-free!’ ” Wilson then insulted his benefactor, the Aspen president William Stevenson, by asking him to spell his name for a book inscription.6

  The award was discontinued soon afterward. Wilson was the last person to win it.

  In his journal The Sixties, published twenty years after his death, Wilson confessed that he was “a man of the twenties.” The sixties weren’t his decade. Paris wasn’t the same; the Princeton Club had been remodeled, not much to his liking. Nylon stockings, “which used to last for months, now run at the slightest contact,” and don’t get him started on disposable razor blades.7 His frenemy Alfred Kazin wrote of Wilson in the sixties that “he was so definitely not of this time.” Kazin called the paunchy Wilson, brandishing a gold-topped walking cane, meandering up and down “the intellectuals’ beach” in Wellfleet, a “character,” and not a very appealing one:

  The sight of him in his Panama hat and well-filled Bermuda shorts, the cane propped up in the sand like a sword in a declaration of war, instantly brought out in me the mingled anxiety and laughter that I used to feel watching Laurel and Hardy crossing a precipice. There was so much mischief, disdain and intellectual solemnity wrapped up behind that getup, that high painfully distinct voice, that lonely proud face.8

  The journals record a life of pain, fraught with world-weariness. “Reading the newspapers, and even the world’s literature, I find that I more and more feel a boredom with and scorn for the human race,” he wrote in 1966. That same year he drafted a poem, published in his 1971 memoir, Upstate: “…In a cage/I stalk from room to room, lose heat and speed./Now entering the dark defile of age.”

  He was seventy-one years old.

  Across the ocean, amid the towering Alps, Vladimir Nabokov found the late 1960s very much to his liking. Lolita had made him a rich man who could travel where he wished and write exactly what he wanted. Nabokov did not need to go to the world; the world came to Nabokov. Whether it was a squad of Time magazine factotums converging on Montreux to prepare their unctuously flattering cover story (“Prospero’s Progress”) in May 1969, or the “hot” young Paramount producer Robert Evans come to read Nabokov’s latest novel, Ada, in galleys, Nabokov luxuriated at the center of his self-created and self-contented universe. He busied himself by translating his “Sirin” stories from Russian into English (Nabokov’s Quartet), with a new edition of Speak, Memory, and of course with the publication of the instant best seller Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. The book sold well on the strength of the author’s worldwide fame, but many readers shared Evans’s assessment of the book, which he speed-read twice, jet-lagged and high on amphetamines: “It was torture.”

  The world had confirmed what Nabokov and his wife had always suspected: that he was a genius. Immodest slips had always been part of the Nabokov show. In the 1950s he had started to
refer to Anton Chekhov as “my predecessor.” When he was translating the folklore tale The Song of Igor’s Campaign in 1959, he wrote to Wilson that “Russia will never be able to repay all her debts to me.”9 “I think like a genius,” was the provocative opening line to Strong Opinions, a collection of his interviews and essays. Brian Boyd correctly observes that “he thought the critical acclaim merely his belated and inevitable due.”10

  The Time cover story allowed him to dump on his fellow “American” authors. Philip Roth? “Farcical.” Norman Mailer? “I detest everything that he stands for.” He had joined Roth, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, and W. H. Auden as perennial Nobel Prize also-rans, writers whose names floated to the surface among each year’s contenders, only to sink back again into the dispiriting slough of success and fame. Nineteen-seventy was again such a year, so that when a Montreux Palace Hotel clerk put through a long-distance call from Stockholm, the maestro braced himself for good news from the selection committee. Alas, it was only a graduate student asking for help with her thesis.*3

  In one of his most complicated literary démarches, Nabokov wrote a poem in 1959 parodying Boris Pasternak’s famous lines about his accursed Nobel Prize. (Pasternak: “What wicked thing have I done…I, who forced the whole world to cry/Over my beautiful land.” Nabokov: “What is the evil deed I have committed?…who set the entire world a-dreaming of my poor little girl?”) But the venture is more complicated. In the final verse Nabokov speculates that, despite being banned in Russia, in a future day “a Russian branch’s shadow shall be playing/upon the marble of my hand.” In other words a future Russia would erect a statue to honor its loyal son Nabokov.