by Alex Beam
One paragraph later Field called the men “competitors.”
“We were never competitors,” Nabokov notes. “In what, good gracious?” “Competitors” stayed.
Detailing Wilson’s solicitude for Nabokov, Field wrote that “Wilson was so energetic in Nabokov’s interest that he even turned to friends with requests for loans.” “Impossible,” Nabokov objected. This, too, stayed in the text.
In his draft Field mentioned that Nabokov and Wilson worked together translating The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Nabokov objected, apparently forgetting that the two men discussed an article on Igor for The New Yorker in 1948, which Nabokov eventually wrote, and the magazine rejected.17 In the heady post-Lolita years, when almost anything with Nabokov’s name found a publisher, Random House issued his translation of and commentary on Igor—actually a retranslation; he had created a version for his Cornell lectures—done without any input from Wilson.
But in rebutting Field’s minor inaccuracy, Nabokov asserted: “We never worked together,” which was untrue. One of his first bylines in an American magazine was his translation of Pushkin’s “little tragedy,” Mozart and Salieri, for the New Republic, a collaboration with Wilson. The two men exchanged draft outlines of a proposed joint book on Russian literature for several years.
Most egregiously Nabokov attempted to recast the well-known story of how the two men met. In the version Nabokov wanted Field to print, “Nabokov’s first awareness of Wilson’s existence was in the late summer of 1940 when N. [sic] received in Vermont a letter from him suggesting they meet in New York. They did.” This completely reverses the terms of trade, as if Wilson sought out the great novelist in his summer retreat. The truth of the matter was that Nabokov’s well-established relative, the composer Nicolas Nabokov, begged Wilson to lend a hand to his needy cousin, and Wilson graciously complied.
Longevity has its privileges—in this case, rewriting history not as it was, but as one wishes it had been.
* * *
*1 The mad, erudite Frederick Exley devoted the better part of his second book, Pages From a Cold Island, to Wilson. Exley indulged the surprising opinion—unique to him—that John Shade, the nominal poet-creator of Pale Fire, was closely modeled on Nabokov’s then-friend Wilson.
*2 There are many examples of unintentional hilarity in Wilson’s The Income Tax, including the moment when the purportedly bereft Wilson admits to IRS inspectors that he owns two homes and rents a third.
*3 Wilson had his own false Nobel moment. Late in life he eagerly tore open a thick envelope mailed from Stockholm, only to discover a crank letter alerting him to a world conspiracy of sex-changing assassins who communicated via ESP.
*4 In a way he did respond, albeit not publicly. Harvard’s Houghton Library purchased Nabokov’s personal copy of A Window on Russia in 2009. Nabokov marked up his books in his delicate, faint cursive, and he marked this one up quite thoroughly. Nabokov is a fastidious—in the English meaning, not the French—copyeditor, and he catches Wilson in dozens of small Russian errors. For example, it’s Novoye Vremya (neuter) not Novaya Vremya (feminine); Belinsky’s patronymic is Grigorievich, not Gregorivich, and so on. He even scores Wilson for misspelling the Gerund Heard Round the World, pochuya, the sniffing of the naggy, which Wilson spells “pochua.” Naturally the man who insists on calling the Tolstoy novel “Anna Karenin” will not stand for Wilson’s reference to “Alexandrina Tolstoya.” He thinks Wilson’s observations on vocabulary are inane, especially the contention that the Russian words for “snow” and “hole in the ice” are synonyms; “two different things,” Nabokov corrects.
As for Wilson’s comments on his novels and on his personality, Nabokov finds them hard to take. He underlines and double-question marks Wilson’s contention that he “somewhere refers to himself as an Englishman.” Nabokov doesn’t like being compared to the “platform poetics” of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and he’s pretty sure that Wilson misunderstood the ending of Luzhin. Nabokov likewise questions Wilson’s assertion that “there is often a very young girl with whom, as in the case of Lolita, [the hero] is very much in love” in the early novels. One can only imagine the thundering letter he would have mailed to The Guardian, following Martin Amis’s 2009 essay, “The Problem with Nabokov,” which stated that six Nabokov novels “unignorably [concerned themselves] with the sexual despoliation of very young girls.”
*5 These 1966 remarks in Encounter terrified Nabokov’s editors at Bollingen, who fretted that they might have to replate all of Onegin, at tremendous expense. “We may prepare ourselves for his wanting to replace the translation with another,” editor McGuire wrote to his boss, John Barrett, that year. “While this threatens to be a dreadful nuisance and expense, a revised text by Nabokov will surely be interesting and important.”
10
Just Kidding?
When the Onegin imbroglio was at its height, the editors of The New York Review of Books sent Wilson copies of the feud-related letters they intended to publish. A letter from Stephen P. Jones of Noank, Connecticut, appeared in the Review, in edited form. Wilson kept a copy of the complete version in his files. Jones professed to admire both combatants, and treated himself to a hearty lunch before tackling Wilson’s meaty critique:
It was upon a full stomach then, that I realized that the whole article was a hoax and that Mr. Wilson had no hand in it whatsoever, that it had been written by Mr. Nabokov as an appendix to Pale Fire and given to Mr. Wilson as a gesture of the friendship referred to in Mr. Wilson’s first paragraph in order that he might buy his dog one of those decadently delightful cushions.
Jones was a real fan. The dog cushion made a Checkers-like appearance in The Cold War and the Income Tax, Wilson’s rant against the Internal Revenue Service. Wilson claimed an IRS agent reprimanded him “for having spent too much money on liquor…and for having bought a $6 mat for my dog.”1
The Review deleted the dog reference, and also Jones’s helpful proposal for resolving the nastiness between the two men:
As to whether or not horses ‘sniff ‘ snow or ‘sense’ it or merely ‘smell’ it, I think we should do what we always do here in town when two old men at the hotel fight over the bathroom: have the chambermaid swallow the key. But yet again, we are very provincial here with long winter nights, nasal horses, deep drifts, etc.
Jones anticipated by a few months the outraged Robert Lowell’s suggestion in Encounter that Nabokov was spoofing his readers with his nine hundred-plus pages of Onegin arcana. Also in Encounter, Paul Fussell detected a whiff of parody in Nabokov’s “Notes on Prosody”: “He has always delighted in parody, and what we have here is like the parody of a dissertation or a textbook.” It escaped no one’s notice that just two years earlier Nabokov had published Pale Fire, a sinister and complicated parody of a “novel in verse” accompanied by a ridiculously overdetermined commentary.
The idea that Nabokov was playing games with his audience in constructing Onegin’s Rube Goldberg–like scholarly apparatus seems ridiculous, and the notion that Nabokov the sleight-of-hand artist may have been feigning umbrage during his feud with Wilson seems equally preposterous. It wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except that the elderly Wilson apparently believed it to be true.
Nabokov was arguably the twentieth century’s Trickster King, addicted to punning, a form of humor which Wilson hated, and to games of all kinds, especially hoaxes.*1 In his Cornell literature lectures, which he read from a prepared text, he would sometimes start reading again da capo, and wait for the drowsy undergrads to figure out what had happened. He once included “Sirin,” his Russian pen name, in a list of the five greatest Russian poets. When a student asked who that was, Nabokov answered, “Ah, I shall read from his work,” but didn’t elaborate.2
Harry Levin remembered a Cambridge gathering in the early 1940s, when the freshly arrived Nabokov convinced a prominent, left-leaning academic that Joseph Stalin wasn’t the real dictator of the Soviet Union. Pointing to a photo
graph from the Tehran summit, Nabokov put his finger on Pavlovsky, Stalin’s ubiquitous interpreter. There—that’s the man who’s really running the country, Nabokov insisted. Stalin is just the front man.3
Nabokov thought liberal academics: (1) knew nothing about the USSR; and (2) would believe anything, Q.E.D.
One of Nabokov’s most elaborate tricks proved to be a hoax within a hoax, a gloss of Churchill’s famous description of the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” In 1950, he wrote an unpublished “Chapter Sixteen” to his childhood memoir Conclusive Evidence, which, reedited and renamed, would later become the classic Speak, Memory. Chapter 16 was a parody of a joint book review, of Conclusive Evidence and of When Lilacs Last, a fictional, patrician New England memoir (a “beautiful, compassionate, intensely feminine quest in the kingdom of things past”), which the author proceeded to ignore. The “review” was jocoserious, on the one hand mocking the flowery pieties of American book reviewing of the time:
the diamond-pattern of art and the muscles of sinuous memory are combined in one strong and supple movement and produce a style that seems to slip through grass and flowers toward the warm flat stone upon which it will richly coil.4
At the same time the “review” was pregnant with insights into the ambitious, little-known Russian-American writer. Nabokov discussed at some length his pre-American career as Sirin, who “had gained a lasting place in Russian literature, despite the fact that his books were banned in his mother country.” In passing he explained how his transition to writing in English trumped the experience of Joseph Conrad, “whose English style, anyway, was a collection of glorified clichés.”
Writing in the voice of an anonymous reviewer, Nabokov said he lived “in the simple disguise of an obscure college professor of literature with spacious vacations devoted to butterfly hunting in the West.” Our reviewer knew the author’s shortcomings: “One cannot help being irritated by certain peculiarities of Nabokov’s manner…[which] seems to combine a good deal of absentmindedness with his pedantism.” The man is annoying! “Few people will share his contention that [T. S.] Eliot’s poetry is essentially platitudinous,” we read. “Then, too, there is his contempt for Dostoevsky which makes Russians shudder and is disapproved of in the academic circles of our greatest universities.”
But inside this hoax Nabokov discussed one of his most famous hoaxes, then known to a relatively small group of Russian émigré literati. A prominent critic of the Russian diaspora, George Adamovich, admired Sirin’s prose but refused to like his poetry. As an obituary tribute to a famous Russian poet, Vladislav Khodasevich, Nabokov published an eloquent verse eulogy, in the name of “Vasily Shishkov.” Adamovich could not contain his elation: “Who is Vasily Shishkov?” he wrote. “Every line, every word is talented.” In the Paris journal Posledniye Novosty (Latest News), Adamovich quoted all the Shishkov he could, and repeated: “Again I must ask who is this Vasily Shishkov?”5 Nabokov soon revealed all in an obviously fictional short story that purported to be an “interview” between Sirin and the mysterious Shishkov,*2 who conveniently disappeared to work on his new magazine, A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity.
That was in 1939. The latter-day Nabokov, living large on Lake Geneva, never lost his taste for trickery. To prove a point—just what point isn’t clear—he insisted in 1967 that the Saturday Evening Post publish a letter in which he accused the magazine of libeling a Cornell colleague, “the poet Sam Fortuni.” He admitted that Fortuni was (1) fictional and (2) an anagram, but he wanted to punish the Post for departing from the verbatim text of an interview he had agreed to publish. The hapless Post editor complained that (1) no one could decipher the anagram and (2) printing a letter of apology for defaming someone who didn’t exist seemed a bit much, frankly. Nabokov reiterated his demand, and helpfully explained the mathematical anagram, a “very simple combination SAM FORTUNI = 12345678910 = 35178942106 = MOST UNFAIR (a phrase actually used in my letter).” The letter ran.
Was Nabokov gaming Wilson during their famous feud? The New Statesman poured gasoline on this fire by publishing a 1967 review of Andrew Field’s book, Nabokov: His Life in Art. In 1967 Field and Nabokov were still close, and Alan Brien, reviewing for the Statesman, suggested that the book was written by Nabokov himself. Brien asked if “this, like its predecessor, Pale Fire, is an elaborate literary hoax with only a glancing surface resemblance to a serious critical study by another author?” “We dedicated Nabokovians” know the master’s love of pseudonyms, of which “Andrew Field” may well be one, he argued. In jest. We think.
Wilson saved this review, and the odd letters that the Statesman published afterward. One correspondent, Ronald Vincent-Smith, agreed that the Field book gave “off a strong smell of Pale Fire.” The following week, one A. Bluhm implored the Statesman: “Will you pu-lease stop kidding (Hi, Lolita) and publish an authoritative editorial statement about the bona fides of Andrew Field, alias Vivian Darkbloom…” For the record, Andrew Field was and is a real person, and, as previously noted, Vivian Darkbloom is a fictional anagram of Vladimir Nabokov that he used in both Lolita and Pale Fire.6
This bizarre exchange gave Wilson a very bad idea. The University of Missouri professor Gennady Barabtarlo was the first to spot the rough draft of a letter to the Statesman among Wilson’s papers. Wilson, Barabtarlo thought, was in a tight spot: “Wilson must have found his position thoroughly uncomfortable because of the swarm of blunders and indefensible stances in his original article that Nabokov had exposed, and was bewildered by all this gallimaufry in print and afraid that he might have missed some disguised digs of Nabokov’s cunning.”7
So Wilson drafted a pseudonymous letter to the Statesman, instructing his secretary not to type it on his personal stationery because “it is part of a joke.” Although not entirely legible, here is what the handwritten draft says:
…the recent polemics between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson have [illegible] elements of hoax. My theory would be that a comedy had been planned by Nabokov and Wilson.
The original article in The New York Review of Books on Nabokov’s edition of “Evgeni Onegin” was authentically the work of Wilson, who intentionally included in it a few rudimentary mistakes in Russian. He then toyed [?] a retort by Nabokov in which he caricatures the virulence with which that brilliant writer is in the habit of attacking anyone who has aroused his animosity by criticizing him or competing with him. [Emphasis added]
The withering ripostes and counterthrusts, Wilson wrote, were actually written inversely, with Nabokov playing the part of Wilson, and so on. “This…shows with clarity just how badly smarting were the cuts Wilson had sustained in the clash,” Barabtarlo elaborated. Quite wisely, Wilson never sent the letter.
Barabtarlo unearthed another oddity in the Wilson papers, a letter of support from an unidentifiable Russian correspondent. Here is Barabtarlo’s translation:
…I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. I do so because, in the first place, you so aptly, so brilliantly, so profoundly, and so caustically let that mister have it whom we both hold in rather low esteem and whom moreover I for one (as a Russian), do not quite take for a writer, although I like his Eugene Onegin very much….
You are the only writer who could accomplish that tour de force and that’s why it seems to me that you are the only person in the world who could, and in my opinion should translate Eugene Onegin into English for mankind, for Pushkin, and maybe for yourself. You hold all the aces in your hand: you are an Anglo-Saxon, a famous and profound writer, you know thoroughly the Russian language, without commanding it (because you rarely speak it) and, besides, nobody feels and loves that period of Russian revolutionary life quite as you do.
Barabtarlo notes “the extraordinarily striking resemblance this letter bears to the style of the Double in Nabokov’s short story ‘Double Talk’!” In other words the letter may have been a crude hoax mailed to Wilson by Nabokov.
This theme would emerge one last time before
Wilson’s death, in the pages of The New York Times Book Review. The Times had reviewed Upstate, Wilson’s memoir of his times spent at his ancestral manse in Talcottville, New York. Upstate, published in 1971, included the previously cited barbed account of Wilson’s 1957 visit to the Nabokovs in Ithaca.
The Times published two letters in response to its review, both from men who claimed to have been at Cornell at the time. The correspondent Diron Frieders (an anagram for “Sordid Refiner”; sorry, I couldn’t resist) said he was “an objective observer [who felt] compelled to step into the fray.” Frieders claimed to have been a student of Nabokov’s who had gathered “some rather precise data about the ‘friendship’ of these two friendly enemies.”
The two men’s hostility stemmed from two incidents, according to Frieders. First he recounted that when Nabokov initially tried to contact Wilson in 1940, the celebrated critic kissed off the émigré nobody with one of his famous, preprinted “Edmund Wilson Regrets” cards. (No fan or foe of Wilson’s has ever suggested this to be true.) Frieders also wrote that, while a guest at the Nabokovs’ in 1958,
Wilson (according to my sources) shoved his foot into one of Vladimir’s cherished butterfly nets, ripping it beyond repair….N, to this day, is convinced that the incident was no accident but rather a demonstration of contempt for his much-publicized hobby. (Wilson at one time had commented that “Butterfly-chasing is an activity unbecoming to a writer.”)8