Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Despite his strong personal convictions, Nabokov would not lift a finger in the world of public policy. When the California Committee Against Capital Punishment asked for his help in 1960, he acknowledged that he supported their goal without reservation but would not contribute an article saying so. He had, he told them, already written “a whole book on the subject.”5

  In his eyes his books were his political statements, in every sense of the word. Though Nabokov could not help but notice America’s vulgarity after seeing it up close, and could not resist threading its book clubs, chewing gum, and prejudice into his stories, this was the treatment he had given almost everything he loved. But he found overt America-bashing distasteful and offensive. When it came to political systems, Nabokov had seen the competition, knew which horse he wanted to win, and was not going to do anything to trip it up.

  In the spring of 1964, Nabokov returned to America for a month to promote Eugene Onegin. After waiting longer than Lolita to see the light of day, the critical edition had finally made it into print through the auspices of a private foundation. While stateside, the Nabokovs headed to Cornell to pull some materials from storage in Ithaca. Old friends there found Nabokov more imperious than he had been in their fonder recollections, and noted that Véra looked more regal than ever.6

  Nabokov had visited New York City briefly two years before for the premiere of Kubrick’s Lolita, but the country to which he returned had changed in his absence. Federal troops had been sent to quell the riots that followed the forced desegregation of the University of Mississippi. Thirty-seven-year-old civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been assassinated by a reactionary the summer before. An African Cornell exchange student had been viciously beaten in Alabama that September, forcing the State Department to make an international apology to Ghana. Two weeks after Nabokov departed Ithaca for the last time, an assistant dean there launched a team-taught seminar on “The Negro Revolt” and what it would mean for America.7

  Racism against black Americans appalled Nabokov, who had touted Pushkin’s interracial background as early as 1942 at Spelman College as an argument against segregation.8 And in his curious personal mix of conservative and liberal politics, Nabokov found an unlikely kindred spirit in President Lyndon Johnson, whose commitment to war in Vietnam and support for civil rights mixed a perfectly Nabokovian cocktail.

  When Johnson had his appendix removed in the fall of 1965 and flashed his scar to reporters (an action entirely outside the possible universe for Véra, who had undergone the same procedure the year before), Nabokov sent the recovering president a telegram wishing him well and praising the “ADMIRABLE WORK YOU ARE ACCOMPLISHING.”9 Johnson had backed the Civil Rights Act the year before and the Voting Rights Act that March, both of which surely pleased Nabokov. And the sustained aerial bombardment of North Vietnam that had begun the same month (and would continue for three years) likely met with equal approval in Montreux, even as it drove tens of thousands of protesters into the streets from Berkeley to New York just days after Nabokov’s telegram arrived.

  Véra reserved a particular fury for the student demonstrators, wishing their universities would deal more harshly with them, believing that naïve Americans had failed to heed the warnings about Communists who had managed to infiltrate and destroy the U.S. educational system. Nabokov family friend William Buckley, running that month as a dark-horse candidate for mayor of New York City, was also unimpressed. Referring to the protesters as mincing slobs strutting their effeminate resentment, Buckley suggested they were the kind of people who “would have deserted little Anne Frank, if her tormentors had been Communists rather than Nazis.”10

  While Buckley shared the Nabokovs’ views on Communism, Vladimir and Véra remained on friendly terms with several people who were less supportive of American foreign policy. Edmund Wilson, it turned out, had not even paid income tax during the 1940s and the first half of the fifties. At the urging of his wife Elena, he had tried to settle up with the IRS in 1955, but the check had bounced. He ended up in court in 1958, and the ruling against him led to liens on his royalties and the small trust fund he had inherited from his mother.11

  Wilson had his revenge by writing a book about the experience, The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, in which he explained that he had not begun his personal tax holiday on principle, but after looking into the IRS and its machinations, he had been deeply disturbed by its labyrinthine nature, and was going to make as little money as possible in the coming years in order to starve the agency and the U.S. imperialism he saw as funded from its coffers.

  Wilson nonetheless found himself embraced by the Kennedy administration. When he was personally chosen by Kennedy for the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the IRS had sent a sixteen-page memo to the White House in protest, noting that he was in the process of writing a diatribe on income tax and the defense budget that denounced both the IRS and U.S. budgetary policy. President Kennedy had refused to retract his choice, answering, “This is not an award for good conduct but for literary merit.”12

  Wilson had not minded Kennedy’s affection, but he did not share Vladimir Nabokov’s high opinion of Lyndon Johnson. Reluctant to see the U.S. enter even the fight against Hitler, Wilson thought U.S. involvement in Vietnam a disgrace. When he was invited by the Johnsons to a summer arts festival, he responded with a rudeness that shocked staffers and infuriated the president. As the White House festival disintegrated into a public shellacking of the president by assorted esteemed thinkers and artists, Johnson fumed that his intellectual opponents were “sonsofbitches” and “close to traitors.” He swore to have nothing else to do with them.13

  2

  In the first months of Johnson’s administration, Wilson made his way to Montreux to visit Nabokov. He and Elena stayed three days, having dinner with Véra and Vladimir, and throwing a celebratory lunch for Nabokov on the second day. Wilson’s wife Elena, who had come from aristocracy herself, felt Vladimir was living “like a prince of the old regime.” The Nabokovs’ quarters were modest enough, but Wilson, whose financial troubles had not abated, was put off by the opulence of the Palace Hotel.14

  The two men had not seen each other for seven years. Wilson complained to a friend in the interim that Nabokov had made “a great grievance” of his dislike for Lolita, though his embrace of Doctor Zhivago had no doubt added to the strain on the friendship. During their years apart, they had continued to write to each other, but less often. In his growing isolation in Montreux, Nabokov more than once had made overtures to an increasingly silent Wilson, at times sounding plaintive (“You have quite forgotten me”).15

  Perhaps it was this longing for the closeness of their early friendship that led Nabokov to discard the wariness he had developed over the years with regard to Wilson’s literary opinions. After dithering, he had hesitantly given permission for prepublication proofs of his Onegin to be sent to Wilson in the months before the latter’s visit to Montreux—a decision which had surely provoked anxiety on both sides.16

  But for three days in Montreux, their friendship reverted to its delightful state in the echoing, empty Palace Hotel, largely bereft of visitors in the off-season. The two men took up their “conversational fireworks” and arguments over razors as if Lenin, Lolita, Zhivago, and the slow death of their twenty-four-year correspondence did not exist.17

  Among Nabokov’s most recent books, Wilson had disliked Lolita but admired Pnin, calling it “very good.” At the time of his arrival in Montreux, the record is not clear on whether he had even read Pale Fire, because he never weighed in on it. If he did not, it is a literary tragedy. Nabokov had threaded their shared language and arguments through his mad Zemblan tale as if creating a special dialogue that Wilson alone might understand.

  A key discussion of shaving, A. E. Housman, and literary inspiration in Pale Fire plays directly off portions of Wilson’s The Triple Thinkers, which Nabokov had read and critiqued. Wilson had suggested elsewhere that T. S. Eliot’s verses stick in o
ne’s head; Nabokov replied to Wilson that they did not lodge in his—and so Pale Fire delivers a girl struggling with Eliot’s most obscure words (grimpen, semipiternal). The lunatic Kinbote is seen by students in the book as “constantly quoting Housman,” whom Nabokov admired but Wilson had criticized as sterile.18

  John Shade, the very decent poet Nabokov created for Pale Fire, is a quintessentially American writer whose work lives in the shadow of Robert Frost. Nabokov, who expressed affection for his invented poet, had himself done readings with Frost, once being in the unenviable position of opening for him in Boston. But Wilson despised Frost, and across his career had accumulated a Nabokov-worthy list of insults against the man, calling him “third-rate,” “a dreadful old fraud,” and “one of the most relentless self-promoters in the history of American literature.”19

  Pale Fire includes reversed words (spider, redips) taken from one of Wilson’s poems, “The Pickerel Pond,” which also makes a passing reference to Nova Zembla.20 After reading that poem, Nabokov had sent Wilson several examples of his own in a similar rhyme scheme—including red wop and powder, T.S. Eliot and toilest—each of which Nabokov borrowed back and folded, with spider and redips, into the pages of Pale Fire.21

  Mocked by the uncaring townspeople in the novel, Kinbote is desperately trying to spin the fantasy of the lovely and beautiful Zembla, behind which Nova Zembla lurks. Along with the nods to Kinbote’s horrors—which seem to be part and parcel of the early camps under Lenin that Wilson was reluctant to acknowledge—Nabokov had privately folded their literary exchanges into Pale Fire, as if baiting Wilson to pay attention, to do the very historical approach favored by him. But Wilson never bit.

  He had not, in fact, bitten on the aspects of Nabokov’s work he might have best understood for more than twenty years. Returning to Nabokov’s 1941 poem “The Refrigerator Awakes,” written after a stay at Wilson’s house at the beginning of their friendship, it is not hard to peek behind the tale of a dedicated suburban refrigerator and find something darker. The poem, explicitly a desperate attempt to make sure a story will be told, was a first shot across the bow with Wilson, who then, as later, somehow missed or mistook the most important elements of the story at hand: the dead bodies in the ice, a “trembling white heart,” the torture house, the mention of Nova Zembla, and the agony of the burden of preserving it all.22

  3

  Instead of Pale Fire, Edmund Wilson turned his critical faculties on Eugene Onegin for a 1965 essay in the July issue of The New York Review of Books. In the first sentence, Wilson declares Nabokov’s project “something of a disappointment,” and vows not to let his friendship interfere with what he intends to say. The subsequent 6,000-plus words proceed to set off depth charge after depth charge. Nabokov “seeks to torture both the reader and himself.” The “lack of common sense” throughout the project led Wilson to interpret Nabokov as trying and failing to integrate his Russian and English selves.

  Hating Freud, Nabokov viewed Wilson’s psychologizing with equal contempt. But he had been just as biting the year before in an essay on someone else’s translation of Onegin (“something must be done … to defend the helpless dead poet”23), and Wilson explicitly used his friend’s venom as an excuse to turn Nabokov’s method on Nabokov himself. He upped the ante by bringing in personal matters—mentioning Nabokov’s limited knowledge of Latin and quoting from their letters.24

  There was plenty to criticize honestly without resorting to their past correspondence. Nabokov’s four-volume set had been out for a year, and other critics had been mixed in their evaluations. Several strongly disapproved of Nabokov’s plodding literalism, while others acknowledged the brilliance of his massive commentary. But Wilson also attempted to question his friend’s Russian, an unfathomable choice—one he was warned against by friends.25

  Nabokov defended his Onegin tactically, delving even deeper into personal matters once Wilson had struck the first blow. Revealing his years of attempts to correct Wilson’s errors during the latter’s “long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language,” Nabokov notes how as late as 1957, Wilson had him in hysterics with his complete inability to read Eugene Onegin aloud, then proceeds to dismantle some of Wilson’s “ghastly blunders.”26 The bulk of both men’s arguments lay in dull minutiae that were surely skimmed by most readers, who were riveted only by the spectacle of two living legends skewering each other.

  Wilson countered by admitting that he might have made some errors, and had realized in retrospect that his original piece sounded “more damaging than I had meant it to be.”27 Nabokov responded again at length arguing that Wilson had misunderstood the whole motivation for the story, explaining the cause of a deadly duel in Onegin lay in Pushkin’s stress on the idea that some things, amour propre among them, are stronger than friendship.28

  Having given permission in 1963 for his publisher to send copies of Onegin to Wilson, Nabokov believed that his friend had begun plotting his attack before he visited Montreux. Wilson actually began reading the edition much later, but Nabokov did not know the truth, and believed that his friend had played at the charade of their 1964 reunion even as he was preparing to publicly savage their friendship.29

  And so Onegin’s literary duel spurred another in which no lives were lost, but the closest friendship of Nabokov’s adult life was permanently broken. Wilson had somehow traveled a path from seeing Nabokov’s views as “neither White Russian nor Communist” in the first months of their friendship to adopting a kind of blindness that reduced Nabokov to a stereotype.30 Yet had Nabokov been less cryptic, or less publicly insistent on his fiction’s irrelevance to the real world, and had Wilson read Pale Fire with half the attention he had paid to Eugene Onegin, the latter might have found new ways to consider so much of what went to the heart of the distance between them.

  Nabokov had taken the subjects of many of their conversations and debates and immortalized them. Pale Fire did not just bear witness to the imprisoned and the dead of Russia, it was also a chronicle of two decades of repartee between Wilson and Nabokov, an inadvertent elegy for a friendship that would soon be lost.

  4

  The Onegin Wars alternately subsided and staggered on for more than two years, during which Nabokov offered that “Pushkin had almost as much English in the 1830s as Mr. Edmund Wilson has Russian today.”31 As if seeking to rewrite the disintegration of relations between them, Wilson drafted a piece—written under a pseudonym—in which he suggested the whole fight had been orchestrated, with his initial mistakes put in intentionally, and Nabokov’s biting response actually penned by him. To his credit, Wilson’s letter does not appear to have ever been submitted for publication.32

  Nabokov did, however, send an interminable, point-by-point refutation of Wilson’s piece to Encounter magazine for publication in February 1966. And he could not resist strafing other would-be translators with fire on the matter of Onegin. Nabokov was published again in Encounter that May, when poet Robert Lowell criticized his translation of Pushkin as a “spoof” on readers, and he, in return, asked Lowell to “stop mutilating defenceless dead poets.”33

  For internationally minded Western intellectuals, Encounter was a hot forum in publishing well into the 1960s. The brainchild of poet Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, it regularly published work by notable writers, from E. M. Forster to Sylvia Plath and Jorge Luis Borges. Edmund Wilson had expanded on his early review of Doctor Zhivago in its pages; Mary McCarthy had written reviews for it. Encounter had even published Solzhenitsyn’s follow-up to Ivan Denisovich, “Matryona’s Home,” a story of a beleaguered peasant woman who sacrifices everything she has to an ungrateful and blind village.

  By 1963, publication in a forum with some of the most famous names in modern literature was no fluke for Solzhenitsyn. Nearly a million copies of Ivan Denisovich had sold in the Soviet Union alone—clearing all the print runs off the shelves. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn kept a low media profile, maintaining a control even beyond that exerted by
Nabokov. With few exceptions, he simply refused to speak to journalists.34

  For someone who had grown up in isolation from much of the dynamic literature of his day, Solzhenitsyn was utterly uninterested in seeing what he had missed and was willing to reject more or less everything that he had not read.35 Whatever literary power Solzhenitsyn had acquired, it was gained in spite of his isolation. By contrast Nabokov had grown up in the embrace of centuries of culture from Russia, Europe, and America, rising to the pinnacle of an international literature that he had studied in depth. They both had read—and admired—Tolstoy and Chekhov. But Solzhenitsyn had less to build on, making it that much more extraordinary that he somehow adopted the emotional power of Tolstoy wholesale and applied it to a different kind of epic history.

  After the publication of Ivan Denisovich, he began to hear from people who responded to that power, receiving piles of letters from those who had been in camps, who had seen their lives destroyed by the system. He wrote many of them back, asking for more detail on their stories and sending follow-up questions.36

  His mail included scraps of notes that he recognized as having been smuggled out of the camps, which led him to the realization that despite Khrushchev’s promises, the system still existed. Not only did it still exist, but Solzhenitsyn learned that Khrushchev had implemented an even more draconian regime of food restriction.37