Eminent Epistolarians

...Jlnd yet "Bunny" and "Volodya" clung to each other, realizing no doubt how precious was the gift of sophisticated intelligence and cosmopolitan erudition they gave each other They exchange in these letters—aside from endless, fascinating literary agreements and disagreements —touching accounts of serious financial problems and bedeviling illnesses, but nothing is so compelling as the expressions of reciprocal need "You are one of the very few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them," Nabokov writes Wilson m the very letter that contains a strong rebuke "I am appalled by your approach to Faulkner It is incredible that you should take him seriously " He warns Wilson against his "socioeconomic approach," his "ideological content" "Keep it down, keep it down for God's sake " That was in 1948, in 1950 Nabokov writes even more movingly "Keeping up this exchange of letters is like keeping up a diary—you know what I mean—but please do not give up, I love your letters " Keep it down and keep it up—emotional and ideological incompatibilities that had to be somehow navigated around But they must both have recogmzed the usefulness of this epistolary diary in it, each man could see truthfully mirrored the shape of his undisguised mind For a long time Nabokov and Wilson toyed with the idea of collaborating on a book on Russian literature Nothing came of it, just as nothing came of the major essay on Nabokov that Wilson contemplated writing "I think that the time has come," Wilson informed Mrs Nabokov, "when I am going to read his complete works and write an essay on him that will somewhat annoy him " Undaunted, Nabokov responded to Wilson's sending him The Shores of Light with "I think I am going to read—or reread—these pieces with great pleasure—with some nasty bit of criticism popping out of me at the least expected moment " I wonder, though, what would have happened if Wilson had accepted Nabokov's 1948 offer to collaborate on the "scholarly prose translation of Evgemi Onegin with copious notes " But he didn't, and, at first, he seemed to approve tentatively of Nabokov's performance "The translation is good, I think," he wrote Helen Muchmc in August 1955 It is too bad that the present book does not (or could not) include Wilson's review of that translation and the ensuing exchange of biting letters to the editor The omission makes the correspondence look somewhat like a Greek tragedy, where the violence takes place offstage and we witness only the events leading up to and away from it Yet even amid angry statements and counterstatements, Wilson and Nabokov affirmed their past friendship Who, then, was right in the fatal clash7 Nabokov was certainly correct about matters relating to the Russian language, and in asserting the terrifying accuracy (or crippling pedantry7) of his translation Wilson was right about the unreadability of the result, and the deadly excess of the accompanying volumes of notes Nabokov surely embodied both Kinbote and Pmn, the maniacal scholar and the pathetic one And so the friends who in the past had tolerated an astomshing amount of harsh criticism from each other could brook no more An attempt at salvaging the relationship was made Learning of what was to be Wilson's last, fatal illness, Nabokov wrote in 1971 " I had the occasion to reread the whole batch of our correspondence It was such a pleasure to feel again the warmth of your many kindnesses, the various thrills of our friendship, that constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery Please believe that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin's and Nabokov's Onegin " Wilson, pleased but unyielding, replied "I was very glad to get your letter I am correcting my errors in Russian in my piece on Nabokov-Pushkin, but citing a few more of your ineptitudes " Then he told of his forthcoming memoir, Upstate, which records a visit to the Nabokovs in Ithaca "I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn't) ' It did, though, and Nabokov dashed o f f an irate letter to the New York Times Book Review, with a reference to Wilson's "Philistine imagination " Within a year, its owner was no more The Nabokov-Wilson Letters is superbly edited, though Harry Levin, in the cited review, corrects a few minor mistakes and oversights My one objection to Karlinsky's good work is the excess of lacunae Too much seems to have been omitted to spare some persons' feelings, while those of others, e g , Jessica Tandy's, are allowed to be bruised Still, we enjoy here a unique literary debate—Nabokov generally attacking countless major writers past and present, and Wilson usually defending them It is apropros one of these divergences—about Malraux, whom Wilson extolled and Nabokov considered third-rate—that the latter wondered "Is literary taste so subjective a matter that two persons of discrimination can be at odds in such a simple case7" That is the greatest question that this exchange raises on page after page and urges us to ponder—fruitfully, I should imagine...

...Wilson had been studying Russian when a letter from Nabokov, a refugee from Europe, arrived in August of 1940 and requested a meeting It was probably the Russianness of Nabokov that first attracted Wilson, but soon the artist and thinker proved equally seductive Finally, there was Nabokov the urbane guest or host—depending on whether the Wilsons or the Nabokovs were entertaining—who charmed Wilson The critic enjoyed playing mentor and protector to Nabokov, but his generosity in helping him with editors, publishers and academic employers was genuine and great By November 12, 1940, in the first preserved letter from Wilson to Nabokov, the then literary editor of the New Republic is already praising his protege's first book review, yet at the same time beginning to carp about a basic difference between them "Do please refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here " And he goes on to object to Nabokov's use of "I for one " Forever afterward Wilson felt compelled to correct Nabokov's Enghsh, which was remarkable but ever so slightly imperfect, Nabokov, in turn, corrected Wilson's Russian, which was more than adequate for someone self-taught late in life, but not impressive Wilson learned much from Nabokov about the Russian language, and not a little about Russian literature He never fully understood Russian prosody, however, Nabokov's long, illustrated letters on the subject notwithstanding For years he did not grasp that Russian words of whatever length had no secondary stresses, when, mne years after Nabokov's longest epistolary lecture, he finally learned this from Dirk Struve, he still could not help becoming recidi-vous soon thereafter Conversely, Nabokov did perceive the presence of secondary accents in English words, but could twist scansion bizarrely to suit his own metrical predilections So for years the two men argued at cross purposes, and became themselves more cross "You are all off, as usual, on English versification, but I am tired of arguing the subject," Wilson complained in a 1950 letter Nabokov didn't take this lying down "Once [and] for all you should tell yourself that in these questions of prosody—no matter the language involved—you are wrong and I am right, always " o n the subject of Lenin as an allegedly enlightened reformer Wilson remained pigheaded despite Nabokov's persuasive evidence to the contrary It was not till the very end of his life—when Nabokov no longer cared, and then in a letter to someone else—that Wilson conceded his error More important, the two men's disagreement about the relevance of social and political considerations to criticism raged unabated " I have never been able to understand how you manage, on the one hand, to study butterflies from the point of view of their habitat and, on the other, to pretend that it is possible to write about human beings and leave out of account all question of society and environment," wrote Wilson to his lepidoptenst-novelist friend, accusing him of hopeless addiction to art for art's sake To this Nabokov answered that "two butterfly populations may breed in vastly different environments and still belong to the same species Similarly, I do not give a hoot whether a writer is writing about China or Egypt, or either of the two Georgias —what interests me is his book " Many entertaining pages of this correspondence are taken up with accounts of Nabokov's lepidopterological expeditions But Wilson never quite drew the full connection between Nabokov's two passions, even though his friend repeatedly wiotc him things like "[catching mothsl is the noblest sport m the world," "Wars pass, bugs stay," and, again, "What are the joys of literature compared to tracking an ovipositing Caleophrys sheridani Edw to its food plant 9" Nabokov's art seems to me perfectly reflected in his lepidoptery—far beyond what Morns Bishop suggested in his "Nabokov at Cornell" "The wonderful similes, the shimmering adjectives had to be captured at the cost of long ambushes, ending m triumphant swoops of the net " Wilson, I believe, got much closer to the truth when, m his attack on Nabokov's Onegin tetralogy, he noted "the perversity of [Nabokov's] tricks to startle or stick pms in the reader," and went on to "his sado-masochistic Dostoevski-an tendencies so acutely noted by Sartre " This led up to the remark in Wilson's memoir Upstate "The element in [Nabokov's] work that I find repellent is his addiction to Schadenfreude Everybody is always bemg humiliated " But it is perhaps not so much gloating over other people's, including his own fictional characters', miseries that epitomizes Nabokov so much as his desire to dominate to have despotic power over his matenal, his readers, his butterflies I have always perceived something awful in Nabokov's desire to possess the butterflies whose beauty he admired by killing them Entomologists who have no esthetic sensibility can stick their pins in without seeming monstrous, but when Nabokov the humanist, artist and victim of Fascist persecutions does so, he becomes Vlad the Impaler Of course, Nabokov was a scholar and scientist, even unto fanaticism, as contraptions like his Onegin and such novels as PaleFire and A rfa wearyingly demonstrate Here, too, there is a power motive unriddling a scientific, scholarly, chess or literary problem became for him the kind of puzzle-solving that predicates control, superiority, dominance Time and again Nabokov reveals himself to Wilson " I have dissected and drawn the genitalia of 360 specimens and unraveled taxonomic adventures that read like a novel This has been a wonderful bit of training in the use of our wise, precise, plastic, beautiful Enghsh language " When Wilson sends Nabokov Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, Nabokov likes "the measurements of the perns given for the lovers Coming [sic] to think of it, I applied the same method to my butterflies " Clearly, the same power plays can be indulged m with butterflies, characters, and words The triumphant assertion of the ego's supenonty—intellectual, physical, sexual—may well have something sadistic about it, but Nabokov's tone is usually that of oneupman-ship, which can indeed turn into Schadenfreude Thus Nabokov urges Wilson to improve his chess game " I hope vou will soon play well enough for me to beat vou That sentence, in some ways, encapsulates this entire correspondence What each man, probablv unconsciously, wanted was to turn the other fellow into a disciple, to bring him up in his image of the novelist or the critic This seems all the more plausible because Wilson, like Naboko\, wrote novels, plays and poems, vv hile Nabokov, like \\ ilson, wrotees-savs, criticism and memoirs Consequently each man telt even moreot an expert in the other s field than mere natural or unnatural ego could account for and flaunted his savvy But these competing pedagogues were also, as Harry Levin has shown in his exemplary critique in the New York Review of Books, rival conjurers, and hostile spells had to follow As the undeservedly forgotten Edward N Horn wrote in a poem "Back and forth improvements flew/Till great magicians bade adieu " In a fundamental sense the two men resented each other Wilson could not refrain from mentioning, in his review of Nabokov's book on Gogol, "the frequent self-indulgence of the author in poses, perversities and vanities", Nabokov, in his article in Encounter, "A Reply to My Critics," declared "I do not believe in the old-fashioned, naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism championed by Mr Wilson that consists of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the imaginary, but generally far less plausible, world of the critic who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were 'real people '" A .A...

...Writers&Writing EMINENT EPISTOLARIANS BY JOHN SIMON FRATERNIZATION between'' creative'' writers and critics usually follows this pattern Critic praises novelist's (or poet's, or playwright's) work, novelist responds with a charming letter, one or the other proposes a meeting and a friendship between kindred spirits is in the offing But sooner or later the critic, if he is an honest person, will have to be less than wholly enthusiastic about something the novelist has written The novelist's ego takes umbrage, and the friendship between kindred spirits is off It is therefore remarkable that two such divergent, prickly and overbearing geniuses as Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson could keep up for two decades the frank, warm and not merely epistolary friendship that emerges from The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940-1971 (Harper & Row, 346 pp $15 00) The third decade, regrettably, yields only a very few, short letters Well before the notorious dispute over Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin (1965), the correspondence had thinned out, after it, there are just two rather touching letters from 1971, and in 1972 Wilson died Scrupulously and learnedly edited by Simon Karhn-sky, the correspondence is the spellbinding record of a tumultuous friendship whose animosities are all too human, yet whose longevity reveals a shared nobility For, ultimately, Nabokov and Wilson were opposites, despite some important similarities To Wilson, literature was intimately connected with social and political questions, to Nabokov, it was largely (albeit not exclusively) a matter of esthetics Wilson—though disenchanted with Communist Russia by 1940, when Nabokov first wrote him—accepted Lenin as a great innovator and leader, and refused to believe there had been a strong liberal movement in late imperial Russia that might have democratized the country but for the triumph of Bolshevism Nabokov, whose father was highly placed in that liberal movement and ended up assassinated for it, knew better about Lenin and the liberals, as a refugee from both Bolsheviks and, later, Nazis, he had a closer view of the workings of totalitarianism in general Wilson, though endowed with a good Yankee sense of humor, was not especially witty, Nabokov was, above all, a great wit, but also a latent sentimentalist —something else Wilson was not Wilson, then, as Sherman Paul put it in his book on him, was "a child of the Progressive Era and, although he criticized its intellectual and moral simplicity, still responded] to its sentiments " Nabokov, on the other hand, was a thoroughgoing skeptic and cynic, except for that crucial nodule of sentimentality "Wilson's prose is above all a friendly and a reasonable prose," wrote Delmore Schwartz in an essay whose style Nabokov found "vile", Nabokov's prose tended toward the precious and baroque Nevertheless, both men passionately believed in literature and the supremacy of the intellect, and both had a particular love for Pushkin It was their shared love of him that brought them together, even as it was a falling out over Pushkin that eventually parted them completely...