The Feud Read online

  This speaks to one of his, and Pushkin’s, private interests—the purported immortality of poets, as expressed in Horace’s famous ode “Exegi Monumentum” (“I have raised a monument more permanent than bronze…“). Pushkin wrote an ode of the same name, which Nabokov, in one of the countless digressions in his Onegin “Commentary,” called “one of the most subtle compositions in Russian literary history.” Pushkin “slyly implies that only fools proclaim their immortality,” Nabokov wrote. But a few years later, responding to what he regarded as Pasternak’s wildly undeserved Nobel award, Nabokov suggested that it was he, not Pasternak, who would be memorialized in the Russian literary future.

  He proved to be right. Moscow has been trying for years to raise money for a proper Pasternak monument, but St. Petersburg has already honored its native son. In 2007 St. Petersburg University unveiled a sculpture depicting the young, pensive Vladimir Nabokov in the courtyard of its Languages Department. There is one quotation engraved in the bronze, the famous final sentences of The Gift: a perfectly scanned, rhyming Onegin stanza.

  Nabokov’s politics, always sui generis, started to wax extreme. In 1965 he was one of President Lyndon Johnson’s few staunch supporters among the literary set. WISHING YOU A PERFECT RECOVERY AND A SPEEDY RETURN TO THE ADMIRABLE WORK YOU ARE DOING was the text of a telegram he sent to the White House after Johnson’s well-publicized appendectomy. “Vladimir was very pro-Vietnam,” Jason Epstein recalled. “He thought the war in Vietnam was his way back to St. Petersburg. He had this fantasy of getting back home.”

  A few years later Vera wrote to a friend: “We are all for Nixon, emphatically against McGovern whom we find an irresponsible demagogue who deliberately misleads his followers and is doing damage to America.”11 (In the last month of his life Edmund Wilson proudly sported a George McGovern for President button.12)

  Around that time Nabokov sent a check to the Israeli ambassador in Switzerland during what became known as the Yom Kippur War: “I would like to make a small contribution to Israel’s defense against the Arabolshevist aggression.”

  It was impossible not to notice Nabokov’s ascension, high above the clouds. “Have you seen Volodya Nabokov on the cover of Newsweek?” Wilson asked their common friend Sonya Grynberg, mixing up his newsweeklies. “He looks like some model who had been hired to pose as Volodya Vladimir Nabokov.”13 Wilson’s Russian was not so weak as to misstate his old friend’s name, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. It must have been intended as a slight.

  The Wilson feud was behind him, indeed the famous correspondence had been in abeyance for more than seven years, when Nabokov jotted off a quick “Dear Bunny” note in March 1971. He had heard from Elena Levin that Wilson had been ill. This was true; Wilson was beginning his precipitous decline and more often than not conducted his affairs from bed. (Pushkin, too, loved to work in bed, but that was because he was a sybarite who didn’t feel like facing the day.) Nabokov said he had been rereading their correspondence, and felt 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.”

  “Nabokov has suddenly written me a letter telling me that he values my friendship and that all has been forgiven,” Wilson reported to Helen Muchnic: “He has been told that I have been ill, and it always makes him cheerful to think that his friends are in bad shape. He was mourning for Roman Grynberg at least ten years before he died.”14

  Wilson responded to Nabokov within the week, announcing that he was working on a collection of articles about Russia, which would include reworking his mammoth, anti-Onegin screed. He planned to correct a few of his own errors and cite “a few more of your ineptitudes.” He added: “I have included an account of my visit to you in Ithaca in a book that will be out this spring…based on twenty years of Talcottville diary. I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn’t).”

  But of course it did.

  Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York, published in the spring of 1971, was a surprise best seller, with 38,000 copies sold before the year was out. The 350-page-long book detailed Wilson’s fondness for his Talcottville neighbors, the indigenous Iroquois as well as the colorful locals, some of whom were his relatives on his mother’s side, and many of whom were close friends. Wilson devoted six pages of the book to the May 1957 visit to Vladimir and Vera Nabokov in Ithaca.

  It was true, as Wilson wrote in his letter, that he had taken a few pages from his journal recording the visit, and rewritten them for publication in Upstate. But a glance at the journal, The Fifties, shows that Wilson revised and expanded his impressions of the Nabokovs for his 1971 audience.

  For starters Wilson explained, in considerable detail, his long-running “animated argument” with Nabokov about Russian and English versification. “Volodya’s insistent idea that Russian and English verse are basically the same…is a part of his inheritance from his father,” Wilson wrote, already crossing several wires. Nabokov did not think Russian and English prosody were “basically the same,” and his “Notes on Prosody” nowhere makes that claim. Any pseudopsychological allusion to his father was bound to raise Nabokovian hackles.

  Wilson intended to dig much deeper. He plowed up almost every relic of their never-ending spat: how to pronounce “nihilist”; the real meaning of fastidieux; Nabokov’s insistence that writers like Turgenev (and, of course, Pushkin) didn’t know much English. “These false ideas,” Wilson writes, “are prompted by his compulsion to think of himself as the only writer in history who has been equally proficient in Russian, English and French, and he is always hopping people, with accents of outrage, for the pettiest kinds of mistakes.”

  It got worse. Wilson took a swing at Vera, to whom Nabokov was legendarily devoted. “Vera always sides with Volodya,” he wrote, “and one seems to feel her bristling with hostility if…one argues with him.” Wilson mentioned Vera’s objections to his house gift, L’Histoire d’O: “She does not like my bringing him pornographic books….She said with disgust that we had been giggling like schoolboys.” Wilson then criticized Vera’s hospitality, an unspeakable insult to a Russian, for whom all social relations proceed from a presumption of generosity to guests. Wilson’s gout prevented him from sitting at the dinner table, so Vera had to bring him his food, separately. “I think it irked Vera a little to have to serve me thus.”

  “I always enjoy seeing them,” Wilson wrote, then immediately retracted the thought:

  But I am always afterwards left with a somewhat uncomfortable impression. The element in his work that I find repellent is his addiction to Schadenfreude. Everybody is always being humiliated….

  And yet he is in many ways an admirable person, a strong character, a terrific worker, Unwavering in his devotion to his family….The miseries, horrors and handicaps that he has had to confront in his exile would have degraded or broken many, but these have been overcome by his fortitude and his talent.

  Why did Wilson publish this diary excerpt, revised, extended, and more detailed in its criticism, if not to remind Nabokov of his previous, diminished existence as a disheveled academic (“his hair ébouriffé [tousled], consuming his little glasses of ‘faculty’ port and sherry”) relegated to the Moosejaw of the Ivy League, that is, faraway Cornell in the Zemblan wilds of upstate New York? Where, Pnin-like, Nabokov was “overworked…with his academic duties and writing his books.”

  On the final night of this visit, Wilson noted that Nabokov had 150 papers to correct, prompting him to drink, and to reprise their many disagreements. Wilson also may have published this passage to remind Nabokov of Wilson’s power, albeit fading power, in North American letters. Nabokov ruled Europe and the world, perhaps. But from the offices of The New Yorker off Times Square down to Publishers Row on Union Square, Wilson still commanded an audience.

  A riposte
was inevitable. Nabokov had seen Upstate, he informed The New York Times Book Review: “Since a number of statements therein wobble on the brink of libel, I must clear up some matters that might mislead trustful readers.”

  Let’s be clear, Nabokov stated: Wilson “has no direct knowledge of my past. He has not even bothered to read my ‘Speak, Memory.’ ” Wilson’s idea that I inherited my ideas on prosody from my father “is too silly to refute. His muddleheaded and ill-informed description of Russian prosody only proves that he remains organically incapable of reading, let alone understanding, my work on the subject.”

  “Typical of his Philistine imagination,” Nabokov wrote, “is his impression that at parties in our Ithaca house, my wife ‘concentrated’ on me and grudged ‘special attention to anyone else.’ ”

  “I am aware that my former friend is in ill health,” he continued, explaining his letter as yielding to the demands of honor over compassion:

  The publication of these “old diaries” (doctored, I hope, to fit the present requirements of what was then the future), in which living persons are but the performing poodles of the diarist’s act, should be subject to a rule or law that would require some kind of formal consent from the victims of conjecture, ignorance, and invention.

  The Times allowed Wilson a brief reply: “I anticipate some similar protests when he reads what I have written about him in my forthcoming volume on Russian subjects.” He added: “I do not see that any question of ‘honor’ is involved in any of the matters he complains about. The only possible reply to his petulant outbursts is to repeat the comment of Degas to Whistler: ‘You behave as if you had no talent.’ ”

  This final exchange took place in November 1971. When Nabokov next took note of Edmund Wilson, it was to record his death.

  Nabokov’s tiny pocket diaries can be found at the New York Public Library. They are not really diaries, unlike Wilson’s journal, which was very much a record of his current activities. These little notebooks are predictably unpredictable and eclectic. Months elapse with no entries, save Nabokov’s annual reminder of Vera’s birthday, or of their wedding anniversary. Sometimes he took note of weather patterns, and in the back, occasionally recorded his year-end bank balances. For instance, 1968 ended well: “Cash,…$6,500 Chase Man; Union de Banques Suisse fr. 26,000; (in Lolita acct) about $145,000.”

  Nabokov sometimes recorded dreams of note, including this one, on July 13, 1968: “Odd dream: Somebody on the stairs behind me takes me by the elbows. E.W. Jocular reconciliation.”

  There are only two entries for the week of June 12, 1972: “Stopped [the heart drug] Segontin of which had taken some eighty pills since March 24,” and “E.W. died.”

  —

  WILSON KNEW the famous quote from Mark Twain’s Autobiography, “I can speak more freely from the grave.” Surely not by design—who isn’t planning to live forever?—his harshest attack on Nabokov appeared in September 1972, three months after Wilson’s death.

  The little collection of essays, A Window on Russia, is quite sweet. It’s more like a rearview-mirror window on Russia, written with great fondness by a visitor who will not be returning. Addressing his wife, Elena, in the introduction, Wilson mentions that he spent only five months in Russia, in 1935, and always struggled with the language. In the opening essay, reprised from his 1943 Atlantic Monthly article “Notes on Russian Literature,” he writes, before throwing up his hands: “What, then, is one to do about Russian?”

  The book also has a charming short piece, “A Little Museum of Russian Language.” It is a funny little museum, displaying, among other things, the famous “little feet” from Onegin’s “Pedal Digression”: “What exactly did Pushkin mean by the damskiye nozhky he so admired?” Wilson asked, and we ourselves still wonder. He has a Nabokov-like disquisition on twelve forms of the Russian verb shchurit’, which means dropping one’s eyelids in a gesture of doubt, coquetry, or something else entirely. Wilson wins the hearts of generations of nonnative Russian students by listing three Russian words for “blizzard”: metel’, buran, and vy’uga. “I do not understand the distinction, if any, between these words,” he writes.

  God bless you, Edmund. Neither do we.

  Wilson included his famous New York Review attack on Onegin in Window (“My own attempts to tease Nabokov were not recognized as such but received in a virulent spirit”) and attached a six-and-a-half-page coda to the article. This is Wilson’s long-promised essay on Nabokov’s fiction, first discussed in their letters a quarter century before. One of the many tensions in their relationship was Wilson’s general refusal to write about, and thus promote, Nabokov’s work. In 1944 Wilson did write a carefully worded and generally positive review of Nabokov’s book on Nikolai Gogol, for The New Yorker. And in 1965, he wrote the Onegin article. Elena Levin, who knew both men very well, thought Nabokov was expecting some favorable publicity from Wilson during the lean, pre-Lolita years.15 That may be so, but it is indisputable that Wilson was offering Nabokov considerable behind-the-scenes help with The New Yorker and with the big publishing houses.

  Now, here it was: a brief—because Wilson was failing—but comprehensive overview of Nabokov’s work, with some biographical observations tossed in. First, Wilson said he had read the “Sirin” work, for example, Mary; The Luzhin Defense; King, Queen, Knave; and Invitation to a Beheading, most of which Nabokov had translated into English; “I have found them rather disappointing,” he reports. His primary complaint is that nothing really happens in these books: “Mr. Nabokov…regards a novel as a kind of game with the reader. By deceiving the latter’s expectation, the novelist wins the game. But the device exploited in these novels is simply not to have anything exciting take place, to have the action peter out.”

  The short essay recycles some previous insults, calling Nabokov a man “who enjoy[s] malicious teasing and embarrassing practical jokes,” and again cites “the addiction to Schadenfreude which pervades all his work.” Wilson seems to be trying to praise Lolita, which he professed not to like when Nabokov had wanted him to like it. “His panorama of middle-class homes and motels is more amusing than his dreary and prosaic German vistas,” Wilson says. “There is also something here like emotion—the ordeals of a torn personality.”

  Wilson likes to explain Nabokov by appealing to his unusual biography, as the brilliant Anglophile son of a well-to-do Anglophile, liberal politician in czarist Russia. This is fingernail-scraping-on-the-blackboard for Nabokov; Wilson insisted on calling Nabokov senior a “liberal,” in quotes, which isn’t exactly a compliment coming from the self-styled progressives of the “intellectuals’ beach” of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Wilson goes on to say that Nabokov “despises the Communist regime, and, it seems to me, does not even understand how it works or how it came to be. His knowledge of Russia, in fact, is very special, extremely limited.”

  Written by a man who bungled his way through five months in Russia, praising Lenin’s dead, waxen “beautiful face, of exquisite fineness,” this is crazy talk. Of course Nabokov hated the regime that, given the chance, would have executed his father, that had raked his departing passenger ship with machine-gun fire, that confiscated his family’s fortune and more hurtfully the emotional property he celebrated in Speak, Memory. This is one essay of Wilson’s to which Nabokov never responded, for obvious reasons.*4

  Wilson was gone but not forgotten in the Nabokov household. Vladimir had started to work on a second, revised edition of the Onegin project, to be published in a two-volume Princeton University Press paperback. Nabokov had gloated that take two would be exponentially more alienating to his critics, “even more gloriously and monstrously literal than the first.” Nabokov felt that his first edition was “still not close enough and not ugly enough. In future editions I plan to defowlerize it still more drastically. I think I shall turn it entirely into utilitarian prose, with a still bumpier brand of English, rebarbative barricades of square brackets and tattered banners of reprobate words, in order to elimina
te the last vestiges of bourgeois poesy and concession to rhythm.”*5

  He had one chief critic in mind. He urged Princeton to speed up publication: “I would like to see my edition printed before confronting an irate Pushkin and a grinning E. Wilson beyond the cypress curtain.”

  During the early 1970s, Nabokov was wrestling with his authorized biographer, Andrew Field, for control of Field’s book, Nabokov: His Life in Part. Initially Nabokov’s bibliographer, Field, a brainy, Harvard-trained, quasi-Nabokovian junior academic, signed on to write about Nabokov at the end of the writer’s life. The whole project veered sideways, badly, with legal threats and accusations of bad faith flying in all directions. Field eventually wrote three books about Nabokov, each of them a bit discursive, digressive, and showily erudite—that is, Nabokovian to the core.

  The Nabokov-Field dispute merits a book of its own. Nabokov hated the Boswellian grit of literary biographies, “the human interest chitchat,” and regretted sharing dozens of casual anecdotes with Field. He despised almost everything about the draft manuscript of Nabokov: His Life in Part, but he especially disliked Field’s treatment of the contretemps with Wilson.

  Field began his account of the Wilson-Nabokov relationship with an anecdote from 1944. The story is innocent enough. Wilson wanted to take Nabokov’s son Dmitri and Vladimir to a special doctor in Manhattan, but Wilson got the address wrong. Wilson and Nabokov were waiting for Dmitri, who had instead shown up at the correct address. Wilson was fuming about the chronically late, irresponsible Russians, but it was he who is in error. “He had taken me to the wrong house!” Nabokov crows. “Isn’t that a marvelous story?”

  This “trivial incident,” Field wrote, may have been the only time “when a clear advantage of one man over the other was acknowledged by both men on anything.”16

  Change it, Nabokov demanded. He wanted the incident described as “the first but not the last time that an unquestionable advantage was won by Nabokov over Wilson in the course of a two-decade-long friendship.” In a side note to Field, Nabokov explained, “I’m afraid I cannot authorize any doubts anent your subject’s clearly winning the Battle of EO.” The original language made it into the book.