by Alex Beam
If we remember him today, we probably recall Wilson as the ruddy-faced jowly critic staring disapprovingly from the inside back flyleaf of an assigned library text. But in his twenties and thirties he was a certified member of Manhattan’s smart set. He worked first for Frank Crowninshield’s legendary Vanity Fair, then moved over to the more progressive New Republic. He was a mandarin but not a snob, writing with equal enthusiasm about Finnegans Wake, which he liked, and Agatha Christie’s detective stories, which he found tiresome. Wilson, who could discuss “Dante and Catullus and Verlaine without standing on tiptoe,” Norman Podhoretz wrote, “is also the man who can without stooping produce an article on Farfariello, who was doing impersonations in Italian at the Fugazi Theater” on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.9
The Great Depression left an indelible mark on Wilson, not because he suffered particularly, but because he traveled to parts of America where the damage was greatest. Wilson, along with fellow writers John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, and Theodore Dreiser, visited Harlan County, Kentucky, to report on the 1931 coal strike and the miners’ abject living conditions. These were writers engagés; in addition to packing his notebooks, Wilson brought food and clothing for the miners. (Dreiser brought a girlfriend, which resulted in an adultery charge.) Sheriffs’ deputies chased Wilson out of Harlan, threatening him with jail time and worse.
The next year Wilson published his fourth book, The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump, comprising dispatches from San Diego, Brooklyn, West Virginia, and the brave new world of Detroit, where Henry Ford was brazenly reinventing capitalism in the teeth of the world crisis. “So far as I can see,” Wilson wrote, “Karl Marx’s predictions are coming true.” In 1932 Wilson, Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson circulated their “Writers’ Manifesto,” calling for “a temporary dictatorship of the class-conscious workers….We declare ourselves supporters of the social-economic revolution,” they wrote, “such revolution being an immediate step toward the creation in the United States of a new human culture based on common material possession.”
Jitters ended with a remarkable chapter, “The Case of the Author,” in which Wilson applied “the Marxist formula” to himself, “as a specimen of the American bourgeoisie.” He noted, for instance, that his father eschewed investments and speculations, “and one of the results of this has been that I have grown up in modern prosperous America with a slightly outside point of view.” He explained that he enlisted in World War I “not because I cared much about the War, but because…I wanted to get away from my old life.” He signed up as an enlisted man instead of attending officers’ school because that was what “most of my friends from college were doing,” and “I wanted to get as far away from that old life as possible….I swore to myself that when the War was over I should stand outside society altogether….I should devote myself to the great human interests which transcended standards of living and conventions: Literature, History. The Creation of Beauty, the Discovery of Truth.”10
The young Wilson scolded himself for his bourgeois lifestyle. His work for “highbrow magazines” netted him about $7,500 a year (slightly over $100,000 today), but he allowed that family inheritances provided an extra “margin for classical reading, liquor, and general irresponsibility. And as I have got used to these bourgeois luxuries, I naturally shrink from the prospect of an era where everybody will have to earn all he gets.” Said era was approaching, he predicted: “The money-making period of American history has definitely come to an end. Capitalism has run its course.” The new proletarian thinkers “look to Russia,” Wilson wrote, and so did he: “I, though I am a bourgeois myself…have certain interests in common with these proletarians. I, too, admire the Russian Communist leaders.”
Inevitably the next stop would be Russia, as it was for so many of his peers. Although he never joined the American Communist Party, Wilson voted for its candidate, William Z. Foster, in the 1932 election. His sympathies lay on the left for most of his life. Funded by a two-thousand-dollar Guggenheim Foundation grant, Wilson sailed from London intending to study at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in Moscow, which turned out to be closed to foreigners. Instead Wilson traveled around the country for several months, writing dispatches that were eventually collected in parts of two books, Travels in Two Democracies (1936) and Red, Black, Blond and Olive; Studies in Four Civilizations: Zuni, Haiti, Soviet Russia, Israel (1956). The dates are significant because Wilson, a self-described “visiting journalist known to be sympathetic with the Soviet regime,” censored many passages in 1936 that showed up in print twenty years later.
With the cruelty of hindsight, we can say that Wilson got off on the wrong foot. In Moscow he stayed in the temporarily unoccupied apartment of Walter Duranty, the notorious New York Times correspondent who completely failed to grasp the horror of Stalin’s tyranny. Ever the reporter, Wilson did notice the signed photograph of Stalin on Duranty’s bookcase.
Wilson knew that he was witnessing a historic turning point in Soviet history, but like so many foreigners on the scene, he didn’t understand what was really going on. His journalistic antennae correctly discerned that “the atmosphere of fear and suspicion…has evidently become more tense since the [Sergei] Kirov assassination”—the 1934 killing of one of Stalin’s rivals, now assumed to have been engineered by Stalin. Wilson infelicitously concluded that the sense of paranoia was “of course…no worse than Hollywood (though the penalties—death and deportation—are greater). Stalin and [Lazar] Kaganovitch are hardly more sacred names in Moscow than Schulberg and Thalberg are on the Coast.”11
Hollywood is a tough town. But no one got a bullet to the back of the head for botching a movie script.
Strolling through Moscow’s Park of Culture and Rest, Wilson remarked to a Russian companion that the assembled holiday-makers seemed to be quite subdued. “She replied in a low voice, ‘C’est que tout le monde a très peur’ ” (“It’s because everyone is very frightened”). Wilson censored that remark in 1936 but published it in the 1956 collection.12
Wilson’s observation that “you feel in the Soviet Union that you are living at the moral top of the world, where the light never really goes out” would haunt him for the rest of his life. Only later—much later—did he temper his enthusiasm for Things Soviet. He never fully surrendered his admiration for Lenin, for which Nabokov attacked him on first acquaintance. The first time Wilson saw Lenin’s waxy effigy preserved in Red Square, he enthused: “The head in the tomb, with its high forehead, its straight nose, its pointed beard…its sensitive nostrils and eyelids, gives an impression in some ways similar to that one gets from the supposed death-mask of Shakespeare. It is a beautiful face, of exquisite fineness, and—what surely proves its authenticity—it is profoundly aristocratic.”13
Wilson’s Russia stay ended with him flat on his back for six weeks in an Odessa hospital. This was probably the only time that Wilson systematically studied the Russian language, surrounded as he was by non-English speakers. Many years later he recalled that “I learned Russian, primarily, I think, in order to read Pushkin,” the Shakespeare of Russian letters.14
What else do we need to know about the forty-five-year-old Wilson? The boundless eclecticism—his detractors would call it high-minded dilettantism—had not yet taken over his career. In later middle age he would dive into Haitian literature, learn Hungarian and Hebrew,*1 the latter language to ease his way into two books about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and immerse himself in the history of upstate New York, where he lived in his mother’s home for about half the year, starting in the early 1950s. Wilson’s enthusiasms extended to the supernatural. “He was very much interested in the Abominable Snowman and wished that he were up to asking The New Yorker to send him on an assignment to track down reports of this fascinating creature,” according to his friend, the Harvard American studies professor Daniel Aaron, who accompanied Wilson on a reporting trip to the Iroquois Nation. Well before the famous protests at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, Wilson had become a fer
vid supporter of Native American rights. In the final decade of his life he rededicated himself to denouncing American capitalism and its infernal paymaster, the Internal Revenue Service.
That was in the future. In 1940 Wilson was a compact fireplug of seemingly boundless energy. He was quite the ladies’ man, already embroiled in his third marriage, this time to the fiery young writer Mary McCarthy. He had previously married a beautiful actress, who seemed to be on tour for much of their marriage. His second wife died in a freak accident. Wilson pursued innumerable extra- and intramarital affairs, which complicated his life enormously. He chronicled his many conquests in his unprudish diary, published posthumously “(Marie: I could feel her vagina throbbing powerfully—Thrust naked cock up into those obscure and meaty regions”15). He “thought constantly of sex,”16 he confessed. Marriage was a commitment that Wilson didn’t take very seriously. Wilson’s daughter Rosalind remembered his first wife, the actress Mary Blair, coming “home from the theater to find a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and that my father was still seeing Edna Millay, with whom he was in love for many years.”17 Wife number two, Margaret Canby, said of him: “You’re a cold, fishy leprous person, Bunny Wilson.”18
Wilson viewed himself as both a creator and a critic, but the world thought otherwise. In 1929 he published his first novel, I Thought of Daisy, which he had been nurturing for years. Even his lover Millay, thinly disguised as the bohemian poet “Rita Cavanaugh,” found the book to be uneven. It became clear, as Wilson’s sympathetic biographer Lewis Dabney wrote, that “Wilson was never quite at ease with ‘invented’ characters.”19
Wilson had a prickly disposition. “His candor may have exceeded his tact,” his friend Aaron once wrote.20 It was true. Addressing Fitzgerald on the subject of his new novel, This Side of Paradise, Wilson said, “Your hero as intellectual is a fake of the first water…”21 His posthumously published diaries have an initially transgressive flavor. For instance, his descriptions of making love to his many wives and mistresses seem prurient, although on further consideration they feel honest in a way that the fictional sex scenes in his “bawdy” novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, never do. Still in his twenties, he wrote a letter to the grand grizzly of American letters, H. L. Mencken, correcting the famous dictionarist on his misuse of “jejune”: “By the way, why do you always use ‘jejune’ as if it meant ‘juvenile’ or ‘callow’? This has been worrying me for years.”22 In later life he noted that his fourth wife, Elena, called certain people “limited.” Wilson called them stupid.
Reproach, and self-reproach, came easily to Wilson. But where his first love, literature, was concerned, he often exhibited a generosity of spirit. Yes, he could criticize Fitzgerald, but it was Wilson who edited his late friend’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, to provide money for Fitzgerald’s widow and daughter. He likewise assembled the book The Crack-Up from Fitzgerald’s unpublished essays and letters, for the benefit of his friend’s estate. A profligate spender who was almost always short of cash, Wilson nevertheless insisted that his five-thousand-dollar Tycoon fee be paid into Fitzgerald’s royalty account, set up for Zelda and her daughter, Scottie.
It is true that Wilson seized on Nabokov, the brilliant apparition from another world, because Nabokov interested him, and not everyone did. But he also offered to help Nabokov because he recognized a kindred spirit in need, and because it was the right thing to do.
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WHO WAS VLADIMIR NABOKOV in 1940? That is a more complicated question. Like Wilson, he enjoyed a superb education, not only at the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, but also from his father, who, like the father in Nabokov’s autobiographical novel The Gift, “knew Pushkin as some people know the liturgy.” (Nabokov called his real father “a torrent of Pushkin iambics.”) Nabokov and Pushkin seemed to have been conjoined at birth. Vladimir was born in 1899, during the heady centennial festivities for Russia’s greatest poet. As a young boy he composed a “Don Juan’s list” of his female conquests, in imitation of Pushkin, and so on.
Nabokov’s father served in Russia’s provisional government of 1917, following the quasi-democratic February revolution. In November the Bolsheviks seized power, arrested the elder Nabokov, and then released him. The family fled St. Petersburg, then Russia itself, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in a coup d’état. Like many aristocratic families, the Nabokovs drifted southward during Russia’s brutal civil war, when it seemed possible that White Russian armies might succeed in rolling back Soviet power. After a few blissful months, which he spent butterfly collecting on the grounds of two different estates on the Crimean Peninsula, Vladimir and his family escaped Russia in 1919, in a steamer raked by Bolshevik machine-gun fire. Nabokov liked to recall that he and his father were playing chess on deck as the Nadyezhda (Hope) slid out of Sevastopol Harbor, and out of machine-gun range. Perhaps that was even true.
The Nabokovs initially fetched up in England, where Vladimir entered Trinity College, Cambridge, his education financed in part by the progressive sales of his mother’s formidable cache of jewelry. While he and his brother Sergey studied in England, the family moved to Berlin, then teeming with an estimated four hundred thousand Russian émigrés.
Nabokov had mixed feelings about the émigrés with whom he shared the next twenty years of his life in Berlin, Prague, and Paris. He insisted that, unlike them, he didn’t regret losing his family’s fortune and heady social standing in the upheaval of 1917. His losses were, however, very real. When he was just seventeen years old, an uncle left him a two-thousand-acre estate, a manor house, and investments that would be worth more than $100 million today.23 But Nabokov felt he had lost something far more precious: the connection to his fairy-tale childhood, so lovingly re-created in the memoir Speak, Memory. And he had lost the connection to his true mother tongue: “My private tragedy,” he called it.24
Nabokov famously never had a home. In the United States he and his wife, Vera, always rented. At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he taught for a decade, they occupied homes vacated by professors on sabbatical. The Nabokovs ended their days in a small suite of rooms at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland. When asked to explain his peripatetic life of exile, Nabokov said, “Nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me.” His hero Pushkin was a wanderer, too, exiled from St. Petersburg by the czar for years at a time. Like Nabokov, “To the end of his life he remained deeply attached to what he considered his real home, the Lyceum, and to his former fellow students.”25
In a loss as tragic as that of his childhood, Nabokov’s father was killed soon after he left Russia. Two right-wing monarchist gunmen burst into a political event in Berlin at which the older Vladimir Nabokov was speaking. The men intended to murder Pavel Milyukov, another exiled parliamentarian speaking at the rally, whom they held responsible for the overthrow of the czar. The elder Nabokov wrestled one of the assassins to the ground, but the second man shot him three times. Milyukov lived, Nabokov’s father died. At the age of twenty-two Vladimir Nabokov found himself more or less alone in the world.*2
He chose the most parlous profession of them all: writing. Supplementing his income by tutoring, translating, and even teaching tennis, Nabokov became one of the best-known novelists of the Russian emigration. Writing as “Vladimir Sirin,” he published nine novels in twelve years, some of which later came to be regarded as masterpieces. Sirin was a success, seeing his work translated into five languages, including English. In 1941 the American publisher Bobbs-Merrill retitled the British translation of Camera Obscura for an American audience: Laughter in the Dark. It disappeared without a trace.26
Nabokov had written his own Finland Station, the notorious, discursive chapter 4 of The Gift, but neither Wilson nor anyone else had ever read it. Chapter 4 lampooned the career of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, regarded by many as the father of Russian socialism. Émigré editors refused to publish the Chernyshevsky profile without significant changes. Nabokov adamantly ref
used. He thought Chernyshevsky was a loser and a phony. As for the nineteenth-century radical writers so beloved by Wilson, they “write with their feet,” Nabokov said. Chapter 4 finally appeared in Russian in 1952, a decade and a half after it was written.
Nabokov created, prolifically, in conditions that would have daunted anyone else. He sometimes composed his fiction or poetry in longhand, sitting atop a toilet seat, while his wife and baby son slept a few feet away in their one-room Berlin apartment. Decades later, when the Wilson-Nabokov feud burned white-hot with loathing, Wilson observed that “the miseries, horrors and handicaps that [Nabokov] has had to confront in his exile would have degraded or broken many, but these have been overcome by his fortitude and his talent.”*3 27
Nabokov’s father was a devoted Anglophile, and, like his son, quite at home in the King’s English. Nabokov père wrote a series of articles (“Charles Dickens: A Russian Appreciation”) that appeared in the Dickensian magazine in 1912. Vladimir claimed that the first language he heard was English, read to him from children’s books in early childhood. Father and young son both loved butterflies, and the boy hovered over copies of the London journal The Entomologist the way his peers (like my own father) might have cherished copies of St. Nicholas, the turn-of-the-century storybook magazine for children.
As he entered his thirties, still treading water financially, Vladimir saw the commercial potential of writing in English instead of Russian. Even before he departed for America in 1940, he had composed his first novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in English. His Russian émigré audience was disappearing, melting away to different continents. Nabokov espied his new world even before he arrived there.
Another fact: Like Wilson, Nabokov was quite a ladies’ man, even something of a rake at Cambridge and in his early twenties. But after an initially shaky period, his 1925 marriage to Vera Slonim became the center of his life. Vera was Jewish, which heightened her husband’s sensitivity to Europe’s resurging anti-Semitism. Nabokov’s mother and sister were living in Prague, which the Nazis occupied in 1938. He moved from Berlin to Paris in 1937, and saw the future of Europe all too clearly. Getting a job outside France “is a life or death question for me,” he wrote to his friend Gleb Struve. “I’m simply perishing.”28 On the gossamer promise of a summer teaching position at Stanford University, Nabokov wangled an American visa for his family. They made their American landfall in New York, aboard the steamer Champlain, on May 26, 1940.
