by Alex Beam
This likewise seems to be a crazy fabrication of the kind of colorful anecdote that would quickly have entered the annals of the two men’s enmity, if true.
Frieders had more to say. He challenged Wilson’s statement that he found “Nabokov’s addiction to Schadenfreude repellent,” adding:
…This statement does cry out for comment. Being fully aware of Vladimir’s almost obsessive contempt for the theories of Freud, Wilson habitually twisted the meaning of this word to create the impression that it meant ‘hatred of Freud,’ an implication that never failed to make Nabokov squirm. Thus, Wilson was occasionally guilty of Schadenfreude himself.
A second correspondent, Mark Hamburg, also served up the story of the torn butterfly net. Hamburg said he visited the Nabokov home as a graduate student, and found professor “Morris Bishop standing in the hallway with Nabokov—while the latter showed him a butterfly net with its bottom ripped out.” He elaborated:
“Surely you can’t suspect Wilson of this merely because you met the wrong train,” said Bishop.
Nabokov, obviously upset, answered, “We have had serious differences of opinion on Russian prosody….His condition makes him quite non-ambulatory….Still, he brought a pair of nail scissors. I cannot be certain.”
Writing from Naples, Florida, just a few months before his death, Wilson told the Times that there was “not one word of truth” in the Frieders and Hamburg letters.
I don’t think I ever spoke of Schadenfreude in his presence and certainly never thought it had anything to do with Freud.
I don’t remember ever seeing his butterfly nets and never disapproved of his lepidopteral activities. On the contrary, I liked to hear him talk about them.
There could have been no question of his meeting the wrong train when I visited him in Ithaca, because I came in a car.
I suspect that both these letters were written by Nabokov himself, who may find that he is sometimes at a loss to amuse himself in Montreux.9
And we are off to the races again: “Puzzled queries from correspondents oblige me to react,” Nabokov wrote to the newspaper, “with some delay, to the tasteless parody (posing as letters in this space) from ‘Diron Frieders’ and ‘Mark Hamburg,’ which I take to be the phony names of one or two facetious undergraduates, judging by the style and piffle.”
He asked the paper to “do a service to Edmund Wilson as well as to truth if you would point out that neither he nor I composed these letters.”
No such assurance was forthcoming, but Mark Hamburg did write in to assure the Book Review that he very much existed: “Edmund Wilson—and now Vladimir Nabokov—are mistaken when they assume I do not exist.” Hamburg said he used to be Morris Bishop’s graduate assistant, and confirmed his bona fides by rattling off insider knowledge of the Cornell campus of the 1950s: “Jim’s Place (the bar); the “Dutch”; Willard Straight; “Baldy” Wilson, the Donne scholar…and lastly, Campus Widow Grace Verezanno.”10
“Of course I’m greatly flattered,” Hamburg added, “that Wilson (an old hero) should think I wrote a letter he attributed to Nabokov (whom I revere).”
The Book Review editor appended a note to the Hamburg letter: “Thus ends our coverage. Or, as Caruso once remarked: ‘La commedia è finita!’ ”
Diron Frieders never surfaced again. Were Wilson’s suspicions justified? Was he being played? Cornell has no record of either a Diron Frieders or a Mark Hamburg being on campus during the late 1950s. Perhaps we will never know. Nabokov was the unparalleled literary gamesman of his time, and as his biographer Brian Boyd once wrote: “Vladimir Nabokov was a game he played to the hilt.”
* * *
*1 Don’t forget acrostics. Nabokov sent a lengthy letter to his friend The New Yorker editor Katharine White, berating her for rejecting his short story “The Vane Sisters.” “I feel that the New Yorker has not understood ‘The Vane Sisters’ at all,” he wrote. “Let me explain a few things.” The last paragraph, he said, “for a more attentive reader contains the additional delight of a solved acrostic,” formed by the capital letters at the beginning of each sentence. White replied, in so many words, that The New Yorker wasn’t Puzzle Week: “We did not work out your acrostic, to be sure, that being rather out of the New Yorker’s line.”
*2 Shishkov was not a name chosen at random. Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd thinks the root shishka (pinecone), echoes the equally famous fake poet Alexander Travnikov (trava means “grass”), invented by Khodasevich himself. Boyd further notes that Shishkov was the maiden name of Nabokov’s great-grandmother. I wonder if Nabokov wasn’t invoking Adm. Alexander Shishkov, the right-wing poetaster who became Czar Nicholas I’s literary censor. Shishkov disliked Pushkin, but nonetheless approved publication of chapter 1 of Eugene Onegin, recognizing its brilliance. Pushkin directs an aside to Shishkov in Onegin, 8:14, prompting a lengthy explanation in Nabokov’s Commentary.
11
Why?
Here is a scene from Andrew Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Part, published just a few weeks before the novelist’s death:
Much of the public face of Nabokov consists of well-practiced bits of vignettes—when he spoke of Edmund Wilson, for example, he would weigh their friendship and then slowly decide that, in spite of all that has happened in recent years, he was a very old friend—in certain ways my closest, and having said that he tilts his head and looks at his wife in an owlish and arch manner. I myself witnessed this particular scene, and as his biographer of course I have on record another instance in which he enacted essentially the same scene for someone else.1
The boldface line is a direct quotation by another name. Nabokov had forbidden Field to quote from their exchanges. As the men’s relations worsened, Nabokov suggested that Field’s interview tapes were fabrications, so the amanuensis dreamed up this elaborate workaround. He printed direct quotations in boldface, but without quotation marks.
Here is a piece of theater: Nabokov tells a third party that Edmund Wilson was “in certain ways” his closest friend. Then he punctuates the ambiguous comment with a knowing look toward Vera, his closest friend in all ways. In what ways was Wilson Nabokov’s closest friend? Because of shared childhood connections, Nabokov was doubtless closer, in certain ways, to Georgy Hessen, a longtime family friend, and to Samuel Rosoff, a Tenishev School classmate (“a sensitive schoolmate of mine”—Speak, Memory) with whom he reestablished contact in Switzerland. He was extremely close to his sister Elena Sikorski, who spent the second half of her life in Geneva, and often shared vacations with Vladimir and Vera. The couple took care of their lifelong friend Anna Feigin, Vera’s cousin, who had helped them with loans and hospitality during the lean years in Europe. These were life friendships, of shared time and experience.
Many of us still have best friends from childhood whom we may see once or twice a decade, yet they remain best friends. Wilson and Nabokov were not like that. Their friendship fed on the oxygen of intellectual discourse. When Nabokov writes to tell Wilson that he misses him, he misses the vigorous repartee that is only partly captured in the written exchanges. For many years they had their lives’ works in common, and in certain ways—certainly when it came to talking about literature and writing—yes, Wilson was Nabokov’s best friend.
So how does a friendship pass from genuine intimacy to loathing? From the borrowing of socks to the rewriting of personal histories? Samuel Johnson remarked that “one of the duties of friendship [is] to hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain.” In the voluminous Wilson-Nabokov correspondence, one finds a two-thousand-word-long, June 1944 letter from Nabokov that includes a graphic account of bleeding diarrhea brought on by food poisoning. Assigned to a Cambridge hospital room with “an old man dying from acute cardiac trouble,” Nabokov monitored his bunkmate’s end-stage ravings and shared them with Wilson: “all very interesting and useful to me.”
For heaven’s sake, Nabokov even dreamed of Wilson:
Am coming down steps of Lausanne-like railway
station and meet Edmund….He is about to catch a train. I tell him I’ll go “upstairs” to see him off. He says: only Russians use “upstairs” in that sense. He walks briskly along the platform and I notice how fit he looks in a dark-grey suit. We lose each other in the crowd and the train glides away.2
How did we travel from “Dear Bunny,” and “Dear Volodya,” to Please Lose My Address and By the Way I’m Removing Your Blurbs from All My Books?
“A black cat came between us—Boris Pasternak’s novel ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ ” is how Nabokov explained the rift in his “death interview” with Alden Whitman, the obituary writer for The New York Times. “He started the quarrel,” Nabokov said, confident that either he or Wilson would be dead when his words appeared. (Wilson predeceased him by five years.) Whitman added that the bad relations were “exacerbated” when “Mr. Nabokov published his annotated English version of ‘Eugene Onegin.’ ”3
I suppose Wilson did start the quarrel, by pillorying Onegin in The New York Review. But that was the violent tremor released by tectonic plates that had been rubbing against each other for many years. In a brief 1965 note to Barbara Epstein, Nabokov referred to Wilson’s attack on the Onegin translation. “Though well aware of the real reason behind this attack,” he wrote, “I consider this reason far too sad and private to be aired in print.”4
The “real reason” hints at a dark revelation. But the truth seems more prosaic. It looks as if Wilson was suffering from a case of Nabokov fatigue manifesting itself as old-fashioned envy. In the course of a quarter century the two men’s fortunes had dramatically reversed. When Nabokov came to America in 1940, he could only have been flattered to have Wilson as both audience and promoter. The country’s leading literary critic is reviewing drafts of your stories and articles, correcting your grammar, and then passing them on to his influential friends? That’s an enviable situation for anyone, much less a barely landed immigrant.
Yes, it was a two-way street, because Wilson feasted on the intellectual banquet of Nabokov’s capacious knowledge of Russian and European literature. But over time it mattered less. Nabokov found his own, wider audience. Editors came to him; he didn’t need an intermediary. Wilson, alternately indifferent to and fascinated by the tidal wave of Nabokov’s post-Lolita fame, started to lose interest in the friendship. After all, Russian and Pushkin were just two of his many enthusiasms.
In 1991 Gennady Barabtarlo visited the Wilson archive at Yale’s Beinecke Library and filed a dispatch in the online magazine Cycnos. Reading Wilson’s notes and letters, Barabtarlo detected “an ulcerous trace of envy on Wilson’s part that…became especially acute after Lolita—not because Wilson secretly admired it (he did not) but because he thought that Nabokov succeeded commercially where he, Wilson, had failed.” The two men had switched places in the cultural firmament. “The novel and the Hollywood film [of Lolita] made Nabokov rich and a celebrity,” Barabtarlo wrote, “while Wilson continued to work up nineteenth-century statesmen, generals and second-line writers, as well as to attack big-power imperialism.”
The “statesmen, generals and second-line writers” describes the subject matter of Wilson’s 1962 book, Patriotic Gore, which—in addition to likening Lincoln to Lenin—devoted considerable space to such lesser-known writers as George Washington Cable, John William De Forest, and Thomas Nelson Page. Wilson flexed his anti-imperialist muscles in The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, and elsewhere.
Barabtarlo further notes that Nabokov “never misdeemed their relative worth as men of letters, but came to realize in full only too late that Wilson thought contrariwise, considering Nabokov as he did an ingenious, even brilliant but superficial and possibly imitative writer and negligible thinker.” It’s true that Wilson regarded himself as Nabokov’s peer, or better, and that over time he lost patience with his friend’s writing.
Wilson committed another sin: He claimed to understand what made Nabokov tick. Following his nervous breakdown in 1929, Wilson wrote The Wound and the Bow, explaining how trauma breeds artistic creativity. “He had come to the conclusion that he had discovered the secret source of Nabokov’s art in schadenfreude,” Brian Boyd writes. Wilson discerned a chilly soullessness in his former friend, an effect of the family’s jarring emigration, and of the assassination of Nabokov’s father.5 But Nabokov declared himself to be unfathomable, and hated all psychologizing, especially when it focused on him and his work. He dismissed Wilson’s analysis as “figments of his warped fancy.”
It also became clear over time that the two men were very different writers. Wilson took literature seriously, sometimes too seriously. In his fiction his seriousness of purpose betrayed him. One would have welcomed some Nabokovian levity in Hecate County, for instance, but there was none. Yet Nabokov’s “deep-lying inhumanity, or, more precisely, unhumanity”—the eminent critic George Steiner’s phrase6—must have worn Wilson down. He always believed that writing had a purpose, and many of his purposes testified to his sense of justice and his ever-inquiring mind. He publicized the downtrodden Harlan County coal miners in 1931 and campaigned for Native Americans’ rights at least a decade before their plight gained national attention. Patriotic Gore reassessed the blithely accepted foundation myths of the Civil War. The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, his groundbreaking popularization of Old and New Testament apocrypha, anticipated the vast, protoacademic Jesus industry of the final quarter of the twentieth century.
Contrast these outings with Nabokov’s declaration: “My books are blessed by a total lack of social significance.”7
One of Wilson’s unrealized ambitions was to create an American version of France’s government-funded Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, an authoritative and accessible collection of classic literature. Wilson hated pedantry and despaired that his nemesis, the fusty Modern Language Association, would hijack his idea for a library of national classics, which they indeed tried to do. Wilson wanted excellent editions of great classics priced for mass consumption. A two-thousand-page, four-volume doorstop translation of Eugene Onegin, costing $150, would be a precise example of what Wilson did not want to see in bookstores.
Where Nabokov was concerned, Wilson appreciated the prose but not the poetry, figuratively speaking. He enjoyed Speak, Memory and portions of Nabokov’s early work, such as Sebastian Knight. But he tired quickly of the gaming, the frippery, the language tricks, the difficult allusions. He seems not to have read the finished version of Bend Sinister, and he abandoned Lolita halfway through. He dismissed Pale Fire and Ada with a snap of his fingers. I find it hard to believe that he read those books, either.
Wilson was in excellent company. This is V. S. Naipaul speaking, but it could just as well be Wilson: “What is [Nabokov’s] style? It’s bogus, calling attention to itself. Americans do that. All those beautiful sentences. What are they for?”8
Wilson doubtless felt unfairly eclipsed by the international acclaim that enveloped Nabokov’s post-Lolita endeavors, but Nabokov had been nursing his own slights. He expressed pique more than once that Wilson failed to finish some of his books, and that Wilson never used his clout to promote him in the early days. Elena Levin told Martha Duffy of Time that Nabokov had been hoping for some favorable reviews from Wilson, and she speculated to the biographer Brian Boyd that Wilson probably never published his promised overview of Nabokov’s work because his Russian simply wasn’t up to it.9 Levin told Duffy in 1969 that “Wilson does not know enough Russian to write about Nabokov or Pushkin.” Then how was he able to trash Nabokov’s work on Onegin? “He simply recognized that this was not a good translation,” Levin replied.10
—
IN A 1942 LETTER to Roman Grynberg, Nabokov addressed his relations with Wilson, whom he had known for only two years. “I love a violin in personal relationships, but in this case there is no way one can let out a heartfelt sigh or casually unburden a soft fresh bit of oneself,” Nabokov wrote. “Still, there is a great deal else to make up for it.”11
The Russian word for fr
iend is droug, and it is a pregnant word indeed. Russian friendships almost rise to the status of blood brotherhood. It is quite possible that Nabokov always regarded Wilson as an American friend, with all the friability that that implies, and not a nostoyashchy droug—a “real friend”—the highest compliment a Russian can bestow.
What of Wilson? What kind of friend was he?
Fanatically loyal, one would have to conclude, especially to his Princeton classmates, whom he regarded as a literary band of brothers. The world has forgotten John Peale Bishop, but Wilson was promoting his classmate’s poetry and prose throughout the latter’s brief life, and lamented to anyone who would listen that Bishop’s wealthy wife had perverted his friend’s true calling: literature. Their classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald died even younger—Bishop lived to age fifty-two, Fitzgerald to forty-four—yet Wilson evinced a fidelity to Scott apparently unblemished by envy. In 1933 Wilson wrote to Fitzgerald: “I have just read Hemingway’s new short stories…now is your time to creep up on him,” repeating the last phrase twice.12 Wilson edited Fitzgerald’s posthumous novel, The Last Tycoon, for free and battled mightily with the authorized biographer Arthur Mizener on his late friend’s behalf. “They [the Fitzgeralds] had a genius for imaginative improvisations of which they were never quite deprived even in their later misfortunes,” was one of many corrective observations he sent to Mizener in 1950.13
Wilson showed tremendous loyalty even to friends who had jumped the rails. “In spite of our unusual loathing of one another’s views, I’d very much like to see you,” he wrote to the editor and poet Allen Tate in 1951.14 Wilson and John Dos Passos had been friends since the 1920s, and Wilson twice intervened to question his old comrade’s sanity. “What in God’s name has happened to you?” Wilson exclaimed in 1938. “You’ve been plugging the damned Stalinist line, which gets more and more cockeyed by the minute.15 Twenty-six years later he called out the slip-sliding Dos Passos yet again: “What on earth has happened to you? How can you take Goldwater seriously?”16
