by Alex Beam
In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, his book about his ruptured friendship with V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux observed that “friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness [emphasis added.]”17 I think Wilson became an inconvenient witness for Nabokov, a man who remembered the fervent supplications for help from Nicolas Nabokov (“Help, dear Edmund Edmundovich. Do whatever you can”), who remembered the years when Nabokov had to borrow money from Roman Grynberg to pay Dmitri’s private school tuitions. Wilson had known Nabokov as a man in need, and continued their friendship into a time when Nabokov preferred to be regarded as a man who needed nothing from anyone.
In the end both men could live without each other. Nabokov had achieved autarky in the Swiss Alps, with all the comforts of not-home in the company of the few intimate acquaintances he cared about. Despite his best efforts to subvert it, Wilson had a stable marriage and also a dwindling but supportive public for his works.
After Wilson died, Vera Nabokova wrote a letter to his widow, Elena. “I would like to tell you how fond Vladimir has always been of Edmund despite the unfortunate turn in their relations. We always think of Edmund in terms of past friendship and affection; not of the so unnecessary hostilities of recent years.” Two years later, when Elena Wilson was assembling the men’s letters for publication, Vladimir wrote to her: “I need not tell you what agony it was rereading the exchanges belonging to the early radiant era of our correspondence.”
12
As I Was Saying…
Even in the decade after the two writers’ deaths, the Onegin translation controversy occasionally lurched out of its coffin. In 1977, the year that Nabokov died, the retired British diplomat Charles Johnston published his rhyming, metered translation that so enchanted the young writer Vikram Seth, who happened to pull it off the shelf of a Palo Alto bookstore. The two events were unrelated. It seems impossible that Vladimir Nabokov would have bothered to care about yet another English Onegin, with his own mortality very much in the balance.
In 1982, from the false azure of a clear sky came that distinctive rumble from the Montreux Palace Hotel. Forty-eight-year-old Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir’s only child and himself a decent translator, happened upon an interview with Johnston in the Moscow journal Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature). Writing from Switzerland, an outraged Dmitri unburdened himself in a breathless letter to The Times Literary Supplement: He quoted Johnston saying of his father’s Onegin that “I believe he got bored doing this, so that what set out to be a literal version in fact contains a strong element of Nabokovian fantasy [emphasis in the original].”
Dmitri: “Johnston, in essence, accuses Nabokov of dishonesty.”
Here we go again.
“It would seem imperative that Johnston, once having made such an accusation, produce a few examples of the ‘Nabokovian fantasy’ he mentions,” Dmitri wrote. “I challenge him to do so.”
Paul Fussell once wrote an essay called “The Author’s Big Mistake.” I keep a copy in my desk. Fussell collected writers’ letters of outrage sent to newspapers and magazines that had published unfavorable—meaning, not favorable enough—reviews of their work. The first sentence hardly ever deviated: “I never write letters complaining about reviews. But in this one, extraordinary case…“
Dmitri simply cannot resist: “It was not my intention here to discuss Johnston’s translation…” We know what is coming next. “However, I cannot forego to point out that…” From “among innumerable examples,” Dmitri highlights one malapropism: In canto 7, stanza 32, his father had a team of horses “to the master coach are harnessed.” Johnston rendered this, “Horses and coaches are spliced in marriage.”
“Those poor horses,” Dmitri wrote. “Poor Pushkin.”1
Sir Charles had plenty of time on his hands. His distinguished diplomatic career, which never included an assignment to Russia, had ended years earlier when he left the governor-generalship of Australia. (It’s possible that he practiced Russian with his beautiful wife, Princess Natalie Bagration, the great-great-granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I.) Johnston’s rejoinder graced the TLS letters page just two weeks later:
Ever since publishing my own translation of Eugene Onegin five years ago, I have emphasized my debt to Vladimir Nabokov. I have a great respect for him, both as a Russian scholar and (except in his translation of Onegin) as a writer in English.
But because Dmitri challenged me to come up with some examples of “Nabokovian fantasy,” Johnston went on, I will be happy to oblige him.
Here are a number of words, which seem to me fantastic in the sense…that their quirkishness unnecessarily distracts the reader’s attention away from Pushkin, and makes him think about Nabokov and his strange choice of language: precognizing; devourment; dulcitude and juventude; dolent.
Which brought Johnston to the “shotman.” In canto 3 Nabokov needed to translate strelok, a “shooter” or “marksman.” He chose “shotman.”
“I looked the word up, in as heavy as possible an edition of the OED,” Johnston reported:
Finally, I learned that, among other things, a shotman is one who fires the explosive charge in a Cornish tin mine. I have met Cornish tin miners in Australia, and other parts of the world, but this seems a bit far-flung….What, I ask myself, what the devil is this Cornishman doing here, crouching in the bushes in the middle of the Government of Pskov? If that isn’t fantasy, I don’t know what is.
Dmitri—excitable Dmitri, the flashy race-car driver, the peripatetic opera singer; loyal, filial Dmitri*—roars back: “Sir Charles has obviously trundled his heaviest artillery into an obscure Cornish tin mine in search of an easy laugh.”
In the murk of his mine, Sir Charles has stumbled upon a perfect example of Nabokovian literality: a word was needed and found that was at once technically accurate, poetically evocative, and suggestive of the proper nuance in Pushkin’s strelok.
Cue the tiresome battle of the dictionaries. If only the world would toss out the OED! Webster’s first definition of “shotman” is “shooter.” Who would have thought?
Honoring the danse macabre choreography of the literary duel, Sir Charles then announced that he was quitting the field: “I have too much regard for the memory of Mr. Nabokov père to relish being provoked into a slanging match with Mr. Nabokov fils.”
Before his figurative departure, Johnston offered an example of a “Nabokovian fantasy” that “can kill stone dead the finest effects of the original.” Just as the Bollingen subeditor warned Nabokov back in 1962, his infelicity at the very end of Onegin, in the poet’s beautiful and oft-quoted farewell to the reader (8.49), had returned to haunt him: “Whoever you be my reader—/Friend or foe, I wish with you/to part at present as a pal.”
Sir Charles’s unfinal word on this subject: “The English language is trickier than it looks.”
That same year Berkeley’s Simon Karlinsky took a potshot at “Johnson” in a New York Times book review, calling his Onegin “undeservedly overpraised by critics.” Karlinsky said the 1977 translation produced “on a person closely familiar with the original the effect of a Chopin nocturne played in the tempo of a military march.”
I didn’t translate the poem for people “closely familiar with the original,” Johnston shot back. He noted that Karlinsky’s view “is shared by Dimitri Nabokov, with whom, in The Times Literary Supplement, I am at this moment conducting a high-spirited correspondence about his father’s version of ‘Eugene Onegin.’ ”2
“Incidentally,” Johnston added, “I was interested by Professor Karlinsky’s choice of language: ‘Undeservedly overpraised.’ This is a fascinating bit of English usage. Can someone be deservedly overpraised? Perhaps in California?”
The Times had seen this movie before, and declined to publish Dmitri’s riposte, which included nine side-by-side examples of how his father’s Onegin obviously trounced Johnston’s. Dmitri read the entire letter in an address to the Cornell N
abokov Festival in April 1983. It ended with the phrase, “To conclude the whole business once for all…“
* * *
* Who of course had plenty to say about Edmund Wilson. “I liked him,” Dmitri told the visiting Martin Amis for an Observer interview in 1981. “He was very good with children. He was cuddly, playful. He could make a mouse out of a handkerchief and make it move for me….Then his immense presumption—that he knew Russian!”
Acknowledgments
This book sprang from a chance comment over lunch at the Café St. Petersburg in Newton, Massachusetts. Michael Johnson, a former Moscow correspondent and editor who has become a widely published Pushkin scholar, told me the story of the Nabokov-Wilson feud. As mentioned earlier, I broke out laughing.
Andrea Pitzer, a founder of the Nieman Foundation’s Storyboard website and author of The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, introduced me to many of the denizens of Nabokovland. She guided me through the thickets of memoirs and archives with patience and intelligence. I am very grateful.
Stephanie Sandler, Harvard’s Ernest Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, allowed me to participate in her semester-long seminar devoted to Eugene Onegin, a relatively rare opportunity to read Pushkin’s masterpiece in Russian, with other Russian speakers. She was a superb teacher, and helped me with many questions that cropped up while I was working on my manuscript. Her colleagues James Russell, the late Daniel Aaron, and Gregory Nagy also made important contributions to this book. Boston University’s Christopher Ricks recalled his 1965 review of Nabokov’s Onegin as if it were yesterday, and enriched my understanding of the poem.
Brian Boyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, is the undisputed dean of Nabokov studies, and a respected academician in other fields. He answered my often naive queries with indulgence and courtesy. He shared his interview notes with key actors in the Nabokov-Wilson drama who are no longer living, such as Mary McCarthy and Harry and Elena Levin. They enriched this book, and I thank him.
The Nabokov scholars Gennady Barabtarlo at the University of Missouri and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney at Holy Cross College also generously shared their work and insights with me.
Edmund Wilson’s two children, Reuel and Helen Miranda, helped me when they could, and I am grateful to them. His lifelong friend Jason Epstein found time to speak with me, and clarified many details of the Wilson-Nabokov imbroglio.
Several writers shared their thoughts and resources with me, including Robert Roper, Stacy Schiff, Stephen Nichols, Ron Rosenbaum, Sarah Funke Butler, and Sasha Chavchavadze, whose grandparents witnessed the Wilson-Nabokov fireworks. My friends Joseph Kahn, Arthur Bowen, Roger Lowenstein, Julie Michaels, Ben Birnbaum, and Ronald Koltnow also provided help and advice. Thanks also to Guggenheim Foundation vice president André Bernard, to Tatiana Ponomareva at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, and to Mike Grinley, art director extraordinaire.
Vladimir Nabokov’s papers reside in two archives, at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and at the Library of Congress. Nabokov’s executor, Andrew Wylie, granted me free range of the Berg, where Joshua McKeon and Lyndsi Barnes answered my specific queries.
Library of Congress staffers Lewis Wyman, Eric Frazier, Alice Birney, Jennifer Gavin, and Margaret Kiechefer piloted me through their considerable Nabokov holdings and the Library’s extensive Bollingen Foundation archive.
Edmund Wilson’s papers are at Yale University’s Beinecke Library; Ingrid Lennon-Pressey, Mary Ellen Budney, Karen Spicher, and Laurie Klein were my talented case handlers there. I was also helped by Jay Satterfield, Special Collections Librarian, and Barbara Krieger, both at Dartmouth College; Dean Smith at the University of California’s Bancroft Library; Abhinaya Rangarajan at the University of Tulsa’s Department of Special Collections; Eisha Leigh Neely and Heather Furnas at Cornell University’s Carl A. Kroch Library; and Jenna Weathers and Karen Fischer at the Newton Free Library in my hometown.
I couldn’t have happened upon a more talented and engaged editor than Gerald Howard, who signed on to this project and immediately proposed an outing to Edmund’s Wilson’s Wellfleet, Massachusetts, gravesite. (See page 11.) I have met many writers who wish they had the privilege of working with Gerry, and I am worthy of their envy. Gerry’s two assistants, Jeremy Medina and Josh Zajdman, came to know me perhaps better than they might have liked, and I extend major-league gratitude to senior publicist Helen Tobin for helping us promote the book. Random House–Pantheon mobilized a small and efficient army to bring this book into print: managing editor Altie Karper, copy editor Sue Llewellyn, text designer Cassandra Pappas, production manager Romeo Enriquez, and jacket designer Kelly Blair. Thank you all very much.
Four sensational readers caught many of my early mistakes and helped smooth out some very rough drafts: Mark Feeney, Katherine Powers, David Roberts, and my wife, Kirsten Lundberg, who has learned more about Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov than she ever dreamed of knowing. What a lucky woman!
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Mary McCarthy interview, Dec. 1985, courtesy Brian Boyd.
2. Simon Karlinsky, ed., Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 236.
3. Jeffrey Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), p. 441.
1 THE BEGINNING
1. Robert Roper, Nabokov in America: The Road to Lolita (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 25.
2. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 18.
3. Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 149.
4. Boyd, American Years, p. 20.
5. Edmund Wilson, The Twenties, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. xxiii.
6. Ibid., p. xxv.
7. Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 319.
8. Wilson, Twenties, p. 157.
9. Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Noonday Press, 1964), p. 36.
10. Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), p. 307.
11. Edmund Wilson, Red, Black, Blond and Olive (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 263.
12. Ibid., p. 219.
13. Ibid., p. 376.
14. Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics: 1912–1972, ed. Elena Wilson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 737 (hereafter cited as LLP).
15. Wilson, Twenties, p. 316.
16. Ibid., p. 318.
17. Rosalind Baker Wilson, Near the Magician: A Memoir of My Father, Edmund Wilson (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), p. 32.
18. Lewis Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 26.
19. Ibid, p. 309.
20. LLP, p. xxi.
21. Ibid., p. 45.
22. Ibid., p. 82.
23. Roper, Nabokov in America, p. 23; Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 121.
24. Brian Boyd, “Nabokov as Translator,” http://www.usp.br/rus/images/edicoes/Rus_n01/04_BOYD_Brian_-_Nabokov_as_Translator_-_Passion_and_Precision.pdf., p. 7.
25. Vladimir Nabokov, trans., Commentary to Eugene Onegin, part 2, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Washington, DC: Bollingen Foundation, 1964), p 130.
26. Roper, Nabokov in America, p 14.
27. Edmund Wilson, The Fifties, from Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), p. 427.
28. Boyd, Russian Years, p. 506.
2 SUCH GOOD FRIENDS
1. Boyd, American Years, p. 13.
2. Karlinsky, Dear Bunny, p. 69.
3. Nabokov correspondence, Aug. 2, 1944, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
&n
bsp; 4. Boyd, American Years, p. 571.
5. Edmund Wilson, “The Pickerel Pond,” Night Thoughts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1961), p. 240.
6. Karlinsky, Dear Bunny, p. 348.
7. Ibid., p. 164.
8. LLP, p. 535.
9. Rosalind Wilson, Magician, p. 32.
10. Wilson, Twenties, p. 494.
11. Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 254.
12. Karlinsky, Dear Bunny, p. 99.
13. LLP, p. 378.
14. Edmund Wilson, “Notes on Russian Literature,” Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1943.
15. Wilson letter to Nabokov, Dec. 12, 1940, Wilson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.
16. Karlinsky, Dear Bunny, p. 76.
17. Wilson letter to Nabokov, Nov. 23, 1960, Berg Collection.
18. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “Sinistral Details: Nabokov, Wilson, and Hamlet in Bend Sinister,” Nabokov Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 179–194.
19. Karlinsky, Dear Bunny, p. 232.
20. Ibid., p. 290.
21. Elena Levin interview, Oct. 22, 1990, courtesy of Brian Boyd.
22. Karlinsky, Dear Bunny, p. 306.
23. The New Yorker, Sept. 9, 1944.
24. Karlinsky, Dear Bunny, p. 282.
25. New York Times, Feb. 18, 1951.
26. Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 254.
27. Karlinsky, Dear Bunny, p. 210.
