9
Until Death Do Us Part
The epistolary clashes over Onegin had wound down by the end of 1967. Wilson and Nabokov had suspended their correspondence. However, Nabokov did like to scratch the itch. In October 1966, he wrote to Page Stegner, an English professor at Ohio State who was compiling The Portable Nabokov: “You have a perfect right to quote Edmund Wilson on my contempt for ignoramuses but your readers might have liked to be told that…I proved him one.”1 A few months later, Vera asked Stegner to include Vladimir’s Encounter broadside, “Reply to My Critics” in the compendium: “The inclusion of this piece V.N. considers very important because Mr. Wilson furtively continues his personal attacks.”
Nabokov continued to play his little tricks. In the thick of the Onegin war he was reediting and embellishing his 1951 memoir, Speak, Memory, which could be counted on to sell thousands more copies now that its author was world famous. In the revision Nabokov compared his childhood inability to capture a rare butterfly to the “absurd oversight” in chess made by the “world-famous grandmaster Wilhelm Edmundson” during a match with the “local amateur and pediatrician, Dr. Schach, who eventually won.” Professor Elizabeth Sweeney deserves credit for solving this intricate puzzle. Schach is a dig at the popular pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and also the German word for “chess” (and the Russian word for “check,” in chess). Noticing that Nabokov’s butterfly has “a white W on its…underside,” Sweeney writes, “invites the careful reader to transpose the syllables of the name ‘Wilhelm Edmundson.’ ”2
More prosaically, there was no world-famous grandmaster of that name.
In the Wilson household, Nabokov remained very much on the radar. The two men often laundered their opinions and accusations through their common friend Roman Grynberg, a businessman and publisher who had known and liked both writers since the 1930s. In prebreakup 1962, Wilson shared his opinion of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire with Grynberg, but not with the author. “Have you seen Volodya’s new book?” Wilson inquired. “I read it with amusement, but it seems to me rather silly. Do let me know what you think of it. I expected that the professor would turn out to be the real King and that the commentator would be the assassin; but he doesn’t seem to have had this idea….The book must have been inspired by his own commentary in Onegin.”*1
Nabokov’s next new novel was Ada, and Wilson again shared his opinion with the Grynbergs. “Have you people read Volodya’s new novel? I am just about to do so. I understand that he takes a nasty crack at me in it.” Indeed he did. Sweeney decoded yet another anti-Wilson dig, this time buried in “Vivian Darkbloom” ’s notes at the end of Ada. Darkbloom explains that the chess player identified as “the Minsk-born Pat Rishin (champion of Underhill and Wilson, S.C.)” is a play on the word “patrician.” Darkbloom further explains: “That epithet [refers] to a popular critic, a would-be expert on Russian as spoken in Minsk and elsewhere.” “Underhill” is a play on Norman Podhoretz’s name; pod gore = “under hill,” approximately. Podhoretz wrote a famous 1958 essay on Wilson, “The Last Patrician.” In their post-Onegin ping-pong in The New York Review, Wilson accused Nabokov of adopting the Belarusian (Minsk) pronunciation of the word “czar.”
WHY NABOKOV PURSUED his personal attacks is a mystery. The two men’s fortunes had diverged, considerably. The second half of the 1960s was not particularly generous to Wilson, especially by contrast with Nabokov, upon whom fortune continued to smile.
Wilson’s health had been poor for much of the decade. He had been suffering from gout, exacerbated by too much drinking, since the 1950s. He also developed serious heart problems, diagnosed as angina in the winter of 1961. There were many times during his later years when he had trouble walking, or ended up in a hospital, from which he more than once checked himself out. Getting to sleep was a problem, often resolved by scotch and Nembutal. His deteriorating health hardly interfered with his literary output, however. He reissued several books in the second half of the decade and composed some new ones as well: A Prelude: Characters and Conversations from the Early Years of My Life, taken from his journals, and The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1947–1969, a sequel to his successful 1955 journalism about the archaeological discoveries in Jordan’s Qumran Caves.
Wilson experienced professional setbacks as well. He could fulminate all he wanted against U.S. imperialism and the taxmen in his 1963 pamphlet, The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, but the IRS was demanding its $70,000 in unpaid taxes.*2 His wife, Elena, appealed to family friend and Kennedy White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who jawboned the IRS into a $25,000 settlement. That applied to back taxes only.3 At one point during the 1960s, the service held a lien on all of Wilson’s literary earnings. He finally bounced the IRS sapajou off his back by auctioning off his papers to Yale and by mortgaging his Talcottville, NY, home.
On the asset side of the ledger Wilson found himself on the receiving end of several sizable, tax-free literary awards, including the one-thousand-dollar Emerson-Thoreau Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (He complained about the ceremony in his journal, noting that “the dinner and drinks were skimpy, as they are likely to be in Boston.”) He also won the National Book Committee’s five-thousand-dollar National Medal for Literature, and the munificent thirty-thousand-dollar Aspen Award from the Great Books–loving grandees of the Aspen Institute. Wilson’s doctor said his heart couldn’t withstand a trip to Aspen (elevation 7,900 feet), so instead he suffered through a lavish banquet laid on in his honor at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Most of the attendees were rich Aspen Institute supporters. Jeffrey Meyers reports that “the oil millionaires who gave the award did not know why he had won it and circulated Who’s Who under the table to find out who he was.”4 A plutocrat’s wife asked if he had written Finlandia. “The whole thing was slightly humiliating,” Wilson recalled.5 And not just for Wilson. His friend Paul Horgan remembered that Wilson “leaped for the check, crying out, ‘Tax-free! Tax-free!’ ” Wilson then insulted his benefactor, the Aspen president William Stevenson, by asking him to spell his name for a book inscription.6
The award was discontinued soon afterward. Wilson was the last person to win it.
In his journal The Sixties, published twenty years after his death, Wilson confessed that he was “a man of the twenties.” The sixties weren’t his decade. Paris wasn’t the same; the Princeton Club had been remodeled, not much to his liking. Nylon stockings, “which used to last for months, now run at the slightest contact,” and don’t get him started on disposable razor blades.7 His frenemy Alfred Kazin wrote of Wilson in the sixties that “he was so definitely not of this time.” Kazin called the paunchy Wilson, brandishing a gold-topped walking cane, meandering up and down “the intellectuals’ beach” in Wellfleet, a “character,” and not a very appealing one:
The sight of him in his Panama hat and well-filled Bermuda shorts, the cane propped up in the sand like a sword in a declaration of war, instantly brought out in me the mingled anxiety and laughter that I used to feel watching Laurel and Hardy crossing a precipice. There was so much mischief, disdain and intellectual solemnity wrapped up behind that getup, that high painfully distinct voice, that lonely proud face.8
The journals record a life of pain, fraught with world-weariness. “Reading the newspapers, and even the world’s literature, I find that I more and more feel a boredom with and scorn for the human race,” he wrote in 1966. That same year he drafted a poem, published in his 1971 memoir, Upstate: “…In a cage/I stalk from room to room, lose heat and speed./Now entering the dark defile of age.”
He was seventy-one years old.
Across the ocean, amid the towering Alps, Vladimir Nabokov found the late 1960s very much to his liking. Lolita had made him a rich man who could travel where he wished and write exactly what he wanted. Nabokov did not need to go to the world; the world came to Nabokov. Whether it was a squad of Time magazine factotums converging on Montreux to prepare their unctuously flattering cover story (“Prospero’s Progress”) in May 1969, or the “hot” young Paramount producer Robert Evans come to read Nabokov’s latest novel, Ada, in galleys, Nabokov luxuriated at the center of his self-created and self-contented universe. He busied himself by translating his “Sirin” stories from Russian into English (Nabokov’s Quartet), with a new edition of Speak, Memory, and of course with the publication of the instant best seller Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. The book sold well on the strength of the author’s worldwide fame, but many readers shared Evans’s assessment of the book, which he speed-read twice, jet-lagged and high on amphetamines: “It was torture.”
The world had confirmed what Nabokov and his wife had always suspected: that he was a genius. Immodest slips had always been part of the Nabokov show. In the 1950s he had started to refer to Anton Chekhov as “my predecessor.” When he was translating the folklore tale The Song of Igor’s Campaign in 1959, he wrote to Wilson that “Russia will never be able to repay all her debts to me.”9 “I think like a genius,” was the provocative opening line to Strong Opinions, a collection of his interviews and essays. Brian Boyd correctly observes that “he thought the critical acclaim merely his belated and inevitable due.”10
The Time cover story allowed him to dump on his fellow “American” authors. Philip Roth? “Farcical.” Norman Mailer? “I detest everything that he stands for.” He had joined Roth, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, and W. H. Auden as perennial Nobel Prize also-rans, writers whose names floated to the surface among each year’s contenders, only to sink back again into the dispiriting slough of success and fame. Nineteen-seventy was again such a year, so that when a Montreux Palace Hotel clerk put through a long-distance call from Stockholm, the maestro braced himself for good news from the selection committee. Alas, it was only a graduate student asking for help with her thesis.*3
In one of his most complicated literary démarches, Nabokov wrote a poem in 1959 parodying Boris Pasternak’s famous lines about his accursed Nobel Prize. (Pasternak: “What wicked thing have I done…I, who forced the whole world to cry/Over my beautiful land.” Nabokov: “What is the evil deed I have committed?…who set the entire world a-dreaming of my poor little girl?”) But the venture is more complicated. In the final verse Nabokov speculates that, despite being banned in Russia, in a future day “a Russian branch’s shadow shall be playing/upon the marble of my hand.” In other words a future Russia would erect a statue to honor its loyal son Nabokov.
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 eliminate 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.
One paragraph later Field called the men “competitors.”
“We were never competitors,” Nabokov notes. “In what, good gracious?” “Competitors” stayed.
Detailing Wilson’s solicitude for Nabokov, Field wrote that “Wilson was so energetic in Nabokov’s interest that he even turned to friends with requests for loans.” “Impossible,” Nabokov objected. This, too, stayed in the text.
In his draft Field mentioned that Nabokov and Wilson worked together translating The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Nabokov objected, apparently forgetting that the two men discussed an article on Igor for The New Yorker in 1948, which Nabokov eventually wrote, and the magazine rejected.17 In the heady post-Lolita years, when almost anything with Nabokov’s name found a publisher, Random House issued his translation of and commentary on Igor—actually a retranslation; he had created a version for his Cornell lectures—done without any input from Wilson.
But in rebutting Field’s minor inaccuracy, Nabokov asserted: “We never worked together,” which was untrue. One of his first bylines in an American magazine was his translation of Pushkin’s “little tragedy,” Mozart and Salieri, for the New Republic, a collaboration with Wilson. The two men exchanged draft outlines of a proposed joint book on Russian literature for several years.
Most egregiously Nabokov attempted to recast the well-known story of how the two men met. In the version Nabokov wanted Field to print, “Nabokov’s first awareness of Wilson’s existence was in the late summer of 1940 when N. [sic] received in Vermont a letter from him suggesting they meet in New York. They did.” This completely reverses the terms of trade, as if Wilson sought out the great novelist in his summer retreat. The truth of the matter was that Nabokov’s well-established relative, the composer Nicolas Nabokov, begged Wilson to lend a hand to his needy cousin, and Wilson graciously complied.
Longevity has its privileges—in this case, rewriting history not as it was, but as one wishes it had been.