Beam’s carelessness reaches an apogee in the Boston Globe article Nabokov was such a Jerk.
It’s not worth dwelling on much of the content: there’s little there of substance. But I shall take a look at the claim that Beam makes regarding Doctor Zhivago. Zhivago is important to this story, as while Nabokov hated the book for artistic and political reasons, Wilson latched onto it. “A black cat came between us … Doctor Zhivago” as Nabokov explained.
This follows up in detail on the review of Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the end of a beautiful friendship. You can read my (not entirely positive) review here.
The dust-up of the feud, and the spectrum of reviews, seems unsatisyingly damning for Beam. So, as a final word on the exchange, he brings in a deus ex machina in the form of Alexander Gerschenkron. We are told that Gerschenkron – the “known as ‘The Great Gerschenkron’ … a mythic figure … feared no-one, not the Bolsheviks, not the Nazis … certainly not Vladimir Nabokov”. In Beam’s account, Gerschenkron attacks every aspect of Onegin – the translation, the commentary, and the scholarship in a “merciless takedown” – Nabokov never replied, and quietly incorporated his changes into the revision.
This account should trouble us, as it brings convenient closure for Beam and allows him to avoid having to examine the scholarship in detail. How accurate is it?
Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the end of a beautiful friendship by Alex Beam
An amusing, light-footed but increasingly partial and even sloppy account of the infamous disintegration of a long-standing literary friendship.
What’s important in a friendship? Does loyalty and tolerance in disagreement come first – or does principal, character and rapport count for more? For a quarter of a century, Vladimir Nabokov – already a well-respected Russian author in the European emigration, but virtually unknown in his adopted American home; and Edmund Wilson, the pre-eminent critic of his day, were vital friends.
This was originally written a comment on an episode of the wonderful Partially Examined Life (“A podcast by those who were once considering doing philosophy for a living, and then thought better of it”) – specifically Ep. 189 on Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al).
Thanks guys for the great conversation: you do your usual wonderful job of presenting compelling readings for positions I am not particularly sympathetic to. In the same way as Robert Williams’ comment on part one – and as alluded to by Wes during towards the end – my general impulse is to bemoan the baleful influence some of these have had on the practice of criticism. I think you made good points on the potential breadth of “intention” and how it could be broader than the conscious. What I found curious though is that the survey (while seeming to be sufficiently broad to take in all of “art”) seems to leave out some very specifically intentional works.
This particularly chimed with me as I read Brian Boyd’s wonderful criticism on Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (a previous Phi Fic read!) – “The Magic of Artistic Discovery”. Now Wes and Mark described several scenarios where the artist either (i) deliberately uncouples intention from the creative process, (ii) uses free association as a source of raw material which they actively shape into the product or (iii) act as readers of their own work, and create meaning therein. I don’t doubt that this is a major origin in many types of works. But I would argue that in writing prose and poetry, it is not a necessary component.
Let’s take some time to look in detail with how Rand executes the features we’ve identified. We can make the trouble with Rand’s writing stand out in bold relief when we compare Roark’s portrayal in The Fountainhead with Nabokov’s of Luzhin in The Defence in these terms.
Affirming our opposition to bad art and banal thought is satisfying and often necessary. In the few days after I’d immersed myself back into the sludgy consistency of Rand’s novel, with all its bald and unchallenged commonplaces, I felt a real need to vent distaste, even just as cathartic resistance. Schadenfreude is fun, but it can get close to bad conscience if that’s all we’re doing – often something of an online speciality. Spending our whole time decrying the bad doesn’t cut it – something that Rand herself would have done well to mark: for all her pleas of positive virtue created by individuals, the majority of The Fountainhead is spent sneering at the trivially dismissable.