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.
Start of a beautiful friendship
The two men, in character and tastes, could not have been more different.
Nabokov, a refugee from the Nazis and Bolsheviks, who had lost the beloved Russia of his childhood as his father to right-wing assassins, had no illusions about totalitarian tyranny and was a stalwart anti-communist. Fleeing Hitler and Europe, he lost the possibility of composing in “the tongue I had so tuned and tamed … softest of tongues, my true one, all my own” that had sustained him through the emigration; and in seeing the emigration and its art deprecated by a Soviet regime interested only in ideological purity, evinced a powerful antipathy to “schools, …” – his “betes noirs were Marx and Freud”.
The initially conservative Wilson, of wealthy New England background, had been horrified by the deprivation he had experienced and fought against first-hand during the Great Depression and became a confirmed socialist and admirer of Lenin. He became interested in Russian, travelled to the USSR and documented his experienced in a book he entitled Travels in Two Democracies. His passionate and stormy personal life of four marriages and numerous mistresses lead him to a Freudian theory of the psychology of literature, where great art emerges from a history great wounds. Nabokov was married for over fifty years to a woman he considered his best reader and editor.
Wilson was an insatiable generalist, and his breadth of interest spanned from Haitian literature to the Zuni; Nabokov was the consummate specialist, a man who spent five years working on the finest details of butterfly speciation in the Harvard museum of comparative zoology.
And yet, for almost 25 years, they were firm friends. The two men charmingly enjoyed each other’s company.
You are one of the very few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them,
Nabokov, letter to Wilson 1946
Wilson was invaluable in his help and promotion of the penurious Nabokovs when the family first arrived in the country; Nabokov was a literary foil, a mentor in Russian language and literature, and excitingly exotic even for a man who already counted Fitzgerald and Hemingway as friends. In private, in visits between the two families and a stream of letters a back-and-forth of lively disputation which seemed to invigorate both writers held forth.
Eugene Onegin
For those familiar with Nabokov, the story of the breakdown of the friendship is well known.
Pushkin is acclaimed and beloved as the greatest poet in Russian, and Eugene Onegin is his greatest work. It is so highly regarded that it has the status of something akin to the whole of Shakespeare condensed into one relatively short novel in verse.
The problem for non-Russian speakers is conveying this in translation. Nabokov was painfully familiar with this problem, teaching the material in his Russian course at Cornell. Prior translations – which preserve the meter, rhyme and unique “Onegin” stanza structure of the original – took great liberties with the style and content, in his view obliterating Pushkin’s artistry. An offhand comment by Vera, his wife “Why don’t you translate it yourself?” became the seeds of a project that would last nine years, and expanded to include an enormous detailed commentary, as well as a rigourously literal translation. His intention, right from the start, was for this to be a crutch for understanding Onegin in English:
[the translation is intended to be] a crib, a pony. And to the fidelity of transposal I have sacrificed everything: elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar.
Nabokov, interview Playboy (1964)
Wilson, even as a prominent critic, had never publicly reviewed Nabokov’s work – even though he greatly admired The Real life of Sebastian Knight, he refrained out of personal considerations. He did not care for Lolita, and in 1958 when after many publishing misadventures Nabokov was finally able to get the book released in the USA, was bemused when it became a bestseller and brought Nabokov widespread fame. This was especially true in light of the history of Wilson’s final work of fiction: Memoirs of Hecate Country, a book he though “his best” and that had once sold well, but been suppressed due to frank sexual content. Wilson’s sales had never recovered.
For many years he had been planning to write a full overview of Nabokov’s work – “something that he will upset him” – derived from his psychological theories of art expounded in The Wound and the Bow.
Never argue with a Russian over Pushkin
He chose the publication of Onegin to strike. His critique, published in the New York Review of Books, was unflinching. He accuses Nabokov of unreadability, solecism and impossible vocabulary, lack of fidelity to Pushkin, faulty interpretation broken English and mistakes in Russian. He objects to Nabokov’s lack of regard for Balzac, Zola and Dostoevsky. He asserts that Nabokov announces that every previous translation is
an ignoramus, incompetent as a linguist and scholar … a low-class person and a ridiculous personality
Edmund Wilson, NYRB
and claims to prefer the version of Ardnt – who had published a prize-winning rhyming translation pilloried by Nabokov.
Nabokov was blindsided by this. After a very frank exchange of letters, with both men shocked at their mutual antipathy, the affair settled down. And so the friendship was over.
Amongst Nabokovians, the story is famous. The criticism and responses are collected in Strong Opinions (VN) and A Window on Russia (EW) respectively.
Brian Boyd covers the complete exchange in his comprehensive biography, including a thorough-going defence of Nabokov’s literalist method in direct comparison to the transparent inventions of translators such as Arndt. The published letters between Nabokov and Wilson leading up to the feud, with the clear drum-beat of disagreement about prosody and Pushkin, contains a detailed explanation of Wilson’s confusions (and Nabokov’s miscommunications).
A large literature discusses the virtues of literal translation, and dozens of translations has appeared in the last 65 years, nearly all speaking of a debt to the Nabokov version. There is a general consensus that Wilson was wrong in most regards; apart from in the degree to which Pushkin knew English. As well as an “assertive defence” of Nabokov’s results, Boyd has examples where Nabokov did not conform to his own literalism, and where the “awkwardness for awkwardness’s sake” – a deliberate device to jar the reader out of well-worn English and appreciate Pushkin’s particularity – backfires and injects Nabokov’s style.
The break of Bunny and Volodya
So what does Beam intend in writing a whole book on the feud alone?
A promising theme, and one that has not perhaps been fully explored, is the tragedy of the implosion of friendship. The epigram (Samuel Johnson on the destruction of friendship), initial chapters of the book, and prominent reviews emphasise this melancholy strain. While long familiar with Nabokov’s side, in reading around this I’ve come to regard Wilson as a literate, flawed but essentially decent man, and a great foil for Nabokov’s brilliance. There’s a rich seam of pathos ready to be explored in Wilson’s biographer’s statement:
Wilson, unfortunately, lost most of the battles he fought … Hecate County was suppressed, the Iroquois’ land was flooded, his precious friendship with Nabokov was destroyed.
Jeffrey Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography
I suspect that this is the intention that Beam went into the work with. However, over his three years of research, he appears to have developed such distaste for both his subjects – but particularly Nabokov – that the book completely loses sight of this. So determined does he become to pillory Nabokov as petty, stingy, erratic (and, to a lesser extent, Wilson as grumpy and gout-ridden) that the noble aims are lost, and the second half of the book becomes increasingly ad hominem (in one of the last chapters he simply states with regard to Nabokov: “he is annoying”).
After finishing the research for the book, Beam published an article in the Boston Globe of quite different tone to The Feud. While the book is light-footed and readable, Beam’s article is shrill and swingeing (the title “Nabokov was such a jerk” gives a sense of this) that removes any doubt of his position. Beam does not show himself in his best light here: compared to the book the article is very superficial, and most of the content of little substance and self-contradictory.
Is this distaste justified? It primarily emerges out of what Beam regards as the pedantry of the exercise and Nabokov’s strong opinions on other translators and authors. There is a clue to this early on: he describes how he laughed out loud at the idea of a friendship imploding over an argument about Russian prosody. But this is the crux of the whole matter, and one that Nabokov, Wilson, and all the other figures took seriously: that there was something at stake in how to translate Pushkin, and his place in wider literature.
…what Beam regards as the pedantry of the exercise. He laughed out loud at the idea of a friendship imploding over an argument about Russian prosody. But this is the crux of the whole matter.
Beam’s dismissal of these stakes – which early in the book is finely comic – leaves a strange hole in his account. We’re supposed to be laughing along at these foolish ageing litterateurs who care enough to argue about whether a peasant’s horse “sniffed” or “sensed” the snow (his description of Wilson’s critique as “stochastically accurate, generally useless and unfailingly amusing” seems to capture this). But for readers who appreciate the stakes of translation, Pushkin, or the personal cost to the two men, this account tells us less and less, beyond Beam’s antipathy to characters that might care about such things.
This explains Beam’s lack of patience with questions Wilson and Nabokov endlessly discussed in their letters, such as the name of the pistol that kills Onegin (“‘LePage’, not ‘Lgiage’, Nabokov pedantifies) or the actual sequence of the duel described in Onegin: he has Nabokov “scolding” Wilson for misrepresenting the duel à volonté.
Rather tediously, for pages Beam mockingly inserts “LePage” pistols into his text as a reminder. But, if we’ve come this far, don’t we care about whether the name of the pistols has been mangled beyond recognition? And he fails to relate the fact that Wilson’s misunderstanding underlay a whole theory of Onegin’s motivations (taking pleasure in killing Lenksi) which Nabokov is keen to argue against.
Literalism
The dismissal cashes out in an increasing number of strange choices Beam makes throughout his account of the feud.
The core, and the most substantial objection raised by Wilson (and others) are that Nabokov’s literalism does not serve the translation. The best – indeed arguably the only way – to examine this question, is to compare the versions side-by-side, and make cases for one approach or the other.
Brian Boyd has done this to great effect in VN: The American Years, comparing Nabokov to Arndt and the more rigourous Johnston, and showing clear interpolations.
In Five: XXXII, for example, Nabokov has:
But the targets of looks and comment
Was at the time a rich pie
while Arndt:
Their scrutiny was all devoted
To a plump pie that made its bow
We can see the preposterous bowing pie is a pure invention here. Further, when describing Zizi, we have:
drunk with the wine of love you poured
Arndt
you made me drunk as one could ask!
Johnston
you, of whom drunk I used to be!
Nabokov
Nabokov’s version is awkward and unpoetic, but is the only version that doesn’t conjure up the unintended image of “Pushkin snoring prostrate on Zizi”.
Beam does nothing of this sort at all. Throughout the two chapters considering Wilson’s critique and Nabokov’s reply, there is not a single comparison of translations to justify the case one way or the other. Indeed, when he does quote Pushkin, Beam doggedly – and deliberately, to “irk the Nabokovian shade” – draws only from Ardnt.
There have been dozens – over forty according to this list – of translations published since Nabokov’s first version, and if looking for a comparison (especially with a rhyming form) the Johnston or Falen versions would now be considered far superior to Ardnt. But because both of these explicitly credit Nabokov with opening up the field, we get nothing of these. Indeed, as much time is given is given to Johnston (in the few page final chapter) as to Douglas Hofstadter’s frankly amateur translation. For some reason, Hofstadter, whose translation is not taken particularly seriously is mentioned here in lengthy footnotes throughout the book – including a damning review which Beam declares is “having a bit too much fun”. It’s hard to escape the sense that Beam dwells on him so long because of his attitude towards the “Nazistic Nabokov” (given Nabokov’s brother was murdered by the Nazis, this seems a bit much).
Instead, we have a re-heating of all the old chestnuts turned over by Wilson and others about Nabokov’s recondite language. These have been pretty much done to death over the last sixty years – Nabokov himself jokes that “mollitude” has now become almost as famous as “nymphette” – and Beam doesn’t add much here.
Not all of Nabokov’s controversial selections stand up – while “sapajous” for “monkey” is an ingenious internal reference to one of Pushkin’s letters, it is not the literal meaning, and should have been explained in the commentary.
But many do: “scrab” is a beautifully economical word, and the meaning of “rememoration” is clear while catching Pushkin’s archaism. Beam’s feigns amused dismissal here: the argument continues to be that words perfectly real in Webster would throw some sort of average reader. In 1965 this may have had more weight, but in the 21st century I no longer have patience for this. It’s easy to discover the meanings of these (really only a dozen or so!) examples and even if not, it’s not like their sense can’t be inferred (surely anyone can figure out what “curvate” means?).
Neither does Beam address the question of literalism as a theory of translation.
Neither does Beam address the question of literalism as a theory of translation. He completely puts aside the fact that Nabokov intended his translation as a guide to study, simply noting it “does not sing for him” (it would be surprising if it did). He doesn’t have much interest in theory of literature, either: we are told of Wilson’s claims of Nabokov art deriving from the deprivations he experienced during the emigration, but only at the end of the book does he mention The Wound and the Bow. Knowing that Wilson has a framework he is keen to fit Nabokov into would let the reader make much more sense of this, and explain some of the strain that crept into their relationship.
An exercise in partiality
While happy to make Wilson look ridiculous, his framing of the reviews and responses of Nabokov’s Onegin become insidiously partial.
We have seen the strength of Wilson’s attack in July 1965; in Beam’s account, Nabokov immediate response was his Reply to my critics with its excoriation of Wilson.
But this isn’t so – as Boyd notes, Nabokov’s first response was actually the “surprisingly gentle” Aug 1965 letter to the New York Review of Books, where “he alluded to his long friendship … and gratitude for Wilson’s past kindness” and notes Wilson’s “mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance is certainly not conducive to a sensible discussion of Pushkin’s language and mine”. This rather reasonable response is entirely ignored by Beam. It was only after further responses (during which, a dreadful error, Wilson accused Nabokov of adopting Belorussian pronunciation) that the full devastating Reply to my critics was published (Encounter, Oct).
Likewise, that the translation was – and continues to be hailed – in academic and critical circles – is something Beam does his best to downplay.
Likewise, that the translation was – and continues to be hailed – in academic and critical circles – is something Beam does his best to downplay. He lists rave reviews from a number of minor reviewers, and then rather waspishly notes: “Nabokov cared little for the idle praise of nobodies” (without considering that perhaps Nabokov shows principle in ignoring uninformed praise as well as criticism). He entirely leaves out the plaudits from Anthony Burgess and John Bayley – Bayley stating that “a better commentary on a poem has never been written” and the commentary on Onegin was “the best in any language”. Michael Wood, the eminent literary critic, writes:
[the idea that it] cannot be read … is an exaggeration. The translation is far more readable than it used to seem, at time far more readable than Johnston’s excellent 1977 version, which in any case acknowledges a great debt to Nabokov.
Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts
The dust-up of the feud, and the spectrum of reviews, seems unsatisfyingly unresolved 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 in rather breathless tones that Gershenkron – “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.
While the story of Gerschenkron’s revenge on Nabokov has been circulated in a few places, re-reading his piece A Manufactured Monument? we find that Gerschenkron is much less critical than implied (and often offers strong if qualified praise), is largely repeating existing criticisms, and has made a certain number of errors himself. More broadly, it is certainly not the case as Beam has it that Gerschenkron revealed “many other errors, which Nabokov was forced to correct” in his revision: for the simplest reason that the bulk of the criticism concerns the felicities of literalism. This is worth looking at more closely, and I do so in this separate post.
A wasted opportunity
Beam can become straightforwardly sloppy. He insists on referring to Véra Nabokov as “Véra Nabokova” to spite Nabokov’s insistence that translations of female Russian names should not keep the feminine ending. His justification for this is that “this is how she signed her name”. But it manifestly is not: Véra is listed as “Nabokov” (or “Nabokoff”) on numerous official documents and in English, signed her name the same way. He makes unsupported statements like “translation isn’t what occupied Nabokov’s eight years of intermittent drudge work”.
Beam can become straightforwardly sloppy
Beam’s carelessness reaches a climax in the Boston Globe article mentioned above. It’s not worth dwelling on much of the content: it is very insubstantial. But I shall take a look at the claim that Beam makes regarding doctor Zhivago in this separate post. 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”, Nabokov explained.
The Feud feels like a strangely wasted opportunity. A whole monograph, to talk about the relations of these two remarkable figures, translation, Pushkin, and the tragedy of dissolved friendship. Beam’s dislike of the principals, which seems have grown during his research on the work, undercuts this note of tragedy and makes him dismiss the literary questions that interested them.
The last latter sent from Nabokov to Wilson read:
A few days ago I had the occasion to reread the whole [batch] of our acquaintance. It was such a pleasure to feel again the warmth of your many kindnesses, the various thrills of our friendship, the constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery.
Nabokov, Dear Bunny
The warmth is genuine and the ideals noble. In The Feud, it’s a shame Beam did so little to marry the two.