Nabokov in America (42 page)

Often they promised to return to see American friends, but those friends made pilgrimage to Montreux instead, obeying the rules about how to behave, how not to inconvenience. The Nabokovs returned in ’62, to attend the premiere of Kubrick’s film, and in ’64 to support the release of the Bollingen
Onegin
. Those trips were fun but also hard work. At the 92nd Street Y in New York, on April 5, 1964, Nabokov recited poetry and prose in a stentorian voice, his playfully reproving tone and occasional King’s Englishism—a-
gane
for again, re-
wawd
for reward—furthering a resemblance to the Romanian-born
actor-producer John Houseman
⁴³
, especially his performance in Smith Barney ads. Nabokov’s spoken English is subtle—capable of lampooning while also asserting superiority—and always intelligible. Some
remnants of Russian pronunciation
⁴⁴
, and possibly his dentures, impose a slight impediment, but he turns this to advantage, affecting a sonorous, hortatory style that a native English speaker on such a stage could only have intended ironically.

Eight years later, he considered another return. McGraw-Hill was soon to release his collection of
ex cathedra
pieces,
Strong Opinions
(1973), and Nabokov, mulling a new multibook contract, dusted off the idea of
Speak On, Memory
once more. “
I have already accumulated
⁴⁵
a number of notes, diaries, letters, etc.,” he told McGraw-Hill, “but in order to describe my American years adequately I should need money to revisit several spots,” among them the Grand Canyon and “other Western localities.” One last gambol over the landscape, on a publisher’s dime. His notes include part of a foreword, and he declares at the outset his annoyance at having been misidentified as a satirist of America: what he
has written, he says, is in no way satire, although, one has to admit, the ways of Americans are peculiar. “
An average émigré
⁴⁶
Russian … will not borrow your comb, walk barefoot on a hotel carpet, or plug up a public washbasin before use, as his American counterpart thinks nothing of doing.” This tendency to misread him on America makes him “prodigiously anxious,” he says—in the end, too anxious to write the book.

His insistence on not being labeled a satirist hangs on a technicality. He knew he wrote in a ridiculing way, but this was not true satire, because satire implies moral judgment and corrective measures, he felt. The Russian reformers of the nineteenth century had indeed had change in mind; in fact, they had devalued literature that did not serve reform. But Nabokov and the European modernists—and
even some primitive Americans
⁴⁷
, going back at least to Poe—preferred not to look beyond the text, pointedly severing writing from its social reality. Edmund Wilson, who visited him in Montreux, would have recognized the stance; he might even have agreed with it. The text was sufficient, Wilson had often acknowledged, was incommensurable, if it chose to be, with the world. On the question of what mattered in literature, though, the two men remained in deep disagreement. Wilson campaigned for the “trashy” and politically
dubious
Doctor Zhivago
⁴⁸
. He published
two long articles
⁴⁹
, one in
The New Yorker
and one in
Encounter
, representing it as “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.” Pasternak had “the courage of genius,” Wilson thought. A poet whom even Nabokov had once respected, who had fallen into silence during the years of Soviet horror, had produced an
epic novel that said no
⁵⁰
to the regime, that stood defiantly against the horror.

Moreover, it was a
modern
novel. “Certain critics … have completely missed the spirit and the shape of the book,” Wilson argued. They had been misled by

the English and American translations
⁵¹
, which … have eliminated so much of the poetry and ignored the significant emphases.
Doctor Zhivago
is not at all old-fashioned: in spite of some echoes of the Tolstoyan tone in certain of the military scenes, there is no point in comparing it with
War and Peace
. It is a modern poetic novel by a writer who has read Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner, and who, like Virginia Woolf … has gone on from his predecessors to invent in this genre a variation of his own.

The book was a complicated, profound weave of symbols and parallels, Wilson maintained. It allegorized cleverly and in parts was “
very much
in the manner
⁵²
of Joyce… . Pasternak has been influenced by
Finnegans Wake
,” Wilson found.

He knew how it annoyed his friend. As he was finishing his
New Yorker
piece, Wilson told a correspondent that he had been talking to Vladimir on the phone and that he was “
behaving rather badly
⁵³
about Pasternak. I have talked to him … three times lately about other matters and he did nothing but rave about how awful
Zhivago
was. He wants to be the only Russian novelist in existence.” Some impish urge—a desire to tweak Vladimir’s nose—seems to have entered the process. Nabokov’s habit was to run down other writers, and Wilson had long detested it. He “has just discovered that
Stendhal is a complete fraud
⁵⁴
,” he wrote to another friend, “and is about to break the news to his class. He has also read
Don Quixote
for the first time, and declares it is completely worthless.”

Nabokov perverted the meanings of stories. He turned
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
, by Tolstoy, into something full of “
cruel little ironies
⁵⁵
”—something by Nabokov, perhaps. There was a divergence in sensibility and also in views of the novel’s likely future. Wilson wanted to recruit “this genre,” what he took for modernism, to a tradition that on occasion had produced works of moral genius, acts of momentous truth-telling that also satisfied aesthetically. Nabokov wanted nothing like that, and in fact he had bet his career on the impossibility of it. Desperate to escape the smothering Russian Problem, he had enunciated over and over a
non serviam
that
rejected the path
⁵⁶
of personal suffering, the bearing of witness from within the beast. He would not be a Pasternak or Mandelstam or, in the next generation, a Solzhenitsyn. As much as he revered and served the Russian heritage, he would never write the kind of book that Pasternak had, a religio-historical saga about, again, the Problem—humanist, generic, “inspiring.”

He responded with fury to “Edmund’s
symbolico-social
⁵⁷
criticism and phoney erudition” about
Zhivago
. Never again must a blurb from Mr. Wilson be used to promote one of his books: so he instructed Walter Minton regarding the translated
Invitation to a Beheading
. He had Véra write Wilson,

As you know by now
⁵⁸
, New Directions are bringing out a new edition of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
. You have been kind to this book in 1941, when it was first published, and for this reason New Directions have taken it upon themselves to ask your endorsement… . Vladimir deplores the publishers’ practice of pestering
famous people… . He begs you to refuse. He has written New Directions that he is against such solicitations.

In case Edmund did not feel the chill, she added, “The reason I am writing this letter (and not V. himself) is that he wants it mailed immediately, but, after having been writing for the last four days, he feels absolutely exhausted.”

The letter found Wilson in his upstate New York home. It was July of ’59, and he was indeed famous, enjoying a late prime.
The Scrolls from the Dead Sea
(1955) had been a triumph, a
New York Times
bestseller for
thirty-three weeks
⁵⁹
, product of a typical Wilsonian effort, first the learning of a new language (Hebrew), then deep reporting for the
New Yorker
, then the writing of
two immensely popular articles
⁶⁰
and finally of the book, a shapely, politically alert, elegantly expressed, scholarly unraveling of a complicated topic. The topic becomes fascinating by virtue of Wilson’s telling. William Shawn, the
New Yorker
chief editor, considered
Wilson’s expository style
⁶¹
one of the half-dozen best in the history of English. Soon he would produce another work of complicated contemporary history,
Apologies
⁶²
to the Iroquois
(1960), based on painstaking reportage à la
The American Jitters
, and two years later he brought out the classic study of Civil War literature
Patriotic Gore
(1962), his great work of American remembrance. In Nabokov’s parlance, Wilson, too, created worlds. He was not notably unfulfilled as a writer, torn with envy. Roger Straus, a publisher who became a close friend, said that Wilson was “not only the man I admired most but
the man who gave me the most pleasure
⁶³
to be with,” and the core of that pleasure was “the excitement of his enthusiasm for other writers present and past.” If envy explains Wilson’s disrespect of
Lolita
, it was not a quality others found in him.

The correspondence that had lasted twenty years, the source and sign of their splendid friendship, now abated. They
never wrote at length
⁶⁴
thereafter, and though there are affectionate phrases in their brief notes, Wilson’s appreciation of
Doctor Zhivago
had finished something. The great feud that erupted six years later, in the summer of ’65, when Wilson published an intemperate, funny, slapdash pan of
Eugene Onegin
in the
New York Review of Books
, was prefigured in the
Zhivago
affair. Nabokov’s cruelty to other writers seems to have unhinged Wilson, and his attack on his friend’s translation is unapologetically an attack on its author:

This production though in certain ways valuable
⁶⁵
, is something of a disappointment; and the reviewer, though a personal friend of Mr. Nabokov—for whom he feels a warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation—and an admirer of much of his work, does not propose to mask his disappointment. Since Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind … by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable and that everybody else … is an oaf and an ignoramus … usually with the implication that he is also … a ridiculous personality, Nabokov ought not to complain if the reviewer … does not hesitate to underline his weaknesses.

The year before, Nabokov, clearing brush for his
Onegin
, had scorched a prior version by a scholar at the University of North Carolina. Now Wilson offered his stark opinion on the matter:

Mr.
Nabokov … took up a good deal of space
⁶⁶
in these pages to denounce [that book]. [His] article—which sounded like nothing so much as one of Marx’s niggling and nagging attacks on someone who had had the temerity to write about economics and to hold different views from Marx’s—dwelt especially on what he regarded as Professor Arndt’s Germanisms and other infelicities… . Arndt had attempted the tour de force of translating the whole of
Onegin
into the original iambic tetrameter… . Nabokov decided that this could not be done with any real fidelity… . The results [of Nabokov’s approach] have been more disastrous than those of Arndt’s heroic effort. It has produced a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin.

Likening Nabokov to Marx: surely he goes too far. Nabokov’s response and Wilson’s response to the response and contributions by third parties played out over the next three years. Nabokov’s main riposte has him rubbing his hands over how a “
number of earnest simpletons
⁶⁷
consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field… . I am not sure that the necessity to defend my work … would have been a sufficient incentive for me to discuss [his] article,” but Wilson’s mistakes are so awful as to be “a polemicist’s dream come true, and one must be a poor sportsman to disdain what it offers.”

Skewering those mistakes, Nabokov puts Wilson in his place: “a mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance” distinguishes his
style, his use of English being “singularly imprecise and misleading.” And then there’s his Russian:

A patient confidant
⁶⁸
of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language and literature, I have invariably done my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957 … we both realised with amused dismay that, despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read
Evgeniy Onegin
aloud, he started to perform with great gusto, garbling every second word … with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that … soon had us both in stitches.

Nabokov vents his “
utter disgust
⁶⁹
” with “amoral” and “philistine” critics of his
Onegin
. Wilson is the representative enemy (he also discusses, with poisonous disdain, other offenders). Wilson fails on every score. Maybe most serious is his indulgence in “the old-fashioned, naïve, and
musty method of human-interest
⁷⁰
criticism … that consists of removing the characters from an author’s imaginary world” and examining “these displaced characters as if they were ‘real people.’ ”

There is some glee, some good fun. Gouty, short Wilson comes into focus when Nabokov speaks of his “
stubby pencil
⁷¹
,” but the overall tone is strained and bullying. He fails in the primary task of an essayist—even one defending his own work—which is to spark and sustain interest, and the litany of offenses goes on for eight thousand picky words, leaving an impression of Pushkin’s poem as food for pedants. Nabokov’s supple and vibrant translation, by miles the most faithful in English and more than sufficiently beautiful, despite his relaxation of rhyme and meter, is left out. He seems half-cowed by the comments of some reviewers and speaks of his “
rather dry, rather dull
⁷²
work” on the poem, calling it “not ugly enough” and promising that “in future editions I plan to defowlerise it still more drastically … turn it entirely into utilitarian prose, with a still bumpier brand of English … in order to eliminate the last vestiges of bourgeois poesy.” Even if he is only pretending humility, he is unlike himself in turning his pen against his own work.
The essay is sorrowful
⁷³
, despite its high spirits; it is an act of destruction, of friendship murder—unavoidable, perhaps, given Wilson’s attack, but woeful, ruinous, and strange.