A writer and his critics
Alex de Jonge
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940-1971 Ed. Simon Karlinsky (Weldonfeld £12.50) Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute Ed. Peter Ouennell (Weidenfeld E6.95) I have always found t dmund Wilson the epitome of a certain kind of critic who, though distinguished and in this case deservedly so, gives little pleasure. This is because he uses the big stick, bullying, rather than persuading his readers into the acceptance of his view. He is moreover capable of dogmatic meanness, and in The Memoirs of Hecate County, a certain dull nastiness into the bargain. Besides, the criticism is not always that impressive; Axel's Castle has not survived nearly as well as Bowra's Heritage of Symbolism for example, while his Window on Russia convinced me that Wilson knew little about the literature and had no feel for it anyway, suggesting that he was incapable of getting any further than Turgenev.
One of the best things about this book is its adjustment of that view of Wilson. He and Nabokov corresponded regularly from the time of the latter's arrival in America up to the moment Wilson mounted his attack on the translation of Evgeny Onegin, writing with an illfounded authority which simply displayed his own incompetence in the field. The Wilson of these letters is quite a different man. From the outset he treated Wolodya' with unfailing generosity and helpfulness.
As Simon Karlinsky points out in his excellent introduction it was Wilson who launched Nabokov as an American writer. He went to great lengths to help him place his wprk, not because he liked everything he did — far from it — but because Nabokov was a friend who was • often in dire need. Thus though he detested Bend Sinister and refused to review it, Wilson did what he could to ensure that it was well reviewed elsewhere. When the two men disagreed, as they frequently did about each other's writing or about other books — Wilson was silly enough to admire Malraux for example — they differed without acrimony.
It is also clear from these letters that Wilson did have a good grasp of Russian and a sense of its texture, and that he had a very genuine feel for Pushkin.
There are times, however, when he, and indeed Nabokov, go quite off the rails.
There is a preposterous argument about Russian versification which resembles the fight between Humbert and Quilty as the protagonists roll around in clumsy con flict, both, as Karlinsky delicately points out, quite missing the other's point.
The letters also set Wilson's limitations. We find him advising Nabokov to avoid puns which are 'pretty much excluded from serious journalism here'. He is preposterously wrong about Lenin's Russia which he considers to be run by the direct descendants of Chekhov's characters. He did not really like Nabokov's major writing at all, failing to see any point to Lolita although he had the intuition to sense that there was something going on above, beyond and below the story line. He reveals the limitations of his feel for Russian literature when thanking Nabokov for explaining the best moment in Dead Souls: the brief and unmotivated appearance of a lieutenant and great lover of boots who cannot bear to go to bed since this would require him to remove a pair he had just had made and which were too beautiful to take off. (It occurs to me that Gogol is implying that he is a Russian officer of great delicacy since he feels that if he is to go to bed the boots have to go.) Anyone who fails to respond at once to the poetry of that paragraph should really leave Russian literature alone.
Despite its fair share of routine letters and notes the correspondence is a delight. The two men write to one another as equals accepting and welcoming advice in some respects, rejecting it in others. Nabokov prefers Wilson's 'war crying' to his 'hymn singing', but accepts and appreciates corrections to his English. Each man prizes the other's friendship very highly and the eventual rift must have hurt them both very much. Their letters abound in good things, such as Nabokov confusing Auden with another poet, Aitken, to his face —Prin would have been proud of that one — or explaining to Wilson that it is indeed perfectly possible to copulate on the floor of a 1920 Berlin taxi-cab; Wilson had expressed doubts. There are also plenty of top grade Nabokovisms, such as his description of cheerful Soviet propaganda as 'this pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom'. I also enjoyed the moment when he howled in protest at having a New Yorker piece edited by 'a man called Ross'; who he? Incidentally the letters are accompanied by excellent footnotes which inform but never intrude.
Nabokov once observed tiidt few writers ever get the chance to revise and tighten their early work. Equally few reviewers ever get the chance to review their own writing. It is a chance I am not going to take, so that one of the essays in Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute is going to pass unnoticed, and the others are only referred to with some trepidation. The book is a combination of reminiscences and painless, well, pretty painless, lit. crit.
Alfred Appel's recollection of Nabokov in Montreux emphasises his extraordinary gentleness in a very tender essay which does great justice to his memory. There is also a remarkable piece by Nabokov's only son, a moving commemoration of his father's warmth, generosity and genius which recollects Fedor Godunov Cherdyntsev's tribute in The Gift, while including Some welcome sideswipes at a translator of Pushkin, W.A. and a biographer, A.F. both of whom need swiping. John Bayley has written an ingenious and largely convincing piece on Nabokov's alleged decadence. I think certain interpretations Nabokov would himself have repudiated, but his argument culminates superbly in a brilliant and utterly convincing vindication of the Evgeny Onegin translation; about time that that piece of justice was done. Robert Alter provides a judicious and properly qualified assessment of Ada, though he might have pointed out that one reason for the extensive references to Chateaubriand is that he wrote all his fiction in exile. Martin Amis has appropriately provided a piece on the black humour of the early novels notably 'the bright brute' King Queen Knave. The only weak spot, I hope, is an essay by Mark Lilly who sounds rather like Nabokov's first émigré critics, who rebuked him for his coldness. He appears incidentally to believe that Humbert Humbert tried to murder Charlotte Haze, writing of various 'attempts upon her life'. There was only one would-be attempt, and when Humbert beheld her swimming beside him 'like a trusting seal' he knew that• murder was not on. Finally the regularity with which various contributors refer to two of Nabokov's most radiant pas radiance he aspired to moret passages s — any ny other quality as a writer — An Evening of Russian Poetry and the sublime last paragraph of Lolita — suggests that who ever picked them, the contributors that is, knew what he was doing. To end on a personal note I should say that I do not allude to either.
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