I’ve lately finished reading The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940-1971 and it was a tasty treat… a shot of intellectual whiskey in the guise of a literary confection. The range of dates given in the title is a bit misleading, since most of the letters are from the 40s and early 50s, with a smattering in later years. Some were lost, but the correspondence also diminished as Nabokov’s stature grew.

It is fitting that Wilson’s first letter has him lecturing Nabokov on matters of style– particularly Nabokov’s love of puns, which is hallmark of a playfulness and exhilaration with language that the old-fashioned Wilson can’t share– as issues of language will consume them and their relationship for the next few decades:

November 12, 1940: In doing future reviews, please follow exactly the New Republic Usage … Another thing: do please refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity … Also, the expression I for one is not precisely in the tone of reviewing.

The bulk of the letters document Nabokov’s literary rise– and Wilson’s significant contribution to that rise– as well as Wilson’s growing immersion in Soviet literature, society, and politics. Along the way are some interesting comments about Lolita (which remains my favorite of Nabkov’s work, perhaps because of Alfred Appel’s wonderful annotations):

April 7, 1947: “I am writing … a new type of autobiography– a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality– and the provisional title is The Person in Question.

(Imagine how strange all that porn spam would sound if that title had been kept: “Red H0T XXX Persons in Question — Click Here!”)

May 16, 1953: I am about to embark on a project– a novel– that has been hanging over me for years, and that fills me with trepidation.

The next mention is framed by Nabokov with a bracket that says “All this is a secret”:

July 30, 1954: The novel I had been working at for almost five years has been promptly turned down by two the publishers (Viking and S. & S.) I showed it to. They say it will strike readers as pornographic. I consider this novel to be my best thing in English, and though the theme and situation are decidedly sensuous, its art is pure and its fun riotous. I would love you to glance at it some time. Pat Covici said we would all go to jail if the thing were published. I feel rather depressed about this fiasco.

For all his stodginess in some matters, Wilson doesn’t seem concerned about the content, though his response is certainly not a ringing endorsement:

November 30, 1954: The little girl seems very real and accurate and her attractiveness and seductiveness are absolutely plausible. The hero’s disgust of grown-up women is not very different, for example, from Gide’s, the difference being that Gide is smug about it and your hero is made to go through hell. The suburban, hotel, motel descriptions are just terribly funny.

I don’t see why the novel should be any more shocking than all the now commonplace “etudes of other unpleasant moeurs.” These peculiar tastes are surely as prevalent if they haven’t been written about as often.

In February 1955, Nabokov is still shopping the book around:

Doubleday has of course returned the MS and I have now shipped it to France. I suppose it will finally be published by some shady firm with a Viennese-Dream name– e.g., “Silo.”

Olympia Press finally agrees to publish Lolita, but Wilson has yet to comment on it again (his understanding seems limited to agreeing that it is not too controversial publication rather than extending to an embrace of the book) and Nabokov indulges in a little goading:

bq. November 24, 1955: Rahv, who had offered to print parts of my little Lolita in the Partisan, has changed his mind upon the advice of a lawyer. It depresses me to think that this pure and austere work may be treated by some flippant critic as a pornographic stunt. The danger is the more real to me since I realize that even you neither understand nor wish to understand the texture of this intricate and unusual production.

Through the next 18 months, Nabokov continues to keep Wilson posted about the attempts at censorship and the controversy surrounding the book until a Supreme Court decision opens the door for American publication. Wilson responds sarcastically (enviously?):

June 12, 1957:

I hope that Lolita, as a study of amorous paternity and delinquent girlhood, will touch the American public to the point of making your fortune. If you can get her married to Pnin in Alaska and bring them home to life tenure and the American way of life in some comfortable Middle Western university, you may be able to compete in popularity with Marjorie Morningstar and be lecturing on young people’s problems from Bangor to San Diego.

Though in a subsequent letter Wilson finds a flare-up of the English scandal surrounding Lolita to be a humorous incident straight out of a Waugh novel, he does not comment on the novel again. As far as I know he chose not to review it as well.

These letters are interesting in any number of ways: seeing the way the network of writers and publishers works, catching a glimpse of the long gestation of some works while other are produced rapid-fire by both parties, and atching the mischievous interplay as their friendship deepens even while the distance between their literary endeavours and trajectories grows greater.

The last two letters, from 1971, are touching, as they follow by a few years a nasty blowout between the two (see Wilson’s scathing review of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin in the NY Review of Books and Nabokov’s telling reply with Wilson’s tit-for-tat responsein the letters section of same) and yet they encapsulate the warm yet uneasy relationship between two powerful intellectuals of opposite types. Nabokov, the fussy, pedantic, brilliant Russian writing in English, and Edmund Wilson, an intellectual, polyglot bulldog fascinated by Russia’s language and politics, make for strange bedfellows.

Thus we find Nabokov, years after the exchange above, writing to “Bunny”:

March 2, 1971. A few days ago I had the occasion to reread the whole batch of our correspondence. It was such a pleasure to feel 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.

To which Wilson replies, as if six years hadn’t passed since Nabokov’s last letter:

March 8, 1971. I was very glad to get your letter. I am just now getting together a volume of my Russian articles. I am correcting my errors in Russian in my piece on Nabokov-Pushkin; but citing a few more of your ineptitudes. [...] I think Solzhenitsyn is remarkable, though somewhat monotonous– not in a class with Pasternak, but after all he has nothing to tell but his story of illness and imprisonment…

I have included an account of my visit to you in Ithaca in a book that will be out this spring … I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn’t).

P.S. According to the Soviet edition of Chekhov, you have the date slightly wrong about the letter in which he tells of your relative’s encounter with him.

I love the way neither can help putting in a little dig at the other. It is emblematic that Wilson presumes to lecture Nabokov on his Russian (it becomes clear fairly quickly in the volume of letters that Wilson’s Russian language skills were nowhere near as good as Wilson thought they were, while Nabokov handled English perhaps even better than Wilson who continually mistook Nabokov’s subtleties and humor for mistakes) and even the date Nabokov has assigned to an old family story involving his aunt.

I would be remiss not to not that this long affair continued even after Nabokov’s passing when Nabokov’s son defends him in the NY Review of Books after publication of Wilson’s diaries.

Ultimately, that I must use Edmund Wilson’s first name to give a reader a moment to recollect who he was (and perhaps do a quick web search to refresh their memory), while no one who cares about literature will have trouble placing the name Nabokov (not to mention those youngsters who might hum a few bars of The Police song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”), perhaps succinctly explains the strange demise of their friendship. In a way, this is a document of a world of literature growing and passing by Wilson who can’t view it with detachment because of his continuing verbal jousting with a primary writer of the new era.

Fascinating and fun reading. Apparently others thought so as well: while finding a few links for this post I discovered that Paul Scheele, a retired poli-sci professor wrote a play based on the letters!