when Wilson.E meets V.Nabokov

Books of The Times
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

THE NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971Edited, annotated and with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky.

When the gods clash, the earth shakes; and few bystanders on the literary scene of the 1960's failed to feel to feel the tremors when Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov collided in the pages of The New York Review of Books and Encounter magazine over Mr. Nabokov's four-volume translation, with commentary, of Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin." What made their skirmish particularly startling was that each turned as a weapon against the other their long-standing literary friendship. As Nabokov wrote, responding to Wilson's review: "I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many interesting talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation."
"The Nabokov-Wilson Letters," edited, annotated and introduced by Simon Karlinsky, professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is the written record of that friendship. It contains 264 letters, the extent remains of a correspondence that begins in the summer of 1940, with Nabokov proposing that he and Wilson meet, and ends, for all intents and purposes, in the spring of 1958, with a perfunctory exchange of summer itineraries.
Background for Rereading
In the meantime, their mutual affection flourishes. Wilson extends a helping hand to the financially hardpressed immigrant, praises his first writings in English, introduces him to editors, publishers and friends. Deeply grateful ("I feel it is you who have given me the great Push"), Nabokov encourages and nurses Wilson's burgeoning interest in Russian literature. Opinions are exchanged, favorite writers recommended, even articles of clothing borrowed. ("Dear Bunny, I am sending you the socks you lent me and a sample of my translation of Yougin One-gin.") Wilson proposes a book collaboration, lines up a publisher and arranges advances.
In short, they weren't being merely facetious when they wrote in the course of the "Onegin" exchange that they had been friends. And this volume creates an extremely rich and interesting background against which to reread that exchange (so much so that one wishes it had been included in these pages).
But why does this book matter so much by itself? Why do we read it as avidly as we do a compelling novel--and a good deal more avidly, by the way, than we did Wilson's "Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972"? Because these letters form a dialogue between two dramatically contrasting characters. Here is Wilson on the one hand, sober, tenacious, and dedicated to the social importance of literature: "Another thing," he admonishes his new friend at he start of their correspondence, "do please refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here."
And there is Nabokov, a butterfly (equipped with a stinger) to Wilson's bulldog. "You can well imagine how strongly I disapprove of your preface" to Anton Chekhov's "Peasants and Other Stories. . ." Do you really think that Chehov is Chehov because he wrote about 'social phenomena,' 'readjustments of a new industrial middle class,' 'kulaks' and 'rising serfs' (which sounds like the seas)? I thought he wrote of the kind of things that gentle King Lear proposed to discuss in prison with his daughter. I also think that at a time when American readers are taught from high school on to seek in books 'general ideas' a critic's duty should be to draw their attention to the specific detail, to the unique image, without which--as you know as well as I do--there can be no art, no genius, no Chehov, no terror, no tenderness, and no surprise."
An Inevitable Clash
They were bound to clash. If we didn't know that they would from recalling the 1960's, we know it from Professor Karlinsky's introductory essay, in which he carefully probes their contrasting attitudes toward everything from pre-Revolutionary Russia to the differences Russian and English versification. And we know it from the growing fissures in their letters, which show Nabokov falling into jocular repetitions of his disagreements with Wilson, and Wilson grumpily declaring, "I am getting rather tired of all these topics and think we ought to start something new."
Actually, there is barely a hint in the correspondence of the explosion that eventually occurred. They continued to exchange an occasional letter right up to 1971. In Nabokov's last note, he asks Wilson to "please believe that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin's and Nabokov's Onegin." In Wilson's reply, the volume's final letter, he warns that "I have included an account of my visit to you in Ithaca" in a forthcoming book. "I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn't)." (It did.)
The rest is silence. A very fraught silence.