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The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship Hardcover – December 6, 2016
In 1940, Edmund Wilson was the undisputed big dog of American letters. Vladimir Nabokov was a near-penniless Russian exile seeking asylum in the States. Wilson became a mentor to Nabokov, introducing him to every editor of note, assigning him book reviews for The New Republic, engineering a Guggenheim Fellowship. Their intimate friendship blossomed over a shared interest in all things Russian, ruffled a bit by political disagreements. But then came the worldwide best-selling novel Lolita, and the tables were turned. Suddenly Nabokov was the big (and very rich) dog. The feud finally erupted in full when Nabokov published his hugely footnoted and virtually unreadable literal translation of Pushkin’s famously untranslatable verse novel, Eugene Onegin. Wilson attacked his friend’s translation with hammer and tongs in The New York Review of Books. Nabokov counterattacked. Back and forth the increasingly aggressive letters flew, until the narcissism of small differences reduced their friendship to ashes.
Alex Beam has fashioned this clash of literary titans into a delightful and irresistible book—a comic contretemps of a very high order and a poignant demonstration of the fragility of even the deepest of friendships.
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout)
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPantheon
- Publication dateDecember 6, 2016
- Dimensions5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-101101870222
- ISBN-13978-1101870228
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Editorial Reviews
Review
⎻⎻ Tyler Malone, The Los Angeles Times
"The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship is a relentlessly absorbing account of a sorry saga which stemmed from a difference of opinion, accelerated into a battle of egos and culminated in bitter loss for both adversaries. . .Was Wilson too scathing? Was Nabokov too thin-skinned? [Alex] Beam leaves those questions for his reader to decide. What he does, though, throughout his compelling book, is strikingly portray two brilliant but flawed men, and remind us that a rock-solid friendship can be eroded or destroyed by the combined forces of ego, envy and wounded pride."
⎻⎻ Malcolm Forbes, The National
"Beam wears his learning lightly. He has a keen sense of the absurd and is mischievous but not malicious in exposing the foibles of these frenemies. He also, while he’s at it, has some Nabokovian fun as he laces his narrative with wordplay and faux-scholarly flourishes...his book mostly leaves you asking yourself how prideful and pig headed even the smartest men can be. If there’s a broader application to The Feud, it stems from that question, which doesn’t bode well for any of us."
⎻⎻ Michael Upchurch, The Boston Globe
"Throughout, [Beam] is not only an amiable guide, but also proves adept concerning Russian history and literature, and Pushkin’s famous novel. (Beam was the Globe’s Moscow correspondent earlier in his career.) Reading The Feud, we may laugh at these famous writers and their prideful foibles, but it also forces us to think how far we’ve come and how much things have changed. Today, the idea of a public squabble over a 19th century Russian text is sort of quaint. But at any point in history, Beam shows us, how quickly such contretemps can turn silly
⎻⎻ John Winters, WBUR.org
"Literary feuds can become the stuff of legend. Often sparked by equal measures of arrogance and insecurity, and fueled by wit and vitriol, the best provide great sideline entertainment for fans and detractors alike...Beam—a former Moscow correspondent and current columnist for The Boston Globe— makes clear in this slender, yet thoroughly researched and sprightly told account of the events, the rivalry was long percolating...What will interest readers, though, are the well-drawn, often unflattering portraits of two prickly, self-assured giants of 20th-century-literature, engaged in childish, if sharp-witted, verbal fisticuffs."
⎻⎻ Robert Weibezahl, BookPage
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2016
"Beam's book evokes the strangely satisfying sensation of witnessing smart people bickering over seemingly small matters. It also provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse, full of anecdotal ephemera, of how Wilson and Nabokov interacted and why. But the more lasting sensation is the bittersweetness of this portrait of a fallen friendship—at its height, Nabokov wrote to Wilson, 'You are one of the few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them.' "
⎻⎻ Publishers Weekly, starred review
"The almost legendary tale of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson's very public literary debate is told with great sympathy and skill by Beam... On one level it is a story of two titans of modern American literature coming to verbal blows over vocabulary and syntax, but more importantly, and more universally, it is the story of a generous friendship collapsing under the weight of reputation and the desperate need to have the final say. Beam is a natural storyteller and lucid scholar... The account of these two apparent geniuses devolving into bickering schoolchildren is endlessly readable and bittersweetly comic."
⎻⎻ Library Journal, starred review
“A shrewd, affectionate, and wildly engrossing account of one of the greatest and most ridiculous smackdowns in literary history. There came a time, in the feud between Nabokov and Wilson, when the former effected the removal from his books of blurbs written by the latter. Among the many delights of Beam's telling of the tale is his unerring acuity, in knowing the nonsense for nonsense, and the heartbreak for misery.”
⎻⎻ Jill Lepore
“Think Mailer versus Vidal meets Wittgenstein’s Poker—two balmy over-clever protagonists brought to splenetic life again by some top-grade research and writing.”
—Richard Cohen, author of How to Write Like Tolstoy
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I first learned of the friendship and subsequent feud between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov only a few years ago. A friend of mine had been tracking down Alexander Pushkin’s descendants—there are a few—and mentioned in passing that Wilson and Nabokov had ended a quarter-century-long friendship because of a disagreement over how to translate Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin. I burst out laughing. It was the silliest thing I had ever heard.
I hadn’t known about this famous contretemps because I was eleven years old in 1965, when Wilson trained his guns against his longtime comrade in letters—”a personal friend of Mr. Nabokov . . . an admirer of much of his work,” as he introduced himself in a salvo of ill-will splattered across the pages of The New York Review of Books. I wasn’t reading the Review, then in its third year of publication, and it certainly wasn’t lying around my parents’ house. I was reading Boys’ Life, what the Russians would call the “organ” of the Boy Scouts of America. I think Vladimir Nabokov, he of the wondrous outdoorsy boyhood, would have approved.
I know a thing or two about Russian language and literature—my harshest readers will confirm that modest count—but I had never read Onegin, and was familiar with only the highest peaks of Nabokov’s astonishing range: Lolita and Speak, Memory. There was a time when college students with literary pretensions read Edmund Wilson, but it wasn’t my time. When I graduated in 1975, Wilson had been dead for three years, with his literary renown and influence already in deep eclipse.
Several years into this project, I laugh less now. Of course the pedantic exchanges between two eminent men of letters still ring silly—is pochuya, which could mean “sensing,” or “sniffing,” a present or past gerund? (Good question!) Did Pushkin know English well enough to read Byron? (Maybe.) But the end of a friendship is always a loss. Especially a friendship so deeply and mutually celebratory as this one. “Edmund was always in a state of joy when Vladimir appeared,” Wilson’s third wife, Mary McCarthy, recalled. “They had an absolute ball together. He loved him.”1 Their correspondence was legendary, full of rambunctious exchanges about literature, gossip, sex in taxicabs, sore gums, and very genuine emotions. “You are one of the few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them,” Nabokov wrote to Wilson eight years into their friendship.2
And then, nothing.
Like so many intimate relationships, this one bore the seeds of its own destruction. In one of his very first letters to his new acquaintance, Wilson scores Nabokov for his punning, which Wilson finds tiresome. But of course it is irrepressible, and will continue throughout his life. Nabokov’s last major novel, Ada—the title itself a pun, alluding to “ardor,” and to the Russian ah, da (oh, yes)—mentions Mr. Eliot’s famous poem, “The Waistline”; and so on, ada infinitum. In many ways the two men proved to be two entirely different and contradictory people, Wilson the erudite literalist and Nabokov the ludist, the fantasist, the trickster king. The opposites attracted, and then they didn’t.
When their friendship ended, much was made of the fact that Wilson never reviewed any of Nabokov’s novels. Indeed Nabokov himself complained in a gift inscription to Wilson, “Why do you never review my works?” But it is very hard to imagine Wilson enjoying, say, The Gift, Nabokov’s favorite of his own Russian novels. The Gift would have infuriated Wilson. It is simultaneously a work of literary criticism, a memoir of the Russian emigration in Germany, and a complicated gloss on Pushkin’s Onegin. The Gift incorporates a novella-length, jocoserious “biography” of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a sacred figure of nineteenth-century socialism whom Nabokov mercilessly lampoons.
It is supremely Nabokovian; a novel, and not a novel. And it ends with a perfectly crafted Onegin stanza, Nabokov’s knowing nod to his favorite Russian writer. That stanza appears on—but I anticipate.
It is equally hard to imagine Nabokov reading, savoring, or even understanding Patriotic Gore, Wilson’s unsentimental, revisionist overview of the literature and the mythopoeia that animated the combatants in America’s Civil War. Wilson spent more than ten years researching the book. It is difficult to envision Nabokov spending even ten minutes perusing its index. When Gore appeared in 1962, Nabokov had already ensconced himself in Switzerland, settled atop a pile of money from the fabulous sales of his novel Lolita. America, and Edmund Wilson, were only faintly visible in his rearview mirror.
Let me make two quick points:
Told from such a distance in time, this becomes a story of unequal combat. Nabokov is very much alive in his work, perhaps less on the night table than on the college syllabus, but nonetheless he remains known to millions. Not so Wilson. In the years leading up to his death in 1972, “he was not much read,” his friend Jason Epstein wrote in a heartfelt obituary. Once hailed as the “dean of American letters,” possessed of what the biographer Leon Edel called “a certain Johnsonian celebrity,” Wilson is largely unknown today. When I mentioned Wilson’s name to a participant at a donors’ event at the Boston Public Library, his reply was: “It’s weird how he makes everything about ants.” No, that is Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor and author of The Ants, The Anthill, and Journey to the Ants. Edmund Wilson was someone else entirely.
Second: There seems to be an infectious tendency to “go Nabokovian” when writing about the late, great novelist. Andrew Field, Nabokov’s first biographer, decided not to include an index with his biography, a complicated and annoying homage to his subject, who sometimes bent indexes to his own playful needs. When Wilson’s biographer Jeffrey Meyers wrote about the Nabokov-Wilson feud, he couldn’t resist the easily available pun “when Pushkin came to shovekin.”3 Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, who spent two years translating Onegin with great élan, fell into pun-ditry himself, asserting his right to “poetic lie-sense,” and so on.
I myself succumbed. It is futile to resist the lure of such pseudo-verbs as “pedanitifies,” or to ignore the temptation to tack footnote after footnote onto my explanation of Onegin’s scintillating “Pedal Digression.” When I needed to cite an Onegin translation, I quoted from the late Walter Arndt’s version, just because I knew that would irk the Nabokovian shade. Nabokov hated Arndt’s Onegin. I call Vera Nabokov “Vera Nabokova” in part because that is how she signed her name, but also to fingernail-scratch the Elysian blackboard where the Master may currently be lecturing. He inveighed against the feminization of Russian family names, and insisted on teaching Anna Karenin, never Anna Karenina.
These are pure Nabokovian impulses. Literary confrontations were to be pursued in this life and the next. When revising his Onegin translation after Wilson’s death, Nabokov urged his publisher to shake a leg: “I would like to see my edition printed before confronting an irate Pushkin and a grinning E. Wilson beyond the cypress curtain.”
A feud unto death, and beyond. As we shall see, Wilson attacked Nabokov from beyond the grave, affording himself a satisfaction we cannot yet fully appreciate. In the five years that he outlived Wilson, Nabokov, too, tap-danced on his old rival’s tombstone, in a manner unbecoming the international celebrity and self-proclaimed genius that he was. And then Nabokov’s son, Dmitri—but again, I anticipate.
In a famous essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.”
In the case of Nabokov and Wilson, it was.
Product details
- Publisher : Pantheon; 1st edition (December 6, 2016)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1101870222
- ISBN-13 : 978-1101870228
- Item Weight : 14.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,792,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #792 in Historical Russia Biographies
- #4,208 in Russian History (Books)
- #9,041 in Author Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
I am a writer with a motley assortment of credits, including the Introduction to Arie Zand’s 'Political Jokes of Leningrad,' for which I was paid the princely sum of $500 in 1982. Also: two novels about Russia; and three – soon to be four — non-fiction books on various subjects. I worked for Business Week magazine in Los Angeles, Moscow and Boston, a cheery eight years of my life I now call The Lost Weekend.
In 1987, I started working at the Boston Globe, where I became seriatim, a business columnist, an Op-Ed columnist and finally a columnist in what used to be called the Living Arts section. I took a buyout in early 2013 and am now writing a weekly column in the Opinion section. I have won a few awards, including some Best of Boston citations, a First Place award for commentary from the Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, a Massachusetts Book Award and an extremely lucrative (now defunct) John Hancock Award for Excellence in Financial Writing. I was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford for the academic year 1996-1997, which was an award of sorts, in addition to being lots of fun.
The Globe allowed me to write occasional humor columns for the since-renamed International Herald Tribune, as well as the first-in-the-world squash blog, for Vanity Fair. My friends and I used to read and post “hate mail” podcasts for the Globe website, reading letters from irate readers. Alas, our efforts failed to attract much of an audience. Further proof, if any were needed, that hate doesn’t pay.
I now write for a variety of publication in addition to the Globe and appear weekly on WGBH’s “Boston Public Radio” show with Jim Braude and Margery Eagan. My next book, "Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece" will appear in March.
I have been married for a very long time and my three adult sons seem to be thriving, for which much thanks.
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And I also enjoyed Nabokov. My college mentor was a huge fan of Pale Fire and I learned to love it as well. Wilson provided Nabokov an entree to many opportunities to review and helped more than one member of the Nabokov family.
The two were reported to be the best of friends.
Then Nabokov did a translation of Eugene Onegin It came out in 4 volumes and totalled 1,895 pages most of which was commentary on the poem. It also includes such interesting English words as "mollitude" and "shandrydans." The most amusing conflict is when Nabokov's colleagues on this translation project suggest he use the word friend while he stubbornly refuses to consider any other word than "pal."
When the Onegin translation was published, Wilson reviewed it for the The New York Review of Books. Says Beam: " It remains a classic of its genre, the genre being an overlong, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job, the yawning massive load of boiling pitch that inevitably ends up scalding the grinning fiend pouring hot oil over the battlement as much as it harms the intended victim."
While this caused hard feelings and sparked debate, I'm not sure it changed much for Wilson or Nabokov. Nabokov's career continued to soar and Wilson's reputation continued to fade. When Wilson was given a literary award late in life, the wife of one of the plutocrats attending the reception asked Wilson if he had written Finlandia.. (He wrote a book called To The Finland Station) Nowadays people confuse him with Edward O. Wilson. As person says to Beam when asked if he knows who Edmund Wilson is, "It's weird how he makes everything about ants."
There are other reasons the friendship may have come to grief. The literary superstar Nabokov may have not have liked remembering how much he relied on Wilson when he first came to America. Wilson who published erotic fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County, may have resented the greater success of Lolita.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the foot fetishes Gore Vidal reviewing The Thirties for The New York Review of Books, counted 24 references to women's feet. Vidal cited Wilson's 'podophilia,' and observes, 'He could have made a fortune in women's footwear.' Onegin is known for its 'pedal digression.'
Mostly this is a lot of fun if you enjoy literary eminences behaving badly. It's a hoot.
If you have any interest in either of these authors, you will love this book as I did.
Unearthing the circumstances of this literary battle between the rivals, native Russian and English speakers, also celebrated writers, the author Alex Beam shed light on their personalities and literary works, often expressing his own opinion, especially about Nabokov’s art and narcissism. I tend to agree with him. We learn that Beam’s heroes had nothing in common from the very beginning. It was the neediness of Nabokov as an immigrant and helpfulness of Wilson held them together.
In whole, this book is an entertaining and educational read that also shows how easily we can be exited and deceived taking demons for angels, as it was the case with Wilson who adored Lenin, the Bolshevik revolution, and the entire communistic enterprise. Clearly, Nabokov’s attitude to these events and his views of the leaders was much more realistic. He personally experienced the hell of the 1917 coup and the following terror on his own skin.
Another Wilson’s fantasy: “There were three great Russian writers during the period of revolution in Russia—Lenin, Trotsky, and Alexander Blok,” sounds as a joke to me, especially because the master of practical jokes was Nabokov, as we learn from the book, not Wilson.
As far as A. Beam’s writing is concerned, it seems he accomplished his mission, “tap-dancing on the graves” of the rivals. Occasionally, however, his book is chaotic possibly because of his own excitement by the topic. For example, the case with Arndt. It was hard to figure out the dates of Nabokov’s and Arndt’s translation of “Eugenie Onegin” and when exactly Bollinger’s Prize was awarded to Arndt for his translation (before Nabokov finished his own or after?) Also, the author could mention those earlier translations, which angered so much Nabokov’s genius.