USA TODAY International Edition
‘ The Feud’ recalls a classic literary dust- up
Writers Nabokov, Wilson battle with and over words
There’s a famous joke that academic fights are so vicious only because the stakes are so low. The Feud, Alex Beam’s smart, agile, goodnatured account of one of America’s most famous literary brawls, simultaneously confirms and confounds that observation; rarely have the stakes of such a dispute been lower, and rarely have the personal consequences seemed sadder.
The Feud ( Pantheon, 224 pp., eeeg) is about Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov. In the middle of the last century, they were two of the most famous writers alive, and intimate friends.
Nabokov, whose star remains uneclipsed in our own era, was of course the author of Lolita, a book that made him both rich and notorious. Wilson was a critic, diarist and novelist who wrote about such an eccentric diversity of subjects that it perhaps ensured his reputation would ultimately fade.
The closeness of their friend- ship was always driven partly by an amiable truculence. They were extremely different — Wilson an “erudite literalist,” Nabokov a “trickster king” — but magnetized to each other in fierce intel- lectual brinksmanship. Nabokov especially, in Beam’s description, was a difficult person, lethally pretentious, haunted by his past. (“Vladimir and his family escaped Russia in 1919, in a steamer raked by Bolshevik machine- gun fire,” an event he never seems to quite have transcended emotionally, at least in this telling.) Wilson, meanwhile, was just averagely ultra- proud.
Their falling- out was over a poem. Nabokov had long been obsessed with bringing Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which Russians consider their nation’s greatest work of literature and which is notoriously difficult to translate, into English. He spent years on the project, ultimately producing an absurdly baroque volume of 1,895 pages, most of them notes — “philological research carried to proctological extremes,” as Beam puts it. The language was affected and bi- zarre, the notes highly pedantic. (“A page and a half on the lingonberry,” we learn.)
Wilson, who had a decent knowledge of Russian, weighed his reaction for some time, then finally published a lacerating review of his old friend’s opus.
So the fight began. An intense friendship became an intense enmity, drawing in many of the major names of 20th- century intellectual circles, much of the feud conducted in the pages of The New York Review of Books. What seems certain from Beam’s description is that Nabokov’s translation is a beautiful disaster, and that Wilson saw this but was, crucially, not the correct person to explain why, because his Russian was so much worse than he believed it to be.
On one level this is a farce. On another, which Beam wisely allows to suggest itself in this knowledgeable and readable volume, it is a sort of minor tragedy — two men, driven to literature at least in part by feelings of insecurity and loss, found and then lost to each other in that same refuge. The Feud brilliantly contours both Wilson and Nabokov in their human rage against each other, places them finely in their milieu, and ultimately elicits in us what each, so profoundly prideful, would least have wished to have from posterity: pity.