Review by New York Times Review
IN 1964, Vladimir Nabokov published an English translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin," regarded by many as the supreme treasure of Russian poetry, in an edition that spanned four volumes. The poem took up a fraction of their 1,895 pages. From the bowels of his dictionary, Nabokov dislodged words that might as well have been invented. If you're looking for "mollitude," "ancientry," "shandrydans," "agrestic," "muzzlet" and "scrab," all in one poem, your search is over. Yet, for some reason, to translate Pushkin's robust Russian word for "friend," Nabokov reached for "pal." The volumes were also heavy on extras - sermons on prosody, disquisitions on usage, vitriolic reproofs of all the strained translations of Pushkin out there. For a quarter-century, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, Nabokov's pal, had remained publicly silent about Nabokov's fiction. So when Wilson panned the translation in The New York Review of Books, he plunged to absolute zero a friendship that had been cooling only gradually. The ensuing quarrel drew in a crowd of what Alex Beam calls "1960s eminentos," from Robert Lowell and Christopher Ricks to the historian Alexander Gershenkron. In "The Feud," Beam deems Wilson's 6,600word appraisal "an overlong, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job." Beam's own account is unfailingly amusing, not overlong, winningly useless and not entirely free of spite for Wilson, who, based on the evidence Beam provides, seems to deserve it. Why did Wilson savage his friend? Wilson had taken up Nabokov's cause in 1940, when Nabokov, already established as a man of letters in Berlin, found himself beached in North America, wearing Sergei Rachmaninoff's hand-me-downs and casting no public shadow. Wilson pulled strings so Nabokov could publish and eat. He implored The New Yorker not to edit away the Russian writer's weird English, which, long before "mollitude" and "scrab," showed an inventive disregard for native norms. For a time, Wilson and Nabokov loved each other's company. Their correspondence, published in 1979, after both were dead, is a landmark of midcentury letters. Beam, like Nabokov's biographers, traces the rift to several causes. Competition was one. "Memoirs of Hecate County," Wilson's sexually explicit novel, published in 1946, sold nothing like Nabokov's "Lolita" did in 1958. That novel made Nabokov a household name, freeing him from penury and college teaching. It sizzled, sauntered and rocked, in contrast to Wilson's book, which the critics had pronounced overserious and unsexy. "Insect monotony" was how Cyril Connolly described the sex. And then there was Communism. For decades, Wilson had been rooting for the Soviet Union to make good on the utopian visions of the 1917 revolution. He longed to know Russian as only a leftwing dreamer could. But to Nabokov the Bolsheviks were the men who had dispossessed his family, even strafing the ship they escaped on with machine-gun fire - in other words, not a group to be redeemed by Wilson's armchair apologetics. And once Wilson went on the attack, Nabokov was not about to ignore his old friend's poor command of the Russian language. Beam, a columnist for The Boston Globe who served as Moscow bureau chief for Business Week, never explicitly takes a side, but his allegiance isn't hard to guess. He channels Nabokov, aping his stylistic flourishes, while depicting Wilson as a gouty, lecherous grump. Implicitly, "The Feud" celebrates the idiosyncrasy of literature rather than its monumentality, and the charismatic Nabokov would seem the perfect embodiment of idiosyncrasy. By 1958, Wilson was past his prime and so were his cherished subjects, Marxism and modernism. But throughout the 1920s and '30s, he had written selflessly and gorgeously about his contemporaries, literary and otherwise, making a contribution to American literature as large as, and much broader than, Nabokov's brilliant but narrow one. It's not surprising that Nabokov's reputation has endured while Wilson's has faded. Personality sells. But it would be a shame if "The Feud," so brisk and entertaining, provided a reader's only glimpse of one of America's best critics. ERIC BENNETT is the author of "Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War" and the novel "A Big Enough Lie"
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 10, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this intriguing and melancholy chronicle, Boston Globe columnist Beam (Gracefully Insane) traces the rise and fall of the friendship between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov. The two men met in 1940, when Nabokov's cousin pleaded with Wilson, an eminent critic and writer, to help Nabokov, a recent émigré from Russia to the U.S. Among other things, Wilson commissioned reviews from Nabokov, helped him secure a Guggenheim Fellowship, and introduced him to prominent editors. Over the years, the two spent holidays together with their families, exchanged affectionate correspondence, and even collaborated on a translation of Alexander Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri. By the time Wilson died in 1972, it had all fallen apart. The main cause was Wilson's scathing review of Nabokov's 1,895-page, hyperquirky translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (one of his many criticisms was Nabokov's choosing the obscure term "sapajous" over the logical translation choice, "monkeys"), which began a protracted war of words between the two. 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." (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal 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 (columnist, The Boston Globe; American Crucifixion). From this feud, ostensibly begun over Nabokov's translation of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, he has fashioned a kind of Euripidean tragedy on the self-destructive power of the ego. 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 intellectual back-and-forth (mostly glimpsed through letters and diary entries) is fascinating-who would ever imagine that the incorrect use of the past participle could evoke such passion? And yet, the account of these two apparent geniuses devolving into bickering schoolchildren is endlessly readable and bittersweetly comic. VERDICT An outstanding and entertaining book that could have surprising appeal beyond its intended literary audience. Readers who give it a chance will soon find themselves unable to put it down. [See Prepub Alert, 6/6/16.]-Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.