In Which God Knows Whatever Possessed Hannah Arendt And Mary McCarthy

Thank You For Everything You Did

When we last left off with the correspondence of Hannah Arendt & Mary McCarthy, Mary was pursuing a divorce with her soon-to-be ex-husband, socialite Bowden Broadwater. The brief impasse between the two friends was mended, but medical problems for both — McCarthy would develop hepatitis after Arendt spent a few months in the hospital because of a taxi accident — brought them closer together again. In these letters they attempt to inch nearer to each other without ever having the advantage of standing in the same room.

Dearest Hannah:

This is going to be a hasty letter and written under the somewhat depressant influence of penicillin and sulfa, so if it sounds strange don’t mind.

Your letter came shortly after I got back from Bocca di Magra, and I was just recovering from the flue, which I’d caught at Bocca, in the damps of the last evenings. Hence its news came to me as from a remote distance.

The other day, though, Carmen at lunch in her gloomy, Spanish-style villa embellished with roses from her rejected suitors and huge oil paintings of wild goats, treated me to some rather shivery prophecies of what Bowden was going to do (or not do). After seeing her, I had a relapse (no connection) and have just got up again today. And meanwhile I’ve bene talking to Reuel on the telephone, he has been in Warsaw, staying with Jim.

Reuel’s advice is that I must take immediate action to get a divorce. That if I don’t, Bowden will become fixed in his ideas and attitudes toward me and it. He says Bowden knows very well that I shall never come back to him, but that if I don’t show him that I mean business about the divorce and will get it in spite of him at any cost, he will keep us all in the present limbo forever.

It was after this that I saw Carmen. Her warnings were not to expect a favorable reply, that the figure of two years had been flourished in Bowden’s conversation, that his dominating idea was revenge, on Jim primarily and incidentally on me. That he no longer loved me but wished someone to pay for his sufferings. That his attitude towards me was malicious. (This I can well believe from the single letter I had from him this summer; it was not, by the way, Hannah, who stopped writing, it was he. For more than a month I did not even have an address for him.) She also told anecdotes of Bowden serving dinner to guests in New York and saying, as he invited them to table, “Sorry, the Mrs has run off with the silver.” This, perhaps unfairly, made me absolutely furious.

I do not agree with you at all that he loves me. If he did, he would not have sat in Venice all summer making spiteful remarks about me and drinking cocktails and leading a bravura social life; he would have tried, I think, to see me, which would not have been hard. Or written me in a friendly way. At least to find out how I was. Certainly, he’s been very much hurt, and his behavior is compatible with that. And he finds it less painful and more dignified, as a role, to say that he loves me than to say that he has been hurt.

He has entered the love-competition and is playing a solo part in it — the man who loves alone, all alone on the stage. The fact is, I am not necessary to the performance, hence there was no reason to seek me.

Mary

Mary, darling —

The scarf is so breathtakingly beautiful that I don’t even know how to tell you that you should not. Which nevertheless is the naked truth! Oh Mary, how I wish you were here and how tired I am of this letter writing. I somehow had the feeling during the last week or so that you would suddenly stand in the door. Then your gift arrived and I changed dresses to try it out. It is simply marvellous, almost too beautiful to become a use-object. But still it would have been better if you would have stood in the door.

This time of year is hectic as usual. Even I have to give a dinner party — you can see how bad it is. For Auden and the Lowells and Rich Heller. They probably all hate each other. I hope not, but if they do, I can’t help it. I saw Lowell several times and we talked at great length. He somehow intrigues me and I think I like him. By the way, he really loves you. I don’t think he pretended for my sake. His mental health seems to be perfect.

Despite all this, I have worked rather well. But everything takes so much more time than one hopes it will. I am in the midst of the last section of the Revolution book and I hate to interrupt it again. But I think I shall finish it in Northwestern where I have only a seminar once a week and lectures twice a week. Since I leave so early, I had to give extra session here in Columbia which I did not mind because the class is so very good. We meet once a week and read Plato together by now have become like old friends.

Love, dearest Mary, and all the wishes in the world.

Hannah

Dearest Hannah,

In the last two weeks I've been frightfully busy, otherwise I’d have answered sooner. My spirits have risen, I'm glad to say, and I've suddenly done some writing. Just reviews, one a long one of Vladimir Nabokov’s new book, Pale Fire, that’s coming out in this week’s New Republic and shorter one of Salinger for The Observer. The last I did in two days and it is very viperish and mean and gave me no pleasure, except to get it out of the way, but I really fell in love with the Nabokov book and worked very hard on it, with pure joy. I'm very curious to know what you'll think of the book if you read it, to me it's one of the gems of this century, absolutely new, though there are flashes of Lolita, Pnin, and all his other books in it. Among other things, it is terribly funny, about academic life, and terribly sad too.

It seems to me to have more of America and of the "new" civilization in it than anything I've ever read, and it's the first book I know to turn this weird new civilization into a work of art, as thought he'd engraved it all on the head of a pin, like the Lord's Prayer. It's a terrific puzzle or game and requires several players to work it out. I ran around Paris, to the library, to friends who knew Russian, to friends who knew German, to friends who knew chess, and enlisted, miraculously, their interest, as though they caught fire from the book too, at secondhand. This contagiousness is one of its qualities. And it's all quite different from working on Finnegans Wake, say, because when you look all the references there you're simply back with the text, but with the Nabokov book everything you're led to is beautiful in itself — rare birds and butterflies, the movement of the stars, curious chess situations, certain passages from Pope and Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Goethe…. I'm far from having elucidated all of it and am dying to hear what other people will find that I've missed. So far, the few reviews I've seen have been absolutely stupid and missed just about everything — in the most predictable way, as though Nabokov, laughing, had written the reviewers' reviews. Well, enough of that.

Otherwise there's nothing specially new. Except a story about Aron that is circulating. It seems he is a Don Juan with his girl students and has been inducing them to grant him their favors with all sorts of promises, which naturally he hasn't kept. But one of these girls has drawn up a bill of charges against him and has sent it, mimeographed, to the principal editors of Paris and to all the professors of the Sorbonne. One of his promises, textually quoted, is that if she will go to bed with him he will "take her on his arm to official dinners." Thwarted of this, she has taken her revenge. Some friends of mine say this is the second mad girl he has been involved with; the first tried to commit suicide to embarrass him or rather staged a suicide.

Oh, I do miss you, Hannah, and wish you were coming here soon.

They hanged Eichmann yesterday; my reaction was curious, rather shrugging. "Well, one more life — what difference does it make?" This cannot be the reaction the Israelis desired, yet short of rejoicing at his death, on the one hand, or being angry at it on the other, what else can the ordinary person feel?

I must stop and start cooking a dinner. I am so glad, Hannah, that you're almost over the effects of the accident, and you were fortunate in misfortune.

Mary

Dearest Mary,

I was just on the point of writing anyway when your letter arrived. I read the Macbeth piece and immediately thereafter the Nabokov review in the New Republic. I fell greatly and enthusiastically in love with the Macbeth article, and Heinrich was even more enthusiastic than I — if possible. You are so entirely and absolutely right and said it all so beautifully! When did you write it and why did you not let me know? It was almost by accident that I saw it in Harper's.

The Nabokov article — very very good, excellent as a matter of fact, very ingenious and puzzling — but I have not read the book. I am going to get it soon, but shall hardly have the time to read it. There is something in Nabokov which I greatly dislike. As though he wanted to show you all the time how intelligent he is. And as though he thinks of himself in terms of "more intelligent than." There is something vulgar in his refinement, and I am a bit allergic against this kind of vulgarity because I know it so well, know so many people cursed with it. But perhaps this is no longer true here. Let me see. I know only one book of his which I truly admire, and that is the long essay on Gogol.

Last Year at Marienbad — I saw it and thought it a bore. But have a look, it is interesting from a technical point of view.

I am glad they hanged Eichmann. Not that it mattered. But they would have made themselves utterly ridiculous, I feel, if they had not pushed the thing to its only logical conclusion. I know I am in the minority with this feeling. One reform rabbi came out for mercy and criticized the Israel execution as "unimaginative"! Isn't that marvellous?

How do you two like Paris? I mean living in the city. When I was there last summer I thought again it is the only place entirely fit to live in. Because it is like a house, the whole city really is, with many many rooms, but you feel never exposed, you are always "housed," protected, an entirely different spatial feeling from all other big cities I know.

Love and yours,

Hannah

Dearest Hannah:

It has reached the point where I feel if I don't write you in the next five minutes I never will — I'll be too ashamed. I don't know exactly what has caused this silence. Lack of time to write a long letter, unwillingness to write a short one. Or you fell off my invalid list. Nicola says he observed that I wrote him as long as he was a classified invalid; after that, silence.

The Conference was bizarre enough. People jumping up to confess they were homosexuals or heterosexuals; a Registered Heroin Addict leading the young Scottish opposition to the literary tyranny of the Communist Hugh Macdiarmid, the Yugoslav group in schism and their ambassador threatening to pull the Belgrade Opera and Ballet out of the Festival because the non-official delegate had been allowed to speak before the official delegate; an English woman novelist describing her communications with her dead daughter; a Dutch homosexual, a former male nurse, now a Catholic convert, seeking someone to baptize him, a bearded Sikh with hair down to his waist declaring on the platform that homosexuals were incapable of love, just as (he said) hermaphrodites were incapable of orgasm (Stephen Spender, in the chair, murmured that he should have thought they could have two). And all this before an audience of over two thousand people per day, mostly, I suppose, Scottish Presbyterians. The most striking fact was the number of lunatics both on the platform and in the public. One young woman novelist was released temporarily from a mental hospital in order to attend the Conference, and she was one of the milder cases. I confess I enjoyed it enormously.

Enough of that. Nicholas Nabokov, on the telephone last night, told me that Cal Lowell was in a mental ward in Buenos Aires and that Marilyn Monroe committed suicide because she had been having an affair with Bobby Kenedy and the White House had intervened. Our age begins to sound like some awful colossal movie about the late Roman Emperors and their Messalinas and Poppaeas. The Bobby Kennedy swimming pool being the bath with asses' milk.

Did you see the Esquire piece on me?

Mary

Dearest Mary:

I know it is terrible to dictate a letter and not to write it but I don't know how long I would postpone answering yours otherwise. Please forgive me. I was so happy with your letter. Everything sounds so good and you yourself sound in high spirits. I enjoyed the Edinburgh bit. I think I read something about it. I knew that Tucci is a hypochondriac. He goes for a complete checkup twice a year to the hospital, each time in perfect health, but a broken arm is, of course, something new.

I am very sorry about Lowell. I hadn't head form him but I was so little at home that I didn't find it strange. Will they be back in New York?

Esquire piece: The less said about it the better, I suppose.

The Tin Drum: I read it in German years ago and I think it is an artificial tour de force — as thought he had read all of modern literature and had then decided to borrow and to do something of his own.

What do you say, since we are on literature, about the Nobel Prize going to Steinbeck? Rather surprising! Have you any idea who the alternatives were?

The Revolution book is finished and will appear in January. The Eichmann article has also become a book, and to everybody's surprise, has been accepted by The New Yorker almost in its entirety. They are starting the series of articles end of January, which reminds me that Harold has now become their art critic and the first article appeared in the current issue. Just in case you should have missed it, I wanted to quote once sentence: "In our time, those who are content merely to paint pictures or to contemplate them are out of touch, either through choice or through ignorance, with the dynamics of creation in the arts; their norm is to be found in the canvases and picture gazers at the outdoor shows in Washington Square. Art, including its appreciation, has become an arena of conflicting powers." Isn't this marvelous? God knows whatever possessed him.

Yours, H

"Nightsea Wind" - Xiu Xiu (mp3)

"Laura Palmer's Theme" - Xiu Xiu (mp3)

In Which Sometimes The Sun Goes Round The Moon

The Strange Case

by VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written in bed, at Bournemouth on the English Channel, in 1885 in between hemorrhages from the lungs. It was published in January 1886. Dr. Jekyll is a fat, benevolent physician, not without human frailties, who at times by means of a potion projects himself into, or concentrates or precipitates, an evil person of brutal and animal nature taking the name of Hyde, in which character he leads a patchy criminal life of sorts. For a time he is able to revert to his Jekyll personality — there is a down-to-Hyde drug and a back-to-Jekyll drug — but gradually his better nature weakens and finally the back-to-Jekyll potion fails, and he poisons himself when on the verge of exposure. This is the bald plot of the story.

First of all, if you have the Pocket Books edition I have, you will veil the monstrous, abominable, atrocious, criminal, foul, vile, youth-depraving jacket — or better say straitjacket, You will ignore the fact that ham actors under the direction of pork packers have acted in a parody of the book, which parody was then photographed on a film and showed in places called theaters; it seems to me that to call a movie house a theater is the same as to call an undertaker a mortician.

And now comes my main injunction. Please completely forget, disremember, obliterate, unlearn, consign to oblivion any notion you may have had that Jekyll and Hyde is some kind of a mystery story, a detective story, or movie. It is of course quite true that Stevenson's short novel, written in 1885, is one of the ancestors of the modern mystery story. But today's mystery story is the very negation of style, being, at the best, conventional literature. Frankly, I am not one of those college professors who coyly boasts of enjoying detective stories — they are too badly written for my taste and bore me to death. Whereas Stevenson's story is — God bless his pure soul — lame as a detective story. Neither is it a parable nor an allegory, for it would be tasteless as either. It has, however, its own special enchantment if we regard it as a phenomenon of style.

It is not only a good "bogey story,” as Stevenson exclaimed when awakening from a dream in which he had visualized it much in the same way l suppose as magic cerebration had granted Coleridge the vision of the most famous of unfinished poems. It is also, and more importantly, ”a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction,” and therefore belongs to the same order of art as, for instance, Madame Bovary or Dead Souls.

There is a delightful winey taste about this book; in fact, a good deal of old mellow wine is drunk in the story: one recalls the wine that Utterson so comfortably sips. This sparkling and comforting draft is very different from the icy pangs caused by the chameleon liquor, the magic reagent that Jekyll brews in his dusty laboratory. Everything is very appetizingly put. Gabriel John Utterson of Gaunt Street mouths his words most roundly; there is an appetizing tang about the chill morning in London, and there is even a certain richness of tone in the description of the horrible sensations Jekyll undergoes during his hydizations. Stevenson had to rely on style very much in order to perform the trick, in order to master the two main difficulties confronting him: (1) to make the magic potion a plausible drug based on a chemist‘s ingredients and (2) to make Jekyll’s evil side before and after the hydization a believable evil.

The names Jekyll and Hyde are of Scandinavian origin, and I suspect that Stevenson chose them from the same page of an old book on surnames where I looked them up myself. Hyde comes from the Anglo-Saxon hyd, which is the Danish hide, "a haven." And Jekyll comes from the Danish name Jokulle, which means "an icicle." Not knowing these simple derivations one would be apt to find all kinds of symbolic meanings, especially in Hyde, the most obvious being that Hyde is a kind of hiding place for Dr. Jekyll, in whom the jocular doctor and the killer are combined.

Three important points are completely obliterated by the popular notions about this seldom read book:

1. Is Jekyll good? No, he is a composite being, a mixture of good and bad, a preparation consisting of a ninety-nine percent solution of Jekyllite and one percent of Hyde (or hydatid from the Greek “water" which in zoology is a tiny pouch within the body of man and other animals, a pouch containing a limpid fluid with larval tapeworms in it — a delightful arrangement, for the little tapeworms at least. Thus in a sense, Mr. Hyde is Dr. Jekyll’s parasite — but I must warn that Stevenson knew nothing of this when he chose the name.

Jekyll’s morals are poor from the Victorian point of view. He is a hypocritical creature carefully concealing his little sins. He is vindictive, never forgiving Dr. Lanyon with whom he disagrees in scientific matters. He is foolhardy. Hyde is mingled with him, within him. In this mixture of good and bad in Dr. Jekyll the bad can be separated as Hyde, who is a precipitate of pure evil, a precipitate in the chemical sense since something of the composite Jekyll remains behind to wonder in horror at Hyde while Hyde is in action.

2. Jekyll is not really transformed into Hyde but projects a concentrate of pure evil that becomes Hyde, who is smaller than Jekyll, a big man, to indicate the larger amount of good that, Jekyll possesses.

3. There are really three personalities — Jekyll, Hyde, and a third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over.

The situation may be represented visually.

But if you look closely you see that within this big, luminous, pleasantly tweedy Jekyll there are scattered rudiments of evil.

Still if you look closely at Hyde, you will notice that above him floats aghast, but dominating, a residue of Jekyll, a kind of smoke ring, or halo, as if this black concentrated evil had fallen out of the remaining ring of good, but this ring of good still reamins. Hyde still wants to change back to Jekyll. This is the significant point.

It follows that Jekyll’s transformation implies a concentration of evil that already inhabited him rather than a complete metamorphosis. Jekyll is not pure good, Hyde (Jekyll's statement to the contrary) is not pure evil, for just as parts of unacceptable Hyde dwell within acceptable Jekyll, so over Hyde hovers a halo of Jekyll, horrified at his worser half's iniquity.

...

I would like to say a few words about Stevenson's last moments.

As you know by now, I am not one to go heavily for the human interest stuff when speaking of books. Human interest is not in my line, as Vronski used to say. But books have their destiny, according to the Latin tag, and sometimes the destinies of authors follow those of their books. There is old Tolstoy in 1910 abandoning his family to wander away and die in a station master’s room to the rumble of passing trains that had killed Anna Karenin. And there is something in Stevenson's death in 1894 on Samoa, imitating in a curious way the wine theme and the transformation theme of his fantasy. He went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of his favorite‘ burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, and suddenly cried out to his wife: what's the matter with me, what is this strangeness, has my face changed? — and fell on the floor. A blood vessel had burst in his brain and it was all over in a couple of hours.

What, has my face changed? There is a curious thematical link between this last episode in Stevenson's life and the fateful transformations in his most wonderful book.

V.N.'s Chronology of Madame Bovary

First Part

1815 Charles born

1821 Gustave born

1827 Charles begins lessons with village priest (spring)

1828 (spring) confirmation

1831 (spring) is removed from school

1834 (spring) fails in medical exam (father hears of it five years later)

1835 (spring) passes exam, becomes "officier de sante"

1835 (fall) goes to Tostes to practice

1836 (Jan.) marries first wife, Heloise Dubuc

1837 (6th or 7th Jan.) goes to Les Bertaux first time

1837 (early spring) first wife dies

1837 (later in spring) goes to Les Bertaux again

1837 (Sept.) makes proposal to Emma Rouault

1838 (June) wedding

1838 (Sept.) ball

1839 (Sept) no ball (all winter at Tostes)

1840 (Feb.) turkey from Rouault

 

Second Part

1840 (March) Tostes to Yonville, Emma pregnant

1840 (summer) Bertha born

1840 (summer) walk to the nurse's house.

1841 (Feb.) walk to cotton mill

1841 (March) Bertha taken home

1841 (early April) visit to priest

1841 (early May) leaves for Paris

1842 (spring) Rodolphe brings farmboy to be bled

1842 county fair

1842 (winter) affair with Rodolphe

1843 (3rd Sep.) Rodolphe leaves Emma

1843 (4th Sep. Monday) the date fixed for their elopement, see Chap. 12; no other 4th of Sep. falls on Monday in the early forties. Emma falls sick - brain fever.

1843 (17 Oct.) recovery

1844 (June) opera, Leon "after three years of absence"

Third Part

1844 (all year) affair with Leon

1845 (summer) roses

1845 (autumn) Charles with Bertha in garden

1846 (mid-Lent, early March) fancy dress ball

1846 (March) Emma asks Leon for money

1846 (March) Emma dies, aged 26-28

1846 (around end May) Felicite runs off with Theodore, taking all Emma's clothes; Leon marries

1846 (early summer) Charles find Rodolphe's last letter

1846 (winter) Homais getting rid of beggar

1847 (around March) mausoleum

1847 (summer Aug) Charles finds all letters; goes to cemetery, sells horse; meets Rodolphe; dies next day aged 33.

1847 Homais calls Louis Philippa (1830-1848) "one good king"

1848 (Feb.) revolution

1856 (April, Napoleon III is now Emperor) Bertha, aged 15, works in a cotton mill. Three doctors have succeeded one another at Yonville between 1847 and 1856; Homais has just received the Cross of the Legion.

"Mystery Light" - Alice on the Roof (mp3)

In Which Vladimir Nabokov Says It All

The Life We've Been Living

The correspondence of Vladimir Nabokov and the critic Edmund Wilson had sputtered over the latter's inability to appreciate some of Nabokov's work. But Edmund still wanted Vladimir as his friend, and by the spring of 1950, illness had affected both men to the point where a skilled correspondent in the ways of the U.S. mail became not only desirable, but a panacea to pain. Wilson continued his wayward criticism; Nabokov composed the first version of his memoir Speak, Memory, then titled Conclusive Evidence. Even as they aged, both men were gifted with a literary curiosity that belied their years. In these letters, a conciliatory tone is struck so that both can educate the other in the particular unappreciated pleasures of the Western canon. The relationship would splinter and fracture in the coming decade, but for now both had one ear open.

Nabokov was preparing a course and asked for Wilson's help; the two argued over the literary worth of Robert Louis Stevenson.

May 15, 1950

Dear Bunny,

Awfully grateful to you for the books. Scott's piece is admirable. His French seemed to me quite good though Vera says she detected a few wrong tenses — but then Frenchmen make mistakes too. The whole thing is very funny and successful. For one instant I had the wild hope that the big Con was French.

I am in the middle of Bleak House — going slowly because of the many notes I must make for class-discussion. Great stuff. I think I told you once that my father had read every word Dickens wrote. Perhaps his reading to us aloud, on rainy evenings in the country, Great Expectations (in English, of course) when I was a boy of twelve or thirteen, prevented me mentally from re-reading Dickens later on. I have obtained Mansfield Park and I think I shall use it too in my course. Thanks for these most useful suggestions. You approach Stevenson from the wrong side. Of course Treasure Island is poor stuff. The one masterpiece he wrote is the first-rate and permanent Jekyll and Hyde. I hope you have enjoyed Cardinal Spellman's poem dedicated to an Alfred E. Smith Memorial Hospital. It ends:

                     ... and we
as brothers must within these troubled waters
protect, maintain AI's heritage and ours
devotedly in service to our fellow men?

I have to go to Boston to have six lower teeth extracted. My plan is to go thither (Tyдa) Sunday the 28th, grunt at the dentist's (a wonderful Swiss, Dr. Favre) Monday and Tuesday and perhaps Thursday (the 31st), then mumble back, toothless, to Ithaca to correct examination papers and return to Boston by car with Vera on the 6th or 7th to have a denture put in; then we shall stay there till the 11th and fetch Dmitri in New Hampshire on the 12th to go back to Ithaca through Albany, near which, at a place called Karner, in some pine-barrens, on lupines, a little blue butterfly I have described and named ought to be out. Would it be possible to fit a meeting with you into this scheme?

Было бцоно in this sense should be understood as было вйдно слдующее — a kind of collective adjectival noun is implied; thus neuter. But it is a good question — as I say to my pet students.

My method of composing is quite different from Flaubert's. I shall explain it to you at length some day. Now I must go to room 178 to analyse "The Lady With the Dog" in English, translating from the Russian text and indulging in most brilliant technicalities that are quite lost on my students.

It may just happen that I shall have to shift the whole Boston affair to after the 12th. Keeping up this exchange of letters is like keeping up a diary — you know what I mean — but please do not give up, I love your letters.

V.

with his son

Nabokov shows some of his usual frustration with Wilson as they continue to banter about Western literature.

June 3, 1950

Dear Volodya:

(1) It is impossible to use automobile gracefully in iambic verse at all. You would have to have anapests or dactyls. The line you wrote is something that would be stumbled over by any native of the English-speaking world, and it demonstrates the fallacy of your stress theory. As I was trying to explain to you some time ago, even the last syllable of a word like imagination had through Milton and I don't know how much later a stress that had to be treated with respect:

"Guiding the fiery-wheeled throne,
The Cherub Contemplation"
                          Il Penseroso

Today it is always slurred: "the first imagination of Christendom" is a blank-verse line of Yeats and more the kind of thing you mean, but your method of approaching such a line leads you into errors about English metrics. "Imagination," I take it, has only one stress that counts, but this is not the case with the two long words of the line above. The last syllable of Christendom is extremely important to the structure of the line. So is the first syllable of automobile, and you have spoilt your line by disregarding it.

(2) As for the street and the moon that Chekhov, in a mood of masochism all too common in Russian literature, has made the victims of the verb instead of, as they should be, its dominators: you have given me two distinct explanations neither of which can justify the construction. The truth is that this is one of the grotesque anomalies so rife in Russian grammar. I propose, when our enlightened proconsuls have to come to the rescue of that unfortunate country, in my role of Secretary for Colonial Culture, to exterminate such absurdities by making indulgence in them punishable by imprisonment.

(3) About Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: I tried reading that to Reuel, too, and it, too, seemed to me thin. Though it is on a bigger scale, I don't really like it as well as Poe's William Wilson, which I imagine must have suggested it. I even prefer Dorian Gray. I don't know what is involved here. People sometimes have infatuations for second-rate foreign authors that mean something different to them than they do to their countrymen. I don't understand your admiring Jekyll and disliking "The Black Monk" and "Viy", the last of which seems to me the greatest story of the horrible supernatural I have ever read. By the way, I think "The Lady With the Dog" rather overrated. I think it owes its popularity — the Soviets have lately got out a special illustrated edition — to its being the only one of these later stories of Chekhov's that has any hint of a love affair not frustrated without respite or putrefying in triteness. "The Archbishop", which I've just read, is a masterpiece.

I am getting rather tired of all these topics and think we ought to start something new. Let me know about your movements. Our definite plan now is to be in Boston the 15th and go on that afternoon — Elena to St. Paul's; Rosalind, Reuel and I to Utica, on our way to Talcottville, all probably getting back Sunday. We'd love to have you anytime. Good luck with your teeth.

EW

Edmund, Elena, Reuel, and Helen Miranda Wilson photographed by Sylvia Saimi in 1950 Nabokov seems to be repaying a previous slight with his analysis of Wilson's literary memoir of the 40s, Classics and Commercials. In any case, he does not seem to have thought much of the book.

November 18, 1950

Dear Edmund,

it is only today that I have a moment to thank you for your book (Vera joins me) — but "better late than never, as said the woman who missed her train" (an old Russian chestnut).

There are lots of things in it that are superb, especially the attacks and the fun. As with most good critics, your war-crying voice is better than your hymn — singing one. Some day you will recall with astonishment and regret your soft spot for Faulkner (and Eliot, and H. James). Your bit on Gogol and me contains various things (added? changed?) that I do not seem to remember having seen in the original version. I protest against the last line. Conrad knew how to handle readymade English better than I; but I know better the other kind. He never sinks to the depths of my solecisms, but neither does he scale my verbal peaks.

I want to make my mid-term report on the two books you suggested I should discuss with my students. In connection with Mansfield Park I had them read the works mentioned by the characters in the novelthe two first cantos of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Cowper's "The Task," passages from King Henry the Eighth, Crabbe's tale "The Parting Hour," bits of Johnson's The Idler, Browne's address to "A Pipe of Tobacco" (Imitation of Pope), Sterne's Sentimental Journey (the whole "gate-and-no-key" passage comes from there — and the starling) and of course Lovers' Vows in Mrs. Inchbald's inimitable translation (a scream).

In discussing Bleak House, I completely ignored all sociological and historical implications, and unravelled a number of fascinating thematic lines (the "fog theme," the "bird theme," etc.) and the three main props of the structure — the crime-mystery theme (the weakest), the child-misery theme and the lawsuit-chancery one (the best). I think I had more fun than my class.

I am worried about Roman. I wonder whether he has quite recovered from his heart attack.

It is fairly probable that I shall visit New York some time in the beginning of next year. I want to see you very much. Vera and I send Elena and you our best love.

V.

Wilson's home in Talcottville

Changes at The New Yorker and Nabokov's desire to secure a Guggenheim to work on his translation of Eugene Onegin are the subject of this Wilson letter.

January 18, 1951

Dear Volodya:

I recommended you warmly for a Guggenheim, but I wish you had given them some other project — it seems to me a pity for you to spend a lot of time on Onegin when you ought to be writing your own books.

I corrected my description of the duel in the English edition of the The Triple Thinkers which is just about to come out. It is clear, however, that Pushkin means Onegin to take a certain advantage of Lensky.

We have been leading a most monotonous but rather pleasant and productive life up here. I have been working on a gigantic book containing ninety-two of my articles, mostly written in the twenties and thirties, which has been turning into a sort of volume of literary memoirs. We are going to Boston tomorrow for a long-postponed holiday. At the end of this month, we hope to get to New York for February and March. We're very glad you're coming to Cambridge and shall see you there later on.

Nobody seems to know at The New Yorker what is going to happen now that Ross is dead. I am afraid it may deteriorate instead of taking a new lease on life.

What do you think of Colette? I've been reading her a little for the first time and really don't like it much. The books about Cheri repel me. Have I expounded to you my theory of the role in Russian literature of the decisive step and the fixed gaze? If not, I will do so sometime.

I should like to see the review that Harold Nicolson did of your book. I suppose you saw the thing in the New Yorker.

As ever,

EW

Edmund Wilson's mother had died earlier in the week, and he approached her passing in the same blindly analytic fashion he approached literature. A clerihew is a four line biographical poem with a specific AABB rhyme scene.

February 7, 1951

Dear Volodya:

Thank you for your letter. My mother was nearly eighty-six, was completely deaf, nearly blind and so arthritic that she could hardly stand up. But it was impressive to see how well she kept up and how keen she still managed to be. When she died, she had a moment before been having coffee and joking with Rosalind and her nurse. That morning she had asked Rosalind about her beaux and said, "I suppose they're a lot of writers. Don't marry one or you'll never have any money."

That story about the Blue Light in the Times was not entirely true. The Theater Guild denied it, but, so far as I know, the denial was not published. We had differences on several points, but there was never any question of doing the whole of the printed text. It looks now as if the original people were going to do it April 1, in conjunction with ANTA (if you know what that is). I am much better pleased, for the Guild is old and gaga.

I hope that you will have the publishers send me a copy of your book. You should have them put me on the publicity list, so that you will not have to supply the copy yourself. And please have it sent to the New York address-which, it turns out, is c/o Mrs. Moise, instead of Mrs. Lloyd.

I have been reading with great enjoyment the earlier series of Gogol's Ukrainian Evenings, I have the impression, from the contemptuous way in which you discuss these in your Gogol book, that you have not read them since childhood.

Did you get the Russian clerihew I sent you? If it is off the track, I wish you would let me know. Clerihews, of course, run to lines of any length and are doggerel — like Ogden Nash.

Love to Vera. Is there no chance of your getting to New York during the spring vacation?

As ever,

EW

March 10, 1951

Dear Bunny,

No — I conscientiously reread those Gogol tales (as explicitly stated in my book on G.) and found them exactly as I thought they were on the strength of old impressions. I also remember I had reread them in 1932 or 1933 for an article on Gogol in Russian which I still use for my Russian courses.

In my European fiction class I have finished lecturing on Anna Karenin and "The Death of John, son of Elijah" (joke) and am proceeding to draw a most fascinating comparison between Jekyll and Hyde and "Metamorphosis," with the latter winning.

After that: Chehov, Proust and parts of Joyce. The Moncrieff translation of Proust is awful, almost as awful as the translations of Anna and Emma but in a way still more exasperating because Mr. Moncrieff a son petit style a lui which he airs.

Did you get the two copies of Conclusive Evidence, one with a dedicace? Perhaps, whenever you have the occasion to bother about it, you will send the Wellfleet copy back to me. Did you get my nasty letter about your nasty Russian verse? Will you be in New York at the end of May? Vera and I will be there at that date for a reason and an event which I have been asked not to divulge until mentioned in the papers but which, I suspect, you know of.

Yours,

V.

the Nabokov family estate in Vyra

Perhaps sensing the combative and annoyed tone of Nabokov's previous letters, Wilson lavishes praise after his first reading of Speak, Memory.

March 19, 1951

Dear Volodya:

Elena was so delighted with your book that she swore she was going to write you a letter, to which I was going to add my own comment, but as she hasn't got around to this, I must let you know my opinion; which I know you have been nervously awaiting. This is that Conclusive Evidence is a wonderful production. The effectiveness and beauty of the material have really been raised to a higher power (in the sense of being cubed) by the pieces appearing in a book and in the proper order. I reread the whole thing with avidity, except for the final one that deals with parks and perambulators, the only one I do not care much for (though Elena particularly likes it). I don't approve of the title, which is uninteresting in itself-and what is the conclusive evidence? Against the Bolsheviks?

I have received only the inscribed copy. The other will be in Wellfleet. I hope that you will have both of them put down to publicity, in which case you won't be charged with them. I am a practicing critic, and I want to send the other one to Mario Praz in Rome, who writes about American and English books in one of the papers there.

We're going back to Wellfleet early in May. I know nothing about the event that is bringing you on at that time. Is there no chance of your coming to the Cape?

I did not get your nasty letter and am still awaiting enlightenment — which I think you owe me in return for my inestimable services in straightening you out about English metrics.

I have been fascinated by von Frisch on bees — about whom you first told me. 

I have only looked into the Moncrieff translation of Proust. What struck me was that he had turned Proust's lugubriousness into something lighter and brighter and English.

As ever,

EW

A little flattery goes a long way, leaving Nabokov to subtly apologize for his remarks about Wilson's Tolstoy clerihew in a letter than did not survive.

March 24, 1951

Dear Bunny,

It may sound foolish (in the light of what I always have felt toward criticism of my work), but your letter did give me a twinge of pleasure. I would dearly have liked to get Elena's letter and, please, thank her for me for her kind and subtle attitude toward Conclusive Evidence. Title: I tried to find the most impersonal title imaginable, and as such it is a success. But I agree with you that it does not render the spirit of the book. I had toyed with, at first, Speak, Mnemosyne or Rainbow Edge but nobody knew who Mnemosyne was (or how to pronounce her), nor did R. E. suggest the glass edge — "The Prismatic Bezel" (of Sebastian Knight fame).

A British publisher — Gollancz, do you know the firm? — wants the book and dislikes the title. If Green (the first page of his Nothing is wonderful — with your intonation, I hope) had not used so many monosyllables for the titles, I would have thrown hIim "Clues" (or "Mothing"!).

Several things have happened to me recently. Karpovich, head of the Russian Department at Harvard, will be away next spring term and has suggested I replace him in the Russian Literature courses, so that we shall probably transfer our activities to Cambridge (of which I am thinking with great warmth at udder-conscious and udderly boring Cornell) in January. Another pleasant aspect of this is that we will be much nearer to you in space. We are terribly keen to come to the Cape.

Life, a magazine, wants to take photographs of me catching butterflies, and of rare butterflies on flowers or mud, and I am doing my best to give it a strictly scientific twist — nothing of the kind has ever been done with rare Western species, some of which I have described myself so they are sending a photographer to be with me, for a week or so, in some productive locality in S.W. Colorado or Arizona (Dmitri is in a great singing voice today, booming French from La Juive, and in a minute he is driving me to the soccer field for some practice and coaching) in July — they do not quite understand what is going to happen.

I thought you had some secret influence or something, suggesting my name — que sais-je? — in the matter of the American Academy that is giving me a ceremonious award on the 25th May. I know nothing whatsoever about that institution and at first confused it with a Mark Twain horror that almost obtained my name in the past; but I am told this is the real thing. I am asked not to divulge this news until it appears in the gazettes.

Love to both of you from us both.

V

P.S. I suppose you will find in Wellfleet my letter about your poem. I took it apart, viciously. It is a salad of mistakes.

You can find the first part of this series here and the second part here.

"People, Turn Around" - Delta Spirit (mp3)

"Bleeding Bells" - Delta Spirit (mp3)

"Parade" - Delta Spirit (mp3)

"Children" - Delta Spirit (mp3)