Two old reviews from THE NEW REPUBLIC*:
(a) The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between
Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971 edited, annotated and
with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky (Harper & Row; $15)
by
Leon Edel (May 26, 1979)
excerpts: "Wilson was mainly
preoccupied, as he put it, with "the writing and acting of history." Nabokov
confined himself to the writing (and perhaps at moments the living) of fiction.
Wilson admired the poetry in Nabokov and his storytelling gifts; but he could
not accept the "lost- world side" of the imaginative emigre. This made Nabokov
seem to Wilson ahistorical and apolitical.[...] Wilson pointedly asks how
Nabokov could "study butterflies from the point of view of their habitat and . .
. pretend that it is possible to write about human beings and leave out of
account all questions of society and environment." That expressed the core of
their differences. Behind the screen of delicate acrimony that descended when
they discussed how to render Pushkin, there remained this great divergence and
each took a different road." Differently from Nabokov's views,
Wilson "was concerned with the meaning of revolution, and with what makes
history happen[ ...] Both enjoyed what Wilson called their "intellectual
romps"--but Wilson consistently felt that Nabokov's fiction contained an excess
of "humiliation"-Schadenfreude- of mankind. He speculated that this stemmed from
the cruelties Nabokov had experienced as a proud and indeed arrogant Russian
liberal, humiliated by history[...]
(b) Vladimir
Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977 by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by
Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 608 pp.,
$29.95)
"The Matter with
Style" by Alfred Kazin (December 18,
1989)
excerpts:
"To
my knowledge, no one in English since Poe has written out of such public pride
in his imagination, out of so much contempt for his most talented
contemporaries, out of such an aggrieved sense of genius at bay and condemned
(here because of the switch back and forth between Russian and English) to being
underrated by simpler minds ignorant of the difficulties within and between
languages that Nabokov emphasized as his torment, specialty, opportunity, and
triumph...
His son Dmitri, footnoting
many of these letters, doesn't know why Nabokov as a man has been thought
unpleasant, and testifies to his father's warmth and richness of character. What
put people off was not Nabokov's personality, but the rich, lush, yet secret and
almost underhand quality of his imagination. It could become just too private
and self-celebratory...
Nabokov was right to say
that 'all my stories are webs of style and none seems at
first blush to contain much kinetic matter. . . . For me 'style' is
matter.' I remember reading years ago that Isaac Babel thought
Nabokov didn't have too much to write about. Nabokov would have replied-as he
does in these letters-that all these other people were incapable of locating his
special quality. "Style" was not window dressing but a category, it was a
special attribute of the imagination..."
....................................................................
* - Once again, thanks to James Twiggs for giving me
access to the reviews.
The excerpts I selected don't cover everything
that has been singled out by the reviewers: they were chosen mainly
because of their pertinence in connection to what has been,
loosely, under discussion by the Nab-List.