Vladimir Nabokov was aware that no one in America had done more to support and promote him than Bunny, despite the fact that their friendship had run aground with the polemics over Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, followed by Wilson’s later comments in Upstate regarding a visit to the Nabokovs. Nabokov sometimes ended his letters to Wilson with “love,” and he meant it. A close look at the last novel he published, Look at the Harlequins!, reveals that he fashioned it as a lasting tribute to his deceased friend.
Nabokov had been aware of Wilson’s declining health in the early seventies. Wilson, still active in his seventy-seventh year, but suffering prolonged ailments, died of a coronary on June 12, 1972. Look at the Harlequins! was conceived on September 25, 1972, within three months of Wilson’s death [Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov, The American Years (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1991) 606]. The life and works of the novel’s hero, Vadim N., parody Nabokov’s own life and works in obvious ways and in more subtle ways, as delineated by Brian Boyd. But there are many undeniable elements of Edmund Wilson in Vadim; and it is exactly in the ways that Vadim’s life differs from Nabokov’s that he most resembles Wilson.
Vadim’s personality, described by Boyd as “irritating and impossible,” could not have been more dissimilar to Nabokov’s, while Wilson’s personality, as described in his New York Times obituary, was “dyspeptic” ["Edmund Wilson Dies." (The New York Times 13 June 1972) https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/06/13/80792425.html?pageNumber=1].Vadim is fat and despite his looks, manages to attract women; he drinks too much; he has a “high, clear, insolent voice” [Nabokov, Vladimir Look at the Harlequins. New York: McGraw-Hill Book, Company, 1974. 177]. All these traits are found in Wilson.
Nabokov regarded his childhood as perfect, in sharp contrast to that of Vadim, who describes his upbringing as “atrocious, intolerable” and bemoans having been the only child of an unhappy couple who divorce. Likewise, Edmund Wilson was the only child of an unhappy couple who remained unhappily together. Wilson’s controlling mother developed psychosomatic deafness, while his severely disturbed father kept himself behind a baize-covered bedroom door, and hardly communicated with his family.
While Nabokov’s parents encouraged his art, Vadim is raised by a grand aunt who, exactly like Wilson’s mother, dislikes the dreaminess of her son, and urges him to stop daydreaming and moping. She mysteriously tells him to “look at the Harlequins.” Wilson’s mother was embarrassed by his bookishness, and wanted him to play baseball with the other boys, even buying him a uniform [Dabney, Lewis M. Edmund Wilson, A Life in Literature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) 21]. Both Vadim and Wilson ignore these cajolings in favor of the literary life.
Unlike his creator, Vadim feared madness from childhood. “Madness had been lying in wait for me behind this or that alder or boulder since infancy,” he laments (241). Vadim’s mental processes are clouded by alcohol: he admits “much of the confused impressions listed here in connection with doctors and dentists must be classed as an oneiric experience during a drunken siesta” (19.) Serious mental disease ran in the Wilson’s family. His cousin Sandy, who was his closest childhood friend, was institutionalized for life with schizophrenia. During a family trip to Europe, a physician examined Wilson’s brilliant but troubled father and declared him mad. These events instilled in Wilson a fear that he might be inclined toward madness. In his early thirties, Wilson began suffering from hallucinations and depression, brought on by alcohol abuse, and checked himself into a sanatorium for several weeks.
Unlike Nabokov, Vadim marries four times, like Wilson. The best of his first three marriages was to Iris and it ends suddenly with her death, while Wilson’s marriage to his second wife, Margaret Canby, on whom he modelled Jo in Memoirs of Hecate County, ended in her sudden accidental death. Burdened with guilt, Wilson mourned her even while married to his third wife, Mary McCarthy. Nabokov would have encountered Margaret only through Wilson’s memories and his portrait of her in the novel. There, the hero is conflicted by his relationships with various women. When Jo arrives from California, he relates “I was rescued by a dea ex machina in the shape of my old girl, Jo Gates.” She is voluble, and fun--“dear gay Jo” he calls her [Wilson, Edmund, Memoirs of Hecate County (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004) 302].
Nabokov first got to know Wilson during his rocky marriage to Mary McCarthy. She was considerably younger than Wilson, as is Vadim’s third wife, the sophisticated Louise. Louise is described as “volatile” (189) and “porcelain-pretty and a very fast girl” (158)--a perfect portrait of McCarthy.
Louise is mocked for fancying herself a connoisseur of art. She spouts theoretical, especially Freudian, ideas about art (187-88). Towards the end of the marriage to Wilson, McCarthy began an affair with art critic Clement Greenberg who was a Marxian theorist. Vadim mocks her as “Louise the Intellectual.” It is not clear what Nabokov thought of McCarthy’s presumed intellectualism, but certainly it would have been an area ripe for ridicule. In a 1944 article for The Partisan Review, McCarthy set herself up as a judge of intellectualism, decreeing that Graham Greene was not a true intellectual—he simply used the “rhetoric” of one [McCarthy, Mary, "Graham Greene and the Intelligentsia" (Partisan Review, Spring 1944:228)]. This probably embarrassed Wilson, as he would soon be looking for a British publisher for Hecate and Greene knew everyone in the publishing business. A year later, Wilson showed the manuscript to Greene, who promoted the book to Eyre and Spottiswood, where he was a director, but the firm wouldn’t touch it (Dabney 315).
Wilson became close to the British poet W. H. Auden after his separation from McCarthy, and introduced him to Nabokov. Vadim also acquires a new friend “[a] frail-looking, sad-looking, somewhat monkey-faced man with a shock of black hair, gray-streaked at fifty-five, the enchantingly talented poet Audace” (158). Photos of Auden at the time will confirm the description. Wilson’s fourth wife, Elena Mumm Thornton, once described Auden as looking “like something which ought to be growing in the middle of a forest.” (Wilson, Edmund, The Sixties [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993], 262).
Wilson began his relationship with Elena, who was significantly younger than he, while separated from Mary. Vadim becomes involved with “You” the love of his life, who is much younger, during his separation from Louise. In November 1946, Wilson and McCarthy were involved in a down and dirty custody hearing, with each side calling friends to testify against the character of their spouse. Vadim and Louise’s divorce is also a messy business as he supplies his lawyer with a list of her betrayals (230, but she soon agrees to the divorce in order to remarry a man closer to her age. Soon after the divorce from Wilson, McCarthy married a man closer to her age.
After its publication, obscenity proceedings were brought against Hecate County in several venues and the book was ultimately found to be obscene by the U.S. Supreme Court. Similarly, Vadim tells us that he is involved “in a long legal fight against obscenity charges leveled at my novel by stuffy censors” (201). In contrast, no obscenity case was ever brought against Lolita, or any other book written by Nabokov.
Vadim’s discovery of “You,” the woman who will become his fourth wife and bring him his most satisfying and complete relationship, is the climax of Harlequin. Boyd describes her as someone with “an original mind, [and] a deep appreciation of Vadim’s art. She seems to know him better than he knows himself. She treats him with sweet firmness, constant solicitude, unswerving loyalty” (632). It is a good description of Elena, whose originality and appreciation of literature is illustrated by her reaction to the Lolita manuscript, which she praised despite Wilson’s dislike of it, and by the fact that she recommended it to publisher Roger Strauss. (Strauss greeted it enthusiastically, but decided not to publish it because at the time Nabokov was insisting on his anonymity). Elena appreciated the genius of her husband, despite his physical and behavioral problems, and they were enthusiastic lovers and good companions. In Elena, Wilson had found his most perfect match. Dorothea Straus, the publisher’s wife, said that despite appearing in a faded cotton dress, with bare legs scratched from berry picking, “there was about her an air of regality.” In Dabney’s words, Straus regarded her as having a “formidable intellect” (Dabney, 449). Robert Lowell wrote Wilson, “It’s rare when both husband and wife are delightful and brilliant [….] you both seem to have it right” (Dabney 450-51).
Wilson’s marriage to Elena was overall his most peaceable and fulfilling, but there were troubles. Wilson’s daughter Rosalind wrote that her father was destructive to his wives in a way that “was almost incommunicable because it combined the conscious with the unconscious to such an extent on his part, and constant criticizing from morning to night” (Dabney 464). His son, Reuel, described him as having had “an almost pathological tendency to mistreat his wives, even when they seemed to be getting on well together” (Wilson, Reuel K., "Edmund Wilson's Cape Cod Landscape" [Virginia Quarterly Review 80.1, 2004] http://www.vqronline.org/issues/80/1/winter-2004). The Wilsons’ most severe marital strains arose when the Nabokovs lived abroad, over Elena’s refusal to stay with Wilson in rural Talcotville in the summers, and his sexual transgressions that were mostly confined to that location. Thus, there is little likelihood that any disharmony would have been evident to the distant Nabokovs. Despite these difficulties, Wilson’s journals are filled with descriptions of their love making, and his longing for her when that is not possible. “I think of you every morning when I first wake up and wonder why, when I still had it, I didn’t make love to you every day,” he writes her from Israel in 1967 (Dabney, 500). Elena was firmly and obviously devoted to Wilson. Reading one of his articles in the The New Yorker, Elena commented to a friend that “[w]hen I read his work I forgive him all his sins” (Dabney 458).
Vadim has a troubled relationship with his daughter Bel, who comes to live with him and Louise. Louise becomes competitive and tries to undermine their relationship (189). Something similar had occurred between Mary McCarthy and Rosalind. “When Rosalind and I spent our summers together,” writes Wilson in his journal, she was beginning to mature [….] Then my marriage to Mary set her back to childhood—since Mary was herself so childish and competed in a childish way with Rosalind” (Wilson, Edmund. The Fifties [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986], 406). The Nabokovs knew Rosalind well. When she was living in Boston, they were in and out of the area even after moving to Ithaca, as their son Dimitri was studying at Harvard. Nabokov wrote to Wilson about visiting her in 1953: “We had a wonderful time with your charming daughter in Boston. I played an unforgettable game of chess (no, two games) with her” (Karlinsky, Simon, ed. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001], 311). Rosalind had her first serious emotional collapse in 1956. Wilson was tormented by Rosalind’s difficulties; in April 1957, while at her father’s house Rosalind had had a weeping fit, and two days later Wilson, while visiting with William James, found himself thinking about her and began to cry (The Fifties, 406).
Boyd writes about Vadim that “[h]is tangled relations with his daughter end by stunting her growth and her once-subtle appreciation of the creative side of life” (Boyd 641). Rosalind, who had published some of her writing in magazines, and had become an editor at Houghton and Mifflin, had to quit her job because of her emotional problems. Dabney attributes many of her difficulties to her relationship with her father, writing that he “was too caught up in himself and his interests and his alcoholism to be fully engaged as a father” (458) and that Rosalind “confused her identity with her father” (460).
In September 1963, just as the Wilsons were supposed to sail for Europe with their daughter Helen, Wilson saw that Rosalind was delusional. Elena went ahead and took Helen to boarding school in Switzerland, while Wilson remained in Boston during Rosalind’s hospitalization, and then stayed with her in Wellfleet after she was discharged. After visiting England and France, where Helen joined them for the holidays, the Wilsons returned Helen to school in Switzerland and went straight on to visit the Nabokovs for a three-day visit at Montreux (The Sixties, 295.) It was the first time they’d met since 1957--the Nabokov’s relocation to Europe in September 1959, and the enormous demands of “Hurricane Lolita” having hugely diminished their contact. The visit went very well. “It was grand to see you after all those years and to resume so fluently our natural intercourse…Our love to Elena and to you,” wrote Nabokov soon after (Karlinsky 372.) They never saw each other again, due to the rifts over Eugene Onegin and Upstate. Vadim’s journey to drop off his daughter Bel to a Swiss boarding school derives from this visit (Harlequin, 192).
Through Vadim, Nabokov took the opportunity to parody Wilson’s fictional style. Boyd notes Harlequin’s “brilliantly funny images of deromanticized sex” and “the missing magic of Nabokov’s language” (625). Rather than self-parody, the language may be a send-up of Wilson’s fictional style. Hecate County, Wilson’s best fictional achievement, was infamous for its sterile, mechanistic descriptions of sex. (The narrator, reuniting with his girlfriend Jo describes their tryst thus: “She took rather longer than I did, but she finally went off like an alarm clock…” (Hecate, 302.) The two friends alluded to Wilson’s depictions of sex in an exchange of letters, Nabokov noting that the narrator’s strange sexual partners allow him “no kick from his love-making” and declaring, “I should have as soon tried to open a sardine can with my penis.” (Karlinsky 188). Responding, Bunny wrote that “[t]he frozen and unsatisfactory character of the sexual relations was the point of the book” (Karlinsky, 189).
Even the title of Nabokov’s book, which refers to Harlequin, of the commedia dell’arte, may contain an allusion to Wilson, a talented puppeteer, who loved to entertain friends and family with his puppets and wrote elaborate skits for them. Wilson’s signature character, whom the whole family identified with Wilson, was another figure from the commedia dell’arte—Punch, who can only envy the graceful Harlequin. Punch is fat, homely, and given to hitting people over the head with a club. Just before his visit to the Nabokovs in Montreux in 1964, Wilson had been to London where he ordered a custom-made Punch puppet.
Look at the Harlequins! was not the first time Nabokov had placed Wilson in a novel, although it was certainly the most elaborate. The practice had become a standard joke between them. It began with Wilson’s Hecate County and a description of a party at the home of someone who is known to his guests as Mr. Malatesta, but who is in fact a Russian émigré named Chernokhvostov. The narrator asks another guest about this and receives a bizarre explanation of the origin of the man’s Russian name. In the words of the narrator, the explanation is made: “by a clever Russian novelist who seemed to have known him in Europe but whom I did not necessarily believe.” In case Nabokov might have missed the reference (how would that be possible?) Wilson pointed it out in a letter: “I have introduced you into my book as a friend of Mr. Chernokhvostov’s (you knew him in Europe and your relations are rather ambiguous), who gives a misleading explanation of the origin of his name,” wrote Wilson, no doubt greatly amused at his lampoon of Nabokov’s predilection for the practical joke (Karlinsky 163.)
Nabokov returned the favor in Pnin. Timofey Pnin is planning a party at his home for faculty members and is considering whom to invite. He has constantly confused the names of two professors whom he knows only slightly-- one an ornithologist whom he wants to get to know better, and the other an anthropologist. Mistakenly, he invites the anthropologist to the party, and puzzles his guests by confronting repeatedly the man with inapt comments about birds. Nabokov spends pages of the slim book setting up this joke, which was based on a real incident involving Wilson. Wilson, who considered himself something of a naturalist, had asked Nabokov to invite some entomologists to a party at Nabokov’s house. Ignorant of the fact that no entomologists had come, Wilson, proceeded to badger a puzzled literature professor with talk about insects, to Nabokov’s great amusement (Boyd 47).
Vadim calls his life a “mixed metaphor” (149.) The mixture is part Nabokov and part Wilson, resulting in a character who reunites the two through Nabokov’s alchemy. Nabokov may have cut Wilson from his life, but he would not consign him to oblivion. Instead, he joined him in the world of the miserable Vadim, to whom Nabokov grants salvation through the act of treasuring the “You” he finally had the good fortune to find.
Thanks to Priscilla Meyer for her kind assistance.
--Frances Peltz Assa, Milwaukee, Wisconsin