Books: Chain Mail

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THE NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS: 1940-1971 Edited by Simon Karlinsky Harper & Row; 346 pages; $15

During their long, lively correspondence, they addressed each other as Bunny and Volodya. They agreed to disagree about Beauty and Truth but fell out over nits. They discussed collaborations but never consummated them. They longed for each other's company, then rejected invitations. They were by all counts the odd couple of American letters.

Bunny was Edmund Wilson, the great comparativist from Red Bank, N.J., who foraged ravenously through history, politics, sociology and at least half a dozen acquired languages to give U.S. literary studies an international style. Volodya was Vladimir Nabokov, the great taxonomist of loss from St. Petersburg, Russia, who chased memories of a dispersed culture over two continents and became one of the foremost novelists of the century.

The men met in 1940, shortly after Nabokov arrived in New York with his wife and young son. Nabokov had fled Hitler's Europe with little money and few possessions. Even his reputation as the literary star of the Russian emigration was left behind. Wilson did his best to import it. He talked up Nabokov, found him reviewing assignments, advised him about publishers and warned him that puns did not go over with American editors.

Nabokov's high spirits and intellectual playfulness were both amusing and rankling to Wilson. The American's ideas about important literature leaned more toward social and political content than art for art's sake. Nabokov demurred, but his answer was not frivolous: "The longer I live the more I become convinced that the only thing that matters in literature is the (more or less irrational) shamanstvo of a book, i.e., that the good writer is first of all an enchanter."

As a fiction writer, Wilson's eye was quicker than his hand. He would never equal Nabokov's magic. Yet, like most of the intellectuals of his time, Wilson was fascinated by all things Russian. He had written sympathetically about Lenin and the Soviet Revolution in To the Finland Station and had, at the time of his first meeting with Nabokov, added the aristocratic newcomer's language to his long list of merit badges.

Russian, in fact, bound them together and eventually broke them apart. This theme is the most consistent in their extended correspondence and reads as though two worldly gentlemen were comparing notes on a shared mistress. Yet between the lines about metrics and grammar grinds a mutual competitiveness.