314
CLARENCE BROWN
for any faults he found as for its conveying more
than
anyone wished
to know, and ended with an insulting compliment on ,the physical ap-–
pearance of the books.
Nabokov, whose relish for polemics exceeds even that of Wilson,
must have had trouble believing his good luck. He answered with an
article that was simply annihilating - or would have been against any
victim less resilient and plucky. But I must say that at this stage of his
career Wilson's pluck exceeded his judgment. It was a mistake to include
this thoroughly discredited article in the presenrt: collection, and it was
an even worse mistake to append a note of 1971, where it
is
blandly
stated that the original review
has
been revised to eliminate the very
blunders
thaJt
Nabokov had so gleefully pounced upon. Embarrassingly
conciliatory, Wlilson goes to the length of complaining that Nabokov,
since he is such a practical joker, ought not to mind "my own attempts
to tease." The af.terthought of 1971 also reveals that Wilson had broken
one of his own earlier rules: he had read Nabokov only piecemeal,
and
not very perspicaciously at that. It
is
a rule which, had he observed it,
might have allowed him to see the
Onegin
in an essential perspective,
that of Nabokov's own lifework. But the few stopgap notes that he now
appends on some of Nabokov's novels are not very good, and, anyway, it
is too la:te. There are other essays at the end of the book
which
deal
with lesser writers and are therefore of lesser interest. Edmund Wilson's
most attractive qualities nevertheless show through the most perfunctory
work. Recognizing the moral stature of Solzhenitsyn, for instance, and the
genuinely moving passages in such a novel as
The Cancer Ward,
Wilson
is
too stubbornly honest not to observe tlhat he is as bored by conscientious
bricklaying as by any other brick'laying and finally that "one does not
know how
to
criticize the dryness of some of these pieces." There is,
incidentally, no evidence here, as there is in all the other essays, that he
had ever read the works in Russian.
Clarence Brown
