Yours Ever (19 page)

She insists to her sister Parthenope that she does “not despair—nor complain. It has been a great cause.” But it was the ability to make objective complaint (tinged with a certain messianism, to be sure) that allowed her year and a half’s worth of Crimean letters to effect so many systematic reforms and improvements. Not, of course, without some follow-through on her part. When Nightingale arrived home in the summer of 1856, she found herself, according to her latter-day editors, “unable to rest,” and so, formulating her prescriptions for change, “she wrote letters,” a whole new stream of them, “pursuing Sidney Herbert, on a fishing holiday in Ireland, and Lord Panmure, the [new] Secretary of State for War, shooting grouse in Scotland.”

IN HER LATER YEARS
, beribboned with honors, Nightingale must sometimes have had to endure the compliments of those trying to forget how they had thwarted her in times of trial and obscurity. She may even have recalled, on such occasions, the most famous thanks-for-nothing letter in English, Samuel Johnson’s rejection of praise for his
Dictionary
from Lord Chesterfield, that parental Polonius we fled back in Chapter 3. Johnson reminds Chesterfield that years earlier, seeking assistance for the project, he had “waited in
your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door.” Now, rather than accept Chesterfield’s bouquets, he prefers to pose a question: “Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?”

Few anthologies of letters can bring themselves to do without this one, or another that Johnson wrote in reply to a threat from James Macpherson, whose “translations” of a fabricated antique poet named Ossian Johnson had exposed as a fraud. “I received your foolish and impudent note,” Johnson wrote. “Whatever insult is offered me I will do my best to repel, and what I cannot do for myself the law will do for me.” Just in case his words proved an inadequate shield, Johnson went out and bought an oak club.

Epistolary feuds flourish between professional writers because the breed has difficulty resisting a display of weaponry it can fashion in its own verbal shop. Back in the 1960s, an almost nuclear bout of pedantry and dudgeon broke out between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, when in
The New York Review of Books
the American critic assailed Nabokov’s new translation of
Eugene Onegin
. Friends for twenty-five years—“Bunny” and “Volodya” in their salutations—the writers had once been actively supportive of each other. In fact, in 1947, Wilson had used his hardest cudgels on Nabokov’s behalf, against
The New Yorker’s
Katharine White:

And yet, one can find hints of the Wilson-Nabokov explosion in letters that each wrote during the twenty years before it occurred. Neither man had a temperament suited to continual admiration of anyone, including each other, and there are signs of mutual contempt
in their letters to third parties. Months after Wilson has praised his novel
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, Nabokov writes James Laughlin (still suffering with Henry Miller) that “Bunny Wilson has a very cute but absolutely erroneous theory that ‘Sebastian’ is composed on the lines of a chess-game.” Fourteen years later, he’ll be asking a new editor, Jason Epstein, if
Lolita
can go out into the world without a blurb from Wilson: “We are very close friends, I admire and respect him greatly, but it is not a friendship based on a similiarity of opinions and approaches.” A few years after that he’ll tell one correspondent of his “utter disgust with Edmund’s symbolico-social criticism and phoney erudition in regard to
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
,” and express pleasure at another’s behind-the-back “remarks about the Russian language of our dear Edmund.” Those remarks, made by Gleb Struve, a Slavic languages professor at Berkeley, came two years after Wilson had expressed to Struve his own surprise at finding “that Vladimir regarded
Lolita
as his most important effort in either Russian or English.”

In the years before their open warfare, Wilson becomes increasingly inflated with a sense of his own prowess in Nabokov’s language—and more condescending toward Nabokov’s command of his: “It may be that neither you nor Mirsky, trained on classic Russian verse, quite realizes what English verse is like.” By the mid-fifties Wilson has lost most of his confidence in Volodya’s literary opinions: “What I don’t like about
[The Death of Ivan Ilyich]
—its not being true to human life—is precisely what enchants him.”

In 1964, Pushkin came to shove. Barbara Epstein, wife of Jason, assigned Nabokov’s
Onegin
translation to Wilson for review. A first perusal convinced him, he told Epstein in a letter, that it “is full of flat writing, outlandish words, and awkward phrases. And some of the things he says about the Russian language are inaccurate.” Nabokov could sense what was coming before the review appeared, and warmed up his public response in a letter to William McGuire: “as I have mentioned before [Wilson’s] Russian is primitive, and his knowledge of Russian literature gappy and grotesque. (He is a very old friend of mine, and I do hope our quarter-of-a-century correspondence in the course of which I attempted not quite successfully
to explain to him such matters as the mechanism of Russian—and English—verse, will be published some day).” Each has already stopped writing to the other; the mail is now being dispatched to posterity. For the next half-dozen years they speak only in print, using magazine pages the way a divorcing couple do a lawyer’s office.

Nabokov’s letter to
The New York Review
, where Wilson’s Pushkin piece finally appeared on July 15, 1965, takes sarcastic pains to describe his view of their linguistic association: “A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation.” He proceeds to list seven of “the ghastly blunders” in the offending review, before saying, with his wellborn courtesy, “Let me stop here.” But he can’t. A year later he will be telling a professor, “You have a perfect right to quote Edmund Wilson on my contempt for ignoramuses but your readers might have liked to be told that (in my
Encounter
article) I
proved
him to be one.” About a year after that, in
The New Statesman
, like a tenor making yet another farewell performance, he takes one more parting shot: “I do not intend to continue my chats with Mr Edmund Wilson, in private or print, but let me humbly concede before ending them, that Pushkin had almost as much English in the 1830s as Mr Edmund Wilson has Russian today. That should satisfy everybody.”

How could it? To certain passionate natures the time-consumingness of letter writing offers the chance to cool down (as one imagines Miller doing toward Laughlin), but to disputatious and pedantic people, a letter’s slow cooking offers only the chance to make the perfect retort, the irrefutable response. Foes walk away from in-the-flesh encounters thinking, “if only I’d said
this
, or
that”
—this and that being what go into the mail two days later.

Nabokov and Wilson had one last sadly comic personal exchange in March 1971. Volodya wrote that “A few days ago I had the occasion to reread the whole batch (Russ.,
vsyu pachku)
of our correspondence. It was such a pleasure to feel again the warmth of your many kindnesses, the various thrills of our friendship, that constant
excitement of art and intellectual discovery.” A generous overture, yes, but nothing could make him erase that instructive little parenthesis, or keep him from saying “that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin’s and Nabokov’s
Onegin.”

One is sure that Wilson told the truth about his being “very glad” to get this letter. But with equal inevitability, the first personal tiding in his response is the news that “I am just now getting together a volume of my Russian articles. I am correcting my errors in Russian in my piece on Nabokov-Pushkin; but citing a few more of your ineptitudes.” Lest one think these two old campaigners are making fun of their inability to give it a rest, there is the announcement, further into Wilson’s letter, that he has included a recollection of Nabokov in a forthcoming book
(Upstate)
. “I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn’t).”

In fact, it ended them. Nabokov would find the account “a flow of vulgar and fatuous invention” by—as he told
The New York Times Book Review
—his “former friend.” Wilson might by then be ill, but Nabokov argued that “in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins.” Wilson died seven months later.

WHEN READING THE LETTERS
of a chronic and compulsive com-plainer—let’s take a habitual animadverter like H. L. Mencken—one may have trouble differentiating true fits of spleen from that organ’s mere pirouettes, rhetorical movements designed to delight both writer and audience. If one drops into just a short span of Mencken’s epistolary output, the letters he wrote to a variety of friends and foes in the mid-1930s, one finds him inveighing against sociology, universal suffrage, professional educators, the federal income tax, left-wing book critics, metaphysics, and German red wine—though not German militarism, which the French no doubt deserve. Then again, “All nations as nations are scoundrels.”

It’s when Mencken goes on about “horrible encounters with lady poets,” or sends the greeting “Christmas be damned” to his publisher’s
wife, that one feels less in the presence of genuine annoyance than trademark style—time-tested bits of vaudeville the recipient probably started to applaud at first sight of the envelope’s return address.

Intellectual hatreds may be, as Yeats thought, the worst of all, but one is struck by the cordiality Mencken maintains toward those selling what he judges to be snake oil. Within the same letter he will thrust and sheathe his broadsword, making personal overtures as soon as he’s left his opponent in tatters. Dr. Corliss Lamont, for example, is a candidate for his “I Am Not a Communist—But” club:

And yet, knowing that Lamont has a brother nearby, Mencken inquires, “Do you ever come to Baltimore to see him? If so, I hope you let me hear of it the next time. The cooks here have enlightened ideas, and the best beer in America is on tap.” When composing that list of allies to be shunned, the particular Methodist bishop he no doubt had in mind is the Rt. Rev. James Cannon, Jr., chairman of the World League Against Alcoholism, but “something close to a friend,” as the editor of Mencken’s letters puts it. The fact of their pugnacity is more important than the substance of their quarrel. “You and I are men of a certain bellicosity,” Mencken writes Cannon on June 29, 1934, “but we seem to have been fortunate enough to get very amiable wives. I often wonder how mine stands my wilder moods and more preposterous enterprises.” The letter ends with an invitation to lunch.

Self-mockery combines with self-approval (“I increase in diameter
as in wisdom”) to put the foam on Mencken’s bilious brew, which he sips and serves as refreshment during the pagan spectacles put on by an over-Christianized world: the romance of Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson, “a highly oxidized double-divorcee,” from Baltimore no less, is “the best newspaper story since the Resurrection.”

“What a world!” Mencken writes on January 8, 1935, giving out not jeremiad but the sigh of the ordinarily afflicted person. Within months, the amiable wife he praised to Bishop Cannon will be dead of meningitis, and by February of the following year, after the demise of several friends, he will feel himself “surrounded by nothing but death and disaster.” When on the train to New York he runs into Heywood Broun, another friendly intellectual enemy (“I must say that, for a friend of the downtrodden, he looked to be extraordinarily well fed”), they have “a long gabble on the horrors of human existence.” He’s already been at it as “a general assassin” for a quarter century, and he’s got another twenty years to go.

One has always scrounged after reasons and excuses for Mencken’s anti-Semitism, an explosive incontinence that sometimes gets ascribed to the conventional prejudices of his time, though they can hardly account for the vigor of outbursts that go well beyond the historical “norm” in frequency and intensity. The compulsion does seem less forceful in the letters than in his diaries and posthumous autobiography; indeed, there is enough sorrow and world-weariness in his personal correspondence that a reader is tempted to propose one more probably futile explanation. Was Mencken’s horror of Jews (it can’t be called anything else, despite his wide, and sometimes close, Jewish acquaintance) a kind of misanthropic strike against his species? Did he recognize the Jew as man most fully human, and therefore most detestable?