From this week’s Times Literary Supplement: Morris Dickstein reviews Lewis M. Dabney’s biography of Edmund Wilson:

“With the help of much unpublished material – including some 70,000 letters among the Edmund Wilson papers at Yale – Dabney gives a balanced account of even the most contentious episodes of Wilson’s life, including his friendship and acrimonious quarrel with Vladimir Nabokov. They bonded and broke over Russian literature, but the ill-will went back to Wilson’s dislike of Lolita and perhaps some envy of the fame and wealth the book brought its author, whom Wilson had long sponsored. The immediate occasion was Wilson’s review of Nabokov’s altogether perverse edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but it led Wilson to overreach his own knowledge of Russian, as it led Nabokov, who had admired Wilson’s essays, to denounce his “old-fashioned, naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism”. Here Nabokov unwittingly put his finger on what was strongest about Wilson’s work. Though his mask as a critic was impersonal, judicial, he always reached for the human centre of a book, and always, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out, in a personal way.

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Dabney is scrupulously fair about Wilson’s life and character but finds it difficult to say anything unkind about the work. He defends even his 1947 attack on Kafka, which, he points out, “has been said to mark the outer limits of his sensibility”. (The same could be said of his baffling rejection of Lolita.)

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Full text at http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2064344,00.html.

SK