During my brief but memorable and productive sojourn at Soaring Gardens (courtesy of the Ora Lerman Foundation, thank you) I had the amazing good fortune of stumbling upon and subsequently reading, cover to cover, practically in one sitting, the correspondence of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. For thirty years or so these literary largenesses carried on a passionate, vivid, funny, and extremely specific conversation about literature, politics, daily life AND poetics.
“Bunny” and “Volodya” have a lot to say to one another. “Bunny” is thoroughly American, and like so many of his generation, in love with the promise of communism. He is endlessly optimistic about the Soviet experiment. Focused on the social and class context of literary works, he praises Dos Passos and Faulkner and Jane Austen and tries mightily to persuade “Volodya” to see things his way. “Volodya” will have none of it. A liberal minded white Russian, he has no illusions about the violence of the Russian Revolution, a violence that he sees present from before the get-go. When Bunny waxes enthusiastically that Russiais now full of poets declaiming in public places, suggesting that this is a happy outcome of the revolution, Volodya points out that this declaiming of poetry had been going on for a long time. It’s Russian tradition, he maintains, not a Soviet innovation.
And so it goes for years. These two men, in a very private conversation, discuss literary and political matters of great consequence. They are friends; they share a lot in their conversations, much of it about versification. Bunny was studying Russian (late in life he took up Hungarian) and was fascinated by Russian versification. How do you do an iamb in Russian? What does an iamb mean in English? How do all those long “ion” words in English affect the way a poet can write a line? Those questions get huge amounts of attention and all in extremely specific terms—these two guys are looking at the details of words and lines. They don’t generalize much and when they do, one or the other gets annoyed.
Eventually their differences over versification—and politics—cause a breach in the friendship and a break in communication. Happily, they reconnect before Bunny’s death.
But during the years of intense communication, the reader sees just how deep the friendship is in spite of profound disagreements. Bunny recommends Volodya for writing jobs, teaches him how to manage editors, negotiates proper payment for Volodya and secures them joint projects that don’t necessarily work out. They comment, sometimes brutally, on one another’s work. Bunny doesn’t like Lolita, for example. He says so quite bluntly. Volodya is dismayed by Bunny’s introduction to Chekhov stories, in which the American critic focuses on the class relations in the stories, rather than on Chekhov’s literary mastery. For his part, Volodya very patiently helps Bunny with Russian and supports him as wives change and babies are born.
These are private letters by public figures. Their quarrels are passionate and urgent and between them. The writing is clear and lucid and not polemical, though politics and culture shape identities and values.
Flash forward. Forced to return to the world, 2013, because of a burned out well pump that meant no water, I find more comments about Mark Edmundson’s complaint about contemporary poetry, recently published in Harpers. Today in the Boston Review I findan article denouncing “conceptualism” in poetry and advocating a return to “affect.” (I didn’t know it had gone, but that’s a complicated matter for another time.) Many comments follow Stephen Burt’s rebuttal to Edmundson, and responses to the anti-conceptualism piece are pouring in to the Boston Review. Some people are really angry one way or the other.
In both of these cases it seems to me that the writers have created straw man arguments, kerfuffles for the sake of—well—kerfuffle, made public so that there can be some trumped-up firestorm of public debate.
It leaves me wondering what these people would say in private. Would they write letters to a close literary friend about the subjects of these kerfuffles? Do the subjects really matter to them? Do these people care deeply about what they are saying? Does it occupy them at breakfast? Would they spend 30 years debating the questions? Would they really?
