'The Heart in Sorrow and in Hate'

Vladimir Nabokov owed his teaching job at Cornell to Morris Bishop (1893-1973), a professor of Romance languages, writer of light verse and, eventually, the novelist’s best friend at the University where he would teach for eleven years. Bishop published well-written non-scholarly biographies of Pascal, Petrarch, Ronsard and La Rochefoucauld. He seems to have been a rare academic without pretensions. Bishop had been reading Nabokov’s short stories in The Atlantic since the early Forties, and lobbied for him despite the émigré’s lack of advanced degrees. Nabokov described Bishop as “my only close friend on the campus.” Bishop in turn wrote of Nabokov: 

“I was fascinated not only by the range and depth of Vladimir’s knowledge but by his exclusions. He had small interest in politics, none in society’s economic concerns. He cared nothing for problems of low-cost housing, school consolidation, bond issues for sewage treatment plants. He got the news not from the New York Times but from the Daily News, quivering with wickedness, lust, and bloodshed. He subscribed for a time to Father Divine’s periodical, revelatory of a lurid, exalted world. His study was rather of human behavior and misbehavior than of the pratings of men in power.”

 

My kind of guy. At Cornell, Nabokov wrote Lolita, Pnin, Conclusive Evidence, and poems for The New Yorker, including some that qualify, like Bishop’s, as light verse. He worked on translations of The Song of Igor’s Campaign and Eugene Onegin, and lepidoptera articles for scientific journals. We can credit Bishop with nurturing Nabokov and his family and making such work possible by helping him land a regular job.

 

When I think of childhood Christmases, I think of family arguments, often alcohol-fueled – petty stuff about gifts and dinner and anything else people decided to get angry about. Despite that, I love the season. Bishop in 1934 published a narrative poem in The New Yorker, “The Dark Christmas on Wildwood Road,” that sounds very familiar. These lines neatly sum it up: “What thermostat can regulate / The heart in sorrow and in hate?” Find a copy of The Best of Bishop: Light Verse from The New Yorker and Elsewhere (1980).