'Your Delicate and Sympathetic Touches'

A reader experiences an almost cosmic sense of rightness on learning that two writers he admires are themselves mutually admiring. Jealousy and back-stabbing are endemic among writers. I once interviewed a poet who spent almost the entire time lambasting another, more prominent poet. I didn’t care for either’s work so I enjoyed myself. Consider this encomium: 

“He is the vaudeville magician par excellence, astonishing us again and again by producing out of the air, in front of our eyes, life untampered with. He is also a poet dealing in prose fiction with the shifting, fictitious nature of reality, with the artifice that we call Time, with the aurora borealis of memory. There is no discoverable limit to the range of his talent. And sadness is his very home.”

 

That’s William Maxwell’s tribute to Vladimir Nabokov when the latter was the recipient of the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1969. Maxwell gets it right, singling out Nabokov’s playfulness, philosophical depth, stylistic mastery and the ever-present note of sadness in his work. “He is one more in the line of great Russian storytellers,” Maxwell says, “and, strangely, he is our own. We got him through accident; history displaced him. Personal deprivation made him a great literary artist.”

 

Maxwell was Nabokov’s editor at The New Yorker beginning in 1955, after the retirement of Katharine White. Brian Boyd reports in the second volume of his Nabokov biography that Maxwell said no other writer except perhaps Rebecca West was as loyal to the magazine. And in her biography of Maxwell, Barbara A. Burkhardt tells us he read in manuscript Pale Fire, and the Russian novels The Defense and The Gift as they were translated into English. When The New Yorker published The Defense in two issues in 1964, Nabokov wrote to Maxwell: “Let me add that I much appreciate your delicate and sympathetic touches. The thing reads beautifully.” Rare words from Nabokov, who was notoriously resistant to editorial meddling.

 

For my money, Nabokov and Maxwell are the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century, the greatest pleasure-givers. Their only serious rival is Willa Cather.

 

[Maxwell’s tribute can be found in Conversations with William Maxwell (ed. by Barbara Burkhardt, University Press of Mississippi, 2012).]