Strong opinions

10 TO JOHN LEONARD, ЕDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

published on November 7, 1971

I seek the shelter of your columns to help me establish the truth in the following case:

A kind correspondent Xeroxed and mailed me pp. 154162 referring to my person as imagined by Edmund Wilson in his recent work Upstate.* [* Upstate. Records and Recollections of Northern New York. 386 pages. Farrar. Straus and Giroux.]

Since a number of statements therein wobble on the brink of libel, I must clear up some matters that might mislead trustful readers.

First of all, the «miseries, horrors, and handicaps» that he assumes I was subjected to during forty years before we first met in New York are mostly figments of his warped fancy. He has no direct knowledge of my past. He has not even bothered to read my Speak, Memory, the records and recollections of a happy expatriation that began practically on the day of my birth. The method he favors is gleaning from my fiction what he supposes to be actual, «real-life» impressions and then popping them back into my novels and considering my characters in that inept light — rather like the Shakespearian scholar who deduced Shakespeare's mother from the plays and then discovered allusions to her in the very passages he had twisted to manufacture the lady. What surprises me, however, is not so much Wilson's aplomb as the fact that in the diary he kept while he was my guest in Ithaca he pictures himself as nursing feelings and ideas so vindictive and fatuous that if expressed they should have made me demand his immediate departure.

A few of the ineptitudes I notice in these pages of Upstate are worth considering here. His conviction that my insistence on basic similarities between Russian and English verse is «a part of [my] inheritance of [my] father . . . champion of a constitutional monarchy for Russia after the liritish model» is too silly to refute; and his muddleheaded and ill-informed description of Russian prosody only proves that he remains organically incapable of reading, let alone understanding, my work on the subject. Equally inconsistent with facts — and typical of his Philistine imagination — is his impression that at parties in our Ithaca house my wife «concentrated» on me and grudged «special attention to anyone else».

A particularly repulsive blend of vulgarity and naivete is reflected in his notion that I must have suffered «a good deal of humiliation», because as the son of a liberal noble I was not «accepted (!) by the strictly illiberal nobility» — where? when, good God? — and by whom exactly, by my uncles aunts? or by the great grim boyars haunting a plebeian's fancy?

I am aware that my former friend is in poor^health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins. Indeed, the publication of those «old diaries» (doctored, I hope, to fit the present requirements of what was then the future), in which living persons are but the performing poodles of the diarist's act, should be subject to a rule or law that would require some kind of formal consent from the victims of conjecture, ignorance, and invention.