Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and Who Was Smarter You, of whom drunk I used to be. || C.T. May

The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship
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When he was just 17 years old, an uncle left him a 2000-acre estate, a manor house, and investments that would be worth more than $100 million today.But Nabokov felt he had lost something far more precious: the connection to his fairy-tale childhood.
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In a famous essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed."
In the case of Nabokov and Wilson, it was.
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In many ways the two men proved to be two entirely different and contradictory people, Wilson the eru-dite literalist and Nabokov the ludist, the fantasist, the trickster king. The opposites attracted, and then they didn't.
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"You are one of the few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them," Nabokov wrote to Wilson eight years into their friendship.
And then, nothing.
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"Edmund was always in a state of joy when Vladimir appeared," Wilson's third wife, Mary, McCarthy, recalled. "They had an absolute ball together. He loved him."
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