Lolita’s secret revenge mission, and other daft theories of literary spite

Richard Bradford has written more than 20 books of literary criticism and biography. This latest one is a compendium of writers’ feuds and resentments. Reading Literary Rivals is a curious experience; from the quotations and bare facts you can just about make out a version of reality, but it’s fighting so hard against the author’s interpretations that it’s sometimes obscured altogether.

It feels as if Bradford has done his research with a baleful monocle pressed to his eye, giving a ghastly pallor to everything he reads. When Dickens read Thackeray’s review of his work, he wrote to thank him, but when Professor Bradford read the same review, he saw nothing but mockery and malice. Nabokov and his friend Edmund Wilson disagreed about communism. A letter from Nabokov to Wilson about the Russian Revolution was, Bradford says, ‘a magnificently calculated act of vengeance’.

This was nothing compared to the devilish motive behind Lolita. Wilson had written a book with a similar theme, but it wasn’t any good. Nabokov apparently decided to teach him a lesson: ‘It is unsurprising that Nabokov never openly acknowledged a link between Lolita and Wilson’s book,’ Bradford argues. ‘For one thing, it would be churlish to thank someone, even implicitly, for their part in a literary masterpiece that was designed to cause them pain.’

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His endlessly grim analysis of friendship gets the professor into all sorts of tangles: he admits that ‘by all accounts Nabokov and Wilson’s exchanges were amicable, but one suspects this was as much a performance as a reflection of sincere affection’. Bradford ascribes some fiendish characteristics to Wordsworth too, arguing that he cynically exploited Coleridge’s fragile state of mind to turn him into a thankless assistant. It means he then has to explain away their decision to go travelling together.