Strong Opinions

I am about three-quarters of the way through Nabokov’s Strong Opinions. Sometimes he comes off like an insufferable prig, like the literary egghead brother of Comic Book Guy on "The Simpsons," but the best thing about these interviews is he doesn’t hold back. He rips a new asshole on various literary giants:

Hemingway and Conrad: “writers of books for boys”

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés.”

Finnegan’s Wake: “A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.”

Dreiser, Tagore, Gorky: “formidable mediocrities”

Dr. Zhivago: “melodramatic and vilely written”

Faulkner: “corncobby chronicles”

Death in Venice: “Asinine” – and, in another interview, the embodiment of poshlost.

N. gets asked a lot to judge what he thinks is good writing. Of the Americans, he admires Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson’s poetry. He also likes Borges and Robbe-Grillet, although he denounces the latter’s claim that there is no psychology in his novels as “preposterous. Those manifestos, those dodoes, die with the dadas.”

Of contemporary American writers, he says he like Salinger and Updike, but claims not to have heard of Pynchon, with whom he is compared. As a boy he liked H.G. Wells, Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

This made me think of S.’s theory that “words are magic” after she read Isaac Babel:

“My feelings toward James are rather complicated. I really dislike him intensely but now and then the figure in the phrase, the turn of the epithet, the screw of an absurd adverb, cause me a kind of electric tingle, as if some current of his was also passing my own blood.”

Greatest masterpieces of 20th century prose, in this order: Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Biely’s Petersburg and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.

He doesn’t think much about novels that attempt to take on the Big Social Issues; novels with a lot of dialogue; moralists, didacticists: “There can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.”

Some of the questions reflect the social tenor of their day. He gets asked repeatedly about psychoanalysis and Freud (“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.”). Here’s another:

VN’s opinions: on the modern world, contemporary politics; on drug addicts who might consider Lolita “square”?

“Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read Lolita, or any of my books; some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term ‘square’ already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than radical youth, nor is there anything more Philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery.”

Naturally, he gets asked over and over about his writing process, which involves index cards, no typing, and writing out of sequence. I like his description of hitting the sweet spot/phlow while writing, which I’ve always found to be like the fugue state of playing a musical instrument when you stop reading the notes and something like memory, but not exactly, takes over:

“The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myself not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just come to me…”

E.M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?

“My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel which I dislike; and anyway it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting of out hand; it is as old as quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.”

Elsewhere he answers this question thusly:

“I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane.”

Here, Nabokov presages the emoton:

How would you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?
“I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”

Finally:

Do you believe in God?

“To be quite candid – and what I am about to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill – I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”

Huh?