Strong Opinions
Strong Opinions is an aptly-titled mix of Nabokov's interviews and essays in which he shares his uncompromising views on everything from tennis to swimming pools to American hotels; demolishes a few negative reviews of his work ("If told I am a bad poet, I smile,” begins one, "but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary”); offers an instructive peek into his writing methods, and cuts loose on interviewers and fellow-writers alike with wit so blistering, and hilarious, you wonder if the offended parties themselves could help giving vent to masochistic guffaws. And so it goes on, page after scintillating page. Nabokov himself points out in the introduction (the collection was selected and edited by himself) that you won't find much of this sort of thing in his fiction due to the tight aesthetic constraints he placed on that art: interviews were for him a chance to discuss matters that, while of interest to him, did not necessarily fit into his artistic vision and were therefore excluded from his novels. The result is something rarely seen, a kind of "Nabokov at leisure."
Or, almost at leisure. A certain eccentricity of Nabokov's is worth mentioning here because it has a direct bearing on this book: Nabokov loftily refused to sit for "chatty" interviews, instead demanding each question in writing, in advance, in response to which, on the day of the interview, he would read his carefully composed reply—even when that interview were being televised. This quaint foible, a measure of the importance he placed on words and self-presentation, results in a superbly crafted read, with questions of a pedestrian sort that, put to Nabokov, become fascinating ("How do you spend your day?") followed by answers in his virtuosic prose style. Much has been made of Nabokov's disdain for other writers in this book and elsewhere, some even going so far as to claim that his arrogance has put them off his fiction. At first glance, the accusation seems justified, though not the response. (Tolstoy condemned Shakespeare's plays as a "collection of bloody crimes” but neither Tolstoy nor Shakespeare are any the worse for it.) Indeed, other than Gogol and Pushkin, it appears that the man did not read a single writer that he tolerated, let alone liked. But this is an unfair simplification. Nabokov pillories authors in one place only to very quietly praise them in another. For example, he accuses Borges of writing, "pretentious fairy tales" but elsewhere, in an inconspicuous aside, declares him one of his favourite writers, admiring, "the lucidity of his thought." He rants down Finnegans Wake, but elsewhere (keep your eyes open: he happens to be trash-talking various celebrated writers at the time) declares Ulysses the greatest book ever written. In my view, however, the shortage of praise for other writers in these interviews, as well as all his ribald scorn for the darlings of the literati, is the direct result of an artistic sensibility. Nabokov's art everywhere eschews frank sentiment, of which ernest praise is one variety. (He also in one of these interviews admits to a fear that the writer he praises will read of this praise with confusion, hating, as he may do, Nabokov's own writing). And there is no question that Nabokov considered these interviews—both his painstakingly written responses, and the public image those responses were intended to engineer—a part of his art, and beholden to the exacting laws that make his fiction so original and superb. |