The reactions to my last couple of postings, as sent in by SK, AB, and JF, have exceeded  my expectations.  They are --- how shall I put this? Decidedly American.

 

It would be very much more persuasive if there were a Russian, British or other European voice raised in support of VN’s American literary identity; but it seems as though the basic question of whether there is such a thing as this kind of identity in the first place has been solidly confirmed. Americans are dead set on claiming VN for America, based on the 19 years he spent in America, and disregarding the 60 years he spent elsewhere. Agreed, the 19 he spent in America were his most rewarding in practical, physical terms. He had every reason to be grateful and courteous to America, but this doesn’t make him “an American”.

 

I’ll confine myself to a few good-natured, even-tempered remarks, refraining from epithets such as “objectionable”, “offensive”, “violent”, “dismissive”,  and similar adjectival flings, which seem to me to lower the standards of civilized debate.

 

AB wrote:  Mencken …..  suited only to the time in which he had his greatest success, the Twenties. ….  mentioned disparagingly by two characters in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. ….  something on a par with Jimmy Breslin of the ‘60s. …. couldn’t have held his own for ten minutes ….  with William Safire ….  Mencken …. was really a Rush Limbaugh.

 

Unfortunately, Breslin, Safire and Limbaugh mean even less to me than Mencken, although I’ve heard of their names (at least I think I have). Were they television pundits?

 

Just to do a little more homework, I put “literary criticism”, “literary theory”, and the like into Google, and aside from some surprise at the plethora of sites dealing with literary theory, the whole question of which is clearly in a state of turbulent turmoil at present, I did note that the name of Mencken seemed to come up with great regularity. Eg, here:

 

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/lit-crit.html          and here:

 

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E01EFDA1E39F936A35757C0A967948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

 

Pale Fire is mentioned on page 2; and Mencken on page 4 of the second site.

 

AB’s: Sandburg, too, is very much trapped in his time ….. No one reads him today except scholars who for some reason have been forced to, contrasts agreeably with JF’s mention of Sandburg's other poem known to every American who took college-prep English, "Fog". Perhaps these college-prep Americans were the scholars forced to read him.  It seems to me that Sandburg is still around, and will be for some time to come. I confess I do also like Sandburg’s “Chicago”.

 

SK wrote: I heavily recommend you to read Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s essay “How Nabokov rewrote America” in The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Following earlier urgings, I actually ordered this book on 30 December, but it still hasn’t arrived. I expect it in the next day or two. I’m impressed by the eagerness with which list members make recommendations, not forgetting Brian Boyd’s suggestion that: you might try broadening your tastes. I do have a personal library of about 10,000 volumes, but no librarian, and they’re in a state of chassis at present, so I won’t make any reciprocal recommendations. Besides which, most of the books deal with topics largely irrelevant to this discussion. Perhaps, though, I could mildly suggest starting with a look at Aristotle’s definition of democracy, not as the best, but as the least bad form of government.

 

I will admit to having read snippets of Emily Dickinson and Edna St Vincent Millay; several stories by Ring Lardner; as well as most, virtually all, of  Ambrose Bierce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Mark Twain (I use the amusing moniker he chose for himself and under which he is published and best known).  All of these I greatly enjoyed. I mentioned Bierce in an earlier posting: “many  American authors (Bierce comes to mind), spent time in England and Europe, some of them for quite long and formative periods, but they remain essentially American.”  Twain’s hilarious essay “The Awful German Language” repeatedly amuses me in connection with translation, and especially the complete impossibility of “literal” translation.

 

AB also wrote: I don’t see Joyce and Beckett putting their heads together and conniving to concoct a “calculatedly” “difficult” idiom for any reason other than for art.  I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly with this comment. SK identified the person who made this strange remark:  The British critic I mentioned was John Carey. If this is the same Carey who wrote on Marvell, I’ll say I've found him interesting, if perhaps a little facile. Wasn’t he Iris Murdoch’s husband?

 

Carey wasn’t the critic I had in mind who attacked academic literary gobbledy-gook. That was someone else, who wrote an article on the subject not long ago, I believe in the New York Times. I think his name does begin with C, but I still can’t remember it.

 

JF wrote:

 

I'd be very interested in comments on whether Nabokov was technically an aristocrat or "from an aristocratic family", as I got into an argument elsewhere about the latter phrase.

 

Subject to correction from the better-informed, I’d say the Nabokovs were definitely not aristocrats within the precise European (and non-British) application of the term. But I haven’t perused the Almanac in this connection.

 

JF: Pound, when you linked his prolixity with Whitman's I assume you were talking about the Pound of the Cantos.  Yes, that is what I was thinking of.

JF: I can't think of a British equivalent to Whitman's and sometimes Sandburg's esthetic of "Don't stop when you're on a roll."  Well, I did suggest that Blake’s prophetic books perhaps provide striking examples of a Britisher on an extended roll of that kind, but that sort of thing seems to me to have become extinct among the C20th British, and I can’t imagine it in any other European languages. No doubt I’m wrong.

 

 

Perhaps it’s worth repeating that I insist on nothing, but hope to be rational, even-tempered and good-natured in any discussion. I must now make a mighty resolve to shut up for a while.

 

 

Charles