Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most part Shenker is content to remain in the province of words--an area he knows like the back of his hand. He seems equally at home conversing with Nabokov and Asimov, I.F. Stone and I.B. Singer, Georges Simenon and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Perhaps he is most comfortable with writers like S.J. Perelman (the subject of three separate interviews) and Brigid Brophy, who share his penchant for groan-inducing puns and shameless plays on words. Parelman, Shenker tells us, has a myna bird, "scion of an ancient mynasty,...and wherever Perelman goes the bird is sure to go; it followed...
...range of literary and intellectual likes and dislikes Nabokov registers here is a similar kind of possibility, a source of material, a vocabulary of its own. Nabokov says that many popular writers "simply don't exist" for him. Nabokov has his own firm canon of tastes--for protection from all the books which come charging down from the past, reputations fixed, for cover under which to deploy his own literary formations and figures...
...Nabokov's abhorrence of Freud, "the Viennese witch doctor," is famous. Freud's vocabulary is simply too crude--maybe because it's too useful. His words are ones we use and over-use--"ego," "repression"--for want of better ones. This is not good enough for someone whose whole business is the delicate shading of every sense and tone. Such horrors as the scene in The Magic Mountain when Thomas Mann has his heroine ask to borrow the hero's pencil are ample warning that novels ought to be sources for the psychologist and not vice versa. For Nabokov...
...then there is Dostoevsky, who, says Fyodor, the hero of Nabokov's The Gift, "turned Bedlam back into Bethlehem." Nabokov doesn't like old Fyodor because of his mysticism, his sentimentality, his journalese. There is a difference of type: Dostoevsky was a rough writer, who often scrawled or dictated under the burden of absurd deadlines, and Nabokov is a careful, multiple re-writer. Nabokov's condemnation must also be seen as the answer to a question forced especially on any Russian writer: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. It is a question of native sensibility...
What gives such a sense of the master about Nabokov is perhaps the feeling of common characters, common turns of phrase, common interests running through his long shelf of books. His novels span the gap between contemporary Switzerland and Russia before the Revolution. In between lie post-war America and Berlin between the wars, tea on the edge of Bloomsbury and dinner with Joyce in Paris. There are fantastic countries, like "Ultima Thule" published last spring in a A Russian Beauty and Other Stories...