EDNOTE.
Reactions?
-------------------------------------------------------
From
interview with Anthony Burgess // Paris
review. 1973. Vol.14. 56 (Spring), pp.119-163.
<p.143>
Has Nabokov influenced your work at all? You've praised
"Lolita" highly.
Reading
"Lolita" meant that I enjoyed using lists of things in the "Right to an
Answer". I've not been much influenced by Nabokov, nor do I intend to be I was
writing the way I write before I knew he existed. But I've not been impressed
so much by another writer in the last decade or
so.
Yet you've been called an "English Nabokov", probably
because of the cosmopolitan strain and verbal ingenuity in your
writing.
No influence. He's a Russian, I'm English. I meet him
halfway in certain temperamental
endowments. He's very artificial though.
<p.144>
In what way?
Nabokov is a natural dandy on the grand international
scale. I'm still a provincial boy scared of being to nattily dressed. All
writing is artificial and Nabokov's artifacts are only contrived in the récit
part. His dialogue is always natural and masterly (when he wants it to be). "Pale Fire"
is only termed a novel because there's no other term for it. It's a masterly
literary artifact which is poem, commentary, casebook, allegory, sheer
structure. But I note that most people go back to reading the poem, not what
surrounds the poem. It's a fine poem, of course. Where Nabokov goes wrong, I
think, is in sometimes sounding
old-fashioned - a matter of rhythm, as thought Huysmans is to him a sound and
modern writer whose tradition is worthy to be worked in. John Updike sounds
old-fashioned sometimes in the same way - glorious vocabulary and imagery but
a lack of muscle in the rhythm.
Does Nabokov rank at the top with
Joyce?
He won't go down in history as one of the greatest
names. He's unworthy to unlace Joyce's shoe.
<...>