These are interesting questions indeed.  My own view is that VN meant his remarks rather simply and straightforwardly: You can tell a lot about a person by reading his work.  Unburdened of the baggage of any critical theory, this is unexceptionable, and applies to Eliot too, and any other writer you can think of.  “The Waste Land” is perhaps not “an expression of personality,” but upon reading it, you aren’t going to confuse Eliot’s personality with, shall we say, Charles Bukowski’s.  Yes, VN can appear a problematic case because of that gargoyle-expelling project of his, but I don’t think good readers run any serious risk of mistaking VN’s personality for Humbert’s, or Kinbote’s, or even Van Veen’s.  So to Matt Roth, I would say that yes, VN would welcome any critical lens that used his works to discern the personality traits that VN himself believed were relevant to who he was.  (He would have enjoyed Brian Boyd’s critical biography very much, don’t you think?) As we know, though, this certainly didn’t include the entire category of “unconscious” traits, a la Freud.

 

Regards,

 

J. Morris