Literary Meanderings
NABOKOV
For me, literary criticism is a foreign language, and I haven’t made a habit of it. Writing fiction is more inviting than writing nonfiction, which demands a logical mind and a fidelity to fact. I usually approach essays and reporting much as I do fiction—as organic, intricately involved designs rather than as straightforward journalism—and I usually find that the design doesn’t want to be that literal.
I wrote my graduate dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor. The novel was new at the time, and only reviewers had picked at its dense fabric. John Updike in his review said it would be good fodder for some graduate student, and I grabbed the challenge. It was a great pleasure trying to track down the hundreds or thousands of literary allusions, obscure words, and intricate patterns in this seemingly abstruse novel. My youthful earnestness ran roughshod over the delicacy and exquisiteness of Nabokov’s novel, and I apologize for the excesses of the misdirected scholar that I was then.
Luckily, my scholarly pursuits more or less ended there, but I still urge the reader to delve into the magic of Nabokov’s writing, including the dazzle and dance of his poetic novel Ada.
MARK TWAIN
I wrote about Mark Twain’s humor and language for an introductory essay to one of his novels, The American Claimant, in the Oxford series of facsimiles of Twain’s books.
Mark Twain’s parents migrated from Kentucky to Missouri. Twain’s dialogue could have been a transcription of my grandparents talking. It was the language I used for the novel Feather Crowns, as it channeled through my parents and grandparents.
—BAM