SES wrote:
I believe that Edgar A. Poe, one of the young VN's favorite writers, had
a deep, varied, and lasting influence on him -- even though he later claimed to
have outgrown Poe. (Interestingly, Poe too fits oddly into the canon of
American literature.)
In pursuit of this thread I looked up EAP, and was rather surprised to
learn that he'd been educated in Scotland and England between the ages of 15 and
20. I do think of him as an American writer, but of a rather peculiar kind.
He was popular in England, among the neurotic middle classes, and even more so
in France, I believe, among the upper intelligentsia. I wouldn't like
to fix a postal address on the House of Usher. It seems to hover in a sort
Neo-Gothic country of its own. Not exactly American Gothic, though.
The context for VN's remarks on "best
readers" suggest that he was thinking in terms of a popular audience rather than
critics and reviewers. (He may have once considered Edmund Wilson one of
his "best readers," but then thought better of it.)
Perfectly
true. I was fencing a bit sneakily. Greene was nevertheless an extremely
important, almost a key "reader" for VN. Comparative national sales figures
would no doubt answer this question.
Nevertheless, I am quite willing to agree with
Charles that to some extent VN remained only "technically" American -- although
I think that this was a deliberate choice on his part, especially after
LOLITA. In my most recent essay on the subject,* I argue that VN's
complicated relationship to his adopted country -- especially as an expatriate
-- consciously mirrored his relationship to his Russian homeland. As he
himself explained in an interview: "I think I am trying to develop, in this rosy
exile, the same fertile nostalgia in regard to America, my new country, as I
evolved for Russia, my old one" (SO 49).
I was led on to wonder if Conrad could truly be described as an "English"
writer. I believe Karen Blixen never even set foot in England, nor
would one call her precisely a "colonial" writer. She features, incongruously,
in the new DNB, a publication with which I am seriously at odds. Can Beckett
really be called a "French" writer? Eliot eventually became quite English,
unlike (ugh) Pound. This sort of categorization is perhaps unworthy of any
discussion of "art", which I suppose should be above and beyond any such petty
constrictions. I still find it misleading, however, to describe VN as an
American writer, as it seems to me that all his works, without exception, are
the products of a very distinctive European sensibility, and European culture.
Not that I've read everything he wrote.
Charles