Perhaps someone has made this point already (I've been away
from the list for a couple weeks), but it seems to me that
both verbose and concise writers appear in great, if not equal,
numbers everywhere, and the examples and counter-examples
might never end. Graham Swift is a wonderful "digressionist"
and Raymond Carver is as spare as they come. Geoffery Hill and
Jorie Graham are verbose, but different in every other way. It
_may_ be more productive to talk about prolixity as it relates
to literary traditions, which span nationalities. The Romantics
(British and American) and Victorians were expansive writers
because of their philosophy, not their nationality. By contrast,
but also by philosophy, the American Realists and Naturalists of
the late 19th and early 20th C.s were immaculately concise--see
also Imagism. In the last 100 years, it isn't hard to see the
ghost of Romanticism in many of the more indulgent writers (Ginsberg,
Pynchon, John Irving, Graham Swift, Charles Kinbote) while
Realism/Naturalism can still be seen as holding sway in others
(Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Tobias Wolff, John Shade).
Nabokov's sensibility always seems uniquely eastern European to
me. The dark, erudite humor that is fundamental to VN's work is
found in VN's Russian favorites of course, but also in Kundera
(Czech) and in many poets like Charles Simic (Serbian-American) and
Zbigniew Herbert (Polish). Taken together, these writers still
lean a bit on the Romantic tradition, but the hardship of their
political and social situation doesn't allow them to be as indulgent
of that tradition as either Brits or Americans. I don't imagine VN
had much tolerance for the French Surrealists, but some of the
revolutionary spirit of Surrealism, particularly as it relates
to the subversion of oppressive order, obtains in VN's work.
Matt Roth