Not every novelist has opinions. Some of the very greatest have a touch of the idiot savant, like Adalbert Stifter, Ronald Firbank or Henry Green. And not every novelist with opinions is worth listening to. Vladimir Nabokov’s opinions, on the other hand, are of compelling interest because — paradoxically — he regularly and accurately insisted that his novels sent no message, made no moral case, presented no argument. The beauty and fascination of his views on literary and other matters rest, I think, on his openness to laughter.
Nabokov used to complain that his lectures to undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell were greeted in silence; he was sure that if he had heard them, he would have been in fits of laughter from start to finish. The possibility of laughter, never very far away, is what gives Nabokov’s intelligence the confidence of the first-rate.
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