Amateur writer

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One of my favorite blogs to pop in on every now and then is The Amateur Gourmet, a theater grad student's account of eating in NYC. It's not great literature, but is consistently entertaining; and even though I don't share the blogger's food taste at all it sometimes points me to restaurants worth a visit.

The other day the blogger mentioned he has a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, posted on his wall: "Great ideas are hogwash, style and structure are the essence of a work."

I've never heard the quote before, but it fits my view of Nabokov. He's one of those gruff Russian geniuses, a classic hedgehog to borrow Isiah Berlin's term in that he has life philosophies that he applies to his writing in a disciplined, hard-working manner and someone who as a result hates dilettantes/dabblers/sloppy thinkers above all.

The genius of his writing stems from exact and telling description, whether of character or situations, along with inventive plots that unfurl in unexpected--to the reader--ways, stirred with a deep psychological understanding of the human condition. He's all concrete--what happens matters in his books, it's not about mood or talk. Even his love of butterflies was as a collector rather than as a head-in-the-clouds poet. And his letters to Edmund Wilson (Bunny) reveal not great minds communing, but rather are filled with pithy comments and revolve around money.

So maybe it's not surprising that he'd value style and structure--things that can be learned and worked at--over great ideas, which seem to just come to you (although in reality they require the foundation of a lifetime of awareness). It fits the Russian mentality of head-down, straight at 'em, an attitude that compensates for inferior materials, whether in sending waves of soldiers at the Nazis in WWII or in stockpiling nuclear warheads during the Cold War.

I actually disagree with Nabokov (for one thing I like science fiction, which is nothing if not great ideas wrapped in bad style inside bad structure) although I can see his point that having great ideas means nothing unless one also does the hard work of making the most out of them, a process that in writing requires structure and style. It's why Russians love poetry, where every word is absolutely necessary and one idea is enough to inform an entire work (too many indeed leave it bloated).

It was unexpected to see the quote on the Amateur Gourmet's website--he's pretty slapdash--and my guess is Nabokov would've detested the blog as a format ('you must be disciplined in your writing; you must spend time to revise and revise and revise; and you must receive money for your work.').

It's especially ironic that the Amateur Gourmet misquotes Nabovkov... the actual quote from Lectures on Literature appears in the foreword and reads:

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Inscription by Nabokov via the Times.