Kapow!!

Nabokov had a ferocious disregard for Hemingway. He also disdained Lawrence and other Anglophone writers from whom he learned and borrowed, such as Faulkner, whom he dismissed with lengthy screeds spluttering with appalled rage. Hemingway was special, though, bestriding the era as an unequaled commercial colossus. In 1940, Hemingway was dominatingly present, with the publication in October of For Whom the Bell Tolls, his long, sporadically excellent, crowd-pleasing novel of the Spanish Civil War. Nabokov admitted in later years to having read some Hemingway (he never admitted to reading Lawrence). In an interview Nabokov granted in the ’60s he said, “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls, and bulls, and loathed it. Later I read his admirable ‘The Killers’ and the wonderful fish story.” “Bells, balls, and bulls” conflates For Whom the Bell Tolls with The Sun Also Rises, and “the wonderful fish story” is no doubt The Old Man and the Sea, another crowd-pleaser but definitely minor Hemingway. “The Killers,” all dialogue, was virtually a screenplay—for Nabokov a mark of triviality.

Nabokov was an opinionated prick.  But he was good enough to get away with it, so we don't mind.


TS