'The Names of Goneril's Dogs'

Often reprimanded for his purported snobbery and hauteur, Vladimir Nabokov writes in a lecture for the creative-writing class he taught at Stanford in 1941:

“To acquire true style is impossible without having creative genius, and more people have it than is generally thought. Most children have it, many young people, very few men of settled habits and conventional tastes.”

 

How encouraging to students and other would-be writers. Let’s speculate on what Nabokov is getting at. I know from years of experience working with students and faculty that many confuse style with a certain elevated, over-emphatic tone. They flip a switch before touching the keyboard and forsake naturalness of expression. It suggests they are intimidated by writing and language – perhaps a form of PTSD triggered by memories of topic sentences. Public schools have systematically sabotaged writing ability among children for generations.

 

I suspect there may be a secondary reason many students find writing onerous if not impossible. Most don’t read. Learning to write has two prerequisites: reading and writing. You learn from gifted forebears and from endlessly writing. Nabokov suggests most of us are not born dullards. We’ve been taught. Perhaps. Here’s where Nabokov gets even more interesting and probably controversial:

 

“On the other hand many a person who can at a moment’s notice produce a triolet or hash any given subject into rhyme, or is praised by his or her friends for writing such perfectly lovely letters, is generally much more hopelessly removed from ever becoming a creative writer, than the one who emphatically denies any literary knack, but will experience that authentic, that unmistakable shiver of creative response when getting to the passage where King Lear recalls the names of Goneril’s dogs.”

 

Tray, Blanch, Sweetheart.