John Morris:"My own view is that VN meant his remarks rather simply and
straightforwardly: You can tell a lot about a person by reading his work"... "
'The Waste Land' is perhaps not 'an expression of personality,' but upon reading
it, you aren’t going to confuse Eliot’s personality with, shall we say, Charles
Bukowski’s."..."I don’t think good readers run any serious risk of mistaking
VN’s personality for Humbert’s, or Kinbote’s, or even Van Veen’s."..."VN would
welcome any critical lens...to discern the personality traits that VN himself
believed were relevant"...
Jansy: Even if one isn't "going
to confuse Eliot's personality" with any other author's after reading "The Waste
Land" or mistake "VN's personality for HH's, CK's", we should always know
that H.Humbert,C Kinbote, Van Veen - or HH's Lolita, Van Veen's Ada, for that
matter - are not Jane Austen's , J.D. Salinger's or
Doestoevsky's characters, but clearly VN's own. They form a consistent
and impressive lot of gargoyles and caryatids.
J.Morris added, at the end of his
message: "As we know,
though, this certainly didn’t include the entire category of “unconscious”
traits, a la Freud." and I agree, for I prefer the limitation
of Freud's evaluation of Hanold (a character in Jensen's work
"Gradiva"), to what he concluded about Leonardo or to what
other invasive "applied psychoanalysts" try to write about famous
artists' "cathedrals."