The Canadian connection? That this discussion happened on CBC television’s Close-Up in the 1950s. What a golden age for CBC television! Today the likes of the boorish Heather Hiscox would have spoken over Nabokov and Trilling, competing with them for the camera. She would have castigated Nabokov for writing smut.
But what am I saying? Heather Hiscox wouldn’t have been capable of interviewing Nabokov and Trilling, because the CBC executives nowadays think Canadians putzes both incapable and uninterested in cultural concerns beyond Skating with the Stars. There’s both more class and hip-ness and cool in Berton’s bow tie than in there is now in the entire network.
Thanks to MobyLives for the link.
Tags: CBC, Lionel Trilling, miscellaneous, Pierre Berton, Vladimir Nabokov