Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0018093, Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:28:36 -0700

Subject
Re: de fencing lessons]
Date
Body
Exactly!
Carolyn

p.s. Your prize? Next time you are in Pasadena I'll take you to the
veddy veddy British Rose Tree Cottage for a proper English tea and
I'll explain my thoughts on Pale Fire to you face a face .


On Mar 29, 2009, at 6:06 AM, Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:

CK: here’s what you wrote en anglais, early March (well within living
memory!)
---------- exhibit 1 -------
To the List,

This Sunday Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting 'the Three
Faces of Eve," with Joanne Woodward. I believe that along with
Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde and Wilde's Dorian Gray, this film and
more importantly the nonfiction book on which it is based by authors
Thigpen and Cleckley, are important sources used by Nabokov in Pale
Fire. [my emphasis — skb]

I know I am in the decided minority on this, but the movie is a great
one whether or no.

Carolyn

8:00 PM EST Three Faces of Eve, The (1957)
A psychiatrist tries to help a woman integrate her split
personalities. Cast: Joanne Woodward, Lee J. Cobb, David Wayne. Dir:
Nunnally Johnson. BW-91 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

------- exhibit 2 in reply to MR’s response to exhibit 1 -------
Dear Matthew,

Three Faces really is the sprinkling on top and is not necessary to my
interpretation, whereas Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde are really more
important. It seems to have been a redundancy as is the Hogg work.

The way I got to Three Faces by the way was not through the word
"ditch" but through my belief that Nabokov wanted PF to be solvable by
anyone who had a tv and would have seen the films that were shown on
tv in the fifties. I did myself remember seeing those three films on
tv. I further concluded that VN wished his non-scholarly reader to go
to the texts and read those three works. Which is what I did and which
is when those word clues jumped out at me. In other words, the word
clues act as confirmation to the reader that Nabokov intended him to
read these particular works.

[Again, I’ve added bold emphasis to remind you what you wrote! Seems
quite clear to me. How have I misinterpreted you?
Come on: don’t be ‘tahrsome.’ -- skb]

Hogg is different - - that was clearly a clue for the more scholarly
reader. But the more sophisticated clue-words "cresset" and
"parahelion" still work as confirmation in the same way. If any other
puzzle was ever constructed like this, i.e. with pre--planned
confirmations, I'm not aware of it.

Carolyn

On Mar 2, 2009, at 6:30 AM, Matthew Roth wrote:

The next issue of the Nabokov Online Journal will include an article
by Tiffany DeRewal and me that lays out our version of a Shade-Kinbote
multiple personality theory. We don't talk about TFoE, but I've always
been interested in that possible link. At the very least, its
popularity in the 50s makes clear that a lot of people were thinking
about split personalities at that time. And we know, from notes in the
Berg Archive, that Nabokov in the late 1950s was reading DJ West's
Psychical Research Today and paid particular attention to several
multiple personality case studies therein.

That said, I don't think Carolyn's idea of "word links," especially
with a word as mundane as "ditch," gets us very far. There would have
to be a whole host of stronger associations between PF and TFoE before
I'd be willing to sprinkle that one on top.

Matt Roth
------------

I posted a long response on March 3 which failed to elicit your
expected rebuttal.

CTaH



On 27/03/2009 03:08, "Carolyn Kunin" <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:

> On Mar 26, 2009, at 7:35 PM, CTaH wrote: Your earlier claim was
> simply that VN had planted _significant_ clues in Pale Fire
> pointing at popular 1950s films & their TV showings which had
> various 'split-personality' themes.
>
> Dear Scouse,
>
> I'm afraid you didn't follow my arguments at all. I actually said
> something quite different. Depressing and too tahrsome to
> contemplate discussing further. Peut-etre je ne dois plus que parler
> en Francais?
>
> your person in Pasadena

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