Subject
Re: Fw: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS re: Rote, Eliot's Sweeney...
From
Date
Body
RE: [NABOKV-L] Fw: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS re: Rote, Eliot - Palermo and Haedel i...B.Boyd: The evidence suggests VN did read TSE closely, because he WAS lauded to the skies from the 1940s to the 1960s. VN pastiches "Gerontion" and "Ash Wednesday" in Lolita, and targets Four Quartets and echoes The Waste Land in at least two places in "Pale Fire," and (admittedly, in his most positive judgment) declares Eliot "not quite first-rate"--a lot more than he allows any of the other "plaster busts."...
JM: additional echoes from ADa with VN's satire..
Van's eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla - here a Wall Street, very 'patrician' colleague of Demon's, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors [...]
He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman's[...]
[...]The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon's new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yam extolling the Roman faith.[...].
The poem was but the twinkle in an owl's eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced 'seminal' by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 ('Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,' 'Sween as poet and person,' 'Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography') both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman's control of background adjustment - or Demon's edict.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
JM: additional echoes from ADa with VN's satire..
Van's eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla - here a Wall Street, very 'patrician' colleague of Demon's, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors [...]
He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman's[...]
[...]The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon's new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yam extolling the Roman faith.[...].
The poem was but the twinkle in an owl's eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced 'seminal' by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 ('Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,' 'Sween as poet and person,' 'Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography') both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman's control of background adjustment - or Demon's edict.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm