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Re: VN Sighting: Philip Roth's _Exit Ghost_
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Juan Martinez sent a sighting from page Philip Roth's Exit Ghost:
"'... The portrait of himself is not a flattering one, believe me. The young boy rising from a forty-year sleep! It's extraordinary. This is Lonoff's Scarlet Letter. It's Lolita without Quilty and the stupid jokes. It's what Thomas Mann would have written if..."
JM: I wonder if this insertion is a flattering one either: We find Humbert Humbert as a "child sleeping beauty", one which might have been created by Thomas Mann were he someone else or had Nabokov been merely a bildungsromantic novelist.
I loved a coincidence in this text, though. While I was pouring through "The Enchanter Hunters" and meeting "The Enchanter's" hero who didn't originally intend to ravish a conscious young prey, because he needed her to be asleep, I came across a reference to the number "forty" ( like Roth's " a boy rising from a forty-year sleep", set in another role).
Why did Humbert Humbert keep and count forty purple pills? Were these related to Nabokov's other reference to Ali Baba's open sesame and forty thieves in lieu of those wakeful thousand nights and one night? Thieving forties?
So I started from: Was he not a very Enchanted Hunter as he deliberated with himself over his boxful of magic ammunition? To rout the monster of insomnia should he try himself one of those amethyst capsules? There were forty of them, all told - forty nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of one such night in order to sleep?
and moved to: "Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away [...]I waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower." ( Dolly, not Lolita! - and Pale Fire's parachute theme?)
Next I searched for Ali Baba in "Pale Fire" Zembla:I'll be going to Rome soon, you'll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves." (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)
Curiosity killed the cat and I tried on various sentences carrying "forty" ( fortyish Humbert Humbert plus those not despairing aged-thirty Balzac women but the equally frightening fortyish... and more, time and space...)
In Lolita:
1. there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell [...]
2.John Farlow was a middle-aged, quiet, quietly athletic, quietly successful dealer in sporting goods, who had an office at Parkington, forty miles away: it was he who got me the cartridges for that Colt and showed me how to use it, during a walk in the woods one Sunday.
3. to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool's book she had (A guide to Your Child's Development)[...] Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under "Your Child's Personality":
4.The stipulation of the Roman law, according to which a girl may marry at twelve, was adopted by the Church [...] There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed by the local priest and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride.
5. "Sometimes," said Lo, "you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood."
6. Dr. Blue [...] assured me it was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the "ague" of the ancients...
7..She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible[...]fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body.
8.I could leave paved X and reached paved Y by means of a transverse dirt road. It was only some forty miles long according to my map.
And, last.(OEL)..: "The book developed slowly, with many interruptions and asides. It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America."
Would I find other clues somewhere else? Yes. But I wonder what they mean, or what their meaning adds up to.
PALE FIRE
1. That's the Great Bear./120 A thousand years ago five minutes were / Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
2. We have been married forty years. At least/ Four thousand times your pillow has been creased/ By our two heads. Four hundred thousand times/(280)
3. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle's raucous dying request: "Teach, Karlik!"
4. Thus that northern king,/ Whose desperate escape from prison was/ Brought off successfully only because /Some forty of his followers that night/
Impersonated him and aped his flight -
5. The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and his coronation was perhaps the most trying stretch of time in his life. He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom.
6. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair...
7. I'll be going to Rome soon, you'll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves." (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)
8. a few hours later took the manuscript out again, and for several days wore it, as it were, having distributed the ninety-two index cards about my person, twenty in the right-hand pocket of my coat, as many in the left-hand one, a batch of forty against my right nipple and the twelve precious ones with variants in my innermost left-breast pocket.
ADA
1. somehow or other, when the last of some forty convulsions had come and gone in the ordinary course of collapsing time, and his train was bowling past black and green fields to Ardis...
2. For thirty or forty horrible years the unfortunate husband and wife labor and economize to repay the debts they accumulated in the purchase of a half-million-franc necklace which they had secretly substituted for the lost one ( a patent lie in fiction's fiction, for Maupassant's ascribed period is of "ten years")
3. part of his recent dream in which he had told Blanche that he had learned to levitate and that his ability to treat air with magic ease would allow him to break all records for the long jump by strolling, as it were, a few inches above the ground for a stretch of say thirty or forty feet (too great a length might be suspicious)
4.Blue butterflies nearly the size of Small Whites, and likewise of European origin, were flitting swiftly [...] In less complex circumstances, forty years hence, our lovers were to see again, with wonder and joy, the same insect and the same bladder-senna along a forest trail near Susten in the Valais
5. What we have here' [...] This tiny one, for example, was composed in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress,
6. Now you have, say' (turning to Ada in solemn consultation), 'forty minutes' ('Give her a full hour, she can't even memorize Mironton, mirontaine') - 'all right, a full hour to learn these eight lines by heart
7. In the second period of separation, beginning in 1886, the code was radically altered. Both Van and Ada still knew by heart the seventy-two lines of Marvell's 'The Garden' and the forty lines of Rimbaud's 'Mémoire.'
8. Mr Plunkett had been[...] called 'gaming conjurers,' both in England and America. At forty, in the middle of a draw-poker session he had been betrayed by a fainting fit of cardiac origin [...]
9. He found the necklace. In icy fury, he tore it into thirty, forty glittering hailstones, some of which fell at her feet as she burst into the room..Her glance swept the floor[...]Van calmly quoted the punchline from Mlle Larivière's famous story: 'Mais, ma pauvre amie, elle était fausse'
10. ' We'll manage, perhaps, to wear our masks always, till thee do us part, but we shall never be able to marry - while they're both alive. [...]One can't bribe one's parents, and waiting forty, fifty years for them to die is too horrible to imagine ...
11. Cosmeticians of genius restored forty-year-old matrons to look and smell like schoolgirls at their first prom.
12. One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia...
13. The main picture had now started. The three leading parts - cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna - were played by solid stars, whose images passed by in 'semi-stills,'
14. Van swallowed a favodorm tablet and, while waiting for it to relieve him of himself, a matter of forty minutes or so, sat down at a lady's bureau to his 'lucubratiuncula.'
A real scientist would search for other numerical references ( twelve, fourteen, twenty, ninety-two...) but I rest my case without having gone further than my own "forty winks"... A terrible woman aged forty, or a man? Forty diamonds, forty lies, forty thieves?
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"'... The portrait of himself is not a flattering one, believe me. The young boy rising from a forty-year sleep! It's extraordinary. This is Lonoff's Scarlet Letter. It's Lolita without Quilty and the stupid jokes. It's what Thomas Mann would have written if..."
JM: I wonder if this insertion is a flattering one either: We find Humbert Humbert as a "child sleeping beauty", one which might have been created by Thomas Mann were he someone else or had Nabokov been merely a bildungsromantic novelist.
I loved a coincidence in this text, though. While I was pouring through "The Enchanter Hunters" and meeting "The Enchanter's" hero who didn't originally intend to ravish a conscious young prey, because he needed her to be asleep, I came across a reference to the number "forty" ( like Roth's " a boy rising from a forty-year sleep", set in another role).
Why did Humbert Humbert keep and count forty purple pills? Were these related to Nabokov's other reference to Ali Baba's open sesame and forty thieves in lieu of those wakeful thousand nights and one night? Thieving forties?
So I started from: Was he not a very Enchanted Hunter as he deliberated with himself over his boxful of magic ammunition? To rout the monster of insomnia should he try himself one of those amethyst capsules? There were forty of them, all told - forty nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of one such night in order to sleep?
and moved to: "Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away [...]I waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower." ( Dolly, not Lolita! - and Pale Fire's parachute theme?)
Next I searched for Ali Baba in "Pale Fire" Zembla:I'll be going to Rome soon, you'll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves." (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)
Curiosity killed the cat and I tried on various sentences carrying "forty" ( fortyish Humbert Humbert plus those not despairing aged-thirty Balzac women but the equally frightening fortyish... and more, time and space...)
In Lolita:
1. there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell [...]
2.John Farlow was a middle-aged, quiet, quietly athletic, quietly successful dealer in sporting goods, who had an office at Parkington, forty miles away: it was he who got me the cartridges for that Colt and showed me how to use it, during a walk in the woods one Sunday.
3. to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool's book she had (A guide to Your Child's Development)[...] Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under "Your Child's Personality":
4.The stipulation of the Roman law, according to which a girl may marry at twelve, was adopted by the Church [...] There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed by the local priest and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride.
5. "Sometimes," said Lo, "you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood."
6. Dr. Blue [...] assured me it was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the "ague" of the ancients...
7..She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible[...]fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body.
8.I could leave paved X and reached paved Y by means of a transverse dirt road. It was only some forty miles long according to my map.
And, last.(OEL)..: "The book developed slowly, with many interruptions and asides. It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America."
Would I find other clues somewhere else? Yes. But I wonder what they mean, or what their meaning adds up to.
PALE FIRE
1. That's the Great Bear./120 A thousand years ago five minutes were / Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
2. We have been married forty years. At least/ Four thousand times your pillow has been creased/ By our two heads. Four hundred thousand times/(280)
3. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle's raucous dying request: "Teach, Karlik!"
4. Thus that northern king,/ Whose desperate escape from prison was/ Brought off successfully only because /Some forty of his followers that night/
Impersonated him and aped his flight -
5. The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and his coronation was perhaps the most trying stretch of time in his life. He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom.
6. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair...
7. I'll be going to Rome soon, you'll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves." (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)
8. a few hours later took the manuscript out again, and for several days wore it, as it were, having distributed the ninety-two index cards about my person, twenty in the right-hand pocket of my coat, as many in the left-hand one, a batch of forty against my right nipple and the twelve precious ones with variants in my innermost left-breast pocket.
ADA
1. somehow or other, when the last of some forty convulsions had come and gone in the ordinary course of collapsing time, and his train was bowling past black and green fields to Ardis...
2. For thirty or forty horrible years the unfortunate husband and wife labor and economize to repay the debts they accumulated in the purchase of a half-million-franc necklace which they had secretly substituted for the lost one ( a patent lie in fiction's fiction, for Maupassant's ascribed period is of "ten years")
3. part of his recent dream in which he had told Blanche that he had learned to levitate and that his ability to treat air with magic ease would allow him to break all records for the long jump by strolling, as it were, a few inches above the ground for a stretch of say thirty or forty feet (too great a length might be suspicious)
4.Blue butterflies nearly the size of Small Whites, and likewise of European origin, were flitting swiftly [...] In less complex circumstances, forty years hence, our lovers were to see again, with wonder and joy, the same insect and the same bladder-senna along a forest trail near Susten in the Valais
5. What we have here' [...] This tiny one, for example, was composed in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress,
6. Now you have, say' (turning to Ada in solemn consultation), 'forty minutes' ('Give her a full hour, she can't even memorize Mironton, mirontaine') - 'all right, a full hour to learn these eight lines by heart
7. In the second period of separation, beginning in 1886, the code was radically altered. Both Van and Ada still knew by heart the seventy-two lines of Marvell's 'The Garden' and the forty lines of Rimbaud's 'Mémoire.'
8. Mr Plunkett had been[...] called 'gaming conjurers,' both in England and America. At forty, in the middle of a draw-poker session he had been betrayed by a fainting fit of cardiac origin [...]
9. He found the necklace. In icy fury, he tore it into thirty, forty glittering hailstones, some of which fell at her feet as she burst into the room..Her glance swept the floor[...]Van calmly quoted the punchline from Mlle Larivière's famous story: 'Mais, ma pauvre amie, elle était fausse'
10. ' We'll manage, perhaps, to wear our masks always, till thee do us part, but we shall never be able to marry - while they're both alive. [...]One can't bribe one's parents, and waiting forty, fifty years for them to die is too horrible to imagine ...
11. Cosmeticians of genius restored forty-year-old matrons to look and smell like schoolgirls at their first prom.
12. One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia...
13. The main picture had now started. The three leading parts - cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna - were played by solid stars, whose images passed by in 'semi-stills,'
14. Van swallowed a favodorm tablet and, while waiting for it to relieve him of himself, a matter of forty minutes or so, sat down at a lady's bureau to his 'lucubratiuncula.'
A real scientist would search for other numerical references ( twelve, fourteen, twenty, ninety-two...) but I rest my case without having gone further than my own "forty winks"... A terrible woman aged forty, or a man? Forty diamonds, forty lies, forty thieves?
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
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/