Subject: RE: lock review
From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <[email-masked]>
To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 09:08:14 +1300

 Dear Don,

Odd that you missed both versions of what I sent re the Lock review itself.
Could you please post this before the "ament catkin botkin" note.

What's with this "card for D. Barton Johnson" that appears at the bottom of
messages--or sometimes in lieu of them?

Anyway, here is what I would like to run, perhaps with a note that it was
sent several days ago but did not come through:

>From Brian Boyd

"This reader," notes Charles Lock in his review, "finds it puzzling that
Boyd does not appear to have recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary." In
an endnote in _Nabokov's Pale Fire_ I cite Michael Long as the first to have
noted in print, in his _Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia (1984), that
the word "stillicide," which Kinbote remembers "having encountered . . . for
the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy," occurs in Hardy's "Friends
Beyond." Lock comments: "One need not have waited till 1984. If, puzzled by
the word 'stillicide,' one had looked it up in the Oxford English
Dictionary, one would have found the word described as 'now rare' and
Hardy's poem (from 1898) cited as the only example since the seventeenth
century."

This reader can resolve Dr Lock's bepuzzlement. I did not have to wait until
1984, as I had identified Kinbote's reference long before, having owned,
since before I published on Nabokov or anyone else, not only the OED (and, I
must confess, Webster's Second and Third), but also an ample volume of
Hardy's poetry that includes "Friends Beyond." Indeed in writing about _Pale
Fire_ in the 1973 MA thesis that Nabokov read I cited OED definitions, and
have cited them again in books and articles on Nabokov since, as well as
pointing out occasionally arcana Nabokov employs that are present in
Webster's Second but absent from both the OED and Webster's Third.

But in fact the OED does NOT identify the poem "Friends Beyond," but only
the volume from which it derives. In my note in _Nabokov's Pale Fire_, I was
merely acknowledging Michael Long's first public identification of the poem.
Perhaps Dr Lock is not aware of the tradition of scholarly civility?

I quote Webster's Second's definition of stillicide in _Nabokov's Pale Fire_
for two reasons: first, that Nabokov had Webster's Second with him as he
wrote _Pale Fire_, as well as his memories of Hardy's poetry, which he
admired, and he did not have ready access in Nice, Champex-Lac or Montreux,
to the OED; and second, that the very definition from which I quote ("a . .
. succession of drops; now esp., the dripping of rain water from the eaves;
eavesdrop") is plainly the source (as the OED is not) of Kinbote's "My
dictionary defines it as a 'succession of drops falling from the eaves,
eavesdrop, cavesdrop.' "

Dr Lock, who likes to lose himself in detail, and ignore arguments, should
at least get the details right.