Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Nabokovian blunders
From: "Sandy Klein" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:01:16 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:[email-masked]] On
Behalf Of Donald B. Johnson
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 12:32 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Nabokovian blunders

----- Forwarded message from [email-masked] -----
    Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:11:17 -0400
    From: Andrew Brown <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: Andrew Brown <[email-masked]>
 Subject: Re:      Re: Fwd: Re: Nabokovian blunders
      To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum

Do you believe, Jo, that Nabokov was absolutely serious in these
remarks, and did not intend them as satirical exaggerations of the TYPE
of comments a writer of genius might expect from publishers of purely
mercenary intent?

If so, what do you make of VN's comment that his preferred choice of
reading material was strictly homosexual?  Are you able to suppose that
Nabokov meant he generally preferred the writing of men over the writing
of women?
Or did it seem to you that VN, with unsmiling dedication, restricted his
pleasure reading to, say, Isherwood, Burroughs, Bowles, Capote, Auden
and others of like persuasion, perhaps in order to tone up his "gender
bending" skills?

I'm curious.  If you have time would you be willing to bring to our
attention examples of humorous comment, irony, or exaggeration in VN's
work?
Or do you think these are impossible to quote because of their straight
non-existence? Are you aware that some writers, in certain moods, might
indulge the impulse to create suppositious examples with the optimistic
presumption that their reader has sufficient penetration to understand
their references?

Or do you think, as Andrew Field evidently did, that when Nabokov made
reference to a chimp making a drawing of its prison bars, that this was
granite-like fact, and that the newspaper article mentioned really did
exist beyond VN's imagination.

Are you convinced, without qualification, with a staunch and leaden
pedantry, that every statement a writer makes in conversation or print
is to be interpreted with unremitting, fundamentalist literality? And
any statement that cannot be so interpreted is a black and hellish LIE?
I'm curious. As Dickens' Rosa Dartle says, I simply want to know.

Andrew Brown

----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2005 10:49 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Nabokovian blunders

> Re Nabokovian 'blunders'
>
> Dear Anthony
>
> In her award-winning biography of Vera Nabokov Stacy Schiff discussed
> several uneasy questions relating to Nabokov's account of his early
> interactions with the US publishers Viking, Simon and Schuster, New
> Directions, Farrar and Straus and Doubleday. Regarding the 'girl/boy'
> exchange alluded to by Nabokov in his famous postscript, Schiff
concluded:
>
> "None of them (i.e. US publishers) appears in any shape or form to
> have suggested the author transform his twelve-year-old into a boy, or
> Humbert into a farmer, as Nabokov later claimed." (p. 206)
>
> This ruse was only one of several 'untruths' propagated by Nabokov in
> "On
a
> Book Entitled Lolita." Centerwall has paid attention to several other
> misleading statements made by VN in his postscript. I have contributed
more
> comments and observations on this matter in SNLR.
>
> Another dimension to VN's 'gender-bending' strategy involved VN
> himself dressing up in anagram guise as Vivian Darkbloom, the silent
> mistress of Lolita's early abuser, Clare Quilty. The autobiographical
> reverberations attached to this particular cryptic crossword style
> clue are, I would suggest, highly significant.
>
> Jo Morgan
> Sydney
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----

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