Dear Walter Miale
 
Authors, unlike generals, cannot command the riotous ranks of those ragtag bands who constitute their readership. Nabokov did, frequently in his prefaces, like to play the hermeneutic generalissimo, intimating that the field over which the interpretative battles of his posthumous future might rage was already mined againsts guerilla assaults intent on challenging, with their semantic insurgency along unsuspected defiles, the lie of the land as he had crafted it. You cannot however checkmate the moves in a game of infinite combinations whose future permutations you will never have occasion to witness.
 
As to luck favouring the best authors, Sappho, the greatest lyric poet of antiquity, lack Irish blood, and her works did not survive the fires of 1204 C.E. The splendid abundance of Aristotle's dialogues, perhaps on par with the otherwise incomparable works of his mentor Plato, did not survive the damp of Skepsis' cellars, as his lecture notes, scarcely commendable for their literary genius, did. We have dull Manilius with his fluently banal volumes on astronomy, whom luck favoured over the dazzling genius of Heraclitus. We have but a 16th part of the Satyricon of Petronius, the greatest novel of antiquity, but numerous specimens of late hellenistic romances. To turn to the modern period, whole stacks of libraries fatten on the omnia opera of forgotten hacksmiths, while masterpieces have  consistently struggled to find a publisher ( John Kennedy Toole and his 'A Confederacy of Dunces', being a late case).
 
Of course, you mean the best authors are lucky in the readers they attract. But luck has nothing to do with that. Genius may be ignored, but not for long, once it is noticed. Some notably tiresome books have attracted readers of praeternatural genius willing to spend a large part of their lifetimes elucidating the finer points of drabness. Manilius again, who seduced the palmary acuity of three of the greatest readers of the last five hundred years, Scaliger, Bentley and Housman.
Regards
Peter Dale
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From: Nabokv-L
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Sent: Saturday, August 12, 2006 5:00 AM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [Fwd: Re: [NABOKV-L] monte-fonte]



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] monte-fonte
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:31:58 -0400
From: Walter Miale mailto:<wm@greenworldcenter.org
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum mailto:<NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
References: mailto:<44DCE912.3070400@utk.edu

>...many a salutary caution against over-reading what authors, 
>especially brilliant ones, write, as if every divined association a 
>sequence of words may conjure up were necessarily part and parcel of 
>authorial intentions, and not,  in good part, simply the ingenious 
>outcome of ingenuous obsessions on the part of the reader.

So true. But aren't the best authors (as the best generals are 
purported to be) the lucky ones?

Walter Miale






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