Stephen Blackwell mentions several instances in which he found "Nabokov bubbling up from Millhauser's memories" while he was reading this writer's new story in the Jan. 3 New Yorker, "Getting Closer". He concludes that in "a variation on Nabokov's phrase from Speak, Memory (p. 77), the story's last paragraph asserts (reporting the thoughts of the story's hero): "Things will stop and no one will ever die....Whether conscious, unconscious, or coincidental--a marvelous story." 
In a PS to the posting on Millhauser, he corrected the name of the  whaling ship "That's the "Charles W. Morgan", not the "William S. Burroughs"; I have no idea how that bizarre mental transposition took place while I was writing." 
 
JM:  Coincidences or not, yesterday I'd been once again watching the movie "The Illusionist," based on Millhauser's story. Dreamlike spaces, trance-like states,fabulations, childhood's epiphanies when "things stop" ( and besides... all of these are safely distinct from burroughian alcohol and opium induced states).
However, it seems to me that Steve is pulling the wool over our eyes. His parapraxis, substituting Morgan* by Burroughs in connection to Melville (and "Pale Fire"?), serves to misguide us from a tourist-information site where we find that the whaleship Charles W. Morgan  is "the 'crown jewel' of Mystic Seaport's collection"... (just kidding!)
 
Who wrote a short-story about a father who climbed into a tree and disappeared in it? Millhauser? Nabokov? Bradbury? Calvino?
 
 
.............................................................................................................................................................................................................
* - There was a Ted Morgan, who wrote the biographies of Winston Churchill, William S. Burroughs, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.