Yes, Carolyn, McArthur was citing a British World War I ballad he learned in his West Point days, but as Ward Swanson noted in the Nabokovian, 44 (2000), p. 14, Nabokov and Shade were echoing Thomas Flatman (not among those “not in this Index”), and hyper-aptly, his “On the Much Lamented Death of our late Sovereign Lord King Charles II of Blessed Memory” (1685), ll. 21-25: 

But Princes (like the wondrous Enoch) should be free
From Death’s unbounded tyranny,
And when their godlike race is run
And nothing glorious left undone,
Never submit to Fate, but only disappear.

Shade's “eh, Charles?” is a nice bonus for those who stumble on the echo. 

Brian Boyd

On 25/05/2014, at 6:42 am, Carolyn Kunin <chaiselongue@ATT.NET> wrote:

Jansy's quote recalls General MacArthur's famous remark "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." Part of his resignation speech I believe. Was Shade perhaps suggesting that Kinbote abdicate? Of course he would have done this tongue-in-cheek as he knew there was no Zembla, or any king thereof. I wonder too, perhaps someone knows, if MacArthur was making reference to an earlier quote?


Carolyn

p.s. To those interested in such things, I went last night to see a dreadful production of Cosi fan tutte, and was telling my neighbor how I discovered that Mozart had taken the second theme, on which most of the overture is based, from four bars of entr'acte music from the Barber of Seville commissioned by Catherine II of Paisiello (not the more famous Rossini, to which Jansy refers above). Mozart heard it in Prague when he was there for the performance of one of his own operas, and how he did it I'll never know, managed to pick out those four inconsequential bars and spin them into musical gold. 


On Friday, May 23, 2014 6:26 PM, Jansy Mello <jansy.mello@OUTLOOK.COM> wrote:


[NABOKV -L] A certain kind of immortality...
Variations on: “Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die — they only disappear, eh, Charles?" (Pale Fire)
Still wondering about Erwin’s song (from VN’s “A Nursery Tale” adapted short-story in a London play) and the musician G. Rossini, I finally came to his overture of “The Barber of Seville - where I read a comment on the youtube link stating that “old artists never die, they just become enchanted”.
It reminded me of Kinbote’s reported dialogue with John Shade and this time I found a new site with innumerous variations of the same idea.
 
The closest to Nabokov’s is the already mentioned “Old magicians never die, they just disappear” [already discussed in a past VN-L exchange on Thursday, August 03, 2006 12:49 PM with Subject: [NABOKV-L] Kings never die...( Pale Fire). https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0608&L=NABOKV-L&E=quoted-printable&P=133618&B=------%3D_NextPart_000_0023_01C6B721.C7AC00E0&T=text%2Fhtml;%20charset=iso-8859-1]
For other examples found at this new site: http://www.joe-ks.com/archives_sep2004/Old_People_Never_Die.htm
Kinbote’s quip isn’t very original at all…



Google Search
the archive
Contact
the Editors
NOJ Zembla Nabokv-L
Policies
Subscription options AdaOnline NSJ Ada Annotations L-Soft Search the archive VN Bibliography Blog

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.