Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0020398, Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:55:49 +0100

Subject
Re: [NABOKOV-L] Of bards and beards and then Browns, Brownings,
Pippa and peaches, Andrea del Sarto...
Date
Body
Jansy: thanks for your tireless trawling for exciting Robert Browning links
to VN. That your net also catches links to the colour Brown is a tad less er
catching, since the original Anglo-Saxon nickname Brun referred to
hair-colour, a connection long lost when the family name Bruning, attached
to a Hugo, first emerged circa 1198 in the Pipe Rolls of Norfolk.
Incidentally, surnames owe their existence to BIG government¹s need to
collect personal taxes! The Bruning surname, with diverse spellings
including Browning, spread over the centuries (Robert¹s fore-bears being
well established in Dorset by the 14th century), and we even have Browning
heraldry that might provide semiotic fodder to add to the verbal accidents
of Browning tommy-guns and, who knows, Browning Gravy mixes:

A Coat of Arms granted to a Browning family of Gloucestershire depicts a
barry wavy of six silver and blue. The Crest is a sinister arm from the
elbow issuing from a cloud in the dexter, holding the hand above a serpent's
head, erect from the middle, and looking toward the sinister proper.

Can we link Robert B¹s beard to John Shade¹s shaving interlude and the Abe
Lincoln allusions? The definitions and dating of beard-styles, like Newgate
and Tyburn Frills and Collars (originally thieves cant for the hangman¹s
noose), seem too vague to form strong opinions. Since VN makes overt,
not-to-be-missed allusions to Robert Browning (ditto Frost, Eliot, Dryden,
Pope et al), why do we search for obscure, hidden references? Readers know
that VN knows all these poets, and VN knows that his readers know that he
knows them ... Of course, VN knows all the obscure, or more kindly, less
famous, poets too (e.g., Hugh MacDiarmid, whom I met in the flesh but was
unknown to some Nabokovians). VN fooled us with his DIRECT mention of Edsel
Ford! And according to Prof. Gwynn, John Shade is based on poet/critic Yvor
Winters, which VN¹s readers ought to know about but, I my case, didn¹t until
recently. Following Ron Rosenbaum¹s Œleaks,¹ I can¹t wait to buy Pale Fire,
the unmolested Poem:

I was particularly struck by the degree of erudition about contemporary
American poetry that Gwynn brought to his case that Nabokov meant "Pale
Fire" to be a reproof to over-casual, over-personal, over-trivial trends in
American poetry. A reproof to the belief that formal poetics could not
capture deep feeling in traditional verse forms. And that Nabokov had
modeled John Shade on the well-known traditionalist American poet Yvor
Winters, who was a partisan of formal poetics.
http://www.slate.com/id/2261520/

I also note from Ben Kipela¹s blog/essay, Nabokov the Trickster, that
Winters¹ opinion of VN can¹t be located in print (is this true?) but can be
deduced from his general writings.

By the way, is anyone interested in what Winters thought or might have
thought of Lolita? He never wrote a single word about Nabokov that I am
aware of, though they both taught at Stanford for a short while in 1941. I
think Winters would have found Nabokov¹s style fragmented and wasteful and
his theme improperly developed. More importantly, he would have had very
serious doubts about the use of an unreliable narrator. This matter is
related to the issues discussed in the essay ³Problems for the Modern Critic
of Literature.² Using a narrator like Humbert, I believe Winters would have
said, forced Nabokov to write less well than he could have and provided him
with no sound way to generalize his theme or fix what he wished to
communicate about the complex experience of lust. In general, I think
Winters would have said, the author who uses an unreliable narrator has no
means to reach a final judgment of his subject matter, which amounts to an
abdication of the writer¹s primary responsibility and a short-circuiting of
the chief source of literature¹s power.
http://yvorwinters.blogspot.com/2009/02/nabokov-trickster.html

I conclude with how we Brit schoolboys first learned to love our dear bold,
a-courting Browning:

"I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,‹and this is no
offhand complimentary letter that I shall write . . . and there a graceful
and natural end of the thing . . . In this addressing myself to you‹your own
self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say,
love these books with all my heart‹and I love you too."

Wham-bang, we cheered. Knickers-off when I arrive. Your place or mine?

I must compare this with VN¹s epistolary wooing of Véra!

Stan Kelly-Bootle

On 26/07/2010 22:11, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:

> While I was going thru assorted sources to learn more about Andrea del Sarto
> and Browning, I found a picture of the poet and... his beard! His
> beard...isn't it another example of the "newgate frill"? Perhaps it's Browning
> who is indicated in Pale Fire, another Robert, another poet under a different
> guise, all the time?
>
> Here are interesting links to Nabokov's work. I started with Beerbohm's
> "Brown" who led me to Browning's poem ( cf. item II from the site that carries
> RB's image).
> Next, various interconnections linking peaches, Brown, Browning in Lolita, PF
> and Ada.
>
> I-
>
> Max Beerbohm's playwright, "Brown Savonarola" ( who, as a boy, had been mocked
> at school because his parents christened him Ladbroke Brown) had named him his
> "literary executor". The narrator tried to find a producer for Brown's
> unfinished piece (the playwright was struck dead by an omnibus right in front
> of the narrator, while he was in the process of describing the risk of his
> dying in exactly the same way). Next, he attempted to complete the missing
> act, with even less success. In Brown's play, at the end of Act. III, a Pope
> enters to demand the arrest of Savonarola and Lucrezia Borgia.
> We read [ Re-enter Guelfs and Ghibellines fighting. SAV. and LUC. are arrested
> by Papal officers. Enter MICHAEL ANGELO. ANDREA DEL SARTO appears for a moment
> at a window. PIPPA passes. Brothers of the Misericordia go by, singing a
> Requiem for Francesca da Rimini. Enter BOCCACCIO, BENVENUTO CELLINI and many
> others, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves but scarcely
> audible...]
>
> What an array of names and "scarcely audible" allusions in Max B's
> short-piece. As in "Lolita" (revamped in Pale Fire) we find a surprisingly
> displaced "Pippa passes" and then Browning again, through Andrea del Sarto (
> the poem he wrote in Florence).
>
> In Ada there are several Browns (twisting around Robert B. and René
> Chateaubriand), there's Browning, the poet, a "Brown Hill College," where Aqua
> studied. Also Ada once attended a Brownhill school which keeps to
> old-fashioned rules under a certain Miss Cleft, its headmistress.
> This reference takes us back to "Lolita" where there's the most obvious
> reference to the poet Browning ( "She watched the listless pale fountain girl
> put in the ice, pour in the coke...You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We
> always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the
> concoction." ) but now, it's not Ada's mistress, Miss Cleft, who is mentioned,
> but a quote from Robert Browning ( Lolita: "Wow! Looks swank," remarked my
> vulgar darling ...and with a childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that
> had struck in the peach-cleft-to quote Robert Browning.")
> Ada teems with "Browning's peaches" ( "Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen,
> respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in
> 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old
> rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind ‹ fig-picking,
> peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts
> in bursting shorts...")
> In Pale Fire, Kinbote mentions Browning directly ( on lines 671-672, for
> Shade's "The Untamed Seahorse - "See Browning¹s My Last Duchess. See it and
> condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume
> of poetry ‹ or a long poem, alas ‹ with a phrase lifted from a more or less
> celebrated poetical work of the past..." There's Gradus, with digestive
> problems, when he almost drops his gun ( a "Browning") in the toilet.
> And yet, in the beginning, there's always, "Lolita" (and other assorted Browns
> and Brownings) ...
>
>
>
> II -
>
> "Edward Dowden in his fine but now forgotten book, The Life of Robert Browning
> (London. Dent, 1915/1927), in a footnote on page 191, states that
> "Mrs Andrew Crosse, in her article, 'John Kenyon and his Friends' (Temple Bar
> Magazine, April 1900), writes: 'When the Brownings were living in Florence,
> Kenyon had begged them to procure for him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti
> of Andea del Sarto and his wife. Mr Browning was unable to get the copy made
> with any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea
> del Sarto - and sent it to Kenyon!'."...
> I would argue that the voice in the Victorian poem is not only that of
> Browning's 'Andrea' but is that of Browning himself, of a Browning deeply
> resenting Elizabeth's greater fame during her lifetime, and that Robert
> Browning has thus constructed of Andrea Del Sarto's double portrait his own
> 'Portrait of a Marriage'. Reverberating with these portraits of wives is also
> that of Browning's 'My Last Duchess'. "
> (Cf. Robert Browning's Andrea Del Sarto as Double Self-Portrait -
> Anglo-Italian Studies, Robert Browning, Andrea Del Sarto, Lucrezia Del Fede,
> ... Ritratto di Andrea del Sarto e di Lucrezia del Fede sua moglie. ...
> www.florin.ms/AndreaSarto.html <http://www.florin.ms/AndreaSarto.html> )
>


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