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[NABOKOV-L] Darwinism, T.H. Huxley and Ellery Queen
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I perused two indexes ( Nabokov's butterflies and Boyd's AY) but found no reference to Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895) a British biologist, defender of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. I did find an interesting entry on Julian (his grandson): "While accepting the fact of evolution,Nabokov thought the Darwinian account of its mechanisms in error." A footnote informs us: "At that time, his position was not so unusual as it may seem now. Among professional biologists it was only in the decade 1937-1947 that what Julian Huxley called "the evolutionary synthesis" itself evolved, and settled the differences between naturalist and geneticists..." (B.Boyd AY, page 37)
It is always possible to depart from a novel that mentions the natural sciences, chess, astronomy or writers and, next, find a link between that novel and VN, even if later these connections or its derivatives are disproved.
This time my curiosity alighted on Ellery Queen's 1963 crime novel "The Player on the Other Side". The author's pen-name hides two writers': Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, whereas the story develops the theory about "split personality", of Stevenson's Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde kind. It also plays with the reversal of names ( the familiar god-dog and a midas-sadim) in a game using initials that indicate chess moves and point to YHWH (God)
For the "Y" (as in York or in Yahweh), we also find a mispelling that turns it into WYE.
For E.Queen, this "Wye" stands for "the player on the other side.", in a quote from grandpa Huxley: "The chess board is the world, the pieces the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.*"
So many promising leads towards Pale Fire's New Wye and IPH. None of them true. Or so it seems to me. But the idea of "Wye" as "Y" ( God? The Enemy?) remains interesting.
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* "Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would one day or other depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to scorn upon the father who allowed his son, or the State which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight? Now, it is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, the fortune and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess board is the world, the pieces the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. All we know is that his play is always fair, just and patient. But, also, that he never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well the highest stakes are paid with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated without haste, but without remorse. My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, strong angel who is playing for love as we say, and would rather lose than win, and I should accept it as an image of human life. Well, now what I mean by education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of nature; and the fashioning of the affections, and of the will, into harmony with those laws."
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