Subject
Fw: Boyd response to Lock review]
From
Date
Body
----- Original Message -----
From: "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@gte.net>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 2:30 PM
Subject: Boyd response to Lock review]
> EDITOR's NOTE. On Jan. 17th (Weds.) NABOKV-L ran Charles Lock's group
> review of Boyd's PALE FIRE and recent books by Connolly, Cornwell, and
> Diment. Below, Boyd responds to Lock's comments on his PALE FIRE study.
> NABOKV-L apologizes for the delay in sending out BB's response due to
> the vagaries of my e-mail.
> ----------------------------------
>
>
> From Brian Boyd
>
> "This reader," notes Charles Lock in his review, "finds it puzzling that
>
> Boyd does not appear to have recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary."
> In
> an endnote in _Nabokov's Pale Fire_ I cite Michael Long as the first to
> have
> noted in print, in his _Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia (1984),
> that
> the word "stillicide," which Kinbote remembers "having encountered . . .
> for
> the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy," occurs in Hardy's "Friends
> Beyond." Lock comments: "One need not have waited till 1984. If, puzzled
> by
> the word 'stillicide,' one had looked it up in the Oxford English
> Dictionary, one would have found the word described as 'now rare' and
> Hardy's poem (from 1898) cited as the only example since the seventeenth
>
> century."
>
> This reader can resolve Dr Lock's bepuzzlement. I did not have to wait
> until
> 1984, as I had identified Kinbote's reference long before, having owned,
>
> since before I published on Nabokov or anyone else, not only the OED
> (and, I
> must confess, Webster's Second and Third), but also an ample volume of
> Hardy's poetry that includes "Friends Beyond." Indeed in writing about
> _Pale
> Fire_ in the 1973 MA thesis that Nabokov read I cited OED definitions,
> and
> have cited them again in books and articles on Nabokov since, as well as
>
> pointing out occasionally arcana Nabokov employs that are present in
> Webster's Second but absent from both the OED and Webster's Third.
>
> But in fact the OED does NOT identify the poem "Friends Beyond," but
> only
> the volume from which it derives. In my note in _Nabokov's Pale Fire_, I
> was
> merely acknowledging Michael Long's first public identification of the
> poem.
> Perhaps Dr Lock is not aware of the tradition of scholarly civility?
>
> I quote Webster's Second's definition of stillicide in _Nabokov's Pale
> Fire_
> for two reasons: first, that Nabokov had Webster's Second with him as he
>
> wrote _Pale Fire_, as well as his memories of Hardy's poetry, which he
> admired, and he did not have ready access in Nice, Champex-Lac or
> Montreux,
> to the OED; and second, that the very definition from which I quote ("a
> . .
> . succession of drops; now esp., the dripping of rain water from the
> eaves;
> eavesdrop") is plainly the source (as the OED is not) of Kinbote's "My
> dictionary defines it as a 'succession of drops falling from the eaves,
> eavesdrop, cavesdrop.' "
>
> Dr Lock, who likes to lose himself in detail, and ignore arguments,
> should
> at least get the details right.
>
>
>
>