Subject
New Yorker's "Conclusive Evidence": When Lilacs Last (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Dieter Zimmer, Editor of the German Rowohlt series (most
recently a fully restored version of the Nabokov Lolita screen play), once
again displays the sort of knowledge that makes his Rowohlt Nabokov
indispensible for the serios Nabokovian.
-----------------------------------------
From: "Dieter E. Zimmer" <DEZimmer@compuserve.com>
Dear Nabokovians of the List:
In case not everybody remembers, I would like to point out that WHEN LILACS
LAST (from Walt Whitman) is the title of a novel Charlotte is reading in
LOLITA: A SCREENPLAY, published version of 1974, page 47. It is in one of
the scenes Nabokov had cut when he left Beverly Hills in 1960 but which he
restored from the unused material when he prepared his screenplay for
publication in 1970.
WHEN LILACS LAST (no author given) here is the title of a trashy bestseller
("300,000 copies in print") which H.H. sees advertised and which Charlotte
has read but H.H. has not (and certainly will not).
"CHARLOTTE: Oh, you should [read it]. It was given a rave review by Adam
Scott. It's about a man from the North and a girl from the South who build
up a beautiful relationship-he is her father image and she is his mother
image, but later she discovers that as a child she had rejected her father,
and of course then he begins to identify her with his possessive mother.
You see, it works out this way: he symbolizes the industrial North, and she
symbolizes the old-fashioned South, and-
LOLITA (casually) and it's all silly nonsense."
As far as I can make out, there is no mention of such a book in LOLITA, at
least not in the German version which I can search automatically (and where
obviously a few setters were lost).
Still I would be reluctant to assume that "Barbara Braun's" book of this
title was all that trashy, simply because it would make the person of the
imaginary reviewer too inconsistent. Somebody who has written so
perceptively on CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE, slipping into the mind of its author,
can hardly proceed to praise mere kitsch. Or if he does, it would imply
that in a corner of his mind Nabokov too had a faible for kitsch.
In any case, to me it seems too far-fetched to read something particularly
nasty into the name of ist author, "Barbara Braun". If you find a barbarian
in Barbara and a Nazi in Braun, WHEN LILACS LAST would have been written by
an American Nazi barbarian, and an imaginary reviewer who finds such a book
suffused by a "deep human glow" would seem to be utterly unqualified to
speak well of CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE.
There are a few books written by American lady authors and published
between 1940 and 1960 with lilacs in their title in the LoC catalog. I
don't know any of them. Perhaps someone wants to check whether one of them
is similar to the book described by Charlotte in LOLITA or in the appendix
to CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE.
Dieter E. Zimmer
Hamburg, Germany
recently a fully restored version of the Nabokov Lolita screen play), once
again displays the sort of knowledge that makes his Rowohlt Nabokov
indispensible for the serios Nabokovian.
-----------------------------------------
From: "Dieter E. Zimmer" <DEZimmer@compuserve.com>
Dear Nabokovians of the List:
In case not everybody remembers, I would like to point out that WHEN LILACS
LAST (from Walt Whitman) is the title of a novel Charlotte is reading in
LOLITA: A SCREENPLAY, published version of 1974, page 47. It is in one of
the scenes Nabokov had cut when he left Beverly Hills in 1960 but which he
restored from the unused material when he prepared his screenplay for
publication in 1970.
WHEN LILACS LAST (no author given) here is the title of a trashy bestseller
("300,000 copies in print") which H.H. sees advertised and which Charlotte
has read but H.H. has not (and certainly will not).
"CHARLOTTE: Oh, you should [read it]. It was given a rave review by Adam
Scott. It's about a man from the North and a girl from the South who build
up a beautiful relationship-he is her father image and she is his mother
image, but later she discovers that as a child she had rejected her father,
and of course then he begins to identify her with his possessive mother.
You see, it works out this way: he symbolizes the industrial North, and she
symbolizes the old-fashioned South, and-
LOLITA (casually) and it's all silly nonsense."
As far as I can make out, there is no mention of such a book in LOLITA, at
least not in the German version which I can search automatically (and where
obviously a few setters were lost).
Still I would be reluctant to assume that "Barbara Braun's" book of this
title was all that trashy, simply because it would make the person of the
imaginary reviewer too inconsistent. Somebody who has written so
perceptively on CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE, slipping into the mind of its author,
can hardly proceed to praise mere kitsch. Or if he does, it would imply
that in a corner of his mind Nabokov too had a faible for kitsch.
In any case, to me it seems too far-fetched to read something particularly
nasty into the name of ist author, "Barbara Braun". If you find a barbarian
in Barbara and a Nazi in Braun, WHEN LILACS LAST would have been written by
an American Nazi barbarian, and an imaginary reviewer who finds such a book
suffused by a "deep human glow" would seem to be utterly unqualified to
speak well of CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE.
There are a few books written by American lady authors and published
between 1940 and 1960 with lilacs in their title in the LoC catalog. I
don't know any of them. Perhaps someone wants to check whether one of them
is similar to the book described by Charlotte in LOLITA or in the appendix
to CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE.
Dieter E. Zimmer
Hamburg, Germany