Content-Type: message/rfc822; name="RE_ lock review.eml" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="RE_ lock review.eml" Return-Path: Received: from mailhost.auckland.ac.nz ([130.216.1.4]) by mtapop2.verizon.net (InterMail vM.4.01.03.00 201-229-121) with ESMTP id <20010122201146.HKXC20046820.mtapop2.verizon.net@mailhost.auckland.ac.nz> for ; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 14:11:46 -0600 Received: from foaex01.auckland.ac.nz (foaex01.auckland.ac.nz [130.216.239.8]) by mailhost.auckland.ac.nz (8.9.2/8.9.2/8.9.2-ua) with ESMTP id JAA04118 for ; Tue, 23 Jan 2001 09:09:02 +1300 (NZDT) Received: by foaex01.auckland.ac.nz with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) id ; Tue, 23 Jan 2001 09:08:17 +1300 Message-ID: From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" Subject: RE: lock review Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 09:08:14 +1300 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="koi8-r" X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Dear Don, Odd that you missed both versions of what I sent re the Lock review itself. Could you please post this before the "ament catkin botkin" note. What's with this "card for D. Barton Johnson" that appears at the bottom of messages--or sometimes in lieu of them? Anyway, here is what I would like to run, perhaps with a note that it was sent several days ago but did not come through: >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.