R. S. Gwynn said: "Interesting material, which I'm glad to have. Ford was a "real" poet (no cornpone Ozarks versifier he), and I suspect that VN was torn between the quality of the line and the poet's name, which would have appealed to his sense of the absurd. E. F. is one of the few poets of that generation ever mentioned by VN; his comments on Lowell, for example, are generally dismissive (worse when he considers Lowell as translator). I have heard that he praised Richard Wilbur, but he rarely mentioned anyone else born after 1915."
MR: As you mention, the inclusion of Edsel Ford in PF is somewhat remarkable. He is the only truly contemporary writer mentioned, and VN actually had to break the fictional timeline of the narrative in order to include Ford's lines. Kinbote, writing in 1959, say the lines are from a poem "recently published," but in fact the lines were not published until 1961. VN has, in Eysteinian fashion, placed a real object in his fictional milieu, but it is an object from the future, like one of those drawings from a children's magazine where one must find "what's wrong with this picture," and upon closer inspection we see that the horse and buggy has a steering wheel. At the risk of being obnoxious, I will quote from my note, regarding VN's reasons for including the lines. After pointing out that the theme of "The Image of Desire" connects directly to Kinbote's desire to see the image of his Zembla in Shade's poem, I say:
"Soon after the Ford allusion, Kinbote castigates Shade for his inclusion of Starover Blue, "a real person," in an otherwise "invented milieu." This criticism echoes Kinbote's earlier criticism of the painter Eystein, who plants real objects in his trompe l'oeil paintings. Yet Nabokov's inclusion of Ford and his poem in the commentary is nothing if not an Eysteinian gesture. Eystein's paintings depend on a kind of triple sensation. First the viewer thinks the painted subject real. Then the viewer realizes the painting's artifice. Last the viewer realizes there is something real in the painting after all. The Ford allusion works precisely the same way. When we first encounter it, we recognize a real person, Edsel Ford the automobile maker. We then realize that the reference can't be real, since Ford was not a poet. But in the end we discover that the poet and poem actually do exist, though not quite as we first imagined."
On a slightly different subject, I have experienced some Nabokovian awe in the coincidental parallels between the lives and works of Shade and Ford. Both were rural, folksy formalist poets, given to pithy aphorisms. And Ford, like Shade, experienced mysterious blackouts (during the mid to late 1960's) before his early, tragic death. Ford's blackouts were the result of his brain tumor, which was diagnosed much too late. My friend Tiffany DeRewal has posited a scenario in which Shade's early fits were the result of glioma related to Tuberous (Cerebral) Sclerosis.
best,
Matt