J.A: [...] my theory that with Pale Fire it is the reader's catching something akin to Kinbote's fever, not because there is an ultimate answer to anything, but just because the fever itself is fun, thereby exploiting a basic component of our reasoning faculties, their amazing facility and will to know, and also their flawed perspective-marred flesh and blood limitations, which really make the novel such a novel machine.Nabokov is playing with the reader, not instructing them; the better they are at it the more they have a chance of missing the trees for the forest, to take to my point the blunt bathetic blade of an old saw--ha ha.
JM: Very well said and ...mentioning Father Brown  as the cherry on a cloud of whipped-cream ("missing the trees for the forest")?. 
 
Jay Livingston: I was watching Woody Allen's "Radio Days."   Mia Farrow plays Sally White, a 1940s radio gossip columnist.  The following occurs a little over an hour into the film. And now, the makers of Lady Lydia facial cream... bring you "Sally White and Her Gay White Way."
Good evening, and cheers to you all out there.My first exclusive--Clark Gable was in town this week in uniform...and where did he go?
To El Morocco, naturally.That brunette on his arm...was Lolly Hayes, an up-and-coming starlet.  Hope you had fun, Clark.
And didn't Rita Hayworth look stunning last night
...
 
JM: Lolly Hayes is suggestive, but I don't think HH ever called Lolita "Lolly ". Hayes* plaze with "Haze, Dolores", indeed. 
 
* - In VN's  novel we find a  Mrs.Hays (not Hayes), in HH's last moments with Lo. [ Cf. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish. [...] With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again." ]   A prophetic vision of Switzerland ? Swiss ancestors were commonly mentioned, does anyone know when VN introduced the Swiss in his novels? Here we have royal sunsets, witches and a "heterosexual" Kinbote?
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