-------- Original Message --------
Dear Jerry,
so if we compare likelihoods (and that' is all we can do as things
stand),
one could deduce the following hypothesis. VN knew Southey's letters
well
enough. Though if the several differing editions of them are as rare
elsewhere as they are in German libraries, he might not have known them
all.
And please put a shelf full of Southey on somebody's desk and ask him
to
find what he said about rats! (Now that 'The doctor, etc." is available
online, he will be through with the search a few days earlier,
discovering
that Southey was bent on the extermination of rats!) I mean to say that
if
you don't know beforehand that you are looking for rats you probably
won't
find anything. Probably you would find only what you targetted in your
search. How wonderful that Wikipedia now leads readers directly to
several
of those Southey quotes. Three years ago, I did not imagine that would
ever
happen.
So VN could have found various references to Angus MacDiarmid in
Southey's
letter. The latter's bizarre prose may have roused his curiosity, but
the
few short phrases Southey quotes at different loci would probably not
have
been sufficient to make the connection to 'Finnegans Wake'. For that he
would have needed some longer passage. And if he did not come upon
MacDiarmid's extremely rare book itself, he may have come upon that of
Fittis (1891) which seems to have lingered on in the minds of some
readers
and librarians, as even a reprint was published in 1975. There he would
have
found all he needed for his paragraph on Kinbote's academic pursuits in
a
nutshell. But it may also have been the other way around: he first
happened
to find that passage in Fittis and by it was directed to Southey in
whose
letters he found various other interesting items, among them the two
extensive descriptions of Mrs. Coleridge's silly "Lingo-Grande" and his
praise for roast rat. As VN once more studied Swift for PF, there also
is
the possibility that the "little language" Swift used with Stella
directed
VN to the baby talk of other men of letters.
Without further evidence, I am afraid we cannot determine which way the
information took. Anyway, there now is enough of it to fully understand
the
crucial paragraph and to get it right in translation.
Dieter Zimmer, Berlin
Jan 11, 2009 -- 8:30am