[Dear Editors--if you have not sent my prior message re Martin Gardner, please delete it. If you have please run this corrected, more complete version anyway.]

 

In the interest of greater accuracy than my faulty memory can provide on its own, here is an excerpt from a spring 2008 interview I did with Martin Gardner, longtime columnist for Scientific American and author of The Annotated Alice, among many other titles:

 

Q: Did you and Vladimir Nabokov know each other?       

A: No, I never met him. I exchanged letters with his wife.

Q: Was that before or after Pale Fire?

A: I think that was after Pale Fire.

Q: How did you come to quote John Shade in The Ambidextrous Universe?

A: I read the book and I liked it… You know he mentions me in his book Ada. Did you know about that?

He was probably annoyed because when I quoted from the poem, I didn’t credit it to him, I credited it to his imaginary novelist [sic].

Q: But then he credited you as an invented philosopher--

A: And he misspelled my name! I don’t know if he did it on purpose or accidentally.

.....

Q: So you didn’t know Nabokov personally, but did you have other literary fans?

A: Isaac Asimov was a fan, and I got to know him fairly well as a result.

I hope this is of interest to at least some members of the list.

 

Andrea