Dear Carolyn,
It was a serious response (though not intended for his birthday -- that was
an editorial idea). I agree that these are apparently rather pitiful pieces of
evidence for his lovingkindness, and an extermination-camp commandant could
doubtless provide apparently equivalent or better evidence. But I am
somehow convinced of VN's basic true kindness, as opposed to the
sentimental "kindness" of the commandant. I was dismayed that I could
think of no better evidence than these two feeble examples. Perhaps I am too
easily swayed by VN's explicitly stated love of kindness and dislike of
cruelty, but they always struck me as genuine.
What I find most questionable, or at least puzzling, is his insistence
that "Lolita" is "pure" and "abstract", so utterly removed from his own
concerns, whereas his most casual references in interviews, and other parts of
his oeuvre, so frequently return quite (to me) unexpectedly and arbitrarily to
the paedophilic theme, like a sore thumb. I am dismayed not so much by the
apparent obsession as by the suspicion that he is simply not honest here, when
one feels that in an interview, especially one prepared to be read
from index cards, his readers are entitled to expect honesty -- the
truth, even if not necessarily the whole truth. It is true that he said art
itself is a form of deception, but surely we are entitled to expect that his
writings and interviews about himself and his art should not be.
I am surprised that there appears to have been no discussion of this. What
do others think?
Anthony Stadlen