Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Of bards and beards and then Browns, Brownings,
Pippa and peaches, Andrea del Sarto...
Pippa and peaches, Andrea del Sarto...
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While I was going thru assorted sources to learn more about Andrea del Sarto and Browning, I found a picture of the poet and... his beard! His beard...isn't it another example of the "newgate frill"? Perhaps it's Browning who is indicated in Pale Fire, another Robert, another poet under a different guise, all the time?
Here are interesting links to Nabokov's work. I started with Beerbohm's "Brown" who led me to Browning's poem ( cf. item II from the site that carries RB's image).
Next, various interconnections linking peaches, Brown, Browning in Lolita, PF and Ada.
I-
Max Beerbohm's playwright, "Brown Savonarola" ( who, as a boy, had been mocked at school because his parents christened him Ladbroke Brown) had named him his "literary executor". The narrator tried to find a producer for Brown's unfinished piece (the playwright was struck dead by an omnibus right in front of the narrator, while he was in the process of describing the risk of his dying in exactly the same way). Next, he attempted to complete the missing act, with even less success. In Brown's play, at the end of Act. III, a Pope enters to demand the arrest of Savonarola and Lucrezia Borgia.
We read [ Re-enter Guelfs and Ghibellines fighting. SAV. and LUC. are arrested by Papal officers. Enter MICHAEL ANGELO. ANDREA DEL SARTO appears for a moment at a window. PIPPA passes. Brothers of the Misericordia go by, singing a Requiem for Francesca da Rimini. Enter BOCCACCIO, BENVENUTO CELLINI and many others, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves but scarcely audible...]
What an array of names and "scarcely audible" allusions in Max B's short-piece. As in "Lolita" (revamped in Pale Fire) we find a surprisingly displaced "Pippa passes" and then Browning again, through Andrea del Sarto ( the poem he wrote in Florence).
In Ada there are several Browns (twisting around Robert B. and René Chateaubriand), there's Browning, the poet, a "Brown Hill College," where Aqua studied. Also Ada once attended a Brownhill school which keeps to old-fashioned rules under a certain Miss Cleft, its headmistress.
This reference takes us back to "Lolita" where there's the most obvious reference to the poet Browning ( "She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the coke...You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction." ) but now, it's not Ada's mistress, Miss Cleft, who is mentioned, but a quote from Robert Browning ( Lolita: "Wow! Looks swank," remarked my vulgar darling ...and with a childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had struck in the peach-cleft-to quote Robert Browning.")
Ada teems with "Browning's peaches" ( "Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind - fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts...")
In Pale Fire, Kinbote mentions Browning directly ( on lines 671-672, for Shade's "The Untamed Seahorse - "See Browning's My Last Duchess. See it and condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry - or a long poem, alas - with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past..." There's Gradus, with digestive problems, when he almost drops his gun ( a "Browning") in the toilet.
And yet, in the beginning, there's always, "Lolita" (and other assorted Browns and Brownings) ...
II -
"Edward Dowden in his fine but now forgotten book, The Life of Robert Browning (London. Dent, 1915/1927), in a footnote on page 191, states that
"Mrs Andrew Crosse, in her article, 'John Kenyon and his Friends' (Temple Bar Magazine, April 1900), writes: 'When the Brownings were living in Florence, Kenyon had begged them to procure for him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti of Andea del Sarto and his wife. Mr Browning was unable to get the copy made with any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea del Sarto - and sent it to Kenyon!'."...
I would argue that the voice in the Victorian poem is not only that of Browning's 'Andrea' but is that of Browning himself, of a Browning deeply resenting Elizabeth's greater fame during her lifetime, and that Robert Browning has thus constructed of Andrea Del Sarto's double portrait his own 'Portrait of a Marriage'. Reverberating with these portraits of wives is also that of Browning's 'My Last Duchess'. "
(Cf. Robert Browning's Andrea Del Sarto as Double Self-Portrait - Anglo-Italian Studies, Robert Browning, Andrea Del Sarto, Lucrezia Del Fede, ... Ritratto di Andrea del Sarto e di Lucrezia del Fede sua moglie. ... www.florin.ms/AndreaSarto.html )
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Here are interesting links to Nabokov's work. I started with Beerbohm's "Brown" who led me to Browning's poem ( cf. item II from the site that carries RB's image).
Next, various interconnections linking peaches, Brown, Browning in Lolita, PF and Ada.
I-
Max Beerbohm's playwright, "Brown Savonarola" ( who, as a boy, had been mocked at school because his parents christened him Ladbroke Brown) had named him his "literary executor". The narrator tried to find a producer for Brown's unfinished piece (the playwright was struck dead by an omnibus right in front of the narrator, while he was in the process of describing the risk of his dying in exactly the same way). Next, he attempted to complete the missing act, with even less success. In Brown's play, at the end of Act. III, a Pope enters to demand the arrest of Savonarola and Lucrezia Borgia.
We read [ Re-enter Guelfs and Ghibellines fighting. SAV. and LUC. are arrested by Papal officers. Enter MICHAEL ANGELO. ANDREA DEL SARTO appears for a moment at a window. PIPPA passes. Brothers of the Misericordia go by, singing a Requiem for Francesca da Rimini. Enter BOCCACCIO, BENVENUTO CELLINI and many others, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves but scarcely audible...]
What an array of names and "scarcely audible" allusions in Max B's short-piece. As in "Lolita" (revamped in Pale Fire) we find a surprisingly displaced "Pippa passes" and then Browning again, through Andrea del Sarto ( the poem he wrote in Florence).
In Ada there are several Browns (twisting around Robert B. and René Chateaubriand), there's Browning, the poet, a "Brown Hill College," where Aqua studied. Also Ada once attended a Brownhill school which keeps to old-fashioned rules under a certain Miss Cleft, its headmistress.
This reference takes us back to "Lolita" where there's the most obvious reference to the poet Browning ( "She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the coke...You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction." ) but now, it's not Ada's mistress, Miss Cleft, who is mentioned, but a quote from Robert Browning ( Lolita: "Wow! Looks swank," remarked my vulgar darling ...and with a childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had struck in the peach-cleft-to quote Robert Browning.")
Ada teems with "Browning's peaches" ( "Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind - fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts...")
In Pale Fire, Kinbote mentions Browning directly ( on lines 671-672, for Shade's "The Untamed Seahorse - "See Browning's My Last Duchess. See it and condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry - or a long poem, alas - with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past..." There's Gradus, with digestive problems, when he almost drops his gun ( a "Browning") in the toilet.
And yet, in the beginning, there's always, "Lolita" (and other assorted Browns and Brownings) ...
II -
"Edward Dowden in his fine but now forgotten book, The Life of Robert Browning (London. Dent, 1915/1927), in a footnote on page 191, states that
"Mrs Andrew Crosse, in her article, 'John Kenyon and his Friends' (Temple Bar Magazine, April 1900), writes: 'When the Brownings were living in Florence, Kenyon had begged them to procure for him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti of Andea del Sarto and his wife. Mr Browning was unable to get the copy made with any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea del Sarto - and sent it to Kenyon!'."...
I would argue that the voice in the Victorian poem is not only that of Browning's 'Andrea' but is that of Browning himself, of a Browning deeply resenting Elizabeth's greater fame during her lifetime, and that Robert Browning has thus constructed of Andrea Del Sarto's double portrait his own 'Portrait of a Marriage'. Reverberating with these portraits of wives is also that of Browning's 'My Last Duchess'. "
(Cf. Robert Browning's Andrea Del Sarto as Double Self-Portrait - Anglo-Italian Studies, Robert Browning, Andrea Del Sarto, Lucrezia Del Fede, ... Ritratto di Andrea del Sarto e di Lucrezia del Fede sua moglie. ... www.florin.ms/AndreaSarto.html )
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
