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EDNOTE. See last paragraph. Then take a look a Michael Juliar's essay on ZEMBLA at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/apepics.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 8:43 PM
Subject: Nabokov's revelation that the idea of Lolita first came to him ...
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/apepics.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/02/08/bobov01.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/02/08/bomain.html
Novelists and names
(Filed: 08/02/2004)
John Gross reviews Madame Bovary, C'est Moi! by AndrИ Bernard
If a novel is any good, the characters in it exist in their own right. Trying to track down real-life originals seldom does much to enhance your appreciation. And though the quest for originals is obviously a legitimate activity for literary biographers, it is also an area where they are liable to simplify or exaggerate. The excessively direct identification of fictional characters with real people in George Painter's life of Proust is a famous case in point.
You won't find Proust in AndrИ Bernard's Madame Bovary, C'est Moi!. You won't find much about the great masterpieces of fiction in general. Mr Bernard, who works in publishing in New York, seems more at home with popular classics, mystery stories and the like.
This isn't as much of a limitation as it may sound, since he doesn't claim to be conducting a serious inquiry into the relationship between fiction and reality. His book is essentially a light-hearted scrapbook. Its entries for individual characters are dolled up with lively little drawings, and interspersed with quotations - almost all of them unhackneyed - from novelists discussing their craft. There are also lots of boxes devoted to different categories of characters. The Doctors range from Dr Zhivago to Dr No; the Alliterative Characters include Charlie Chan, Willy Wonka, Billy Budd and - why not? - Big Brother.
Interesting scraps of information are doled out along the way. We learn that Scott Fitzgerald thought that Daisy's husband in The Great Gatsby was a more significant character than Gatsby himself; that Kurtz in Heart of Darkness was originally going to be called Klein; that the "Nero" of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is because Stout wanted his famous detective to have the same kind of first name as his own, something Roman and autocratic.
As for the question of real-life originals, it is striking and rather disappointing how often in Bernard's account the road leads back to the author himself. Flaubert's identification with Emma Bovary gives the book its title. But on Bernard's showing James Thurber might equally have said, "Walter Mitty, c'est moi", and P. D. James might equally say, "Adam Dalgleish, c'est moi" - and there are many other examples.
On the face of it Flaubert's remark was a complete paradox, but Bernard doesn't pause to consider what he meant by it: he is not much interested in psychological complexities. Where he is much more assured is when he has a straightforward story to tell - the complicated genesis of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, for instance; the process by which Perry Mason evolved from a lawyer called Ed Stark to a lawyer called Ed Stone to the finished product.
Detectives are his strong suit. He traces the origins of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee (originally Dallas McGee: the name was changed after the assassination of JFK) and Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn (named after the founder of Dulwich College, where the author's father went to school). He points out that Donald Westlake's Parker is distinguished by his inability to park - which is, I suppose, moderately amusing, but hardly in the same class as a name-joke as, say, Michael Frayn's grande dame Lady Driver in his play Donkeys' Years.
Often he spends more time discussing the names of characters rather than the characters themselves, and not always very rewardingly. An entry for Ruth Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford arouses expectations, but all we learn about him is that Miss Rendell decided to call him Wexford after spending a holiday in Wexford. To which the only response can be a massive uh-huh.
It must also be said that Bernard manages to pack in a fair number of errors. He associates Dorian Gray with Oscar Wilde's friend John Gray, for example, but apart from consistently misspelling John Gray's name as "Grey" he clearly has very little idea who he was: there is no indication that he was a highly original poet, or that he later became a well-known priest.
Again, in recording that Long John Silver was modelled, up to a point, on the poet W. E. Henley, he describes Henley as Robert Louis Stevenson's "school chum". The two men were in fact in their twenties when they first met. And Kim appears in a list of characters with only one name, although Kipling emphatically endowed him with a second name, O'Hara.
Still, the book has lots of bright moments, and it contains at least one useful reminder that literary inspiration works in more mysterious ways than all the talk about models and real-life sources suggests - Nabokov's revelation that the idea of Lolita first came to him after reading an article about a monkey drawing pictures in its cage in the Paris zoo.
a.. John Gross's books include 'After Shakespeare' (Oxford).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/02/08/bobov01.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/02/08/bomain.html
Title
Madame Bovary, C'est Moi!: The Great Characters of Literature and Where They Came From
Author
AndrИ Bernard
Publisher
W. W. Norton, ё12.99, 135 pp
ISBN
0393051811
Buy this book
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let the advanced features & services of MSN Internet Software maximize your online time.
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 8:43 PM
Subject: Nabokov's revelation that the idea of Lolita first came to him ...
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/apepics.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/02/08/bobov01.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/02/08/bomain.html
Novelists and names
(Filed: 08/02/2004)
John Gross reviews Madame Bovary, C'est Moi! by AndrИ Bernard
If a novel is any good, the characters in it exist in their own right. Trying to track down real-life originals seldom does much to enhance your appreciation. And though the quest for originals is obviously a legitimate activity for literary biographers, it is also an area where they are liable to simplify or exaggerate. The excessively direct identification of fictional characters with real people in George Painter's life of Proust is a famous case in point.
You won't find Proust in AndrИ Bernard's Madame Bovary, C'est Moi!. You won't find much about the great masterpieces of fiction in general. Mr Bernard, who works in publishing in New York, seems more at home with popular classics, mystery stories and the like.
This isn't as much of a limitation as it may sound, since he doesn't claim to be conducting a serious inquiry into the relationship between fiction and reality. His book is essentially a light-hearted scrapbook. Its entries for individual characters are dolled up with lively little drawings, and interspersed with quotations - almost all of them unhackneyed - from novelists discussing their craft. There are also lots of boxes devoted to different categories of characters. The Doctors range from Dr Zhivago to Dr No; the Alliterative Characters include Charlie Chan, Willy Wonka, Billy Budd and - why not? - Big Brother.
Interesting scraps of information are doled out along the way. We learn that Scott Fitzgerald thought that Daisy's husband in The Great Gatsby was a more significant character than Gatsby himself; that Kurtz in Heart of Darkness was originally going to be called Klein; that the "Nero" of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is because Stout wanted his famous detective to have the same kind of first name as his own, something Roman and autocratic.
As for the question of real-life originals, it is striking and rather disappointing how often in Bernard's account the road leads back to the author himself. Flaubert's identification with Emma Bovary gives the book its title. But on Bernard's showing James Thurber might equally have said, "Walter Mitty, c'est moi", and P. D. James might equally say, "Adam Dalgleish, c'est moi" - and there are many other examples.
On the face of it Flaubert's remark was a complete paradox, but Bernard doesn't pause to consider what he meant by it: he is not much interested in psychological complexities. Where he is much more assured is when he has a straightforward story to tell - the complicated genesis of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, for instance; the process by which Perry Mason evolved from a lawyer called Ed Stark to a lawyer called Ed Stone to the finished product.
Detectives are his strong suit. He traces the origins of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee (originally Dallas McGee: the name was changed after the assassination of JFK) and Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn (named after the founder of Dulwich College, where the author's father went to school). He points out that Donald Westlake's Parker is distinguished by his inability to park - which is, I suppose, moderately amusing, but hardly in the same class as a name-joke as, say, Michael Frayn's grande dame Lady Driver in his play Donkeys' Years.
Often he spends more time discussing the names of characters rather than the characters themselves, and not always very rewardingly. An entry for Ruth Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford arouses expectations, but all we learn about him is that Miss Rendell decided to call him Wexford after spending a holiday in Wexford. To which the only response can be a massive uh-huh.
It must also be said that Bernard manages to pack in a fair number of errors. He associates Dorian Gray with Oscar Wilde's friend John Gray, for example, but apart from consistently misspelling John Gray's name as "Grey" he clearly has very little idea who he was: there is no indication that he was a highly original poet, or that he later became a well-known priest.
Again, in recording that Long John Silver was modelled, up to a point, on the poet W. E. Henley, he describes Henley as Robert Louis Stevenson's "school chum". The two men were in fact in their twenties when they first met. And Kim appears in a list of characters with only one name, although Kipling emphatically endowed him with a second name, O'Hara.
Still, the book has lots of bright moments, and it contains at least one useful reminder that literary inspiration works in more mysterious ways than all the talk about models and real-life sources suggests - Nabokov's revelation that the idea of Lolita first came to him after reading an article about a monkey drawing pictures in its cage in the Paris zoo.
a.. John Gross's books include 'After Shakespeare' (Oxford).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/02/08/bobov01.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/02/08/bomain.html
Title
Madame Bovary, C'est Moi!: The Great Characters of Literature and Where They Came From
Author
AndrИ Bernard
Publisher
W. W. Norton, ё12.99, 135 pp
ISBN
0393051811
Buy this book
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let the advanced features & services of MSN Internet Software maximize your online time.