Subject
Re Victor-L.I.Shigaev (fwd)
Date
Body
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 21:50:17 -0500 (EST)
From: ESAMPVN@aol.com
Sylvia Weiser Wendel wrote on 3/4/97:
>I too reread 'Shigaev' and noted that the title character
>spends hours brushing out his trousers on the landing.
>Didn't Pnin do this while residing in the Clements' house?
>Also in 'Shigaev' the narrator Victor mentions...the
>"paterfamilias"..."who, incidentally, was so infernally
>meticulous that he would bring his own shoe trees with him."
>...and LO-lovers will recognize this shoe tree hangup as also
>belonging to 'the late Harold Haze'--and were not his shoes,
>as recalled by HH, "curiously small"?
Earl Samson's response.: Yes, Pnin did indeed obsessively brush his
clothes; the passage Sylvia
remembers goes: "He had an irritating way of standing on the landing and
assiduously brushing his clothes there, the brush clinking against the
buttons, for at least five minutes every blessed morning." (Section 4 of
Chapter Two) The "every blessed" is Clements' voice in quasi-direct
discourse: this habit was one of many Pninian quirks that irritated Laurence
before he and Pnin discovered the "tender mental concord between [them]".
And the shoe tree hangup belongs to Pnin as well as to Lo's "father." In
Sec 1 of Chap One: "Among other articles indispensable for a Pninian
overnight stay...such as shoe trees, apples, dictionaries, and so on..." (p.
15 in the Doubleday hardback); and among the list of belongings he brought to
the Clements house are "five pairs of handsome, curiously small shoes with
ten shoe trees rooted in them" (p. 35). I don't remember, and don't have
time (=am too lazy) too look it up, if the "curiously small shoes" occur in
_Lolita_ as well as _Pnin_. Question: did those shoe trees belong first to
Pnin or to HH (the other one), since, if I'm not mistaken, the composition of
the two novels overlapped to a degree.
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 21:50:17 -0500 (EST)
From: ESAMPVN@aol.com
Sylvia Weiser Wendel wrote on 3/4/97:
>I too reread 'Shigaev' and noted that the title character
>spends hours brushing out his trousers on the landing.
>Didn't Pnin do this while residing in the Clements' house?
>Also in 'Shigaev' the narrator Victor mentions...the
>"paterfamilias"..."who, incidentally, was so infernally
>meticulous that he would bring his own shoe trees with him."
>...and LO-lovers will recognize this shoe tree hangup as also
>belonging to 'the late Harold Haze'--and were not his shoes,
>as recalled by HH, "curiously small"?
Earl Samson's response.: Yes, Pnin did indeed obsessively brush his
clothes; the passage Sylvia
remembers goes: "He had an irritating way of standing on the landing and
assiduously brushing his clothes there, the brush clinking against the
buttons, for at least five minutes every blessed morning." (Section 4 of
Chapter Two) The "every blessed" is Clements' voice in quasi-direct
discourse: this habit was one of many Pninian quirks that irritated Laurence
before he and Pnin discovered the "tender mental concord between [them]".
And the shoe tree hangup belongs to Pnin as well as to Lo's "father." In
Sec 1 of Chap One: "Among other articles indispensable for a Pninian
overnight stay...such as shoe trees, apples, dictionaries, and so on..." (p.
15 in the Doubleday hardback); and among the list of belongings he brought to
the Clements house are "five pairs of handsome, curiously small shoes with
ten shoe trees rooted in them" (p. 35). I don't remember, and don't have
time (=am too lazy) too look it up, if the "curiously small shoes" occur in
_Lolita_ as well as _Pnin_. Question: did those shoe trees belong first to
Pnin or to HH (the other one), since, if I'm not mistaken, the composition of
the two novels overlapped to a degree.