Dear Don,
Jansy asked me for the Pale Fire reference regarding Chapman's Homer.
"A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door."
I thought this joke pre-dated Nabokov - - and might have been an actual sports headline so I went a-googling. I didn't find a definitive answer, but I did find this interesting discussion:
In "Pale Fire" are the lines:
. . . Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-5
On Chapman's Homer . . .
Was there ever such a game, or is this another of Nabokov's jokes?
DW
To which came the following response:
Could have. Ben Chapman played for the Red Sox in 1937 and 1938 as I think an all-around utility player. In 1937 he had 7 HR wearing number 1 for the Red Sox, in 1938 he had 6 HR wearing number 9 (in other words, his stints with the Red Sox those two years were not consecutive). I couldn't find a way to look up in which games he hit those home runs and what the box scores were for those games, so I can't answer your question, but it's obviously conceivable. From 1930 to 1946 there were 90 of Chapman's homers overall, with the Yankees, Brooklyn, Washington, Cleveland, the Phillies, and the White Sox. From '44 to '46 he was a pitcher, with an overall W:L of 8:6 and 141 innings pitched.
Nabokov's interest in American baseball being limited, I imagine there really must have been such an event, even if the headline itself is just a joke. It must have been an old joke too. Nabokov is not above recirculating old jokes as Jansy and I discovered when we looked into the "what time's the next swan" joke in Laughter in the Dark.
Carolyn