I
have certainly read and enjoyed Jekyll/Hyde, and more than once, tho’
not for a few years now, for the interesting story that it is. I’d
always found its richest significance, for me, to be its value as one
of the great dual personality stories. It was in an early reading of
Jekyll/Hyde that I found the roots for a lot of what fascinated me not
only in literature, from Dracula to the many filmed stories (often by
Hitchcock) in which a personality known as benign and “normal” to some
is revealed as menacing or even psychotic to others. But I did not find
that this quality extended to Pale Fire, which I first understood as
comic, and later understood as a sort of elaboration on the
personalities in Lolita. Kinbote seemed to me a sort of dreamily
elaborated Humbert Humbert, though I don’t think I have either the time
or the brains to fully explain my idea. I don’t think Jekyll/Hyde is as
complex as PF, nor do I find Stevenson’s prose aped by VN.
Andrew