Dear Matt and List,
MR wrote: "...unless Edsel Ford was a visiting writer at Wordsmith, I don't
think we have reason to believe that Kinbote ran into him anywhere. His only
access to "The Image of Desire" would have been through publication in a book or
periodical, but as I said, the poem appeared for the first time in
1961."
Yes, MR is absolutely correct. Independently of the meaning VN could have given to the
word "publication", we see that Kinbote had no reason to run into Ford
anywhere ( except Dr Sutton's tottering car). So he must have been endowed with real prophetic
powers, at least as real as Eystein's inclusion of material objects, besides
paint, into his trompe l'oeils oils.
But I must ask: why did VN "go out of his way" to praise
Edself Ford and add this "real" prophetic element to
PF?
Was it related to Gradus? Was it to emphasize the catastrophic meaning attached to
the Red Admiral butterfly? Are there other examples of CK's
prophecies?
While
I puzzled about it, I remembered S.Johnson's worries about Hodges' very earthly
future safety and checked a bit further. If we follow his (SJ's) own Annotations on
Shakespeare we find after Hamlet's soliloquium: "...who would bear the vexations of life which might be ended by a
bare bodkin, but that he is afraid of something in unknown
futurity?" And
yet, SJ's "futurity" applies to the "hereafter"
and, apparently, such fear only pertains to Shade's, not
to Kinbote's IPH conjectures.