S.Blackwell points out "the probably deliberate irony
of this interview's structure" ...Nabokov lists " no less than five unnoticed
"plums" ....For SB " It looks to me like a case of crypsis...while
simultaneously challenging the very notion of a "clear revelation" of anything,
especially personality--he's not Kinbote, he's Botkine-- (like the
"simple" and "sincere" pilloried in his lectures and interviews).
JM: VN was often, but not always,
deliberately misleading. In the long run he expected, he desired
that his readers would enjoy his jokes and decypher "something, but
never freudian-minded" about him... I
remember only two examples of conflicting remarks : in his biography of Gogol, he wrote that "The
crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the
undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without
giving something of yourself". Nevertheless, he insistently
affirmed that his life was not to be mistaken for his work. He saw his
characters as gargoyles and caryatids expelled to the outside of the cathedrals:
"they are outside my inner self like the
mournful monsters of a cathedral façade - demons placed there merely to show
that they have been booted out".
Changing the subject: I happened to
read again Borges's lecture on Coleridge. He not only asserted that for
Coleridge, Shakespeare was a creative force similar to Spinoza's God
as "natura naturans" but, cryptically including a mention to Francis
Bacon and his theory that God first created Paradise, went on to deal
with Coleridge's dream inside a dream in his
poem Kubla-Khan...
I wonder how familiar VN would be with
such a "paradaisical" theory ( Paradise and Ada's Shattal-tree placed
before everything else after the attic explorations), or how closely
he might have read Coleridge's oeuvre beside's the poet's scarce and
glittering poems.