-------- Original Message --------
Bless your cotton socks, Andrea. It's rather a mixed blessing to find
that Gardner and Nabokov did NOT engage in direct, extensive
correspondence! Earlier suggestions on this list that MG and VN had
enjoyed a lengthy exchange of ideas came as a bombshell to moi. How
could I have missed such news concerning two of my all-time heroes?
And where were those precious discussions that might throw light on
the many vexing questions relating to VN's attitude to "real"
mathematics (as opposed to his scorn for bean-counting arithmetic, as
brilliantly related in his final Lecture on Literature)?
We are now left hoping that MG's exchanges with Véra might reveal
something of interest, although that seems unlikely judging from the
many VN-letters admirably selected by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew
Brucoli.
Thinking of "contacts" and "influences" between writers and
scientists, I found this in the TLS that had me rolling on the floor
at the sheer, ridiculous exuberance of Paul Valéry's "networking." Eat
your heart out, Vladimir:
"Valéry’s circle of contacts remains dazzling. He was intimate with
leading poets and writers (Mallarmé, Gide, Rilke); he worked alongside
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Gabriele d’Annunzio, John
Galsworthy and Stefan Zweig; he exchanged ideas with André Malraux,
Jean Giraudoux, Colette and Paul Claudel (but also with George
Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley); his lectures
at the Collège de France were an influence on Jacques Lacan, Roland
Barthes, Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul de Man. Who else with
such a profile could also have had Einstein as trusted interlocutor
and colleague, discussed atoms with Niels Bohr, or the crisis of
representation in sciences with the likes of Paul Langevin and Émile
Borel; compared notes with Ravel and Stravinsky, Degas and Picasso;
collaborated with Bergson and Sir James Frazer; interacted with both
Pétain and de Gaulle; interviewed Mussolini and crossed paths with an
entire gallery of Europe’s interwar power-brokers? To say nothing of
the cast list of princesses, duchesses, countesses and other denizens
of the cosmopolitan, high-society Paris salons who provided the writer
with dinners, contacts, funding, entertainment, country-seat
vacationing, confidantes and lovers."
Yet, yet: where does Valéry stand now compared with Nabokov in those
impromptu league tables of "Celeb Immortality?"
"Le don de vivre a passé dans les fleurs" (Valéry's seaside-cemetry
epitaph)
skb