L. Hochard: I agree with Joseph Aisenberg that even if HH
had kept CQ's name unchanged out of vindictiveness, JRay would have suppressed
it, so that
the pun on my cue/ my Q remains unexplained, or was never
intended.But as I see it, the contradiction this pun would seem to reveal
needn't be solved since John Ray is but a ghost who rapidly fizzles out.
JM: I don't have Nabokov's English
"Speak, Memory" here, but Nabokov informs, in the Foreword
to his Memoirs, that various names in them shall be changed to avoid
hurting the feelings of those who are alive and to avoid disturbing the
dead ( he adds that the altered names will appear in the Index, for his own
convenience, with inverted commas ...) A nice contrast with HH. Shade
also introduced substantial changes in his poem...