JERRY FRIEDMAN WROTE:
To
Jim Twiggs: I humbly apologize for forgetting to tell you that I read
Dupee's essay and mostly agreed with it. I hope you'll say you cut and
pasted that excerpt instead of typing it.
So as Stan says, we may be
moving toward a consensus. . . . One place I disagree with Dupee is
that he calls Shade "rustic", and others here have agreed.
JT: No apology needed, of course. As for
"rustic," the setting of
Shade's university and his poem are both rustic in the neutral sense of
the word. I don't think it's too much of a stretch for a big city guy
like Dupee--he taught at Columbia for
39 years--to extend the nonpejorative sense to the poem proper. But
perhaps he was being slightly condescending. As one who spent close to
twenty years at Cornell, first as a grad student and then as an editor
at the university press, I can well attest to the fact that, in part
because of the setting of the school and in part because of our state
campus, including the agriculture, veterinary, and home ec (as it used
to be called) departments, we were frequently referred to as the cow
college of the Ivy
League.
(Doesn't VN somewhere mention this himself?) But during my two years as
a teaching fellow, some of the best students in my philosophy classes
entered through the state campus, where the tuition was easily
affordable. By contrast, all too many of my frat-boy students
bore a more than passing resemblance to the character of Andy on The Office,
whose one claim to sophistication is that he graduated from Cornell.
Such louts had some fun of their own with the fact that I was from
Arkansas.
Speaking
more strictly, though, I agree with almost everything Sam Gwynn says in
his post [yesterday] morning about Dickey, Shade, and the word
"rustic." But I
do wonder whether VN's Harvard experience (and Dupee's life at
Columbia) might seem qualitatively different from a life spent in
small-town schools like Cornell.
Turning to another matter, I appreciate Matt
Roth's calling attention to Ilya Vinitsky's new book, Ghostly
Paradoxes.
Last month Jansy and I exchanged some thoughts off List about an
anthology on the same subject, published (as coincidence would have it)
by Cornell
University Press in 1997: The Occult in Russian
and Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. Jansy
posted some interesting quotes from Robert Irwin's TLS review of this
book on 12/10/09.
In connection with the subject of VN and the
occult, Robert M. Adams, in his discussion of Pale Fire in his
book AfterJoyce: Studies in Fiction after Ulysses (Oxford,
1977), writes that "the theme [of intertwining narratives] strikes a
curious resonance upon a set of historical circumstances which, though
Nabokov denies having known of them, are too curious not to be
recorded."
Well
before Nabokov’s time at Cornell (Wordsmith University, through a
conflation of the well-known Wordsworth collection and Goldwin Smith Hall),
the Professor of English at Cornell was Hiram
Corson,
a man of mildly mystic leanings. When his beloved daughter died, the
professor sought to be put in touch with her through mediums. Somehow
he heard of one in England named Blavatsky (it was HPB herself),
corresponded with her, brought her to Ithaca, New York, and put her up
in his house. Evenings, she put him and Mrs. Corson in touch with the
spirit of their dead daughter; during the daytime, he brought her books
from the excellent Cornell University Library;
and under these circumstances, the two volumes of Isis Unveiled were
composed. The combination of these distinctive elements (a grieving
professor of English, his tragic daughter, a Russian outsider with
powerful if discordant vibrations, psychic messages among them) is a
spectacular if irrelevant coincidence, for there’s no overcoming the
author’s denial. Let it go down then among the oddities of literature.
Still, the ungainly devotion and wretched grief of the Shade family are
a center of human feeling amid the obsessions, reflections, and
self-absorbed word-games of Pale Fire. (AfterJoyce, pp. 154-155)
I
don't know whether VN's denial of knowledge of this incident is
anywhere else recorded, but Adams, being a young English professor at
Cornell during the 1950s, was well-placed to have put the question to
VN himself.
Finally,
all of those interested in the general topic of VN and the otherworld
may wish to read a short essay that I stumbled across recently:
Behind the Glass Pane: Vladimir
Nabokov’s “Perfection” and Transcendence
Annette Wiesner, University
of Stuttgart (1998)