S K-B [ "Happy is the novelist who manages to
preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work
of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure
there, among spurious lives." Speak, Memory, Chapter Twelve, 5]: "This
masterful sentence serves as a reminder of Karl Popper’s warning that one cannot
write “everything all at once.” At least not in a linear, natural-language
text...The sentence is also a reminder, if such were needed, that Speak, Memory
is a treasured insight into VN’s world and mind, uniquely defying the labels of
memoir and autobiography."
JM: There's somewhere in "Speak, Memory"
another sentence where Nabokov states that he doesn't believe
that people "think in words," and that he, himself, thinks with
images (there's all that part of Joyce and "shadows of thougts," etc.)
He equally mentions that his novels are visually ready in his
mind, whereas his words come tumbling and stumbling when tries to use
words to set them down on paper ( for me, this is still a very curious
assertion, in line with multilayered boards for synchronized chess-games).
Perhaps, later on, I'll quote from RLSK where V. reacts to
Sebastian's style and the everspreading field of associations which need to
be held in check before he is able to write down a simple sentence.
While discussing the signifier "GREEN" (now moving away from
the sensation of color knock-knocking at my door) I affirmed that in VN's
short-stories the word "viridate" appears two times, and
"verdant". I must have made a mistake and I'll continue
to check on my underlined texts ( one of the sentences is so clear in my mind:
"before they began to viridate...", but I haven't found it
yet).
In the meantime, let me bring what I found in connection to
"vert" and "verdure". The first source is, of course, "Pnin": "Cendrillon's shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel
fur — vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival
of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair
which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated, but from
veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur,
having a bluish, or better say sizïy, columbine, shade — 'from
columba, Latin for "pigeon ", as somebody here well knows — so you see,
Mrs Fire, you were, in general, correct.' " There is a gradual
variation from green into ash-gray and paloma colors.
Ver-ver occurs in Ada, I think. There's also "miniver fur".
There is verdure all over, though. It's in Lolita, Ada,
several short-stories. I picked only one up: " It was a
pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large
cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly
covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is),
towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle
(Cloud,Castle, Lake)