Perhaps the indication about VN's words on "his
watermark" is not in Strong Opinions.After
recovering various interesting observations about VN's references
to composition and style I came no closer to his words about
a specific "watermark."
I tried the internet but found only Vera's words: "Vera
Nabokov identified the 'otherworld' as Nabokov's watermark" in
linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304347997852076.
Here are two other possible indications, still to be
explored: "The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of Pattern in
Vladimir ..." de L de la Durantaye - 2006 -For Nabokov, this
'intricate watermark' stamped upon our life becomes visible first with the aid
of 'the lamp of art'. camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/35/4/301 or, de
La Durantaye's Style is Matter: "The watermarks [Nabokov] so carefully
stamps on the pages of his works are not just the means through which he
discovers his own 'intricate watermark,' ... muse.jhu.edu/journals/nabokov_studies/v011/11.pifer.html
Searching for VN's words about "watermark", I found another
pertinent quote (SO,Vintage, 16/17) with a penciled question mark ("human
characters=carousing hunters?")
" I don't write consecutively from the
beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end. I just fill in the
gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind,
picking out a piece here and a piece there and filling out the sky and part of
the landscape and part of the - I don't know, the carousing
hunters."
pg.69: "I find cards especially convenient
when not following the logical sequence of chapters but preparing instead this
or that passage at any point of the novel and filling in the gaps in no special
order...The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot
understand...how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of
phrase has just come to me."
aphorisms (page 155) "the best part of a
writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his
style." (p.63) "The writer's art is his real
passport. His identity should be immediately recognized by a special pattern
or unique coloration. His habitat my confirm the correctness of the
determination but should not lead to it"
on a "monstrous semblance of a novel" ( Pale Fire, in SO,
p.75): "The form of Pale Fire is specifically, if not
generically, new." ( We learn, extratextually, about Kinbote's
suicide**). When an author writes "the end" (in
his mind or on paper) this signal resignifies the entire novel. Can anyone
help me locate one, or two, of TOoL's "finis"? After all, "Dying is Fun," does
not apply to Flora,to Laura or Aurora. Wild, in Ivan
Vaughn's "TOoL," is merely a character named Philip Sauvage* (I forgot
where Hubert H. Hubert fits.) The end note on "erase, exponge, etc" is not an
intended ending by VN, or is it?
....................................................................................
* Strong Opinions, Vintage, p.258: "...in
this peculiar group of peculiar French there is the word sauvage, which
according to Mr. Wilson should not have appeared in my rendering of [...]
"sauvage, sad, silent"; but apart from the fact that is has no exact English
equivalent, I chose this signal word to warn readers that Pushkin was using
dika not simply in the sense of "wild" or "unsociable" but in a Gallic
sense as a translation of 'sauvage."
** SO page 74: "I think it is so nice that
the day on which committed suicide ( and he certainly did after putting the last
touches to his edition of the poem) happens to be both the anniversary of
Pushkin's Lyceum and that of 'poor old man Swift' 's death" (see
variant in note to line 231)" (the interviewer has
asked VN about Finnegans Wake and if it was "just a coincidence that Kinbote's
'Forword" to Pale Fire is dated 'Oct.19,' which is the date of Swift's
death")
A lost and found quotation (SO.p.44) for Februaty's
L-postings on prosody,poetry and prose: "As in
today's scientific classifications, there is a lot of overlapping in our concept
of poetry and prose today. The bamboo bridge between them is the
metaphor."