Andrea Pitzer: In Jeffrey
Meyers' Edmund Wilson: A Biography, Meyers notes that Nabokov used the term
"a salad of racial genes" (p. 286) to describe Wilson's fourth and last
wife, Elena Mumm Thornton, who was German and Russian. The phrase, of course, is
the same that HH uses to describe his father in Lolita. The quote is not
sourced...
JM: Elena had a great insight
into "Lolita" (contrary to Wilson's opinion) and well worth quoting it here.
I'll find her letter to VN, with his words describing her,
in "Dear Bynny/dear Volodya," and post it then.
Hafid Bouazza: ...
the doors of Elphinstone hospital (the poet Oliver Goldsmith was born near
Elphin, Ireland)
Fran Assa: Excerpt from "The Deserted Village"
of Oliver Goldsmith, apropos Lolita: "And thou,
sweet poetry thou loveliest maid,/.../Dear charming nymph,
neglected and decried,/.../ Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well!/../
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;/.../While self-dependent power can
time defy,/ As rocks resist the billows and the sky."
JM: A possible
direct reference to Golsmith, in "Lolita," which was once brought up
in relation to Joyce's rivers,washerwomen and the "Tigris eye",
with the mystery about tigers roaming Appalachia as described by
Humbert.
Writes HH: "I remember as a child in Europe
gloating over a map of North America that had "Appalachian Mountains" ...so
that the whole region they spanned...appeared to my imagination as a gigantic
Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant
conifers, le montagnard émigré in his bear skin glory, and Felis tigris
goldsmithi, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all
boiled down to a measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinerator, was
appalling. Farewell, Appalachia!"