Carolyn Kunin sends
the following pop quiz [... since the List has been discussing the question of
VN's "cruelty." Anyone care to hazard a guess as to the author who claimed to
love his/ her characters "like a cat loves a bird"? ...p.s. obviously not
the obvious ]
JM: I tried to
settle for Oscar Wilde, because he wrote that "Yet each man kills
the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with
a sword," but he was not referring to his characters and, for
him, "a book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be
written." (his stories for children serve as a proof for his
sincerity, whereas they inform us about his intentions qua social
satire and "Salomé").
Kinbote (who else could have
inserted Boswell's sentence in PF) must have understood Samuel
Johnson's plight to protect Hodge, who was fed with oysters, not mice and
birds...It must have been another Victorian writer.
A modern reviewer, about "Hate That Cat: A Novel,by Sharon
Creech," wrote in quite a different
spirit: "I said I love that book / like a cat loves birds /Love to
feast on its pages /Love to feast on /Perfect words!" ( is
it applicable to TOoL?)
PS: I just read the solution proffered by
James Twiggs ( Muriel Spark. A great quote,
all right. - FROM A REVIEW OF MARTIN STANNARD'S BIOGRAPHY OF SPARK:
But she
denied that her books were amoral or inhuman. They were simply true to life as
everyone knew it really was but did not like to say. ‘I love all my characters;
when I’m writing about them I love them most intensely, like a cat loves a
bird.’ http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/books/5258633/the-goaway-bird.thtml.)
In another posting he also indicated a source about
"neosincerity" ( http://www.nextbookpress.com/arts-and-culture/712/sincerity-now/ The
article mentions an exhibition called Neosincerity: The Difference Between the
Comic and the Cosmic Is a Single Letter--the subtitle being, obviously, a
reference to VN*).
* Dear Jim, I'm not sure who
mentioned the "comic/cosmic" S-difference first: Nabokov or Italo Calvino.
Both have probably reached it quite independently. Calvino uses it in
his "Cosmicomics")