Jansy: thanks for your tireless trawling for exciting Robert Browning links to VN. That your net also catches links to the colour Brown is a tad less er catching, since the original Anglo-Saxon nickname Brun referred to hair-colour, a connection long lost when the family name Bruning, attached to a Hugo, first emerged circa 1198 in the Pipe Rolls of Norfolk. Incidentally, surnames owe their existence to BIG government’s need to collect personal taxes! The Bruning surname, with diverse spellings including Browning, spread over the centuries (Robert’s fore-bears being well established in Dorset by the 14th century), and we even have Browning heraldry that might provide semiotic fodder to add to the verbal accidents of Browning tommy-guns and, who knows, Browning Gravy mixes:
A Coat of Arms granted to a Browning family of Gloucestershire depicts a barry wavy of six silver and blue. The Crest is a sinister arm from the elbow issuing from a cloud in the dexter, holding the hand above a serpent's head, erect from the middle, and looking toward the sinister proper.
Can we link Robert B’s beard to John Shade’s shaving interlude and the Abe Lincoln allusions? The definitions and dating of beard-styles, like Newgate and Tyburn Frills and Collars (originally thieves cant for the hangman’s noose), seem too vague to form strong opinions. Since VN makes overt, not-to-be-missed allusions to Robert Browning (ditto Frost, Eliot, Dryden, Pope et al), why do we search for obscure, hidden references? Readers know that VN knows all these poets, and VN knows that his readers know that he knows them ... Of course, VN knows all the obscure, or more kindly, less famous, poets too (e.g., Hugh MacDiarmid, whom I met in the flesh but was unknown to some Nabokovians). VN fooled us with his DIRECT mention of Edsel Ford! And according to Prof. Gwynn, John Shade is based on poet/critic Yvor Winters, which VN’s readers ought to know about but, I my case, didn’t until recently. Following Ron Rosenbaum’s ‘leaks,’ I can’t wait to buy Pale Fire, the unmolested Poem:
I was particularly struck by the degree of erudition about contemporary American poetry that Gwynn brought to his case that Nabokov meant "Pale Fire" to be a reproof to over-casual, over-personal, over-trivial trends in American poetry. A reproof to the belief that formal poetics could not capture deep feeling in traditional verse forms. And that Nabokov had modeled John Shade on the well-known traditionalist American poet Yvor Winters, who was a partisan of formal poetics.
http://www.slate.com/id/2261520/
I also note from Ben Kipela’s blog/essay, Nabokov the Trickster, that Winters’ opinion of VN can’t be located in print (is this true?) but can be deduced from his general writings.
By the way, is anyone interested in what Winters thought or might have thought of Lolita? He never wrote a single word about Nabokov that I am aware of, though they both taught at Stanford for a short while in 1941. I think Winters would have found Nabokov’s style fragmented and wasteful and his theme improperly developed. More importantly, he would have had very serious doubts about the use of an unreliable narrator. This matter is related to the issues discussed in the essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature.” Using a narrator like Humbert, I believe Winters would have said, forced Nabokov to write less well than he could have and provided him with no sound way to generalize his theme or fix what he wished to communicate about the complex experience of lust. In general, I think Winters would have said, the author who uses an unreliable narrator has no means to reach a final judgment of his subject matter, which amounts to an abdication of the writer’s primary responsibility and a short-circuiting of the chief source of literature’s power.
http://yvorwinters.blogspot.com/2009/02/nabokov-trickster.html
I conclude with how we Brit schoolboys first learned to love our dear bold, a-courting Browning:
"I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no offhand complimentary letter that I shall write . . . and there a graceful and natural end of the thing . . . In this addressing myself to you—your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too."
Wham-bang, we cheered. Knickers-off when I arrive. Your place or mine?
I must compare this with VN’s epistolary wooing of Véra!
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 26/07/2010 22:11, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
While I was going thru assorted sources to learn more about Andrea del Sarto and Browning, I found a picture of the poet and... his beard! His beard...isn't it another example of the "newgate frill"? Perhaps it's Browning who is indicated in Pale Fire, another Robert, another poet under a different guise, all the time?
Here are interesting links to Nabokov's work. I started with Beerbohm's "Brown" who led me to Browning's poem ( cf. item II from the site that carries RB's image).
Next, various interconnections linking peaches, Brown, Browning in Lolita, PF and Ada.
I-
Max Beerbohm's playwright, "Brown Savonarola" ( who, as a boy, had been mocked at school because his parents christened him Ladbroke Brown) had named him his "literary executor". The narrator tried to find a producer for Brown's unfinished piece (the playwright was struck dead by an omnibus right in front of the narrator, while he was in the process of describing the risk of his dying in exactly the same way). Next, he attempted to complete the missing act, with even less success. In Brown's play, at the end of Act. III, a Pope enters to demand the arrest of Savonarola and Lucrezia Borgia.
We read [ Re-enter Guelfs and Ghibellines fighting. SAV. and LUC. are arrested by Papal officers. Enter MICHAEL ANGELO. ANDREA DEL SARTO appears for a moment at a window. PIPPA passes. Brothers of the Misericordia go by, singing a Requiem for Francesca da Rimini. Enter BOCCACCIO, BENVENUTO CELLINI and many others, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves but scarcely audible...]
What an array of names and "scarcely audible" allusions in Max B's short-piece. As in "Lolita" (revamped in Pale Fire) we find a surprisingly displaced "Pippa passes" and then Browning again, through Andrea del Sarto ( the poem he wrote in Florence).
In Ada there are several Browns (twisting around Robert B. and René Chateaubriand), there's Browning, the poet, a "Brown Hill College," where Aqua studied. Also Ada once attended a Brownhill school which keeps to old-fashioned rules under a certain Miss Cleft, its headmistress.
This reference takes us back to "Lolita" where there's the most obvious reference to the poet Browning ( "She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the coke...You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction." ) but now, it's not Ada's mistress, Miss Cleft, who is mentioned, but a quote from Robert Browning ( Lolita: "Wow! Looks swank," remarked my vulgar darling ...and with a childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had struck in the peach-cleft-to quote Robert Browning.")
Ada teems with "Browning's peaches" ( "Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind — fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts...")
In Pale Fire, Kinbote mentions Browning directly ( on lines 671-672, for Shade's "The Untamed Seahorse - "See Browning’s My Last Duchess. See it and condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry — or a long poem, alas — with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past..." There's Gradus, with digestive problems, when he almost drops his gun ( a "Browning") in the toilet.
And yet, in the beginning, there's always, "Lolita" (and other assorted Browns and Brownings) ...
II -
"Edward Dowden in his fine but now forgotten book, The Life of Robert Browning (London. Dent, 1915/1927), in a footnote on page 191, states that
"Mrs Andrew Crosse, in her article, 'John Kenyon and his Friends' (Temple Bar Magazine, April 1900), writes: 'When the Brownings were living in Florence, Kenyon had begged them to procure for him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti of Andea del Sarto and his wife. Mr Browning was unable to get the copy made with any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea del Sarto - and sent it to Kenyon!'."...
I would argue that the voice in the Victorian poem is not only that of Browning's 'Andrea' but is that of Browning himself, of a Browning deeply resenting Elizabeth's greater fame during her lifetime, and that Robert Browning has thus constructed of Andrea Del Sarto's double portrait his own 'Portrait of a Marriage'. Reverberating with these portraits of wives is also that of Browning's 'My Last Duchess'. "
(Cf. Robert Browning's Andrea Del Sarto as Double Self-Portrait - Anglo-Italian Studies, Robert Browning, Andrea Del Sarto, Lucrezia Del Fede, ... Ritratto di Andrea del Sarto e di Lucrezia del Fede sua moglie. ... www.florin.ms/AndreaSarto.html <http://www.florin.ms/AndreaSarto.html> )