Stan Kelly-Bootle [to 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 lesser catching,
since the original Anglo-Saxon nickname Brun referred to hair-colour...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?" [to All] "... 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...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 ..."
JM: Haha. You're a confirmed prankster,
saying whatever you wish by applying a hidden un-kiplingian "IF"
for whatever Winters would have thought...
I think that my PF theory (which nobody
commented so far since I lack the heraldic ring) is rather neat:
instead of considering that Kinbote is a character who wants to get
out of the fictional world, I see Kinbote as trying to kill a real poet
(Nabokov) to be able to pull him into fiction and turn him into a fictional
poet...After I read about Browning's putative competition with his wife's
fame, I made a dream (related to fake beards and shavings as planned for
Kinbote's beaver and Shade's naked neck), in which PF was written
entirelly by...Sybil!
Its plot was rather intrincate but I was
woken up by a person from Porlock (disguised as an alarm clock), so I
cannot reproduce it here.
I was very careful not to use links to colour
directly. There is, in "Ada," a butterfly with a "brown" added to its
tag name but, I suppose, it must be merely descriptive of its colour
brown (as for the Nabokov Blues), so I omitted it. But I also found
(no heart to check it now against the text) a sexy mosquito named something like
"Chateaubriand brown" and this "brown" probably serves to indicate a
certain Professor Robert Brown (whom I mentioned). About the romantic
Browning couple I know almost nothing (did you read Sordello?), except the
marvellous "biography" of their elopement as seen through the eyes of a dog
("Flush") and bits of flush here and there.
Sandy Klein sends the link on
"Waxwing slain" by John Crowley ( http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/152467.html),
in which he mentions Ron Rosenbaum's review for Slate with
more than a grain of salt.
Yes!!!! Rosenbaum wants to see the poem,
"Pale Fire," by Vladimir Nabokov, included in the "poetry" shelves ( Nabokov
"wrote the poem and it's time to claim it for him) and then
he goes on to state that he doesn't want to "downplay the two
essays in the booklet called 'Pale Fire Reflections'..." but, as I see
it, his entire review contradicts his own former assertions.
Perhaps, his personal opinions and frequent readings of "Pale
Fire" are authoritative enough to garantee a wide readership in the
Slate. R.Ron's playfulness must be exemplary of
a kind of humor that I cannot grasp. Right at the begining of his
article there's a striking analogy. He writes: "...You know the line: 'Just when I thought I was out, they
pull me back in.' It's Pacino, complaining about the mob in Godfather III...
Here I'm talking about the world of Nabokov controversies. Some pretty rough
characters in that mob, too. You don't want to get on the Don's bad side."
and later on, he returns to the thread: "Now
the object Mo Cohen sent me is likely to touch off this debate again. Only this
time I think those of us who want to free "Pale Fire" may have the edge, since
the object has the blessing not only of Dmitri Nabokov, the godfather, but of
Brian Boyd, his consigliere, the world's foremost Nabokov biographer." Can
anyone help me get a laugh out of
this?