G. Lipon: Has anyone considered Allan Ginsberg as a model for Kinbote?...Lowell, I think, had said that Ginsberg influenced him to loosen his style of verse, prosody. 

Idle perhaps, but a little arresting to think of Lowell and Ginsberg as the models for Shade and Kinbote! 

 

JM: Google has novelties related to Kinbote’s beaver (explored at the list many months ago).

Even though Nabokov wasn’t an Oxford man in the twenties, it might be of interest because the game travelled over to America (there’s an image of a “literary” critic, William Empson, as a noted beaver).

 

Here are the items: Beaver! (The beard game)

E-mail|Link|Comments (0) Posted by Christopher Shea May 13, 2010 04:39 PM

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Bookride, a rare-books site, calls for a revival of "Beaver!", a game that evidently got its start among the Oxbridge set in the 1920s. Young men would stroll the streets and cry out that word when they saw a bearded man (or, in rare cases, woman--in which case the claim was lodged sotto voce). There was an anti-establishment flavor to the escapade, as beards were seen as a sign of pomposity and fustiness. The game even jumped the ocean:

Helen Hayes described being appalled by her husband Charles Macarthur and a friend of his, who were both old enough to know better, playing the game once at the expense of Charles Evans Hughes, the heavily bearded Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. No one was exempt.

The game was scored like tennis, with deductions for false identifications. And it was popular enough, at least in England, that it drove not a few beavers back to the razor. The British author Mark Bence-Jones, author of a wide range of nonfiction books, who died this year, at age 80, had long called for a revival of the game--unsuccessfully. Bookride now steps forward to carry the torch.  

 

 Btw: in connection to Tamerlane and elephants, I finally heard the recording of Haendel’s “Tamerlano” and, sure enough, we have Princess Irene arriving on a gawdy blue elephant, only to be rejected by her former suitor, Tamerlano himself. 
After I read about Tamerlane’s victory over the Indian army, his cruelty and ambition, the libretto for Haendel’s production appears as a very abstract, “aesthetized” cry for liberty (very successful as a work of Art).