In a message dated 2/14/2012 8:57:30 PM Central Standard Time, nabokv-l@UTK.EDU writes:This is frankly unlikely, given Thompson's versions of reality and his reportorial integrity, but Ed Allen did get into a Lolita-like jam with a book of poems. You can Google it to see what happened (which was nothing much, actually) but must have been painful. A wonderful book, by the way.
I sense that I might get agreement from list members that Mac Lean's comments (i.e., "[Lolita is] a portrait of Nabokov's own passion;" Nabokov's "stuffed-shirtism...is a firewall against an unseemly urge") place him on an intellectual level with P.J. O'Rourke and Hunter S. Thompson. Edward Allen, a novelist, professor and Nabokovian currently at the University of South Dakota, during a lecture in response to a question about the interview excerpted below, stated, "Hunter S. Thompson is an idiot!" Here's a bit from a P.J. O'Rourke interview with Hunter S Thompson from Rolling Stone many years ago discussing Nabokov and his artistic methodology (O'Rourke first, obviously):
Are there any writers who you think [write about sex] effectively, honestly, dirtily? And honestly.
Well, I think that Nabokov could.
A beautiful writer.
Hell of a good writer. A friend of mine, Mike Solheim, was up in Sun Valley [Idaho] back in the early '60s. He told me that Nabokov used to come to the Sun Valley Lodge with an 11-year-old girl. He said it was weirder than Lolita: "It's very nice to meet your niece, Mr. Nabokov." Well, that goes back to the new-journalism question, about writing from experience.
When you read it, you knew this was from real experience. This was not Thomas Mann writing Death in Venice, which seemed to be a student's idea of what a hopeless crush would be, as if he'd observed someone go through it.
And the reason for that is, Nabokov was up at Sun Valley Lodge with an 11-year-old girl.
I'm afraid Lolita strictly fits into the gonzo framework.
But, man, that's where the fun is. You know, why write about other people's experiences?
And, according to this time-line, it would mean that VN was writing about an experience that he had a full decade after the novel was begun. Dah.
Incidentally, since VN didn't drive and didn't fly until late in life, how did he get to Sun Valley? Did Vera drop him off on one of his butterfly-hunting expeditions, which is hard to believe as the Nabokovs had moved to Switzerland in October, 1961?
Why the young still find anything to admire in the idiotic works of HST is beyond me. But they like Burroughs too, they claim.
RSG
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