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A.Stadlen: My question on "significance"
for Brian meant really: did truth slip out in your
Boydian slip? Would Humbert, as Nabokov imagined him, have
sneered at the Shade household? Nabokov shows him at a
critical moment of his life handing Quilty his poem in
imitation of Eliot's Ash Wednesday -- Eliot, whom Nabokov
called a "fake". Would Humbert the sophisticated aesthete
(and also posturing penitent contemplating a turn to
religion perhaps reminiscent of Eliot's) have looked down on
Shade's poetry, as well as on Shade's loving marriage and
decidedly non-nymphet daughter?
Jansy Mello: I'm sorry to butt in but ... Do you mean to
suggest that a Boydian slip could reveal a Nabokovian
truth?* (that Humbert, as Nabokov imagined
him, would sneer or not sneer at the Shade
household). However, your raised an excelent point: In
"Lolita" Humbert hands Quilty an "imitation" of
"fake" Eliot's Ash Wednesday (although H. was a
"posturing penitent" and Eliot was - I suppose- a
sincere penitent), thus enabling his readers
to conjecture about the outcome of HH's criticism
of Shade's art and family life.
Could Nabokov have
consciously intended the present parallel bt.
H's "eliotic" poem, his strong opinions about Eliot
and HH's prescient criticism of John Shade's poetry? We
must also consider Charles Kinbote, who always
emphasized Shade's poetic genius and who, like Eliot (and
Humbert?), was also a penitent, although he seems to have
remained unperturbed by his "great poet"'s atheism
and satire of Eliot's later poems, such as the "Four
Quartets" in PF. **
I never connected the
references to Humbert's and Shade's attitudes towards
Eliot. However, when we throw in that other penitent
(distraught Kinbote) matters get even more complicated.
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* - Cf. my former posting: "A
Boydian slip! Although I hadn't consciously registered
it, I slipped along moving from Shade's "sublimated
grouse" until I came back to Humbert's "sublimated
Riviera" (thereby revealing that, in my amatory eyes, John
Shade's poem is not really a "torquated beauty" as slips
represent one rare form of sincerity)..."
** - Or, when we consider T.S.Eliot's
opening lines in "Ash Wednesday" ( rejecting envy of "that
man's gift" or admitting the loss of "the vanished power
of the usual reign..."
"Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?"