VN COLLATION #9
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu

This month Nabokov was mentioned more often than ever, but very little worth noting was said. Quoted or invoked, his frequent cameos in book reviews and stories about soccer leave one with the impression that the entertainer is bored even if the publicity agent is not. When journalists choose the Nabokov Icon (The Hitchcock look-alike I am imagining) from the graphics menu and import this figure wholesale into their copy, very little of interest emerges except the knowledge that several not unattractive snaps exist for use by journalists, who, in the words of a political analyst on TV, use this image "in the marquis" to light up their candidates. Some sensitive commentators, sense that Nabokov's signature style, his voice as perceived by the reading public, characterized by 'an hauteur; a syntactical primness; a coolness; a metaphorical gorgeousness; and a thief's lonely (all right I take it back, not so sensitive) precision with detail,' is not the only or the true Nabokov and suggest that more should be pursued. Many admire, many fewer have read. Joyce Carol Oates in a review of the Mysteries of Literature, a book eulogizing the mystery genre, faults its author for waxing eloquent on Nabokov and his opinions while mistaking Humbert for a gross elderly man and Lolita for a 14 rather than 12 year old child. Still it is always a joy to come upon the choice quotation that melts the hard journalese for a sentence or two.

Passionate Nabokov readers in the press range from the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, to Sidney Altman, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry who it is said is currently reading Pnin.

I find it a very interesting, humorous, nostalgic book...It has terrific insight into the mores of Americans.

Frederic Raphael wishes he had written it in an October 21, Guardian article :

... its heartless humor and dandyish wit has remained with me, like the leer of a knowing Cheshire cat. ...Nabokov's impudent word play and merciless manipulations of his chararacters' fates are alien to my sentimental nature and modest practice, but I wish I could emulate the sharp-shooting grace of his early fiction, before it became somewhat too showy (the duelist who is unduly smart on the draw becomes a bully). Of all Nabokov s unmatchable work, the lean and juvenile King, Queen, Knave appeals to me as something I might have written, whereas his mature masterpiece Pale Fire, which it somewhat prefigures, is both too rococo and too fantastic for appropriation. (Fabergé is the only man who might plausibly find it jejune).

the unsurpassed autobiography of that supreme self-regarder, Vladimir Nabokov, turned out to be his least conceited book: Speak, Memory was more about his father than about himself. Nabokov was an anti-Oedipus, to whom bringing his beloved sire back to life was a filial pleasure .

True to form, Lolita gets around. The electronic library catalog at Lund University in Sweden is called LOLITA. A new syndrome describing not the perverts, but the average middle-aged man's secret lust for prepubescent girls has been coined, of course, the Lolita Syndrome. Lolita Pop, a record of rock music was recently released on Virgin (I kid you not) records. A first edition of the original Olympia Press edition of Lolita extremely scarce and marred only by the slightest rubbing on the joints is selling for a cool $3,000. And the long promised new version of "Lolita," screenplay by Harold Pinter, directed by Adrian Lyne ( Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 Weeks ) is not yet in production but will be soon. Laughter in the Dark may also become a movie in the not too distant future.

...producers Oliver Eberle and Marco Weber of Treehouse Films are shopping to studios for domestic distribution. ...Treehouse is putting up more than half of the financing , and Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn) will direct. ...The script has been written by Allison Burnett.

To be sure, the entire history of romantic verse and fiction has been self-consciously literary. One could go further and insist that romantic passion itself is literary: as La Rochefoucauld said, no one would ever have fallen in love unless he had first read about it ... I have even intimated that conflicts in love ... are attributable to different reading lists -- that amorous dispute is really always a battle of the books.

Nabokov, the linguist, scores another point from William Safire;

"Clinton, Advisers consider Endgame Plans on Haiti", reads a Washington Post headline, based on an unattributed quote from an official talking about endgame planning. End game began more than a century ago as a chess term, like the older gambit (opening gambit is redundant, as is final endgame). By 1964, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov was using it as a single word: We'll simply take the endgame position at the point it was interrupted today. In dipolingo, endgame is usually followed by exit strategy, first used in business in the late 1970s.

And sadly, there was not much else.