Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  PETER LUBIN

  The multicolored inklings offered by Mr. Lubin in his «Kickshaws and Motley» are absolutely dazzling. Such things as his «v ugloo» [Russ. for «in the corner»] in the igloo of the globe [a blend of «glow» and «strobe»] are better than anything I have done in that line. Very beautifully he tracks down to their lairs in Eliot three terms queried by a poor little person in Pale Fire. I greatly admire the definition of tmesis (Type I) as a «semantic petticoat slipped on hetween the naked noun and its clothing epithet», as well as Lubin's «proleptic» tmesis illustrated by Shakespeare's glowworm beginning «to pale his ineffectual fire». And the parody of an interview with N. (though a little more exquisitely iridized than my own replies would have been) is sufficiently convincing to catch readers.

  LUCIE LEON NOEL

  The extent to which I was concerned with the fragility of my English at the time of my abandoning Russian in 1939 may be gauged by the fact that even after Mrs. Leon had gone over the manuscript of my Sebastian Knight in Paris where it was written, and I had moved to the USA, I begged the late Agnes Perkins, the admirable Head of the English Department at Wellesley, to assist me in reading the galleys of the book (bought for $150 in 1941, by New Directions), and that later, another kind lady, Sylvia Berkman, checked the grammar of my first English stones that appeared in The Atlantic in the early forties.

  1 am sorry that Lucie Leon in her amiably modulated «Playback» does not speak more than she does of her brother Alex Ponizovski of whom I was very fond (I particularly like recalling the streak of quiet eccentricity that endeared him to fellow students at Cambridge, such as the time he casually swallowed the contents of a small bottle of ink that happened to be within reach while we sat and talked by the fire). In her account of a dinner with Janies Joyce in Paris, I found it refreshing to be accused of bashfulness (after finding so frequently in the gazettes complaints of my «arrogance»); but is her impression correct? She pictures me as a timid young artist; actually I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid awareness of what I had already done for Russian letters preventing me from feeling awed in the presence of any living writer. (Had Mrs. Leon and I met more often at parties she might have realized that I am always a disappointing guest, neither inclined nor able to shine socially.)

  Another little error occurs in the reference to the palindrome that I wrote in her album. There was nothing new about a reversible sentence in Russian: the anonymous sandglass «a roza upala na lapu Azora» («and the rose fell upon Azor's paw») is as familiar to children as, in another nursery, «able was I ere I saw Elba». The first line of my Kazak is, in fact, not mine (I think it was given me by the late Vladimir Piotrovski, a wonderfully skillful poet); what I claimed was new referred to my expanding the palindrome into a rhymed quatrain with its three last verses making continuous sense in spite of each being reversible.

  IRWIN WEIL

  Curiously enough, the note appended to my Kazak by Irwin Weil (who contributes an interesting essay on my «Odyssey» elsewhere in the volume) also requires correction. His statement that «the third and fourth lines are each palindromes if one excludes the last [?] syllables» is quite wrong; all four lines are palindromes, and no «last syllables» have to be excluded.* Especially regrettable is Mr. Weil's mistranslation of one of them. He has confused the Russian word for aloes (a genus of plant) with aloe, which means «red» or «rosy», and that, too, is mistranslated, becoming «purple»!

  * This error is due to a faulty transcription of the palindrome on p. 218 of TriQuarterly 17. The Russian word rvat', the first word of line four, has been placed at the end of line three. The errors in the transcription and note (p. 217) will be corrected in the paperback edition of the volume, to be published this fall by Simon and Schuster.

  I must also question an incomprehensible statement in Mr. Weil's article «Odyssey of a Translator». The Russian lawyer E. M. Kulisher may well have been «an old acquaintance» of my father's, but he was not «close to the Nabokov family» (I do not remember him as a person) and I have never said anywhere what Mr. Weil has me indicate in the opening paragraph of his article.

  MORRIS BISHOP

  My old friend Morris Bishop (my only close friend on the campus) has touched me very deeply by his recollections of my stay at Cornell. I am assigning an entire chapter to it in my Speak On, Mnemosyne, a memoir devoted to the 20 years I spent in my adopted country, after dwelling for 20 years in Russia and for as many more in Western Europe. My friend suggests that I was bothered by the students' incompetence in my Pushkin class. Not at all. What bothered and angered me was the ineptitude of the system of Scientific Linguistics at Cornell.

  ROSS WETZSTEON

  I remember most of the best students in my Cornell classes. Mr. Wetzsteon was one of them. My «Bleak House diagram», which he recalls so movingly, is preserved among my papers and will appear in the collection of lectures (Bleak House, Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, etc.) that I mean to publish some day. It is strange to think that never again shall I feel between finger and thumb the cool smoothness of virgin chalk or make that joke about the «gray board» (improperly wiped), and be rewarded by two or three chuckles (RW? AA? NS?).

  JULIAN MOYNAHAN

  Mr. Moynahan in his charming «Lolita and Related Memories» recalls his professor of Russian, the late Dr. Leonid Strakhovski (most foreign-born lecturers used to be «doctors»). I knew him, he did not really resemble my Pnin. We met at literary parties in Berlin half a century ago. He wrote verse. He wore a monocle. He had no sense of humor. He dwelt in dramatic detail on his military and civil adventures. Most of his yarns had a knack of fading out at the critical point. He had worked as a trolley car driver and had run over a man. The rowboat in which he escaped from Russia developed a leak in the middle of the Baltic. When asked what happened then, he would wave a limp hand in the Russian gesture of despair and dismissal.

  ELLENDEA PROFFER

  Ellendea Proffer's report on my Russian readers is both heartening and sad. «All Soviet age groups», she observes, «tend to feel that literature has a didactic function». This marks a kind of dead end, despite a new generation of talented people. «Zhalkiy udel (piteous fate)», as the Literaturnaya Gazeta says a propos de bottes (March 4, 1970).

  STANLEY ELKIN

  Several passages in Mr. Elkin's «Three Meetings», a parody of an «I remember . . «. piece, are extremely funny, such as the farcical variety of repetition or the casual reference to the «lovely eggal forms» he and I encountered on «an expedition up the Orinoco». And our third meeting is a scream.

  ROBERT P. HUGHES

  Mr. Hughes in his «Notes on the Translation of Invttatton to a Beheading» is one of the few critics who noticed the poetry of the Tamara terraces with their metamorphosed tamaracks. In the trance of objectivity which the reading of the festschrift has now induced in me, I am able to say that Mr. Hughes' discussion of the trials and triumphs attending that translation is very subtle and rewarding.

  CARL R. PROFFER

  Mr. Proffer, who discusses another translation, that of my much older Korol', Dama, Valet, tackles a more ungrateful task, first because King, Queen, Knave «does not surmount its original weaknesses», and secondly because revision and adaptation blur one's interest in faithfulnesses. He wonders what «worse sins» (than planning the murder of his uncle) cowardly and brutal Franz could have committed between the twenties and sixties in Germany, but a minute's thought should reveal to the reader what the activities of that type of man could have been at the exact center of the interval. Mr. Proffer ends his «A New Deck for Nabokov's Knaves» by saying he expects the English version of Mashenka to be quite different from the Russian original. Expectation has been the undoing of many a shrewd gambler.

  W. B. SCOTT

  I had read and hugely enjoyed Mr. Scott's essay on my EO translation, «The Cypress Veil», when it first appeared in the Winter, 1965, issue of the TriQuarterly. It is a most refreshing piece. My improved cab is now ready for publication.
>
  Mr. Scott is also responsible for the last item in the volume, a letter addressed by Timofey Pnin to «Many respected Professor Apple [sic]», a stunning affair in which scholarship and high spirits interlace to produce the monogram of a very special masterpiece. And that frozen frenzy of footnotes!

  SAUL STEINBERG

  There is magic in every pen-stroke and curlicue of the delightful diploma that Saul Steinberg has drawn for my wife and me.

  R. M. ADAMS

  Mr. Adams' letter about me addressed to «M. le Baron de Stendhal» is an extremely witty piece — reminding me, I do not know why, of those macabre little miracles that chess problemists call suimates (White forces Black to win in a certain number of moves).

  ANTHONY BURGESS

  In Mr. Burgess' poem I particularly appreciate his Maltese grocer's cat that likes to sit upon the scales and is found to weigh 2 rotolos.

  ALBERT J. GUERARD

  ''Not even Colette», says Mr. Guerard in his tribute to Ada, «rendered fleshly textures and tones with such grace». The lady is mentioned in Ada.

  HERBERT GOLD

  Blending fact and fiction in a kind of slat-sign shimmer, Mr. Gold recalls our meetings in upstate New York and in a Swiss hotel. I recall with pleasure my correspondence with the puzzled editor of the Saturday Evening Post for which he had written what I had thought was to be an interview with me — or, at least, with the person I usually impersonate in Montreux

  RICHARD HOWARD

  Mr. Howard's poem «Waiting tor Ada» contains a wonderful description of a Grand Hotel du Miroir very like some of the «nearly pearly nougat-textured art-nouveau» places where I have been «working wickedly away» during recent stjours in Italy.

  JOHN UPDIKE

  I am grateful to Mr. Updike for mentioning, in his stylish tribute, the little Parisian prostitute whom Humbert Humbert recalls so wistfully. On the other hand there was no reason at all for that harsh and contemptuous reference to a small publishing house which brought out excellent editions of four books of mine.

  R. H. W. DILLARD

  Mr. Dillard's poem «A day, a country home» is most attractive — especially the «light through the leaves, like butterflies» in the fourth stanza.

  HORTENSE CALISHER

  Miss Calisher's contubernal contribution expresses in a sophisticated metaphor her readiness to share the paranoia of her fellow writers. Oddly enough, even the best tent is absolutely dependent on the kind of country amidst which it is pitched.

  JACK LUDWIG

  I remember, not without satisfaction, how fiercely and frequently, during my last year of high school in Russia (which was also the first year of the revolution), most of my teachers and some of my schoolmates accused me of being a «foreigner» because I refused to join in political declarations and demonstrations. Mr. Ludwig in his splendid little article indicates with great sympathy and acumen the possibility of similar accusations being made by my new fellow-citizens. They could not vie with Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius, my fiery, red-haired teacher of Russian literature.

  J. BARTH

  Dear Mr. R.

  Thanks for your birthday greetings. Let me wish you many returns of the same day. How many nice people crowd around my cradle! It is pleasant to know you like Max Planck. I rather like him, too. But not Cervantes!

  Yours cordially,

  V. N.

  CLARENCE BROWN

  Lines 31-32 of Mr. Brown's fascinating poem in Russian display a loopingtheloop inversion of which old Lomonosov might have been proud: «Why, better of Dante's Hell for him to burn in the seventh circle» if translated lexically. His cartoons in a British weekly are marvelous.

  CHARLES NEWMAN

  The editor of the TriQuarterly, in «Americanization of V. N». (an exhilarating physical process in the present case!) recalls taking Pale Fire «to Basic Training in hot Texas», tearing it from its binding, and keeping it «pure and scrolled in my Fatigues' long pocket like a Bowie knife» safe

  from the Barracks Sergeant. It is a beautifully written, and most touching, epic.

  DAVID WAGONER

  Laughter in the Dark is paid a suitable tribute in Mr. Wagoner's sinister poem.

  RICHARD STERN

  I like the epithets «opulent, triplicitous», in Mr. Stern's lines, but I am not sure that any of the four Karamazovs (grotesque, humorless, hysterical, and jejune, respectively) can be defined as «triste».

  ANDREW FIELD

  My good friend, Mr. Field, has contributed some brilliantly worded remarks, one of which refers to V.N.'s being «counted upon to observe the hoisting of his statue (Peter the Great seated upon an invisible horse)». This reminded me suddenly of a not-unsimilar event in California where some fancy statuary, lovingly erected by a Russian group to commemorate Pushkin's duel, partly disintegrated after a couple of years' exposure, removing Pushkin but leaving intact the figure of magnificent Dantes pointing his pistol at posterity.

  BROCK BROWER

  The «sociopolitical nature» of Mr. Brower's tribute to Lolita, far from being repugnant to me (as he modestly assumes), is more than redeemed by the specific precision of his artistic touch.

  IRWIN SHAW

  In his «Advice to a Young Writer», Mr. Shaw draws his examples from the life, labors, and luck of «Vladimir N., perched on a hill in Switzerland». To Irwin S., perched on a nottoodistant hill, I send by Alpine Horn my best greetings.

  JAY NEUGEBOREN

  In a very pretty little poem, Mr. Neugehoren seems to

  rhyme, somewhat surprisingly, «Nabokov» and «love». I would suggest «talk of» or «balk of» as more closely conforming to the stressed middle vowel of that awkward name («Nabawkof»). I once composed the following rhyme for my students:

  The querulous gawk of

  A heron at night

  Prompts Nabokov

  To write

  RICHARD GILMAN

  Mr. Gilman's tribute to Ada comes at a time when I still think that of all my books it is the one that corresponds most exactly to its fore-image; and therefore I cannot help being affected by his kind words.

  GEORGE P. ELLIOTT

  Among my short stories, «Signs and Symbols» still remains an old favorite of mine. I am happy that Mr. Elliott has singled it out for comment with a phrase from Ada heading his pithy piece.

  ALFRED KAZIN

  A final splendid salute comes from one of my friendliest readers. It ends on an emotional note which I inwardly respond to without being able to formulate my response with Mr. Kazin's force and feeling.

  Written on March 10, 1970, and published in the Supplement to TnQuarterly 17, Northwestern University Press, 1970.

  ROWE'S SYMBOLS

  «It appears», says Mr. Rowe* in his Introduction, «that Nabokov — partially by means of the mechanisms revealed below — will continue to flutter the pulses of his readers for some time».

  * William Woodin Rowe: Nabokov's Deceptive World. New York University Press, 1971, 193 pp.

  «The mechanisms revealed below» is a pretty phrase, suggesting perhaps more than its author intends, but it does not quite apply to me. The purpose of the present review is not to answer a critic but to ask him to remove his belongings. The book consists of three parts. Whilst I have no great quarrel with the first two, entitled «A Touch of Russian» and «N. as Stage Manager», I must protest vehemently against a number of indecent absurdities contained in the third part, entitled «Sexual Manipulations».

  One may wonder if it was worth Mr. Rowe's time to exhibit erotic bits picked out of Lolita and Ada — a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick. But that is his own choice and concern. What I object to is Mr. Rowe's manipulating my most innocent words so as to introduce sexual «symbols» into them. The notion of symbol itself has always been abhorrent to me, and I never tire of retelling how I once failed a student — the dupe, alas, of an earlier teacher — for writing that Jane Austen describes leaves as «green» because Fanny is hopeful, and «green�
� is the color of hope. The symbolism racket in schools attracts computerized minds but destroys plain intelligence as well as poetical sense. It bleaches the soul. It numbs all capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art. Who the hell cares, as Mr. Rowe wants us to care, that there is, according to his italics, a «man» in the sentence about a homosexual Swede who «had embarrassing manners» (p. 148), and another «man» in «manipulate» (passim)? «Wickedly folded moth» suggests «wick» to Mr. Rowe, and «wick», as we Freudians know, is the Male Organ. «I» stands for «eye», and «eye» stands for the Female Organ. Pencil licking is always a reference to you know what. A soccer goal hints at the vulval orifice (which Mr. Rowe evidently sees as square).