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Re: Nabokov and Martin Amis
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PS: The poem I was looking for related to "Pawkings was dead" (The Moth" HGW) is no.12 in my edition of Poems and Problems (In Paradise):
"My soul, beyond distant death/ Your image I see like this:/ a provincial naturalist,/an eccentric lost in paradise...
There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers,/ a semi-pavonian creature./Poke at it curiously/ with your green umbrella,...
speculating how, first of all,/ you will write a paper on it,/ then - But there are no learned journals,/ nor any readers in paradise! ...
And there you stand, not yet believing/ your wordless woe./ About that blue somnolent animal/ whom will you tell, whom?
PPS: "I can always tell when a sentence I compose happens to resemble in cut and intonation that of any of the writers I loved or detested half a century ago; but I do not believe that any particular writer has had any definite influence upon me." V.Nabokov. Quoted by Dale E.Peterson in "Nabokov and the Poe-Etics of Composition." SEEJ,vol 33,no.1 (1989).
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Fran Assa: I forgot one of the best, VN-ish parts of "The Moth": The very reliable narrator of the story actually footnotes three of the written volleys between the warring entomologists! [FA former footnote: "New Genus, by heavens! And in England!" said Hapley, staring. Then he suddenly thought of Pawkins. Nothing would have maddened Pawkins more...And Pawkins was dead!]
JM: Your excerpts from HGW's "The Moth" reminded me of a poem by VN in which he describes a heavenly discovery ( an angel, was it?) and finds there is no one else in his Paradise with whom he could share this extraordinary find.
Victor Fet wrote a fascinating article about the "Zoological Label as Literary Form" (The Nabokovian 60, Spring 2008) and, here, the lamentation serves to indicate the social side to labeling, the phantasmatic relationship with known and unknown fellows, similar to a writer's and his readers.
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