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Re: Cocteau and VN
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Dear List,
I won't edit my reply to Jerry Friedman lest I introduce new typos and mistakes (I just confused the words, not the concept, "longitude/latitude" in my latest posting!) and suggested to AB that I meant that Beckett referred to Cocteau instead of to Proust's "floral metaphors.")
Hello, Jerry
I was counting on you to clarify issues but they got even more entangled for me, after your posting!
The dates you mentioned refer to a 16-17 years discrepancy. Besides, you indicate that "the two mistakes would both be correct had Shade been born a year earlier..."
If we can be certain that, according to fictional rules, Shade was born in 1959, then this year must be our point of departure for making further considerations.
I think my calculations were correct (cf. message from 10.01, 22:39, with the subject "responses from Carolyn Kunin on birthday and muscat") in connection to Gradus's birthdate we get 1915,.from his musings about the New Yort Times note.
We have 1915 again here, while calculating the birthyear of Charles Xavier since, according to CK: "in 1932 when our Prince, aged seventeen, had begun dividing his time between the University and his regiment. It was the nicest period in his life. He never could decide what he enjoyed more: the study of poetry - especially English poetry - or attending parades, or dancing in masquerades with boy-girls and girl-boys." Kinbote penned his notes after July 5, but sometimes he copied them from his diary annotations.Nevertheless, independently of that, if CX was born in July 5, 1915, then that's the day he became 17 years-old in 1932..
We can be sure, then (as CK's notes go) that both Gradus and King Charles were born in 1915. How about Kinbote himself? He was explicit about his birthday on July 5 (by mentioning it to Sybil) and it's almost sure that he'd have established the same date for his two inventions (CX and JG). Where do we find that he was born in 1915? This date is also obtainable if we follow his information about the 16-year difference. Well, why were we writing about 1914? I must have been misled at some point. The present ennumeration is correct, I suppose: the three are originated in July 5,1915. We must have come up with a discrepancy somewhere else!
It happened in connection to the NYT's calculations - and I think I've found the mistake (I calculated the 16-year difference, to get at CK's year, before July,5 .)
I quote from my initial posting: Was Gradus born on the same year as Kinbote's? I know there's a trap with the dates, something to do with time intervals and regular counting and not only Kinbote (and a very young Nabokov) are confused by that. I'm completely boggled and. I hope Jerry can clarify it for me! He pointed out the dates of JS's birth and death ( probably according to the second line of Kinbote's foreword):: "John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959)" So, Shade was 60 in July 1.and Gradus, in 1959, was 43 (he'd be 44 four days later) We learned that the time difference bt. CK and Shade was of 16 years, then in July 1 Kinbote would be... (60-16) 44. Where am I misguided? Because Gradus, in July 1, was still aged 43. Sorry, people, but I do feel very inapt at those simple calculations and ashamed to be still inquiring about that, that is, if we have sufficient information to be certain of Gradus's birthdate..." .
There's no discrepancy, after all! We simply need to remember the reference of July 5. Unless, again, I'm off my head with dates and jumping from one page to another.
Right now I was trying to get other clues, from Disa's age, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, trying to compare her with Sybil and JS (married for 40 years and "he Was twice my age the year I married you.)
I underlined and copied all the passages I needed - but I hadn't started to deal with them. Besides, I often get off-tracked because I start to wonder about Disa's escutcheon and the Vanessa butterfly, or the strange unnecessary division, as informed by CK, of the Sutton character.*
Here are some of the notes ( I give up counting numbers.. and, as before, I beg forgivenness for miscalculations and wrong assumptions.):
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) cp. to Shade: we've been married forty years
JS's poem: Old Dr. Sutton ...The man must be - what? Eighty? Eighty-two?/ Was twice my age the year I married you.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947
I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958,
Disa, Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone; my lovely, pale, melancholy Queen, haunting my dreams, and haunted by dreams of me, b. 1928; her album and favorite trees, 49; married 1949,
In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five.
.......................................................................................................
* - Line 119: Dr. Sutton "This is a recombination of letters taken from two names, one beginning in "Sut," the other ending in "ton." Two distinguished medical men, long retired from practice, dwelt on our hill. Both were very old friends of the Shades; one had a daughter, president of Sybil's club - and this is the Dr. Sutton I visualize in my notes to lines 181 and 1000. He is also mentioned in Line 986."
-----Mensagem Original-----
De: Jerry Friedman
Para: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Enviada em: domingo, 12 de maio de 2013 00:53
Assunto: Re: [NABOKV-L] Cocteau and VN
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:02 AM, Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@utk.edu> wrote:
Excellent discovery between Jansy and Carolyn! Not much has been written about Nabokov and Cocteau;
I too found that very interesting!
Jansy and I have bee discussing off-list the strange inconsistency in Kinbote's age reporting: that he is 16 years Shade's junior (= b. 1914), but that King Charles the Beloved was born 1915. Perhaps this slippage is psychologically related to Kinbote's regarding Shade's "60th-no, 61st" birthday, noted already by Jansy. Very possibly others have discussed this in their articles and books, and Nab-Lers are invited to send us all to those sources! I see that the Library of America notes (ahem) tell us that "In his lecture on The Walk by Swann's Way" [...] published in Lectures on Literature, Nabokov wrote "Jean Cocteau has called the work 'a giant miniature, full of mirages, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time.'" Note 554.24-25; p. 896 in the volume. No mention of Cocteau's birthday or the coincidence there.
Unfortunately I've been busy and haven't been able to respond to at least one post on this that was addressed directly to me. I mentioned the 16-or-17-years discrepancy in "A Pale Fire Timeline" <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/friedman.htm> and made the same connection to Kinbote's explicit "slip" about Shade's birthday--the two mistakes would both be correct if Shade had been born a year later.
If there's any interest in speculations, I have two, not necessarily consistent. One is that as Brian Boyd pointed out in "Even Homais Nods" <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/boyd1.htm>, Nabokov made many mistakes in dates. I wouldn't call Kinbote Nabokov's self-parody, but I will venture to suggest that the seeds of some of Kinbote's comic qualities are things Nabokov saw in himself--for instance, difficulties with colloquial American English--and the date discrepancies may have the same source.
The other is that I continue to see a suggestion that Kinbote is lying to Sybil when he tells her Shade's birthday was his as well. It seems out of character for him to talk about what happened on his birthday without complaining that no one gave him a party, he didn't have enough friends in New Wye to have a party, the parties he actually went to were very different from what he would have liked his party to be, or some such. Maybe he just wants to embarrass Sybil. In this view, he would then have decided to adopt July 5 as his (the King's) birthday, which would account for the brief reference in the passage about Disa.
Jerry Friedman
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I won't edit my reply to Jerry Friedman lest I introduce new typos and mistakes (I just confused the words, not the concept, "longitude/latitude" in my latest posting!) and suggested to AB that I meant that Beckett referred to Cocteau instead of to Proust's "floral metaphors.")
Hello, Jerry
I was counting on you to clarify issues but they got even more entangled for me, after your posting!
The dates you mentioned refer to a 16-17 years discrepancy. Besides, you indicate that "the two mistakes would both be correct had Shade been born a year earlier..."
If we can be certain that, according to fictional rules, Shade was born in 1959, then this year must be our point of departure for making further considerations.
I think my calculations were correct (cf. message from 10.01, 22:39, with the subject "responses from Carolyn Kunin on birthday and muscat") in connection to Gradus's birthdate we get 1915,.from his musings about the New Yort Times note.
We have 1915 again here, while calculating the birthyear of Charles Xavier since, according to CK: "in 1932 when our Prince, aged seventeen, had begun dividing his time between the University and his regiment. It was the nicest period in his life. He never could decide what he enjoyed more: the study of poetry - especially English poetry - or attending parades, or dancing in masquerades with boy-girls and girl-boys." Kinbote penned his notes after July 5, but sometimes he copied them from his diary annotations.Nevertheless, independently of that, if CX was born in July 5, 1915, then that's the day he became 17 years-old in 1932..
We can be sure, then (as CK's notes go) that both Gradus and King Charles were born in 1915. How about Kinbote himself? He was explicit about his birthday on July 5 (by mentioning it to Sybil) and it's almost sure that he'd have established the same date for his two inventions (CX and JG). Where do we find that he was born in 1915? This date is also obtainable if we follow his information about the 16-year difference. Well, why were we writing about 1914? I must have been misled at some point. The present ennumeration is correct, I suppose: the three are originated in July 5,1915. We must have come up with a discrepancy somewhere else!
It happened in connection to the NYT's calculations - and I think I've found the mistake (I calculated the 16-year difference, to get at CK's year, before July,5 .)
I quote from my initial posting: Was Gradus born on the same year as Kinbote's? I know there's a trap with the dates, something to do with time intervals and regular counting and not only Kinbote (and a very young Nabokov) are confused by that. I'm completely boggled and. I hope Jerry can clarify it for me! He pointed out the dates of JS's birth and death ( probably according to the second line of Kinbote's foreword):: "John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959)" So, Shade was 60 in July 1.and Gradus, in 1959, was 43 (he'd be 44 four days later) We learned that the time difference bt. CK and Shade was of 16 years, then in July 1 Kinbote would be... (60-16) 44. Where am I misguided? Because Gradus, in July 1, was still aged 43. Sorry, people, but I do feel very inapt at those simple calculations and ashamed to be still inquiring about that, that is, if we have sufficient information to be certain of Gradus's birthdate..." .
There's no discrepancy, after all! We simply need to remember the reference of July 5. Unless, again, I'm off my head with dates and jumping from one page to another.
Right now I was trying to get other clues, from Disa's age, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, trying to compare her with Sybil and JS (married for 40 years and "he Was twice my age the year I married you.)
I underlined and copied all the passages I needed - but I hadn't started to deal with them. Besides, I often get off-tracked because I start to wonder about Disa's escutcheon and the Vanessa butterfly, or the strange unnecessary division, as informed by CK, of the Sutton character.*
Here are some of the notes ( I give up counting numbers.. and, as before, I beg forgivenness for miscalculations and wrong assumptions.):
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) cp. to Shade: we've been married forty years
JS's poem: Old Dr. Sutton ...The man must be - what? Eighty? Eighty-two?/ Was twice my age the year I married you.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947
I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958,
Disa, Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone; my lovely, pale, melancholy Queen, haunting my dreams, and haunted by dreams of me, b. 1928; her album and favorite trees, 49; married 1949,
In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five.
.......................................................................................................
* - Line 119: Dr. Sutton "This is a recombination of letters taken from two names, one beginning in "Sut," the other ending in "ton." Two distinguished medical men, long retired from practice, dwelt on our hill. Both were very old friends of the Shades; one had a daughter, president of Sybil's club - and this is the Dr. Sutton I visualize in my notes to lines 181 and 1000. He is also mentioned in Line 986."
-----Mensagem Original-----
De: Jerry Friedman
Para: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Enviada em: domingo, 12 de maio de 2013 00:53
Assunto: Re: [NABOKV-L] Cocteau and VN
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:02 AM, Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@utk.edu> wrote:
Excellent discovery between Jansy and Carolyn! Not much has been written about Nabokov and Cocteau;
I too found that very interesting!
Jansy and I have bee discussing off-list the strange inconsistency in Kinbote's age reporting: that he is 16 years Shade's junior (= b. 1914), but that King Charles the Beloved was born 1915. Perhaps this slippage is psychologically related to Kinbote's regarding Shade's "60th-no, 61st" birthday, noted already by Jansy. Very possibly others have discussed this in their articles and books, and Nab-Lers are invited to send us all to those sources! I see that the Library of America notes (ahem) tell us that "In his lecture on The Walk by Swann's Way" [...] published in Lectures on Literature, Nabokov wrote "Jean Cocteau has called the work 'a giant miniature, full of mirages, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time.'" Note 554.24-25; p. 896 in the volume. No mention of Cocteau's birthday or the coincidence there.
Unfortunately I've been busy and haven't been able to respond to at least one post on this that was addressed directly to me. I mentioned the 16-or-17-years discrepancy in "A Pale Fire Timeline" <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/friedman.htm> and made the same connection to Kinbote's explicit "slip" about Shade's birthday--the two mistakes would both be correct if Shade had been born a year later.
If there's any interest in speculations, I have two, not necessarily consistent. One is that as Brian Boyd pointed out in "Even Homais Nods" <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/boyd1.htm>, Nabokov made many mistakes in dates. I wouldn't call Kinbote Nabokov's self-parody, but I will venture to suggest that the seeds of some of Kinbote's comic qualities are things Nabokov saw in himself--for instance, difficulties with colloquial American English--and the date discrepancies may have the same source.
The other is that I continue to see a suggestion that Kinbote is lying to Sybil when he tells her Shade's birthday was his as well. It seems out of character for him to talk about what happened on his birthday without complaining that no one gave him a party, he didn't have enough friends in New Wye to have a party, the parties he actually went to were very different from what he would have liked his party to be, or some such. Maybe he just wants to embarrass Sybil. In this view, he would then have decided to adopt July 5 as his (the King's) birthday, which would account for the brief reference in the passage about Disa.
Jerry Friedman
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