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[NABOKOV-L] [Sightings,curious tidbits] Nabokov and Salinger.
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Dear List,
A week ago, or more, I searched for articles related to Salinger and Nabokov in the internet, motivated by a particular review about Salinger*.
Unfortunately the retrieved archives suffered from overlapping references and entries. I hope that most of the excerpted items may still be recovered in full by those who are interested in exploring them and should any of these be a novelty to you.
JM
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Excerpts:
The New Yorker, In the Stacks - Marginal by Ian Frazier June 28, 2010
On a recent Monday, Anne Garner, a librarian at the main branch of the New York Public Library, laid out some books to show. She works in the Berg Collection, where the library keeps rare books, and where the reading room is a hushed, scholars-only sanctum with long, elegant, lamp-lit wooden tables. Anne Garner’s specialty is marginalia...But she majored in classics in college, worked in antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum, and spends her days with books dozens or hundreds of years old, and so is also on good terms with timelessness. In the soft lamplight, the open pages of the books she had chosen glowed like a physical and visible representation of the sublime...One of the first hand-notated books she pointed out had come from the library of the poet Ted Hughes. The book, “Ariel,” by Sylvia Plath, had long, drizzly buckskin-brown stains running down it, and in an inscription on the flyleaf Hughes identified the stains as “thatch-drip” from a house in Devon that he and Plath had lived in. Somehow the term “thatch-drip,” in his blocky, forceful handwriting, distilled the sufferings of a literary life. A few of the marginalia in the books were wordless—for example, in Jack Kerouac’s copy of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” by Henry David Thoreau. Kerouac possessed this book but did not own it, having borrowed it from a local library in 1949 and never brought it back...Of course, the marginalia that corrected, quarrelled, and attacked—“hostile marginalia,” as they’re called—were the most fun. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s copy of “Joan of Arc,” by Robert Southey,* Coleridge came up with so many objections that he had to abbreviate them, as in “L.M.,” for “ludicrous metaphor,” and “N.,” for “nonsense.” Like a censorious teacher, Coleridge wrote his comments in red ink, filling the margins and causing him to remark, “Mercy on us, if I go on thus I shall make the book what I suppose it never was before, red all thro’.” ...As a marginalia scribbler, Mark Twain was perhaps the most entertaining and voluminous of all, with comments that bloomed from space breaks and chapter headings and end pages, sometimes turning corners and continuing upside down... Of special interest to readers of this magazine might be Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of “Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950.” Nabokov’s handwriting (in English) was small and fluid and precise; in books that he took exception to, such as a translation of “Madame Bovary” by Eleanor Marx Aveling, his correcting marginalia climbed all over the paragraphs like the tendrils of a strangler fig. Nabokov was also a professor of literature, and in his copy of the New Yorker anthology he gave every story a letter grade. The way he wrote each grade in the table of contents next to the story’s title carried the authority of one who expects that hearts will soar or plummet at the sight of his boldly printed capital. Many of the stories did not fare too well, and would not have got their authors into a selective university. Top marks went to Jessamyn West’s “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (A-) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (A). Prof. Nabokov awarded only two stories in the anthology an A+: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J. D. Salinger, and “Colette,” by Vladimir Nabokov. ♦ Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/06/28/100628ta_talk_frazier#ixzz19JqVn4Gd
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Humbert: An Introduction - Page 1 - VLS - New York - Village Voice 1 Nov 2005 ... Vladimir Nabokov · Leif Warden · J.D. Salinger ... one regards the more lauded works in the arena of Nabokov studies with alarm. ... www.villagevoice.com/2005-11-01/vls/humbert-an-introduction/ -
"I’ve always been a fan of Salinger, especially the Glass family stories... What impressed me about the Glass family as a young adult reader now seems in middle age excruciatingly self-congratulatory. That being said, I still appreciate the narrator’s overwhelming prescence in some of the stories and the almost constant parenthetical digressions in most. I’ve always felt that Salinger shared a bit of Nabokov’s cleverness, and for years I harbored, in one of my more protracted bouts of magical thinking, the ridiculous fantasy that Salinger, like John Ray, Jr. and Vivian Darkbloom, was but another sly fabrication of Nabokov’s.
Conversely, several years ago, a rather hilarious article appeared in the Village Voice entitled Humbert: An Introduction, with the subtitle Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita. It begins with this preface: “Editor’s note: In July of this year, cleaning out my “N” file, I discovered the pristine galleys for Mercy Pang’s foreword to a book on Nabokov—one, to my knowledge, never published. Pang was a friend, later enemy, of the family; her current whereabouts are unknown. In truth she drove me up the wall. The title above, after Borges, is my own. I do not know “Chad Ravioli.” —E.P.”
This unpublished book, authored by one “Leif D. Warden” of Ursinus College reveals that Salinger was Lolita’s ghostwiter and that Salinger’s short story A Perfect Day For Bananafish is its companion piece : “Citing a cache of letters belonging to his niece, Esmé Rockhead, Warden claims that Nabokov—though indubitably the author of such works as The Eye—did not, in fact, write Lolita. Warden sets about to prove that the author was none other than one J.D. Salinger.”
The article is worth reading for those who may be easily amused. Far more satisfying, is the letter to the editor that appeared the following week, from Richard G. DiFeliciantonio of Ursinus College: "On behalf of the faculty and staff at Ursinus College I’d like to express my pleasure with Ed Park’s bang-up research for his work “H.H.: An Introduction,” [Voice Literary Supplement, November 9–15]. Leif D. Warden was a phony and a snob, and Park is absolutely correct that he never taught in any conventional classroom, choosing instead, smelling of Yuengling, to loiter among the coeds at Wazzner Student Center. However, I want to point out that it was actually Warden’s wife with whom Salinger was allegedly intimate, not his niece. But that’s not important anymore as all the papers were burned at a homecoming bonfire. What is important is that our gem of a college, named for the great German Latinist and theologian Zacharias Baer, sits in the suburbs of Philadelphia; it never has been nor ever will be an institution in western Pennsylvania.Richard G. DiFeliciantonio"
Humbert: An Introduction Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita:
By Ed Park Tuesday, Nov 1 2005
Editor's note: In July of this year, cleaning out my "N" file, I discovered the pristine galleys for Mercy Pang's foreword to a book on Nabokov—one, to my knowledge, never published. Pang was a friend, later enemy, of the family; her current whereabouts are unknown. In truth she drove me up the wall. The title above, after Borges, is my own. I do not know "Chad Ravioli." —E.P.
Leif D. Warden's book-length study of Vladimir Nabokov remains, 20 years after its writing, a most lucid, thorough, and above all honest treatment of that talented lepidopterist's life and art. With the exception of Andrew Field's outstanding book1, one regards the more lauded works in the arena of Nabokov studies with alarm. Alfred Appel Jr.'s simpering Lolita annotation is shamelessly Kinbotean, while New Zealander Brian Boyd's two-volume travesty might make more sense in Maori. At last, re-Leif: Originally entitled Vlad the Impaler, Warden's classic study is to be published next month (under my admittedly modest house's imprint) as Warden's Nabokov. The original manuscript's suppression at the hands of G.P. Putnam's disturbed Warden surprisingly little; he was (in the words of a mutual friend) "content to shepherd toward publication his next masterpiece of anti-Vlad criticism, The Prismatic Bezel." How handsomely that lustrous title glows today, over a dozen years later! And how fortunate for today's readers that Innsmouth Press is including the entire text of The Prismatic Bezel in its deluxe edition of Warden's Nabokov! Though many remember Warden as a gruff, opinionated man, our acquaintance was a warm one. My years at Ursinus College were brightened immeasurably by the walks we took around Collegeville, during which we discussed the writers who obsessed him: Nabokov, of course (whom he considered a "phony" and a "snob"), the now obscure thriller writer E. Phillips Oppenheim (E.P.O., an "acronymical anagram" of Poe), and especially Salinger—an alum of dear Ursinus, and, from what I understood then, a great intimate of Professor Warden's niece. (I should point out here that Warden did not actually teach at Ursinus—but he always carried chalk.) We would often stop by the campus watering hole for a pint of obscure Teutonic lager, challenging the huddle of timid English majors to debates on matters literary. Few took us up on our challenge, but those who did took as sound a drubbing as they were likely to obtain anywhere in western Pennsylvania. Warden similarly shows no mercy in the pages of Warden's Nabokov. His most devastating attack is on Lolita, the demonic pinnacle of Nabokov's career. Citing a cache of letters belonging to his niece, Esmé Rockhead, Warden claims that Nabokov—though indubitably the author of such works as The Eye—did not, in fact, write Lolita. Warden sets about to prove that the author was none other than one J.D. Salinger. The visible works of Jerome David Salinger may be quickly enumerated on the fingers of one hand: (a) The Catcher in the Rye, 1951. Your favorite. (b) Nine Stories, 1953. Notable for its one perfect story—Nabokov thought so, too. (c) Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, 1955. Commas are not literature. (d) Seymour: An Introduction, 1959. One of the strangest creatures I know. (e) Franny and Zooey, 1961. Regrettable and forgettable.
The above notations are Warden's, not mine. Though he felt that Salinger was a true American genius, he thought most of Salinger's meager output failed quite utterly. The "one perfect story" of the Nine is "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Though Ms. Rockhead's letters from a certain "J.S." reveal explicitly her correspondent's plans for writing Lolita, and the secret terms of his ghostwriting (as agreed upon with Nabokov), I will refrain from citing the letters, which have since been lost. Instead, I will reiterate what he lists as the major points of similarity between Lolita and "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and let the reader connect the numerous dots. As Warden writes in Master Warden, his charming autobiography (1969), in a remarkable footnote drawing from Novalis: "To read in a book something which one has experienced in life is to become the author of that book; to read in a book something which one has read in another book is to render the two authors interchangeable, equivalent, while simultaneously assigning to the reader—the one who makes the cognitive connection between the two—the role of supreme author." His conclusion, I trust, is hardly disputable.
I just found this note in a binder—a note from Leif D. Warden.
In an article ("Inspiration") written for The Saturday Review, Nabokov cites several favorite stories by his contemporaries, trying to extract exemplary elegant lines. These are "A-plus" stories, says VN, and he attempts to explain his love for, among others, "Bananafish": " 'Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle . . . ' This is a great story, too famous and too fragile to be measured here by a casual conchometrist." ( Strong Opinions, p. 313) The example is a dud; the word conchometrist makes no sense. The sentence only vibrates when the reader realizes that it is the child's foot which Seymour Glass—the repressed pedophile, the suicide—kisses . . . and the castle looms in significance once the image of young Humbert and Annabel comes flickering into view: They pawed each other desperately on that distant beach, where "sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children" granted them "sufficient concealment to graze each other's lips." Is this too-blatant similarity one of the reasons Nabokov seems at a loss for words?But on to the main event. Many have noted Nabokov's admiration for Salinger's story, and though one cannot expect the average critic to be privy to such a trove of information as Warden was, one wishes somebody would have noticed, after 40 [now 50—Ed.] years, that Salinger's story is at the heart of Lolita. "Would it bore you very much," says Charlotte (Lolita's mére) to Humbert Humbert, "to come with us tomorrow for a swim in Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes for her manners?" For some time after, the "lake is out," it is "unattainable"; weather, or Lolita's moods, prevent them from making the excursion. When Charlotte and H.H. finally visit, they go sans little Lo, and he discovers that the name is "Hourglass." Humbert contemplates drowning Charlotte—lucky for him, he does not or cannot. Appel points out that Humbert revises his chronicle as he goes along, and then spouts some nonsense about how "hourglass" symbolizes time and "our glass" represents a "circumscribing mirror"—irrelevant!Nabokov's play on Our Glass/Hourglass might be applauded—if Salinger hadn't thought of it first. (Of course, he did; of course, he wrote Lolita.) In "Bananafish," we meet Sybil Carpenter this way: "See more glass," said Sybil Carpenter, who was staying at the hotel with her mother. "Did you see more glass?" "Pussycat, stop saying that. It's driving Mommy absolutely crazy. Hold still, please." "See more glass," here, is a child's game, a solecism—the man referred to is, of course, Seymour Glass, who will put a bullet in his head by story's end. (Humbert will put bullets aplenty into Quilty, and will, himself, expire.) Seymour Glass's curse and saving grace, as any reader of that story knows, is that he (unlike H.H.) cannot and will not engage in the illicit and unspeakable with the young girl Sybil. Humbert is a wretch because he crosses that line. (The implication in the Esmé Rockhead correspondence is that "J.S." wanted to cross that line in his fiction, anonymously; VN needed a surefire bestseller in order to free him from academic drudgery.) It is curious that some of the more "astute" commentators on Nabokov's work have missed this reference to Salinger. Could it be that Vlad himself asked Appel to ignore the "homage" of "Our Glass Lake"? In A.A.'s introduction to The Annotated Lolita, why does he bother with "satirized too is the romantic myth of the child, extending from Wordsworth to Salinger," without mentioning by name J.S.'s "Bananafish," the clear precursor to this novel? Why note that the name Sybil (given by "Nabokov" to H.H.'s aunt) should remind one of "any of several prophetesses, credited to widely separate parts of the ancient world," with nary a word about how "Nabokov's" pedophile's relation shares a name with the object of Salinger's pedophile's obsession? Warden would have acted as an abler annotator than awful Appel.
The Prismatic Bezel: Destroying Nabokov was printed privately in 1981, a year after Warden's death. I offer it as part of the omnibus edition of Warden's work because it provides a tonal counterpoint to some of the harsher judgments found in Vlad the Impaler. Bezel has as its centerpiece three astonishingly sensible essays—"The Yoknapatawpha– Zembla Express: Faulkner in Nabokov," " Lady Chatterley's Lover—Secret Keys to Pnin," and "VN's Debt to Forster"—all of which had been slated to appear in consecutive issues of the Penumbra Quarterly, Vol. VIII (1978), but which were lost by PQ's then editor, Chad Ravioli. (Fortunately, Warden later found the carbons.) Ravioli, whom I spoke to yesterday in the course of preparing this article, fondly remembers a particularly lambent line that graced one of the many hundreds of notes that the conscientious Warden fired off to the Penumbra editorial board. With regard to his Faulkner-Nabokov piece, Warden wrote a letter to Ravioli in which he paraphrased a fragment from Carlyle (1833), proposing that "all men are vectors condemned to transgress a circle of infinite circumference whose diameter is equivalent to the past minus the present plus the future." Ravioli answered with the gnomic paradox that memory rediscovers magic in the form of ecstasy, while literature is engaged in the "onomatopoeic amnesia" of myth. Warden's response—his last known epistle—claimed the existence of a proto-Hebraic tribe that once thrived in upper Saskatchewan, which tetragrimed the name of God not as JHVH or YHWH but as YMCA.I hope to have a book of Warden's letters out by the summer.Buenos Aires 20 March 1995
1 Warden only noticed his anagrammatic relation to Field after I told him of it one summer afternoon in Buffalo. He was over the moon.
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www.huffingtonpost.com/.../nabokov-marginalia-author_n_620734.html - Nabokov Marginalia: Author Graded New Yorker Stories, Gave A+ Only ... Nabokov Marginalia: Author Graded New Yorker Stories, Gave A+ Only To Salinger And Himself. First Posted: 06-22-10 09:54 AM | Updated: 06-22-10 09:54 AM ...
www.huffingtonpost.com/.../nabokov-marginalia-author_n_620734.html -
www.nypl.org/.../passing-author-jd-salinger-resonates-throughout-ny - NYPL Says Goodbye to J.D. Salinger | The New York Public Library
7 Jan 2010 ... One of Salinger's early fans was Vladimir Nabokov, whose papers and working library are in the Berg. The latter includes his copy of The New ...
www.nypl.org/.../passing-author-jd-salinger-resonates-throughout-nypl -
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Tue, 30 Mar 1999 "Re: nabokov, america, salinger" In checking through Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov (trying to find out when Nabokov became U.S. citizen), came across following which might be of interest: "Asked in a 1975 interview whom he most admired among current American writers, (Nabokov) answered Edmund White (and Updike, and Salinger)" (p. 608) Nabokov re himself and America: "America is my home now (...) It is my country. The intellectual life suits me better than any other country in the world. I have more friends there, more kindred souls than anywhere" (a statement he seems to have made in the forties) (Boyd, p. 22). Worth mentioning also perhaps is that Nabokov, like Salinger, was writer for the New Yorker in the late forties and early fifties; and that Nabokov published a collection of short fiction under the title *Nine Stories* (!?!) with New Directions in December 1947 (Boyd, p. 126). Have always felt there are affinities but surely somebody out there has looked into the Salinger-Nabokov connection more thoroughly. Denis Jonnes
Bananafish Archives, March, 1999: nabokov, america, salinger
30 Mar 1999 ... Have always felt there are affinities but surely somebody out there has looked into the Salinger-Nabokov connection more thoroughly. ...
www.roughdraft.org/JDS/JDS.ocon.mar99/0479.html -
“J. D. Salinger was one of those very few writers whose enormous artistic achievement is out of all proportion to the small place their writings occupy on the bookshelf,” said Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of The New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. “His one great novel was, of course, The Catcher in the Rye, but several of the 'Franny and Zooey' Glass family stories, especially the first, 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' are also classics..One of Salinger’s early fans was Vladimir Nabokov, whose papers and working library are in the Berg. The latter includes his copy of The New Yorker’s anniversary volume of short stories, containing what the editors regarded as the fifty-five best that the magazine had published from 1940 to 1950. Nabokov graded each of the stories (there are a lot of Cs and Ds), and the only stories he awarded an A+ were his own ('Colette') and Salinger’s 'Bananafish.' A tribute from one master to another.”
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* - Postscript
J. D. Salinger
by Adam Gopnik February 8, 2010
J. D. Salinger’s long silence, and his withdrawal from the world, attracted more than the usual degree of gossip and resentment—as though we readers were somehow owed more than his words, were somehow owed his personal, talk-show presence, too—and fed the myth of the author as homespun religious mystic. Yet though he may seem to have chosen a hermit’s life, Salinger was no hermit on the page. And so his death throws us back from the myth to the magical world of his writing as it really is, with its matchless comedy, its ear for American speech, its contagious ardor and incomparable charm. Salinger’s voice—which illuminated and enlivened these pages for two decades—remade American writing in the fifties and sixties in a way that no one had since Hemingway. (The juvenilia of most American writers since bear the mark of one or the other.) But if it had been Hemingway’s role to make American writing hardboiled, it was Salinger’s to let it be soft, even runny, again.
“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” which appeared here in the issue of April 8, 1950, is an account of the horror and battle shock of the Second World War—which the young Salinger fought during some of its worst days and battles—only to end, amazingly, with the offer of an antidote: the simple, direct, and uncorrupted speech that young Esmé’s letter holds out to the no longer entirely broken narrator. It was the comedy, the overt soulfulness, the high-hearted (to use an adjective he liked) romantic openness of the early Salinger stories that came as such a revelation to readers. The shine of Fitzgerald and the sound of Ring Lardner haunted these pages, but it was Salinger’s readiness to be touched, and to be touching, his hypersensitivity to the smallest sounds and graces of life, which still startles. Suicides and strange deaths happen in his stories—one shattering story is devoted to the back and forth on the telephone between a betrayed husband and the man in bed with his wife at that very moment—but their tone is alive with an appetite for experience as it is, and the certainty that religious epiphanies will arise from such ordinary experience. A typical Salinger hero is the little boy who confuses “kike” with “kite,” in “Down at the Dinghy”—who thinks that his father has been maliciously compared to “one of those things that go up in the air. . . . With string you hold.”
Salinger was an expansive romantic, an observer of the details of the world, and of New York in particular; no book has ever captured a city better than “The Catcher in the Rye” captured New York in the forties. Has any writer ever had a better ear for American talk? (One thinks of the man occupying the seat behind Holden Caulfield at Radio City Music Hall, who, watching the Rockettes, keeps saying to his wife, “You know what that is? That’s precision.”) A self-enclosed writer doesn’t listen, and Salinger was a peerless listener: page after page of pure talk flowed out of him, moving and true and, above all, funny. He was a humorist with a heart before he was a mystic with a vision, or, rather, the vision flowed from the humor. That was the final almost-moral of “Zooey,” the almost-final Salinger story to appear in these pages: Seymour’s Fat Lady, who gives art its audience, is all of us.
As for Holden Caulfield, he is so much a part of the lives of his readers that he is more a person to phone up than a character to analyze. A “Catcher” lover in his forties handed Holden’s Christmas journey to his own twelve-year-old son a few years ago, filled with trepidation that time and manners would have changed too much for it to still matter. Not a bit—the boy grasped it to his heart as his father had, as the Rough Guide to his experience, and used its last lines as his yearbook motto. In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.” Of the three, only “Catcher” defines an entire region of human experience: it is—in French and Dutch as much as in English—the handbook of the adolescent heart. But the Glass family saga that followed is the larger accomplishment. Salinger’s retreat into that family had its unreality—no family of Jewish intellectual children actually spoke quite like this, or revered one of the members quite so uncritically—but its central concern is universal. The golden thread that runs through it is the question of Seymour’s suicide, so shockingly rendered in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” How, amid so much joyful experience, could life become so intolerable to the one figure who seems to be its master?
Critics fretted about the growing self-enclosure of Salinger’s work, about a faith in his characters’ importance that sometimes seemed to make a religion of them. But the isolation of his later decades should not be allowed to obscure his essential gift for joy. The message of his writing was always the same: that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence that still surround us (with the hovering unease that one might mistake emptiness for innocence, as Seymour seems to have done with his Muriel). It resides in the particular things that he delighted to record. In memory, his writing is a catalogue of those moments: Esmé’s letter and her broken watch; and the little girl with the dachshund that leaps up on Park Avenue, in “Zooey”; and the record of “Little Shirley Beans” that Holden buys for Phoebe (and then sees break on the pavement); and Phoebe’s coat spinning on the carrousel at twilight in the December light of Central Park; and the Easter chick left in the wastebasket at the end of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos”; and Buddy, at the magic twilight hour in New York, after learning from Seymour how to play Zen marbles (“Could you try not aiming so much?”), running to get Louis Sherry ice cream, only to be overtaken by his brother; and the small girl on the plane who turns her doll’s head around to look at Seymour. That these things were not in themselves quite enough to hold Seymour on this planet—or enough, it seems, at times, to hold his creator entirely here, either—does not diminish the beauty of their realization. In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Seymour, thinking of van Gogh, tells Buddy that the only question worth asking about a writer is “Were most of your stars out?” Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his. ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/02/08/100208ta_talk_gopnik#ixzz19JCKwMVF
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