Message

2. You are right about the Academy of Arts and Letters medal. Father was hard at work and preferred to delegate me to say a few words on his behalf. To answer Dane Gill and others about his awards: he did get four nice plexiglass Playboy awards for best short story of the year, an Oscar nomination for the (almost unused) Lolita screenplay, a posthumous Critics' Choice Award in 1995 for Stories, invitations to accept doctorates from a couple of well known universities (he sent regrets because he did not want academic honors for what he had not studied, and thought it laughable to call oneself "doctor" unless one practices medicine), and a "grooming" invitation to Stockholm (declined). I may have missed something. It is not entirely true that he didn't give hoot. Sometimes he found it touching and entertaining. But he would never go one step out of his way to promote himself for a prize.

3. He did enjoy watching Yashin. Among other reasons, besides the moon landing, that my parents temporarily ordered a TV were the Olympics, major tennis finals, and sometimes hockey championships. When visiting at other times, I was relegated to the downstairs hotel TV to watch my F.1 races, unless Miss Warfield, an elderly British spinster, had beaten me to it. Finally I said basta, went out, and got the most elaborate set money could buy in Montreux. For Nick Grundy: team-wise, VN was not much of an athletic supporter, as they say in England, with one exception -- when an American team -- or individual --was playing, whatever the opponent, he was staunchly on the Americans' side.

4. For Dane Gill again, the Penguin Stories are the same ones I edited for Vintage, with "Easter Rain," of course, included. The Vintage Nabokov, which I am proofing as I write this, will consist of ten stories from the above collection, plus excerpts from Lolita and Speak, Memory.