-------- Original Message --------
Dear Jansy,
Thank you for alerting me to Victor and Jerry's previous observations
regarding Parthenocissus. It strikes me as remarkable that we all seem
to have arrived at the same destination by different routes. Brian Boyd
says in NPF that VN many times provides multiple ways of reaching those
conclusions he most intends us to find.
In your last note you say that Boston is closer to Wordsmith than
Virginia. Despite the "New England" location cited by Odon (via
Kinbote), all other information--including comments made by VN in an
interview--point to New Wye being somewhere in the mountains of
northern Virginia or West Virginia. I know this has been discussed at
length on the list, but I will risk cutting and pasting below an entry
from the commentary to PF that I am working on with my students this
semester.
Matt Roth
The exact location of New Wye is something of a puzzle, though
"Appalachia" clearly places it somewhere along the Appalachian Range in
the eastern portion of the United States. Later on in the Foreword
(19.30-31) Kinbote says that New Wye is "at the latitude of Palermo."
The latitude of Palermo, Italy is 38 degrees 07 minutes North. A
similar latitude of 38 degrees in America would seem to place New Wye
at a point along a line stretching from Washington, D.C. west to
Charleston, West Virginia. The only information which conflicts with
this conclusion is in the note to line 149, in which Kinbote reports
that Odon's mother, Sylvia O'Donnell was "was an American, from New Wye
in New England" (139.15-16). This is either a mistake by Kinbote or an
oversight by Nabokov, a fact which becomes clear once we survey the
remaining evidence. In the note to line 949, Kinbote says that Gradus
took a train from New York City to Exton, a journey of "four hundred
miles" (277.9). Later on!
in the same note, Kinbote says that it was reported that "Jack Grey had
been given a lift, all the way from Roanoke, or somewhere, by a
lonesome trucker" (284.6-8). Roanoke is located in southern Virginia,
along a highway heavily traveled by trucks hauling goods up and down
the east coast. In a post to the Nabokov listserv, D. Barton Johnson
quotes from an interview in which Nabokov indicates that “the
particular features of the landscape—the lakes, the campus, the
academic suburb---remain close to Cornell,” but adds that Wordsmith is
“much more to the south than any of the colleges with which I have been
connected. … The flora and the fauna may indicate somewhere a little
further south in Appalachia.” Finally, we have a note about the
elevation of New Wye in the note to line 238, where Kinbote says that
Shade often remarked on "the extraordinary blend of Canadian Zone and
Austral Zone . . . in that particular spot of Appalachia where at our
altitude of about !
1,500 feet northern species of birds, insects and plants commingled wi
th southern representatives” (169.2-6). When we take all of this
information together, we can see that New Wye must be located somewhere
along the spine of the Appalachian Range, probably in the mountains of
northern Virginia or eastern West Virginia. Of the locations along this
line, Harrisonburg, VA seems to fit all of the requirements.
Harrisonburg, home to both James Madison University and Eastern
Mennonite University, is located at 38 degrees 44 minutes latitude, and
on the eastern edge of the city the elevation rises to just above 1400
feet. By the shortest highway route, it is about 350 miles from New
York City, but a train route with many stops could easily come out
closer to 400 miles. Harrisonburg is located along old route 11 (now
made largely obsolete by Interstate 81), making it an easy stop for any
truck heading north out of Roanoke. Another curious fact: the Botkin
(also Botkins and Bodkin) family name is particularly common in
Harrisonburg and its direct !
vicinity. A search of 2008 phone directories reveals 201 people or
establishments in Virginia named Botkin, while no neighboring state has
as many as 100. As this map
(http://www.whitepages.com/search/Replay?sea_id=60091362588773431122&lower=1&view=map)
shows, the Botkins are clearly clustered around Harrisonburg and points
just south, with 33 Botkins in the city of Harrisonburg alone. There is
also a concentration of Botkins in and around Charleston, West
Virginia, but the elevation of Charleston is much lower. While it is
hard to know how Nabokov may have known of the prevalence of the Botkin
name in these areas, the geographical hints alone make the mountains of
northern Virginia the most likely location for New Wye. We should,
however, never fail to forget that ultimately New Wye is a fiction and
can't truly be found on any map.