J.A: [...] my theory that with
Pale Fire it is the reader's catching something akin to Kinbote's fever, not
because there is an ultimate answer to anything, but just because the fever
itself is fun, thereby exploiting a basic component of our reasoning faculties,
their amazing facility and will to know, and also their flawed
perspective-marred flesh and blood limitations, which really make the novel such
a novel machine.Nabokov is playing with the reader, not instructing them; the
better they are at it the more they have a chance of missing the trees for the
forest, to take to my point the blunt bathetic blade of an old saw--ha ha.
JM: Very well said and
...mentioning Father Brown as the cherry on a cloud
of whipped-cream ("missing the trees for the
forest")?.
Jay Livingston: I was watching Woody Allen's "Radio
Days." Mia Farrow plays Sally White, a 1940s radio gossip
columnist. The following occurs a little over an hour into the film. And now, the makers of Lady Lydia facial cream... bring you
"Sally White and Her Gay White Way."
Good evening, and cheers to you all out
there.My first exclusive--Clark Gable was in town this week in uniform...and
where did he go?
To El Morocco, naturally.That brunette on his arm...was
Lolly Hayes, an up-and-coming starlet. Hope you had fun, Clark.
And
didn't Rita Hayworth look stunning last night...
JM: Lolly
Hayes is suggestive, but I don't think HH ever called Lolita "Lolly ".
Hayes* plaze
with "Haze, Dolores", indeed.
*
- In VN's novel we find a Mrs.Hays (not Hayes), in HH's last
moments with Lo. [ Cf. Hays, the brisk,
briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were
Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was,
whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish. [...] With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove,
half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old
woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and
whom I was never to see again." ] A prophetic vision
of Switzerland ? Swiss ancestors were commonly mentioned, does anyone know
when VN introduced the Swiss in his novels? Here we have royal
sunsets, witches and a
"heterosexual" Kinbote?