Question posed last week on the BBC TV Mastermind Quiz:
“Which 20th century novel starts
‘Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul?’”
Contestant: “LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER.”
[Gasps of disbelieving horror!]
Quiz master, John Humphrys: “No. Lolita.”
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NATIONAL REVIEW, Nov 17 2008:
Review by John Derbyshire of two new Samuel Johnson biographies (by Jeffrey Meyers and Peter Martin). John discusses the epilogue to Meyers’ “Samuel Johnson: The Struggle” which deals with SJ’s influence on six later writers, including Woolf, Beckett and Nabokov.
“Nabokov coped better [than Beckett] though more subtly, with Johnson’s huge shadow. His strange 1962 novel ‘Pale Fire’ is, Meyers tells us, shot through with Johnsonian and Boswellian allusions. We get over seven pages on this. I should like to read ‘Pale Fire’ again before passing judgement on Meyers’s interpretation. It is Nabokov’s most playful, most convoluted novel (which is saying a lot) -- THE KIND OF THING AN INGENIOUS THEORIST MIGHT READ ALMOST ANYTHING INTO.”
These are MY CAPS, triggered by the fact that I’m in media res enthralled with Priscilla Meyer’s [no relation to Jeffrey Meyers!] FIND WHAT THE SAILOR HAS HIDDEN (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1988). “Ingenious Theory” is the perfect description of Priscilla’s mix’n’match allusion-juggling. More anon.
Stan Kelly-Bootle