From Jim Twiggs

RESPONSE TO ANDREA PITZER

I’m indebted to you for so clearly and briefly stating, in your first two paragraphs (below) what I believe to be true of Shade's poem and also of the man. If I were writing my long letter of December 2006 today, I would recast it in places so that my respect for the poem and my compassion for the man came through more clearly. I do indeed consider him to be a complex character about whom readers’ feelings may legitimately vary. In writing that long letter I was reacting, in part, against a view of the poem as uniformly good or even great and the man as uncomplicatedly straightforward and trustworthy.

I also thank you for reminding us of the piece by Abraham Socher, which I hadn’t reread since it appeared in the TLS. Whether the conclusion is true or not, the essay strikes me as  both enlightening and entertaining.

RESPONSE TO JERRY FRIEDMAN

JF: “. . . You’re saying that Nabokov unconsciously sabotaged his poem for comic and thematic purposes.”

JT: That, I guess, is my extreme back-up position. I’d like to think (and do in fact think) that VN wrote what he wrote consciously--which means that I don’t put a lot of stock in some of his reported comments about Shade and the poem. Again I’d like to point out that this is not a question that arises only, or even most often, with VN. I mentioned the case of Flannery O’Connor, but I’m sure we could all come up with examples of writers who, for one reason or another, have said things about their work that do not strike some of us as adequate at one time or another. I also seem to remember VN’s somewhere saying that “Pale Fire” was a trickier poem than it might seem to be. If so, would that count as a mark in my favor? (Does anyone else remember such a comment?)

As long as “werewolf” is being used metaphorically, I have no objection to the rest of your post. But for me, as much as I respect the contributions of Matt and Carolyn, it still seems better simply to say that in Canto IV we are presented with an unforgettable picture of a grieving father stripping himself bare for the reader. I consider the tub scene and its aftermath not great poetry by any stretch but an amazing piece of writing nonetheless. 

The only part that I think fails is when VN steps in to deliver a list of his pet peeves. This is just too intrusive, it seems to me, in the same way as when, earlier on, Kinbote uses the word “voodoo” in front of “psychiatry.” In both cases, wouldn’t we be better off without the editorializing?

RESPONSE TO JANSY MELLO

There’s a part of your post-- the part where you speak of VN’s “critical views on victorian, romantic, and decadent writers, to describe conflictual urges” etc.-- that embarrasses me, because I had no such tremendously big ambitions. Nor would I feel competent to write on such lofty matters. My concerns were much more local. Other than that one passage, I enjoyed your post immensely, with its insights and wonderfully apt quotations.

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.