S.Klein posted a link
thru Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 filed under In the News, quoting a theory, by Terry Castle
of The New Republic, “that Nabokov knew The Price of Salt and
modeled the climactic cross-country car chase in Lolita on Therese and Carol’s
frenzied bid for freedom…” . Once in a while we find people mentioning
"Lolita" and how "VN knew and modeled" some author without acknowledging
it. For me, the reports about VN's adventures and butterfly-hunting expeditions
in America, even had he read and enjoyed Patricia Highsmith's "cross-country car
chase," provide sufficient material to garantee his original twist and
HH's (often hallucinatory) Quilty in different disguises.
Humbert Humbert mentions his
beard in "Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am now,
today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that...") in a
novel that often returns to Beardsley, a bearded woman, a Miss
Beard, a grieving Kasbeam barber.
HH once saw himself as a "Poor Bluebeard" - and
another "blue-black beard" - grown by a "corpulent botanist's husband" - is also
mentioned: he is "a handsome Assyrian with a
little blue-black beard").
Kinbote, in New Wye, looks like a " Big
Beaver" ( whereas well-shaven Shade resemble Samuel Johnson, or an
old hag), but an "Assyrian beard" has irrupted
before. When Luzhin's father ( in "The Defense") thinks
about his son, he sees him as a "boy ...who is to glide, across the alternation of
many nights and days, from the oblivion of breakdown into the whiteness of a
hospital where the psychiatrist wears "a black Assyrian beard."
Perhaps in ADA, with its frequent excursions
towards the Orient and ancient cities, or Aqua's doctors, there will
be other assailing hairy "Assyrians" (Byronic or not).
Did VN ever grow a beard? I vaguely
remember studio-photographs related to VN with people wearing costumes and
maks, but I cannot find them (if they exist) to check that.