Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red

This has always struck me as quite bizarre. VN acknowledges in an interview in "Strong Opinions" that he had lent some of his likes and dislikes to Shade at this point, and recites it by heart, so we are entitled to ask of him, not just of Shade, how can lumping these things together constitute "speak[ing] of evil as none has/ Spoken before"? His dislike of bullfighting is fair enough, part of his admirable dislike of cruelty of all kinds. But, if Nabokov did not, as he claimed, understand music, of what interest is his philistine loathing of jazz? And, acutely conscious as he was of the Holocaust, Stalinism, and so on, how could he list "swimming pools" as part of his purportedly unprecedented discourse on "evil"?

 

I believe Carolyn proposed that this shows that something strange is happening to Shade at this point; specifically, a stroke. But it is Nabokov's own endorsement of the list that is "the real thing strange".

 

 

Anthony Stadlen