Green Door chronology:
JM: ...a person mentioned to
me Hugh G. Well's short-story "The Door in the Wall," and, like the green door
it describes. I was revisited by my first experience of reading it as a young
girl...It seems that Nabokov, who used to like Wells in his early childhood,
might have equally been haunted by a green door.His way of expressing
this opening into "arcadia," as a parallel world co-existing with ours,
changed along the years, but... the longing remained.... Nevertheless,
although this "green door" suggests the familiar indication of a
"hereafter" or "other worlds," I surmise it indicates still another
dimension of ecstatic experience...
Carolyn Kunin: I believe the source of
the green door is the back door to Dr Jekyll's house. May be others, of
course.
Fran Assa: Are you saying that VN
actually made reference to a green door in any of these stories or
books? ... A Green Baize door had a particular significance for Edmund
Wilson: in his childhood, his neurotic father used to hide behind one--the green
baize was to keep the sound out, like Proust's cork lined room.
David Powelstock: Jekyll’s back door
is not green, at least not in my edition!
Dieds: The title of the porno movie
refers to the 1956 pop hit by Jim Lowe...I doubt if this will be very helpful to
Nabokovians.
JM: H.G. Well's "door in the wall" was
indeed a green one, but the color he chose for it has probably no
particular meaning.
When I referred to "a green door," in relation to
Nabokov I was merely using it to signal its "opening into arcadia, hereafter,
other worlds," to draw a parallel bt VN's and HGW's.fictions and a kind
of nostalgia for a lost paradise, a lost landscape and lost childhood
which both shared.It was a starting point for something else [paradise as
relating to a future space, versus paradise as a kind of "epicurism of
duration" (Van Veen, in ADA)].
Let's say that, quite innocently, I encouraged a
sequence of "quid pro quods"...
Fran, great to learn that "a green baize door" was
significant for E.Wilson, meaning his father's place of isolation from the
world. I never checked for green baize doors in Nabokov's texts but. perhaps,
they would be as insignificant as H.G.Wells choice for this color (the door was
set in a white wall and there were carmine red flowers close by, I
think).
Carolyn, interesting supposition of a
"split-world" through RLStevenson (whom Nabokov continued to admire,
against Wilson's critical comments, way into adulthood, unlike his appreciation
of HGWells)