Petter Naess: VN makes much of the lack of
spontaneity in his "interviews", in which questions are submitted and VN's
(written) responses are prepared beforehand. Sometimes he has a bit of fun with
this by inserting faux spontaneity to create the illusion of an actual
interview... in the midst of answering a literary question, pretends to be
accosted by his dog (did he ever own a dog, btw?) and interjects "Down, Fido"
(or something like that...), but now I'm unable to locate that passage.
JM: Yes, I remember
the Fido thing. There must be two similar instances for, in the one I
located (Vintage,p. 78), Nabokov doesn't mention Fido, but Plato: " I would say that imagination is a form of memory. Down, Plato,
down, good dog. An image depends on the power of association...both memory and
imagination are a negation of time...". He mentions Plato before (pages
69,70), probably later on too. Nabokov was not playing spontaneous as he seems to have
been a forerunner of "neosincerity."
His family owned dogs ( there were
Box I, Box II...), his first love kept Floss; Quilty and Aunt Maud had a
shaggy skye-terrier...I'm a cat person, so I cannot be more precise about dogs -
which are platonically immaterial anyway.