B.Boyd to Mike Marcus: As an admirer of Nabokov
and Shakespeare--who I have no doubt was Edward de Vere--I too am curious about
VN's exact views on the authorship question...
Jansy Mello: For Mike
Marcus's collection on "Vere" and "Verre", from PNIN:
"... Look at it! Look at this writhing pattern. You know, you should
show it to the Cockerells. They know everything about old glass. In fact, they
have a Lake Dunmore pitcher that looks like a poor relation of
this.'
Margaret Thayer admired it in her turn, and said that when she was a
child, she imagined Cinderella's glass shoes to be exactly of that greenish blue
tint; whereupon Professor Pain remarked that, primo, he would like everybody to
say if contents were as good as container, and, secundo, that Cendrillon's shoes
were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur — vair, in French. It was, he
said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being
more evocative than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated,
but from veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur,
having a bluish, or better say sizïy, columbine, shade — 'from columba, Latin
for "pigeon ", as somebody here well knows — so you see, Mrs Fire, you were, in
general, correct.'
'The contents are fine,' said Laurence Clements.
'This
beverage is certainly delicious,' said Margaret Thayer.
('I always thought
"columbine" was some sort of flower,' said Thomas to Betty, who lightly
acquiesced*.)
btw: I just realized there's another
possible hidden "play": the two names, Cockerell and Thayer (or, as
Pnin called her Mrs. Fire) and VN as a "firebird".
..........................................................................................................
* Alexey Sklyarenko wrote about "irises" and I suppose
he is indicating the flower called "Iris" and not the
"harlequin" prismatic effect, with a similar double meaning (the
columba=dove and the columbine=flower besides the name Cinderella,
related to cinders and the color gray/vair)
In his memoir essay The Literary Evening at P. A.
Pletnyov's (1869) Turgenev describes Pletnyov's guests and mentions the
so-called "harlequin" (of different colors) irises of one of them:
адъютант в жандармском мундире,
белокурый, плотный мужчина с разноцветными (так называемыми арлекинскими)
зрачками