Yesterday I received a book, with a note
inside: "there are various references to Nabokov in it." It's a 2010 Brazilian
edition (Ed.Nova Fronteira) of Christopher Hitchens' Memoirs,
"Hitch-22." There were six entries in the Index under
"Nabokov,
The first reference (p.219) shows him in
the early seventies, being impressed by the literary opinions of Martin Amis who
advised him to "search for writers that stood amid(st) the two
literary giants, Charles Dickens and Vladimir Nabokov"("procurar algo entre os
gigantes Dickens e Nabokov"). He returns to VN and Dickens (p.225), being
recited to him by Martin, who dwelt in "the drop in Bleak House; and
offered a frightening rendering of the last verbal duel between Humbert
Humbert and Quilty."
More than a hundred pages later,
Hitchens gets to his own reading of Nabokov while presenting Paul Valéry's and
Salman Rushdie's theories relating literature and music. After he conjectured if
a particular musical ability is necessarily present in any great artist,
he came across "an obstacle that was the size of an iceberg. Vladimir
Nabokov, a man that was capable, more than anybody else, to make
someone feel inhibited by his sharing the same language with him
(and English was only his third option), loathed music." Hitchens then proceeds
to his reading of Nabokov's short-story "Music.," before he mentions a
case, kept in the NYPB ("Nabokov under Glass"...btw:Would this also be
related in anyway to a Snow-White legend, like Carolyn's magical
butterfly?) - in which he finds that VN had attempted a
special kind of notation to place above his holographs. He asks: "wouldn't
that be some sort of musicality"? On p.501, Hitchens returns to another
short-story by Nabokov, in connection to the WWII genocide of Jews,
gipsies, homosexuals: "Signs and Symbols." and quotes a paragraph about Aunt
Rosa...
The last entry mentions Bend
Sinister and the Toad, but I didn't find his reading very
satisfactory (so I prefer not to translate it here because I might distort it
even more) and in contrast to E.Wilson's very pertinent commentary in one of his
letters to Nabokov..