M.Roth: "...A tangle of associations led me back
to a report from the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 27
(1915). The experiment described there involved a number of SPR
automatists who claimed to be channeling (independent of one another) messages
from a number of erudite spirits, including F.W.H. Myers. You’ll recall
that Myers (former head of the SPR and author Human Personality and Its Survival
of Bodily Death) contributes a poem in the séance scene in “The Vane Sisters.”
According to the Proceedings, one of the SPR sitters, Mrs. Piper, recorded a
message from Myers which said “I gave Mrs. Verrall laurel wreath.” Mrs.
Verrall was another SPR automatist, and when they checked her scripts written
during the same time period (but supposedly without knowledge of Mrs. Piper’s
scripts) they found that, three weeks prior to Mrs. Piper’s message, she had
written a number of lines containing references to laurels and laurel
wreaths. This seems to me quite similar to the situation in VN’s story,
where spirits take credit for images given previously to a
writer. "
Jansy Mello: I advanced the hypothesis that "The
Laurels" might have been inspired in one of the houses the Nabokovs lived during
their life in America, in a vain attempt to do away with ghostly mysteries or
any "flawy but genunine gleam"*. Unfortunately, however, I read M.Roth's
posting incorrectly. Nabokov doesn't mention laurels, but Myers, in
The
Vane Sisters. Besides, checking through Dieter Zimmer's
exhilarating ennumeration of Nabokov addresses in America, I could find no such
place in his list-in-progress, published in
Zembla since
1997... Please, check
Vladimir Nabokov's Whereabouts (Homes & Haunts) by
Dieter E ...
www.dezimmer.net/HTML/whereabouts.htm
................................................................................................................................................
* - "Frederic Myers, an old hand at the game, hammered out a
piece of verse (oddly resembling Cynthia's own fugitive productions) which in
part reads in my note
* "Frederic Myers, an old hand at the game, hammered out a piece of
verse (oddly resembling Cynthia's own fugitive productions) which in part reads
in my notes:
What is this—a
conjuror's rabbit,
Or a flawy but genuine
gleam—
Which can check the perilous
habit
And dispel the dolorous
dream? "