Vladimir Nabokov - Strong opinions

NINA BERBEROVA

In Miss Berberov's excellent article on Pale Fire I find a couple of minute mistakes: Kinbote begs «dear Jesus» to relieve him of his fondness for faunlets, not to cure his headache, as she implies; and Professor Pnin, whose presence in that novel Miss Berberov overlooks, does appear in person (note to line 949, Pale Fire), with his dog. She is much better, however, at delineating the characters in my novels than in describing V. Sirin, one ot my characters in «real» life. In her second article, on «N. in the Thirties» (from her recent memoirs, The Italics Are Mine), she permits herself bizarre inaccuracies. I may be absentminded, I may be too frank about my literary tastes, okay, but I would like Miss Berberov to cite one specific instance of my having read a book that I had never read. In my preface (June 25, 1959) to the English-language edition of Invitation to a Beheading I have more to say about that kind of nonsense. Then there is a sartorial detail in her memoir that I must set straight. Never did I possess, in Paris or elsewhere, «a tuxedo Rachmaninov had given [me]». I had not met Rachmaninov before leaving France for America in 1940. He had twice sent me small amounts of money, through friends, and I was eager now to thank him in person. During our first meeting at his flat on West End Avenue, I mentioned I had been invited to teach summer school at Stanford. On the following day I got from him a carton with several items of obsolete clothing, among which was a cutaway (presumably tailored in the period of the Prelude), which he hoped — as he said in a kind little note — I would wear for my first lecture. I sent back his well-meant gift but (gulp of mea culpa!) could not resist telling one or two people about it. Half a dozen years later, when Miss Berberov migrated to New York in her turn, she must have heard the anecdote from one of our common friends, Karpovich or Kerenski, after which a quarter of a century elapsed, or rather collapsed, and somehow, in her mind, the cutaway was transformed into a «tuxedo» and transferred to an earlier era of my life. I doubt that I had any occasion in Paris, in the thirties, when the short series of my brief encounters with Miss Berberov took place, to wear my old London dinner jacket; certainly not for that dinner at L'Ours (with which, incidentally, the «Ursus» of Ada and the Medved'oi St. Petersburg have nothing to do); anyway, I do not see how any of my clothes could have resembled the doubly anachronistic handmedown in which the memoirist rigs me out. How much kinder she is to my hooks!

PETER LUBIN

The multicolored inklings offered by Mr. Lubin in his «Kickshaws and Motley» are absolutely dazzling. Such things as his «v ugloo» [Russ. for «in the corner»] in the igloo of the globe [a blend of «glow» and «strobe»] are better than anything I have done in that line. Very beautifully he tracks down to their lairs in Eliot three terms queried by a poor little person in Pale Fire. I greatly admire the definition of tmesis (Type I) as a «semantic petticoat slipped on hetween the naked noun and its clothing epithet», as well as Lubin's «proleptic» tmesis illustrated by Shakespeare's glowworm beginning «to pale his ineffectual fire». And the parody of an interview with N. (though a little more exquisitely iridized than my own replies would have been) is sufficiently convincing to catch readers.

LUCIE LEON NOEL

The extent to which I was concerned with the fragility of my English at the time of my abandoning Russian in 1939 may be gauged by the fact that even after Mrs. Leon had gone over the manuscript of my Sebastian Knight in Paris where it was written, and I had moved to the USA, I begged the late Agnes Perkins, the admirable Head of the English Department at Wellesley, to assist me in reading the galleys of the book (bought for $150 in 1941, by New Directions), and that later, another kind lady, Sylvia Berkman, checked the grammar of my first English stones that appeared in The Atlantic in the early forties.

1 am sorry that Lucie Leon in her amiably modulated «Playback» does not speak more than she does of her brother Alex Ponizovski of whom I was very fond (I particularly like recalling the streak of quiet eccentricity that endeared him to fellow students at Cambridge, such as the time he casually swallowed the contents of a small bottle of ink that happened to be within reach while we sat and talked by the fire). In her account of a dinner with Janies Joyce in Paris, I found it refreshing to be accused of bashfulness (after finding so frequently in the gazettes complaints of my «arrogance»); but is her impression correct? She pictures me as a timid young artist; actually I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid awareness of what I had already done for Russian letters preventing me from feeling awed in the presence of any living writer. (Had Mrs. Leon and I met more often at parties she might have realized that I am always a disappointing guest, neither inclined nor able to shine socially.)

Another little error occurs in the reference to the palindromethat I wrote in her album. There was nothing new about a reversible sentence in Russian: the anonymous sandglass «a roza upala na lapu Azora» («and the rose fell upon Azor's paw») is as familiar to children as, in another nursery, «able was I ere I saw Elba». The first line of my Kazak is, in fact, not mine (I think it was given me by the late Vladimir Piotrovski, a wonderfully skillful poet); what I claimed was new referred to my expanding the palindrome into a rhymed quatrain with its three last verses making continuous sense in spite of each being reversible.

IRWIN WEIL

Curiously enough, the note appended to my Kazak by Irwin Weil (who contributes an interesting essay on my «Odyssey» elsewhere in the volume) also requires correction. His statement that «the third and fourth lines are each palindromes if one excludes the last [?] syllables» is quite wrong; all four lines are palindromes, and no «last syllables» have to be excluded.* Especially regrettable is Mr. Weil's mistranslation of one of them. He has confused the Russian word for aloes (a genus of plant) with aloe, which means «red» or «rosy», and that, too, is mistranslated, becoming «purple»!

* This error is due to a faulty transcription of the palindrome on p. 218 of TriQuarterly 17. The Russian word rvat', the first word of line four, has been placed at the end of line three. The errors in the transcription and note (p. 217) will be corrected in the paperback edition of the volume, to be published this fall by Simon and Schuster.

I must also question an incomprehensible statement in Mr. Weil's article «Odyssey of a Translator». The Russian lawyer E. M. Kulisher may well have been «an old acquaintance» of my father's, but he was not «close to the Nabokov family» (I do not remember him as a person) and I have never said anywhere what Mr. Weil has me indicate in the opening paragraph of his article.

MORRIS BISHOP

My old friend Morris Bishop (my only close friend on the campus) has touched me very deeply by his recollections of my stay at Cornell. I am assigning an entire chapter to it in my Speak On, Mnemosyne, a memoir devoted to the 20 years I spent in my adopted country, after dwelling for 20 years in Russia and for as many more in Western Europe. My friend suggests that I was bothered by the students' incompetence in my Pushkin class. Not at all. What bothered and angered me was the ineptitude of the system of Scientific Linguistics at Cornell.

ROSS WETZSTEON

I remember most of the best students in my Cornell classes. Mr. Wetzsteon was one of them. My «Bleak House diagram», which he recalls so movingly, is preserved among my papers and will appear in the collection of lectures (Bleak House, Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, etc.) that I mean to publish some day. It is strange to think that never again shall I feel between finger and thumb the cool smoothness of virgin chalk or make that joke about the «gray board» (improperly wiped), and be rewarded by two or three chuckles (RW? AA? NS?).