Dear participants in a fascinating and mind-bending discussion on the
authorship question in PF:
I have a minor correction, and a small dollup of information about
notes and manuscripts.
The MC: VN's dictionary was Webster's 2nd, not the 3rd--which was a
significant abridgement of the 2nd.
The dollup: I have been looking at archival materials as part of my
ongoing work on the relation between VN's scientific and artistic
activities. The notecards at the Berg Collection of the NYPL,which are
open to scholars, tell us some potentially interesting things about
what VN might have been thinking about during PF's composition. We
can't make absolute conclusions from these, as they are probably
incomplete; and they themselves have ambivalent significance. But for
what they are worth:
During the fifties, VN looked at psychiatric journals. Some of the
results of these exercises can be found explicitly in Pnin--and
possibly also in Lolita--in references to specific psychiatric
papers. There are several note cards with details from these articles;
they relate to studies of sexual behavior in children and adults, as
tranformed in Pnin (e.g. pp 50-52). There are also notes that
relate to psychical research: Psychical Research Today
(D.J. West, 1954) and examples of secondary personalities; also, a
long-ish reference to The Case of Patience Worth ((W.F. Prince,
1927)--a renowned case of channeling by a mid-western housewife of a
17th century author (during the years 1912-1937). The notes also
include reference to the possible faking of such paranormal
phenomena--but no specific comments or evaluations by VN about his
response to these. (I can't quote directly, of course, because these
are unpublished materials and I haven't requested permission to quote
them.) There is nothing in the notes I have seen, I should add, that
suggests anything about the "authorship" or "identity" questions. This
information does not help us make a decision; maybe VN destroyed his
"keys". We are left (we on the sidelines, I mean) to evaluate for
ourselves the force of the arguments on either side. The notes are in
the item "Notes on various subjects", a binder of several hundred note
cards.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that in the one (?) other VN novel where
an alternate personality is a definite trait of the narrator, The
Eye, the situation is related both to a death wish and to
intimations of homosexuality. But the narrator never converses with
Smurov, his erstwhile self.
With best wishes to all,
Stephen Blackwell,
your lurking co-editor