B.Boyd: The evidence suggests VN did
read TSE closely, because he WAS lauded to the skies from the 1940s to the
1960s. VN pastiches "Gerontion" and "Ash Wednesday" in Lolita, and targets Four
Quartets and echoes The Waste Land in at least two places in "Pale Fire," and
(admittedly, in his most positive judgment) declares Eliot "not quite
first-rate"--a lot more than he allows any of the other "plaster
busts."...
JM: additional echoes from ADa
with VN's satire..
Van’s eye over his
umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee
striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman,
Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The
Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla — here a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’
colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote
verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton
Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being
betrayed by several mirrors [...]
He walked through
the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr
Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their
shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the
hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at
Ovenman’s[...]
[...]The
last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring
of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two
lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight,
Demon’s new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who
at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one
miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on
Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle
yam extolling the Roman faith.[...].
The poem
was but the twinkle in an owl’s eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced ‘seminal’ by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh,
Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so
high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility;
it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays
in 1910 (‘Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,’ ‘Sween as poet and person,’
‘Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography’) both the satire and the
romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman’s control of
background adjustment — or Demon’s edict.