Brian
Boyd:"... Nabokov's knowledge of modern American poetry
was, I suspect, not assiduous or methodical, but what came his way he could
retain and put to wonderful use--like Edsel Ford's poem, too. The list is an
excellent way for discoveries like yours and Matt Roth's of the Edsel Ford to
become known in a flash."
JM: It was thanks to your
diligence and trained eye that one of these letters ( June 9, 1944)
referring to some of The New Yorker's poems
- which had been misfiled at the Beineke-Library
- made its way into the Karlinsky edition of the VNabokov-E.Wilson
correspondence (and included in your Vladimir Nabokov: The American
Years, pp. 73-75.)
......................................................................................................................................
"This derisive tone, fed up with the foolhardiness of humanity and
especially of the bourgeois, gets its strength from Flaubert’s intelligence and
extraordinary knack for parody. The training of his intellect and humor upon the
target of middle-class values, from which he tried to keep a distance his whole
life, and upon the new, comfortable, and peaceful daily life enabled by
modernity and industrialization, gives Flaubert’s voice a power with which many
writers today sympathize. In recent times, Flaubert admirers, especially among
young writers, have given great importance to identifying with this voice,
taking the mask of mockery, cynicism, and intelligence from Flaubert and placing
it over their own faces. When reading Nabokov’s Lolita, for instance,
one detects a Flaubertian sensibility behind the scornful needling of American
middle-class life. We all regard an eminent author’s derision of human
foolishness and mediocrity as appealing; we read his books, in some respects, to
hear these voices and live among them." (Orhan Pamuk: "Table
Talk")