Phyllis Roth:
I tried to address this issue, however successfully or not, in
"Toward the Man Behind the Mystification," published in 1982 in Nabokov's Fifth
Arc, edited by Rivers and Nicol. I'm still rather fond of that piece but
there were no drum rolls when it appeared.
[EDNOTE. I too discussed the issue in a couple
of conference papers, one of them in a session organized by Phyllis, and an
essay called "'The Small Furious Devil': Memory in 'Scenes from the Life of
a Double Monster,'" in A Small Alpine Form, ed. Nicol and Barabtarlo.
SES]
JM: Thank you both for
the bibliographic indications. Roth's "Toward the Man behind the
Mystification" is easily available and I'll try to get the other articles as
soon as possible.
btw: I also
recommend SES's 1995 article "The V-Shaped Paradigm: Nabokov and
Pynchon," where this matter is also addressed in relation to
TRLSK.
I was interested in
exploring Nabokov's vocabulary
in relation to 'homosexuality' (because he was famous for his attention to
detail and opposition to generalizations) and this is why I turned my attention
to his rendering of human relationships (man-woman;woman-woman;man-man).
Like one, in TRLSK, when V. approaches "the crucial point of Sebastian's sentimental life ...in the
pale light of the task still before [him]."* I also
questioned if VN's pederast characters were mainly pedophiles, as someone
concluded once.
In "Verses and
Versions" there is an epigram by Pushkin which VN translated as: "
The harm is not that you're a Pole..a Tatar be, for all I
care...no harm there either: the harm is you're Vidock Figlyarin."
Perhaps Sergey's
"harm" resulted from his having been, simply, his (not very) younger
brother and easily tagged?
.............................................................................................
*V. had just been
analysing Sebastian Knight"s novel "Success", where SK
probes "the aetiological secret of aleatory
occurrences," related to Percival Q's meeting a girl (a
conjuror's** assistant). According to him the novel contains "a passage so strangely connected with
Sebastian's inner life at the time of the completing of the last chapters, that
it deserves being quoted in contrast to a series of observations referring
rather to the meanders of the author's brain than to the emotional side of his
art," referring to William, who was the girl's "first queer effeminate fiancé, who afterwards
jilted her" and who, in tears, would exclaim " 'Raining in
Paradise,' ... 'the onion of happiness... poor Willy is willy nilly a
willow'..." This same childish donjuanesque "willy" who
later asks himself: "Would she go the way of May, Judy, Juliette,
Augusta, and all the rest of his love-embers?"
**in TRLSK VN chooses the word "conjuror," although in PF he refers
to Shade as a "conjurer."