Anthony Stadlen: "I do not
agree at all that "brothers" and "kinsmen" are being contrasted, in Leviticus,
with "fellows" and "neghbours". This is not sentimental rosy-glow love, it
is honest love-as-action. As Auden said: "You shall love your crooked neighbour
with your crooked heart." hope this will be regarded as sufficiently
relevant to discussion of VN, as this is as it were the primal literature of our
civilisation that underlies all discussions of Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Nabokov
and others."
Anthony Stadlen: I am somehow convinced
of VN's basic true kindness, as opposed to the sentimental "kindness" of the
commandant. I was dismayed that I could think of no better evidence than these
two feeble examples. Perhaps I am too easily swayed by VN's explicitly stated
love of kindness and dislike of cruelty, but they always struck me as
genuine.What I find most questionable, or at least puzzling, is his insistence
that "Lolita" is "pure" and "abstract", so utterly removed from his own
concerns, whereas his most casual references in interviews, and other parts of
his oeuvre, so frequently return quite (to me) unexpectedly and arbitrarily to
the paedophilic theme.I am surprised that there appears to have been no
discussion of this. What do others think?
JM: Freud's famous
clinical observation ("neurotics are perverts in their dreams"), must have been
aided by his readings of Plato. Freud makes two explicit references
to the Greek philosopher's Book IX - The Republic, in his "The
Interpretation of Dreams." In chapter: "Moral
Sense in Dreams" he writes: "Plato...thought that the best men are those who
only dream what others do in their waking life". In the
closing lines of his book he writes: "The virtuous man is content to
dream what a wicked man really does."
We cannot be certain, even, that
Humbert actually did" what he confessed in writing, while confined in
an asylum.But we can be certain that Nabokov's dreams and nightmares
were seldom gentle and kind (he suffered from chronic insomnia).
Through his writing he exorcized and expelled his monsters, placed like
the gargoyles in the façade of cathedrals. If Nabokov's
"inside" was not a cathedral, we know that his art strained to reach
an invisible dimension where kindness is the rule.
Personally, I don't worry about Nabokov's
well-being in any protean hereafter, nor do I find it important to
ascertain that he was kind or generous in his cotidian life. His
writing could operate an alchemy and his readers get a whiff of
this invisible realm. This is what matters to me.
(btw: Stan! Was there a person from
Porlock who kept you from seeing the hidden haiku in
TOoL? If "style is matter", what's to be
discerned in anyone's immaterial after-life?
You wrote: "I will dust the old Ouija
board and try again tomorrow. Dying to meet you! So many questions!" - but
I hope to meet you in June, despite televised World-Cup
Championship games. We even could try consulting the Ouija board
together, in great style, with Carolyn's helping hand!
)