Efficient and coherent ED Steve
Blackwell wrote: "Jansy, I'm not
inclined to post Vidal's quotation of VN, since it's just rhetorical; or--do you
have a larger point on the Lincoln topic you're after?" *
JM: There's no "larger point"
to add but, in this reformulated posting, he may let it pass. The smaller
point at issue is that I still have another (irrelevant!) reference to Lincoln,
one that is even more distanced, than Gore Vidal's risposte, related to the
living Abraham and his biographical work of fiction.
In a very curious book titled "A Reader's Guide
to Writers's London" (Ian Cunningham, Prion Books, 2001), there was an entry
related to Holborn (p.79) the area that "dominates Dickens' greatest novel,
Bleak House, starting from its arresting opening, with London in
'implacable November weather"...In the novel, the sinister lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn
has chambers at Lincoln's Inn Fields... Dickens is actually describing the home
of his closest friend, 'the Lincolnian mammoth' John Forster, at 58 Lincoln's
Inn Fields...It was also at Forster's home that Dickens read his Christmas story
'The Chimes'... Lincoln's Inn itself was one of the four Inns of Court (see
Temple), built piecemeal between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. Among the workers was a young bricklayer, later a playwright, Ben
Jonson...The foundation stone of the chapel was laid by Donne"
aso.
In Nabokov's "Lectures on Literature"
(F.Bowers,1980,p.63-124) we find his study of "Bleak House," when he
feels "at table with our tawny port...Modern authors
still get drunk on his vintage." In it there is a typical
comment (similar to his observations about Shakespearean plays and Gogol's
work):
"In discussing Bleak
House we shall soon notice that the romantic plot of the novel is an
illusion and is not of much artistic importance. There are better things in the
book than the sad case of Lady Dedlock...it is going to be all play [...] The
study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised
mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic
vibrancy of authentic literature, for those who do not experience the telltale
tingle between the shoulder blades. As is quite
clear, the enchanter interests me more than the yarn spinner or the
teacher."(64-65)..."His people are alive, not merely clothed ideas or
symbols"(69)... and there's an Ada "on the good side" (68). How VN deals with
Skimpole, Jo and with Dickens' definition of "a child," is worth
remembering. "The Precision of Poetry and the
Excitement of Science. And this is the impact of Bleak House at its
best.."(123)
Inspite of the inadequate connecting threads bt.
Lincoln's Inn Fields, Dickens and Abraham Lincoln, this verbal voyage might
be of interest to the Listers. I'm sure that it will send me back to
Nabokov's lectures and to Dickens' "Bleak House," Mnemosyne at her
best!
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* - Vidal, defending his novel "Lincoln" quoted
Nabokov: "The late Vladimir Nabokov said that when anyone criticized his
art, he was indifferent. That was their problem. But if anyone attacked his
scholarship, he reached for his dictionary." www.nybooks.com/.../gore-vidals-lincoln-an-exchange/
-