Charles Nicol: "Ah,
fleeting fame! The "writealike" winner was me, Chaz Nicol...The contest had two
steps: first, the judges narrowed down the entries and mixed them with
some actual unpublished VN prose, and then the rest of the Society voted
for the "real" Nabokov. Since everybody who voted, voted for me, I beat
out the Original of Vladimir. If you would like to read 200 more words
adding to the adventures of Timofey Pnin, please turn to, um, I think, the June
1999 or 2000 issue of the Nabokovian; the winner was announced in the
following December issue. ...ps: My episode is about Pnin learning to
drive (which puts him up one on his original author). What I didn't say
there was that I believe he ended up driving a 1948 Studebaker, a car that
resembed an Easter egg equipped with the nose of a B-29."
JM: ..."What's in a name?" -
if your victorious story beat out the original and is
indelibly registered on paper and on Kindle-like
visions? There are various short-stories
about pacts with the Devil (Nabokov's "Nursery Tale" is one) and today
I found a cleverly twisted one, by Max Beerbohm ( in "Seven
Men": "Enoch Soames"), related to an author's wish to find his name
mentioned in the archives of the British Museum a hundred-years in the future,
even if this costs him his immortal soul. Beerbohm plans a revenge on the
scholar (named Nupton) who forgot to include the name of Soames,
with the conviction that he'll not have read the present report he's
then working upon, so that his "words will meet the eye of some
contemporary rival to Nupton and be the undoing of Nupton." Perhaps
there's a sixth arc in Paradise? ( I think Tom Rymour described it
once).
JM: There may be a reward for
those who can tolerate the jargon which endows literary articles with the
glow of a scientific report. I, for one, am now glad that I persevered
through Helen Deutsch's "Loving Dr.Johnson", at a relative distance from her
initial anatomical reports and unnamed lungs in a jar, to reach
the marvellous centrifugal Coda (chapter five), dealing with
Hawthorne, Nabokov and Beckett. She mentions a letter written by Beckett:
"They can put me wherever they want, but it's Johnson, always Johnson, who
is with me. And if I follow any tradition, it is his."(234).]
(HD,220) "The consummate 'link-and-bobolink,'
the 'correlated pattern in the game' (812-13) that reassures John Shade about
life's overarching design, connects the ends of art to the endless refractions
of art within individual imaginations [Cf. Chaz Nicol!]. Art becomes an
encounter fraught with desire: whether it be Kinbote's fantasy that he has
'impregnated Shade' with the true inspiration for his poem or Boswell's claim
that he alone is uniquely 'impregnated with Johnsonian aether," art remains
unfinished; it does not end - rather it wounds, and in wounding it comes to
life."
(221-222): "John Shade and Vladimir Nabokov were not the only authors
to search for a weak spot in the armor of the confident order of Pope's "Essay
on Man,"...Samuel Johnson's passionately satiric response to these sentiments
(in his review of Soame Jenyns's "A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of
Evil") is reminiscent in its destructive energy of Kinbote's transgressive
reopening of Shade's neatly finished couplets. The vanity of such couplet art in
Johnson's account expands by analogy, emptying out the divinely ordered
world."*
(234) "While it's difficult to think of two
writers more different in style than Nabokov and Johnson [Samuel], it's
interesting to contemplate how coincident Lawrence Lipking's claim that 'we
wake from a book like "Rasselas" to discover we are in it' is with Brian
Boyd's description of "Pale Fire" as a book from which we wake to call it
life."
..................................................................................................................................
*-In his introduction to Max Beerbohm, John
Updike writes, on "Savonarola's Brown": "The model tragedy, concerning the
Florentine monk Savonarola, upon which Brown has been portentously laboring,
turns out, when he dies, to be one act short of five, and in its maladroit blank
verse and mob of Renaissance characters a travesty of Shakespeare. Max was a
versifier of dainty skill, and the comic effects, to be savored line by line,
hinge on fine points, such as contractions run riot to fit the meter, unhappy
coinages like 'friskfulness,' clanging iambs, and drooping enjambements. Yet
there is something wild and disheveled about the piece overall, especially the
last three pages, where Beerbohm asserts his own presence; Bardolatry is
possibly so big and well-armored that is has splayed his
pen."