Stephen Blackwell: No time for research
right now, but my memory and at least one source gives Nabokov's eyes a hazel
shade.
..The Atlantic's ninth editor-in-chief, Edward
Weeks. The two men were introduced in 1941 by the critic Edmund
Wilson and began to meet regularly for lunch at th eRutz Hotel in Boston. Weeks
was enchanted by Nabokov. As the editor recalled years later in an interview,"He
would come in a shabby tweed coat, trousers bulging at the knee, but be quite
the most distinguished man in the room, with his perfectly beautiful hazel eys,
his fine brown hair, the elan, the spark . . . ." Any significance to the
present discussion?
JM: I tried
to find the reference using google-desktop. I came with various (uncertain)
references to hazel eyes:
Sebastian Knight "It
contained among other things a wicked Chinaman who snarled, a brave girl
with hazel eyes, and a big quiet fellow whose knuckles turned white
when someone really annoyed him..."
Despair(?): "I
sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe for
the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural
side-wave of her brown hair... But, probably the truth was that I loved her
because she loved me... I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner
jacket, with
the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair
and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...."
La Veneziana: "The
painting was very fine indeed. Luciani had portrayed the Venetian beauty in
half-profile... she seemed...to have frozen motionless, her hazel,
uniformly dark eyes gazing fixedly, languidly from the
canvas.
Solus Rex ( or Ultima
Thule) in a small island of text there's an interlingual mention to Hazel (cf.
the color of VN's passport-eyes): "The words of the family arms,
"see and rule" (sassed ud halsem), used to be changed by wags,
when referring to him, to "armchair and filbert brandy" (sasse ud
hazel)."
Scott's Lady of the Lake, the poem from
which Nabokov borrowed the name Hazel Shade, opens with the famous
chase of a stag by a hunter that begins in the woods of Glenartney and ends at
the shore of Loch Katrine... Scott's poetry thus connects Kinbote's Zemblan past
with the story of Hazel's life... Cf. Nabokov's Pale Fire and the Romantic
Movement (with special reference to the Brocken, Scott and Goethe) by
Gerard de Vries
I also dipped through Strong
Opinions and Speak,Memory, looking for a reference to
Nabokov's description of what his passport information contained. As
usual, I was led astray and got nowhere special.
Anyway, I was reminded that Nabokov's nose is "
a Korff nose" (SM,ch.3,p.53) and a concrete version of a versipel is "a
sheepskin with the leather outside" worn by the Nabokovscoachman Zahar
(ch.5, 98). In SO, p.83, Nabokov gets angry at questions related to "The
Doppelg*anger" theme ("the subject is a frightful bore..." "I do not see any
Doubles in 'Laughter in the Dark.' A lover can
be viewed as the betrayed party's Double but that is pointless."
At least, these collected curiosities may point
the way for further searches and be more easily recoverable through
search-machines and pursued in
detail...