From the EDS: Resending this because many subscribers can't receive postings from YAHOO accounts via the list. Sorry. –SB*

Jansy: I had no idea that yahoo postings via list were unavailable to me. Good to know that. Thanks for resending them. I’ve always enjoyed James Twiggs VN-findings and the two links he sent this time provided rich in information, instigations, associations and literary enjoyment.

I selected a paragraph from Lara Delage-Toriel’s interview for a brief comment:

"The suggestive playfulness of Nabokov’s prose allows him to be much more daring and subversive than Kubrick could ever be. One of the reasons for this is that although the latter had escaped from Hollywood, he still had to comply by current censorship rules, and thus had no choice but to turn the relationship between the stepfather and his protégée into something very chaste. Emblematic of this is the night in the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, which features James Mason not in bed with Sue Lyon, but trapped in a ridiculous cot, now a slapstick comedian instead of a Latin lover. Kubrick also chose to foreground the rivalry between Quilty and Humbert in order to steer his film towards the more politically correct form of the love triangle. So I’d say that Kubrick’s film does not so much exaggerate the sexual content of the novel as it transfers Nabokov’s diffuse poetic sophistication onto more readily accessible and less controversial iconic objects." ** because I once had a very curious experience with the scene at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel that set me wondering about how a very abstract erotic/perverse dimension could still manage to seep through “current censorship rules”  intended to provide “chaste scenes” such as Humbert being shown as a “slapstick comedian instead of a Latin lover.”   Years ago my living-room television was on and I noticed that this particular scene from SK’s “Lolita” was being exhibited, although there was nobody watching it. On an impulse, I sat down for a few minutes together with my five or six year-old grandson Rafael (he is now 14), considering its “inoffensive” “slapstick comedy” dimension. I was certain that that particular moment was “chaste” and yet, after only one or two minutes had elapsed, the child asked me: “Granny, what is that evil father planning to do with his  daughter??”  I turned the TV off before I could even let my perplexity take over: What could he have seen in it? How did he reach this image (“evil father with bad intentions”) if only the fumbling motions of a porter opening a cot were being shown? Rafael had no inkling of the plot, no previous experience with any SK movie nor with any “Lolita” related discussion… It seems to me that the entire (abstract?) atmosphere of the movie cannot be isolated from the smallest cinematic frame and I still wonder why…Was it something in the expression of James Mason which I missed because my attention had been drawn to the cot and porter?

Ronald Rayfield’s pen is extremely sophisticated with suggestive items left open for wider conjectures. Such as: “What seems to emerge is a portrait of a marriage of which most male writers can only dream: a wife who devotes all her talents, energy and steely character to nurturing her husband's genius and promoting his fame. (Véra's biographer, Stacy Schiff, simply called her a 'shrewish, controlling dragon-lady' and compared extracting information from her with extracting an angry cat from its box at the vet's.) In his foreword to this book, Brian Boyd presents a condensed version of his extensive and canonical biography of Nabokov. His very first sentence - 'No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer lasted longer than Vladimir Nabokov's' - is his only wrong call: Anthony Powell's sixty-five years of marriage to Lady Violet Pakenham is the obvious record-holder. Field in his biography, frustrated by the Nabokovs' manipulation, relied too much on gossip, speculation and psychoanalysis; Boyd, who won the family's total trust and who stuck to what was corroborated by documents or respectable sources, has superseded him. Nevertheless, he lets his love of Nabokov downplay, even ignore, uncomfortable facts./ / One such fact is Nabokov's 1937 love affair in Paris with the young blonde Russian émigrée Irina Guadanini. It is clear (from other sources) that Véra, stuck in Prague with her mother-in-law and infant son, was told in an anonymous letter of the affair. The content of her letters to Nabokov that spring and summer can only be guessed at; the nervous tone that enters Nabokov's mixtures of cloying affection with irritable self-justification belies the sincerity of his declarations during the previous fourteen years…”

*Unless I’ve missed something, these two links haven’t been previously posted:LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS/Two interviews on Lolita/http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/portrait-young-girl-60th-anniversary-lolita-part //  LITERARY REVIEW  Letters to Véra /  http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/rayfield_09_14.php  by James Twiggs

**Erik Morse interviews Lara Delage-Toriel A Portrait of the Young Girl: On the 60th Anniversary of "Lolita" Part I — An Interview Series /January 6th, 2015

*** Two Interviews on Letters to Véra. R.Rayfield.

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.