ROBERT ALTER
Mr. Alter's essay on the «Art of Politics in Invitation to a Beheading»1 is a most brilliant reflection of that book in a reader's mind. It is practically flawless so that all I can add is that I particularly appreciated his citing a passage from The Gift «that could serve as a useful gloss on the entire nature of political and social reality in the earlier novel».
STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN
Mr. Hyman in his first-rate piece «The Handle» discusses Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, the two bookends of grotesque design between which my other volumes tightly huddle. I am a great admirer of Ransom's poem about Captain Carpenter aptly mentioned by Mr. Hyman.
DABNEY STUART
I must point out two fascinating little mistakes in Mr. Stuart's very interesting «Laughter in the Dark: Dimensions of Parody»: (1) The film in which my heroine is given a small part in the 1920s has nothing to do with Garbo's Anna Karenina (of which incidentally I have only seen stills); but what I would like my readers to brood over is my singular power of prophecy, for the name of the leading lady (Dorianna Karenina) in the picture invented by me in 1928 prefigured that of the actress (Anna Karina) who was to play Margot forty years later in the film Laughter in the Dark; and (2) Mr. Stuart cleverly toys with the idea that Albert Albinus and Axel Rex are «doubles», one of his main clues being that Margot finds Albinus' telephone number not under «A» but under «R» in the directory. Actually that «R» is a mere slip or typo (the initial corresponds correctly to the man's name in the first English-language edition of the novel, London, 1936).
GEORGE STEINER
Mr. Steiner's article («Extraterritorial») is built on solid abstractions and opaque generalizations. A few specific items can be made out and should be corrected. He absurdly overestimates Oscar Wilde's mastery of French. It is human but a little cheap on his part to chide my Van Veen for sneering at my Lolita (which, in a transfigured form, I magnanimously turned over to a transposed fellow author); it might be wiser for him to read Ada more carefully than did the morons whom he rightly condemns for having dismissed as hermetic a writer's limpid and precise prose. To one piece of misinformation I must strongly object: I never belonged to the «haute bourgeoisie» to which he grimly assigns me (rather like that Marxist reviewer of my Speak, Memory who classified my father as a «plutocrat» and a «man of affairs»!). The Nabokovs have been soldiers and squires since (at least) the fifteenth century.
BARBARA HELDT MONTER
In her otherwise impeccable little piece «Spring in Fialta: The Choice that Mimics Chance « Mrs. Barbara Monter makes a slight bibliographic mistake. She implies that I wrote the Russian original of the story sometime around 1947, in America. This is not so. It was written at least a dozen years earlier, in Berlin, and was first published in Paris («Vesna v Fial'te», Sovremennyya Zapiski, 1936) long before being collected in the Chekhov House edition, New York, 1956. The English translation (by Peter Pertzov and me) appeared in Harper's Bazaar, May, 1947.
JEFFREY LEONARD
I am not sure that Mr. Leonard has quite understood what Van Veen means by his «texture of time» in the penultimate part of Ada. First of all, whatever I may have said in an old interview, it is not the entire novel but only that one part (as Alfred Appel correctly points out elsewhere) in which the illustrative metaphors, all built around one viatic theme, gradually accumulate, come to life, and form a story turning on Van's ride from the Grisons to the Valais — after which the thing again disintegrates and reverts to abstraction on a last night of solitude in a hotel in Vaud. In other words, it is all a structural trick: Van's theory of time has no existence beyond the fabric of one part of the novel Ada. In the second place, Mr. Leonard has evidently not grasped what is meant by «texture»; it is something quite different from what Proust called «lost lime», and it is precisely in everyday life, in the waiting-rooms of life's stations that we can concentrate on the «feeling» of time and palpate its very texture. I also protest against his dragging «Antiterra», which is merely an ornamental incident, :nto a discussion whose only rightful field is Part Four r id not the entire novel. And finally 1 owe no debt whatsoever (as Mr. Leonard seems to think) to the famous Argentine essayist and his rather confused compilation «A New Refutation of Time». Mr. Leonard would have lost less of it had he gone straight to Berkeley and Bergson.
NINA BERBEROVA
In Miss Berberov's excellent article on Pale Fire I find a couple of minute mistakes: Kinbote begs «dear Jesus» to relieve him of his fondness for faunlets, not to cure his headache, as she implies; and Professor Pnin, whose presence in that novel Miss Berberov overlooks, does appear in person (note to line 949, Pale Fire), with his dog. She is much better, however, at delineating the characters in my novels than in describing V. Sirin, one ot my characters in «real» life. In her second article, on «N. in the Thirties» (from her recent memoirs, The Italics Are Mine), she permits herself bizarre inaccuracies. I may be absentminded, I may be too frank about my literary tastes, okay, but I would like Miss Berberov to cite one specific instance of my having read a book that I had never read. In my preface (June 25, 1959) to the English-language edition of Invitation to a Beheading I have more to say about that kind of nonsense. Then there is a sartorial detail in her memoir that I must set straight. Never did I possess, in Paris or elsewhere, «a tuxedo Rachmaninov had given [me]». I had not met Rachmaninov before leaving France for America in 1940. He had twice sent me small amounts of money, through friends, and I was eager now to thank him in person. During our first meeting at his flat on West End Avenue, I mentioned I had been invited to teach summer school at Stanford. On the following day I got from him a carton with several items of obsolete clothing, among which was a cutaway (presumably tailored in the period of the Prelude), which he hoped — as he said in a kind little note — I would wear for my first lecture. I sent back his well-meant gift but (gulp of mea culpa!) could not resist telling one or two people about it. Half a dozen years later, when Miss Berberov migrated to New York in her turn, she must have heard the anecdote from one of our common friends, Karpovich or Kerenski, after which a quarter of a century elapsed, or rather collapsed, and somehow, in her mind, the cutaway was transformed into a «tuxedo» and transferred to an earlier era of my life. I doubt that I had any occasion in Paris, in the thirties, when the short series of my brief encounters with Miss Berberov took place, to wear my old London dinner jacket; certainly not for that dinner at L'Ours (with which, incidentally, the «Ursus» of Ada and the Medved'oi St. Petersburg have nothing to do); anyway, I do not see how any of my clothes could have resembled the doubly anachronistic handmedown in which the memoirist rigs me out. How much kinder she is to my hooks!
PETER LUBIN
The multicolored inklings offered by Mr. Lubin in his «Kickshaws and Motley» are absolutely dazzling. Such things as his «v ugloo» [Russ. for «in the corner»] in the igloo of the globe [a blend of «glow» and «strobe»] are better than anything I have done in that line. Very beautifully he tracks down to their lairs in Eliot three terms queried by a poor little person in Pale Fire. I greatly admire the definition of tmesis (Type I) as a «semantic petticoat slipped on hetween the naked noun and its clothing epithet», as well as Lubin's «proleptic» tmesis illustrated by Shakespeare's glowworm beginning «to pale his ineffectual fire». And the parody of an interview with N. (though a little more exquisitely iridized than my own replies would have been) is sufficiently convincing to catch readers.