Word: good
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Slightly pedantic word play, cultural booby traps, brisk leaps from the Bard of Avon to the Good Ship Lollipop, elegant divertissements for all occasions ?such things can be expected of Nabokov. But that is far from all. Russian by birth, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Switzerland, he has become, at 70, the greatest living American novelist, and the most original writer and stylist since Joyce. He is also an exile, a man who has triumphantly survived this century of the refugee, a man who has lost everything, yet transformed his losses through art and levity into...
...series of nannies and governesses assisted his mother in teaching Vladimir to speak and read English (before he could read Russian). Tutors and coaches turned Nabokov into a competent boxer and a skilled tennis player?good enough, in fact, so that later, in straitened exile, he helped pay his way by giving lessons. More or less on his own he became an expert at chess problems and a collector of butterflies...
...decades between Cambridge and World War II, three pieces of great good fortune befell Nabokov. In 1925 he married Vera Evseena Slonim, the slim and beautiful daughter of a Jewish St. Petersburg industrialist also ruined by the revolution. In 1934 they had a son, Dmitri, an only child now studying opera in Italy. In 1939, having moved from Berlin to Paris to avoid the Nazis, Nabokov quite by chance received and accepted a proposal to lecture on Slavic languages at Stanford...
...busy. Besides, science (lepidopterology) was once again coming to the aid of Vladimir's art. Its handmaiden was technology in the form of a 1952 Buick, bought mainly to search for specimens in the West. Vera did the driving. Nabokov, with the security of a man who is good at nearly everything, easily concedes he cannot handle a car, adding generously, "There are some people who can refold maps, too, but I am not one of them." Every summer they coursed up and down Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and Oregon in search for the feeding grounds of Nabokov's beloved "blues...
Death of a Gunfighter might have been as good as its actors. As bone-weary Marshal Frank Patch, Richard Widmark is as legitimate and leathery as a saddle. His mistress (Lena Horne) cannot make a move or a speech that is not correct or elegant; her appearance in this symbol-minded film sadly recalls a 13-year absence from Hollywood. Like the High Lama in Lost Horizon, Widmark and Horne seem at once endlessly old and miraculously preserved, as if they were waiting for a revelation. Death of a Gunfighter is not it. In a town settling into the 20th...