Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MICHAEL J. ARLEN writes about television much the same way Nabokov wrote about the appalling manners of the bourgeoise--as if from a great height, but always with a folksy, familiar smile. In a way it's a style that accentuates the very elegance it is perhaps trying to diffuse; a style all the more fitting to The New Yorker, that dual bastion and mausoleum of literacy, where Arlen's "The Air" column regularly appears. The New Yorker's literacy is a curious one, of course, harking back to the most Anglophilic time in our history. It is a magazine...
...late Vladimir Nabokov will always be for me the epitome of the third stage of name-dropping. Vlad was always a sweet man, with more taste and savoir faire than anyone I'll ever meet, but he could never refer to anyone without calling him "my dear friend." "My dear friend Phyllis Schlafly just dropped in," he once told me. Another time--this was with John Updike at the Algonquin--Volodya turned to me and, with his mouth still full of mashed potatoes, whispered into my ear, "Reminds me of the way my very, very, very dear friend Rusty Staub...
Wilson later provided some basis for the charge when he argued proper Russian usage with Vladimir Nabokov. But he was right about Hemingway's sexual antagonism. It started with his mother. "I hate her guts and she hates mine. She forced my father to suicide," he writes Publisher Charles Scribner in 1949. Women, he suggests frequently, will trap and destroy a man. They can also be too competitive. After his divorce from Combat Correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway writes Scribner: "Have a new housemaid named Martha and certainly is a pleasure to give her orders. Marty was a lovely girl...
Indeed, nothing seems to have been rejected at all, except for taste and value. Throughout, Lolita proves to be less a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov than a travesty. To get to the hot question first, the play is no pornographic scorcher. True, there are guarded scenes of fellatio and cunnilingus, but in this era of X-rated films and worse, they are surprisingly restrained...
...this Lolita suggests very simply that Nabokov's is not a novel for the stage. In print the author can swathe the transgression he is describing in bundles of carefully selected sentences that, by explaining, defending, or indicting Humbert's obsession, make us ponder its meaning. On stage, nothing tempers the nakedness of the act; and when Albee's Lolita takes off her bathrobe to say, "Come and get it, Daddy," or buries her face in Humbert's groin, Richardson must literally draw a curtain over the scene--a comic gesture that only underscores Albee's inability to find...