P andVN

[MalignD at aol.com]

The following is from the second volume of Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov, 
The American Years:

"A Nabokov cult developed among Cornell's ambitious young writers:  the 
future novelist Thomas Pynchon, science fiction writer Joanna Russ, novelist 
Richard Farina ... critic Roger Sale, editor Michael Curtis.  At Cornell's 
literary club, the Book and Bowl, Marc Szeftel and Richard Farina read from 
Lolita ...  One undergraduate, the future experimental novelist Steve katz, 
even showed Nabokov the typescript of his novel, The Steps of the Sun.  'It 
occures to me I don't know anything about the world of this novel, its 
boundaries, its presuppositions, its values,' Nabokov wrote on the 
manuscript, but he could give some basic literary advice:  'Nothing ages 
faster than "stark realism." ... You have to saturate yourself with English 
poetry in order to compose English prose.  You must know your tool.  You do 
not.  You cannot begin all over again with the Canterbury tales in 
comic-strip Englisyh ...  Suggestion:  Read:  Milton, Coleridge, Keats, 
Wordsworth.'"

I  don't cite this as unimpeachable (and, if true, it says nothing, finally, 
about influence); just adding it to the pile.