Pynchon and Nabokov at Cornell

[jbor]

on 12/7/03 1:03 AM, Malignd wrote:

> I mentioned about two weeks ago that Vera said she
> remembered TP's handwriting and said in that post that
> this was anecdotal and that I thought it had been
> challenged.  But I can't verify one way or another.

That Pynchon took Nabokov's course or sat in on some of the lectures is
repeated in several critical sources (eg. Winston 1975, Chambers 1992). It
would be hard to imagine that Pynchon avoided going to hear N's lectures,
which were open to all comers and often overflowed, even if he never
actually enrolled in N's course.

Don't know for sure about the Vera N. anecdote, but if she did say she
remembered P's handwriting, and his handwriting is actually as she described
it, then that's pretty conclusive for mine. (How else would she know what
his handwriting was like? And why would she even have mentioned it?) I think
the question is whether or not she ever actually said this (I remember
reading the report at the Pynchon Files site, and I have a vague
recollection of seeing it somewhere else as well), rather than whether she
was telling the truth about it.

Even without the obvious stylistic and thematic resonances, there are overt
references to _Lolita_ (in _Lot 49_) and Nabokov (in the _SL_ 'Intro').

best