NP: Publication of Pale Fire (from Vera)

[Tim Strzechowski]

from Stacy Schiff, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov).  Modern Library: New York, 1999.
 
Regarding the publication of Pale Fire:

"In March 1961 Nabokov has attempted to interest Esquire in an excerpt of Pale Fire.  'It is a narrative poem of 999 lines in four cantos supposed to be written by an American poet and scholar, one of the characters in my new novel, where it will be reproduced and annotated by a madman,' he had written from Nice.*  We warned that the work was 'rather racy and tricky, and unpleasant, and bizarre" but hoped Esquire might take it.  The honor fell to Harper's, who ran the novel's foreword in their May 1962 issue, on American newsstands just as full-page ads announcing Kubrick's Lolita appeared in the papers" (287-8).

* The novel had evolved significantly from the one Nabokov had described to Jason Epstein almost exactly four years earlier.  What it resembled more closely was an indignant letter he had fired off to the publisher of his Three Poets when the volume appeared in England in 1958 without a mention of him on the jacket.  "A Mr. Stefan Schimanski is named as 'editor' -- who the deuce is Mr. Schimanski and what has he been 'editing' in my book?" wailed Vladimir, sounding like a resurrected John Shade.  (287)


also of interest, perhaps:

"When pressed to name her favorites among her husband's works, Vera generally cited Pale Fire.*" (354)

* The biographical account she would have found most acceptable would doubtless have resembled Mrs. Shade's entry in the Pale Fire index: "Shade, Sybil, S's wife, passim."  She would have shuddered at Vera Evseevna Nabokov's lengthy index entry in Boyd's second volume, which begins with "advises N not to burn Lolita," and ends with "as writer of N's letters."



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"Life is never fair ... And perhaps it is a good thing
for most of us that it is not."
                                               ~~ Oscar Wilde
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