Nabokov's Signs and symbols

[Mark Kohut]

Here's inside New Yorker shit I learned; Wm Maxwell did not like The
Lottery, would not have published it.....Ross never committed himself to an
opinion....young Brendan Gill
was the first cheerleader....

But evidently Maxwell turned the Salinger story into what was
published....took a long part of 1947 and it was held to be published in
January 1948 because Ross wanted the stories
to be as if HAPPENED WHEN PUBLISHED....see The Lottery....(obvious resort
for winter vacation for Bananafish)....

And Ross complained to Cheever, "Why are all your stories so fucking
gloomy, John?..but i must publish them".....half-off remark since Cheever
was often more 'spiritually" upbeat than many.....certainly that Salinger
story.......

Nabokov later gave Cheever's *The Country Husband an A+ too...*.only two so
recorded, he gave one of his own NY stories just an A......lots of lower
grades, of course.  and that dog in this story.......does he bound into the
end of Vineland?

I've never read of Murakami translating Cheever either.....

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 5:37 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Your link to the Cheever had me thinking the same thing. I can't
> recall if Murakami translated Cheever but his short stories have a
> similar rhythm. And one of his famous stories is A Good Day for
> Kangaroos, which goes back to the Salinger.
>
> On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 6:21 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And there is a good Murakami story that I would bet a jar of jelly on
> this influenced. The existential phone calls one.
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> >> On Apr 23, 2017, at 9:00 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Nabokov's first story published in the New Yorker in 1948 is a tiny
> >> little piece that seems to me very relevant to readers of Pynchon.
> >> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/05/15/symbols-and-signs
> >> He told the fiction editor that “a second (main) story is woven into,
> >> or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one,” although from
> >> my reading this could be a tease, since there's such a heavy
> >> metafictional layer exploring our tendencies to "project a world"
> >> (COL49) when we're reading. Plus it tied in neatly to the discussion
> >> of weather in books had here recently, and Nabokov might be satirising
> >> the idea that climate is a conspiracy based on our mood.
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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