venus febriculosa

Martin Gardner to me will always be the brilliant person who gave us The Annotated Alice, on a steady diet of which I grew up as a child, and which is, to this day, a worthy read (I am pleased to report I still possess the original copy that was given to my family in August 1973. I do not recall the occasion. I had just turned seven.).

Here are two amusing letters to the editor published in the same issue of the New York Review of Books in response to a review by Matthew Hodgart of the newly published Ada.

To the Editors:

NYR readers may be amused to know more about why Nabokov, as pointed out in Matthew Hodgart’s excellent review of ADA (May 22), refers to me on p. 542 of his novel as an “invented philosopher.” In my Ambidextrous Universe (Basic Books, 1964), in a section on Kant’s approach to space and time, I quote two lines from Pale Fire. (Nabokov’s page citation is to the British Penguin Press edition; he will find his lines rendered in Russian on p. 159 of a Russian paperback translation.) I did not mention Nabokov but credited the poem instead to his invented poet, John Shade. Nabokov returns the joke by calling me “invented,” since my book appeared on Terra, a perhaps imaginary earth, whereas the action of ADA occurs on Anti-Terra, an earth of antimatter. (Nabokov’s novel exploits the familiar science-fiction concept of “parallel worlds” first used so entertainingly by H. G. Wells in his greatest Utopia novel, Men Like Gods.)

Unfortunately, some astonishing recent experiments on time reversal were made too late for me to discuss them in my book or for Nabokov to refer to them in the remarkable essay on time that is Part 4 of ADA. It now appears that if there is an Anti-Terra in the cosmos it is not only mirror-reflected and charge-reversed, but possibly also changing in a time direction opposite to our own. A New American Library paperback edition of The Ambidextrous Universe will appear this summer with a last chapter much lengthened to explain these fantastic new developments. The new section was written, alas, too soon for me to quote from Nabokov’s imaginary antinovel with its palindromic (reversible) title.

Martin Gardner

Hastings-on-Hudson

New York

Montreux-Palace Hotel

Montreux, Switzerland

Matthew Hodgart, Esq.

Cornell University

Department of English

Sir,

I do not really mind your introducing ridiculous errors (such as “at graze” instead of “at gaze” or the reference to Gardner—look up that passage in his book and index) all through your review of ADA, but I do object violently to your seeing in reunited Van and Ada (both rather horrible creatures) a picture of my married life. What the hell, Sir, do you know about my married life? I expect a prompt apology from you.

Vladimir Nabokov

from an interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk [1971-72]:

Personal Past

“Pure  Time,  Perceptual  Time, Tangible Time, Time free of
content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time  described
by my creature under my sympathetic direction.
     The  Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present,
but it looks somewhat out of focus.  The  Past  is  a  constant
accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for
constant  retrospection  and  the best we can do is to pick out
and try to retain  those  patches  of  rainbow  light  flitting
through  memory.  The  act  of  retention  is  the  act of art,
artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic  re-combination
of  actual  events.  The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and
the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken  by
a   stranger  to  console  sentimental  bereavement.  The  good
memoirist, on the other hand, does his best  to  preserve  the
utmost  truth  of  the  detail. One of the ways he achieves his
intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing  the
right patch of remembered color.”