I do tend to go on about that old boy don't I? anyway, I posted a capper on that whole series of posts shortly after I stopped posting here:
http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/2008/09/waxwing-philosophical-hermeneutic.html
(PS madu twas yr nominalism above brought it to mind, so enuf with my selfreferencing I'll stop no I'll go on no not on no ...)
No, don't stop, do go on!
By the time that I got to
Dear Bunny,Dear Volodya, as the Wilson/Nabokov correspondence, the coincidence of two celebrities of the Literary world being addressed as Bunny would make the inquiring mind wonder why?
We may never have the answer. I only know the half of it. In fact, more usually before you discover Bunny Garnett, you have to work your way around the Bloomsbury Circle; but a short-cut is available from Virgina Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell to Duncan Grant to Bunny Garnett (the Garnetts were renowned British publishers).
Because of the Circle, one might start anywhere. Lyyton Strachey is a good start with the painting of him by Carrington (Dora de Houghton Carrington) so that this throws you back again to Vanessa Bell painting at Charleston, with Duncan Grant; and eventually there is Bunny.
I ran into the lot of them one hot Summer day(1988?) in Princeton, when I escaped a persistant Arab lothario(the borough was rife with them at the time) by ducking into the Witherspoon St. Library at the corner of Hamilton St. I went and hid in the stacks and just settled down on the carpet under the windows where I could lean against the wall after discovering the handy stack of that period of British literature. I figured, I ought to kill a lot of time. I carried about as much as I could handle on one trip seven blocks back home and began a long acquaintance.
It was interesting how it neatly tied up with another set from D.H.Lawrence at Lady Ottoline Morrell's garden parties playing musical chairs with T.S Eliot, Bertrand Russell,Robert McAlmon,Bryher,H.D., Nancy Cunard,Robert Graves, simply because I had opened a copy of The White Goddess, in about 1970.
After that, I just read what my great-aunt Hazel White suggested, as she had lived through all of them as contemporaries.
But when in doubt, just follow the Bunny.
