All the Nabbys Down in Whoville....

From "Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel" by Judith and Neil Morgan:

"When an invitation came from Professor Brewster Ghiselin at the University of Utah to lecture at a ten-day writers' conference at Salt Lake City in July of 1949, Ted [Theodore Geisel] accepted with uncharacteristic alacrity.
The company was lively: the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who had moved to America nine years earlier; a budding American novelist, the forty-year-old Wallace Stegner; and poets William Carlos Williams and John Crowe Ransom."

And this:

"One night the Stegners thirteen-year-old son Page and the Nabokovs' son, Dmitri, fifteen, were late returning from a movie. Nabokov paced the front porch and finally called the police. The boys appeared after eleven, explaining that they had stayed for a second feature and had missed the last streetcar.
Ted had tried to distract Nabokov by drawing a grotesque vacuum cup sucking up a wizened Page Stegner into a machine called the Stegner Junior Reducifier. Forty lears later as a university professor, Page Stegner kept the drawing framed on his wall.
"When Dmitri crashed in flames over a little California sexpot," Wallace Stegner recalled, "Ted was urged to make a Nabokov Junior Reducifier too, but refrained."


During the conference Geisel wrote a butterfly poem for Nabokov (who besides being a novelist & lecturer was also a respected lepidopterist):

'To a Butterfly With Fallen Womb'

No surgic band, no metal truss
is on the market, little cuss,
quite small enough to fit your groin,
to gird your microscopic loin.
You're destined til the day of doom
to tote a badly fallen womb.
But cheer up lass! Don't feel so low.
The damned thing really doesn't show!

And from "Verses and Versions" By Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd & Stanislav Shvab:

"Years later in 'Horton Hears a Who!' he introduced an incidental "black-bottomed eagle named Vlad Vlad-i-koff" after Vladimir Nabokoff (as Nabokov once spelled his name)."


There really is no point to this blog, I just like the idea of Dr. Seuss and Nabokov meeting and becoming friends, and the thought of a Dr. Seuss character being based (even partly) on old V. N.