Martin Schneider follows up on my mention earlier this week of a ’30s animation goody starring Otto Soglow’s Little King.

Vladimir Nabokov really liked the work of Otto Soglow. We know this because in the 1967 foreword to his memoir Speak, Memory, he draws attention to a little wordplay he made involving the cartoonist’s name.

Let’s look at the passage:

Reviewers read the first version more carelessly than they will this new edition: only one of them noticed my “vicious snap” at Freud in the first paragraph of Chapter Eight, section 2 and none discovered the name of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him in the last sentence of section 2, Chapter Eleven. It is most embarrassing for a writer to have to point out such things himself.

No kidding! Is it me or does Nabokov come off a touch vainglorious and snippy here? Still, I daresay we can find some empathy for a great author in his twilight years uncertain of his legacy.

Reviewers read the first version more carelessly than they will this new edition: only one of them noticed my “vicious snap” at Freud in the first paragraph of Chapter Eight, section 2 [i.e. the “Sigismond Lejoyeux” bilingual pun, p. 156, —A. Zh.] and none discovered the name of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him in the last sentence of section 2, Chapter Eleven [219; according to commentators, the reference is to Otto Soglow, 1900-1975; the rather desperate pun is in the words ”so glowing” —A. Zh.]. It is most embarrassing for a writer to have to point out such things himself” (15).

So the “rather desperate” pun here is limited to so glowing—it’s fascinating to me that he expected his readers (reviewers) to “solve” this puzzle based on such a mundane combination of words. If he’d contrived it to read “a grotto so glowing”—a Nabokovian turn of phrase, potentially—I would better understand his dismay.

So far I haven’t used The Complete New Yorker at all. I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to see if Soglow’s cartoons ever appeared embedded in Nabokov’s prose?

It turns out that it happened exactly once.

Nabokov’s first ever New Yorker item appeared in the 4/11/42 issue, an odd semi-cannibalistic poem called “Literary Dinner.” It appears on page 18; a Soglow appears on page 20.

Close.

In the 6/23/45 issue appears a highly Nabokovian TOTT about a doppelganger. (He wouldn’t write another TOTT for nearly 31 years! A record, surely? Perhaps the good librarians can tell us at a later date.) It is not the kind of piece that would ever appear as a TOTT today; Nabokovians may find in the piece some echo of his novel Despair (also about a doppelganger).

Bingo: The piece covers six pages, on the second of which is a Soglow.

Just the one time. Did the name strike him as potentially punny already in 1945?