“I won’t hide it: I am so unused to the idea of people, well, understanding me - so unused to it that in the very first minutes of our meeting it seemed to me that this was a joke, a masquerade deception….There are just some things that are difficult to talk about - one brushes off their wondrous pollen by touching them with words….Yes, I need you, my fairy tale. For you are the only person I can talk to - about the hue of a cloud, about the singing of a thought, and about the fact that when I went out to work today and looked each sunflower in the face, they all smiled back at me with their seeds.”
— Letter from Vladimir Nabokov to Véra, Véra by Stacy Schiff
Readers reading readers reading readers. A Dried-Beef Sandwich. Cover illustration for Judge magazine, June 28, 1919. Illustration by Orson Lowell.
Life, Judge, The American Girl and other magazines provided Lowell with outlets for his work through the 1940’s. He seemed to have a great sense of humor as well as being a marvelous penman. His book work tapered off as the market for illustrated novels diminished in the early 1920’s.
“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
“Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t?”
“Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn’t hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.”
