1 See Francis Nevins' biography of Woolrich First You Dream, Then You
Die, (The Mysterious Press, 1988), pp. 474-475 for his meditations on
the affinity between Hitchcock and Woolrich. I mean no disrespect to
Woolrich; although he and Hitchcock were both definitely "masters of
suspense" in their own rights, I find little of his tortured, desperate
characters in Hitchcock's films.
2 Alfred Appel, Jr., The Annotated Lolita (McGraw-Hill, 1970), pg.,
xv.
3 See William Rothman, Hitchcock, The Murderous Gaze (Harvard
University Press, 1982) for a detailed treatment of Hitchcock's
authorial voice.
4 See Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon and Schuster,
1967), especially pg. 203.
5 Andrew Field, VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Crown
Publishers, 1986), pp. 25- 26
6 Spoto gives a mention to the Hitchcock-Nabokov connection on pg.
508 of The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (Little,
Brown & Co., 1983). The Nabakov quote is also from pg. 508.
7 Thomas Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games
(University of Georgia Press, 1991), pg.10.
8 Appel, op. cit., pg. xix
9 Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1962), pg. 214
(Berkeley Books edition).
10 Andrew Field, op. cit., pg. 150.
11 Nabokov, op. cit, pg. 52
12 Leitch, op. cit., pg. 10
13 Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (Time-Life Books, 1947),
pp.216-217.
14 Spoto, op. cit., pp. 261-263
15 I have discussed this point with Ken Mogg, editor
of the MacGuffin Film Journal. He thinks it is unlikely that this is an
allusion to Number Seventeen, but instead is an attempt
to show that the small town Fairvale police are undermanned and a few
days behind the rest of the world (the actual date should be December
20). Since I have found no other reference to this allusion in the
other critical literature on Psycho, I know that I am at risk of being
criticized for over interpreting, but there is always that hope that
someday someone will agree with me on this point.
16 Appel, op. cit., pg. lxiii.
17 Nabakov, Pale Fire, pg. 41 (Berkeley Books edition).
18 Mogg, The MacGuffin Film Journal, (Issue 10, August, 1993), pg. 5
19 Nabakov, op. cit., pg. 32
20 The article, "Why I Am Afraid of the Dark" was originally
published in Arts: Lettres, Spectacles, number 777, June 1-7, 1960 and
is reproduced in Sidney Gotleib's Hitchcock on Hitchcock (University of
California Press, 1995), pp. 142-145.
21 Nabakov, op. cit., pg. 21
Return to page 4 of "Hitchcock/Nabokov."