Links
Archives
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
|
MELITTA
The literary world is abuzz with talk of a Nabokov scandal. It turns out that in 1908 an obscure German housewife, Melitta Bentz, received a patent for a "filter top device lined with filter paper," which would make a better cup of coffee by ridding it of impurities. This revolutionary innovation made her fortune, and the company she founded, Melitta, continues to thrive today. Apparently one evening late in life, in an uncharacteristically rhapsodic mood, Melitta Bentz penned a sort of prose poem to her coffee filter and the larger stock of coffee makers and other products into which her company had diversified. The work, titled MELITTA, remained in a fragmentary state - she never finished it - but what we have (discovered decades after the fact by a literary sleuth) is more than merely suggestive. Nabokov, who lived during the '30's in the same Berlin neighborhood as Melitta Bentz, and who indeed was an enthusiast of her filters, clearly either found inspiration in (or plagiarized from?) her work. Here are a couple of excerpts from Bentz's MELITTA: Excerpt One, MELITTA: Melitta, light of my life, fire of my grounds. My drip, my froth. Me-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Me. Lee. Ta. It was Me, plain Me, in the morning, standing twelve inches high on the sideboard. It was Melly in the afternoon. It was Melitta USA on the dotted line. But in my arms it was always Melitta. Did it have a precursor? It did, indeed it did. In point of fact, there might have been no Melitta at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial coffeemaker. In a cafe by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Melitta was manufactured as my age that summer. You can always count on a caffeine addict for a fancy prose style... Excerpt Two: MELITTA: "Now who are you?" Filty asked in a high hoarse voice, his hands grasping a cup of coffee, his eyes fixing a point to the northwest of my head. "Are you by any chance Brewster?...People," said Filty, "people in general, I'm not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it's absurd the way people invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre, they use the coffeemaker, they use the telephone." "Speaking of coffeemakers, Filty," I said, "do you recall a little contraption called Melitta?" Dmitri Nabokov, the writer's son, has called the whole thing "a tempest in a coffee cup," but other observers are shocked by the close resemblance in style and content between the two works. Some are calling for Nabokov to be disinterred for a proper dressing down. |