Stalking Nabokov
Page 45
You gently yawned and stacked away your plate.
We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw
480 Twigs at the windowpane. Phone ringing? No.
I helped you with the dishes. The tall clock
Kept on demolishing young root, old rock.
“Midnight,” you said. What’s midnight to the young?
And suddenly a festive blaze was flung
Across five cedar trunks, snowpatches showed,
And a patrol car on our bumpy road
Came to a crunching stop. Retake, retake!
(PF 50)
Notice the details that recur from the opening passage: the explicit, emphatic link, “Retake, retake!”; the seemingly everyday but actually pointed recurrence of windowpane and plate; the even more covert link in the cedar trunks lit up by an ironically festive blaze, for the waxwing at the start of the poem can only be a cedar waxwing, Bombycilla cedrorum (and not the Bohemian waxwing, Bombycilla garrulus).6
In Shakespeare’s sonnet 30, we tuned into the supple orchestration of sound, singular even by Shakespeare’s standards. As part of a longer poem, the opening of “Pale Fire” can connect with multiple patterns in ways impossible within the small scope of a sonnet, but how do these lines compare with Shakespeare’s sonnets in their internal phonic play? Because visual effects dominate so much, we may overlook the aural, but here, too, Shade voices his passion for pattern:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
Notice the unusual alliteration in w (was, waxwing, windowpane), reinforced by the terminal ws, and the repeated dow, in “shadow” and “windowpane,” interlaced with the repeated win in “waxwing” and “windowpane.” Notice, too, that in addition to their end rhymes the first two lines, unusually, also have initial rhyme (I/By), and that this initial rhyme then becomes the rhyme for the second couplet (I/sky), and that the first line in this second couplet also continues the first couplet’s initial rhyme, so that line 3 has both initial and end rhyme. If we add to these immediate rhymes the reprise at lines 131–32 (“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By feigned remoteness in the windowpane”—and notice here the new internal rhyme on “feigned”), and the -ain/-ane rhyme pattern throughout the poem, and the shadow of a rich rhyme between the final line of the poem and the first, the opening couplet forms part of six rhyme patterns in addition to the immediately obvious end rhyme. “Some kind of link-and-bobolink,” indeed!
Shade not only claims to understand his world through “combinational delight,” to have “A feeling of fantastically planned, / Richly rhymed life,” but he also takes issue with those who have rejected rhyme as if its possibilities had been exhausted. In Four Quartets—the most admired recent long poem at the time Shade was writing, and his one overt target7—T. S. Eliot alternates between mostly unrhymed and occasionally rhymed passages and explicitly articulates what he sees as the problems of modern poetry. Shade implicitly identifies the main problem as a failure to see new possibilities in fertile old forms. Eliot’s sometime mentor and editor, Ezra Pound, famously rejected the crimes of rhyme, the evil of the cheville, and the anachronism of poetic inversion to secure a rhyme. I suspect that Shade has a polemic purpose at the end of his first line, in addition to all his other purposes, in placing “slain” after “waxwing,” as if he were seeking the poetic elevation English poets have found from Milton’s “with wandering steps and slow” to Arnold’s “with tremulous cadence slow” and beyond, or as if he were placing the adjective after the noun in a way that modernists no longer tolerated but other poets of note could still use (Kathleen Raine, in “Passion” [1943], shows exactly what modernists had good reason to reject: “Then the sky spoke to me in language clear, / familiar as the heart, than love more near”).8 For a moment, Shade seems to have sinned—only to follow with an adverbial phrase, “By the false azure in the windowpane,” that makes any other placement of “slain” unnatural.
Although Shade maintains the Shakespearean intensity of poetic craft of his first fourteen lines through all 999 lines of “Pale Fire,” I will now jump to the end of the poem and the effects that he makes converge there.
The core of the concealed patterns that Shade embeds in his poem is an almost syllogistic series of images associating Hazel with phantoms and ghosts. He first refers to Hazel obliquely in terms of “The phantom of my little daughter’s swing” under the shagbark tree in the garden. He next mentions her in terms of loving his wife most of all “When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost.” After Hazel’s death, his recollection of I.P.H. confirms for him that
no phantom would
Rise gracefully to welcome you and me
In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree.
Nevertheless as he brings his poem to a close he admits, “I’m reasonably sure that we survive / And that my darling somewhere is alive.” And, as we will see, he does his poetic utmost to call up Hazel’s presence at his conclusion.
In part, his change from “no phantom… near the shagbark tree” to the sense of Hazel somehow near as his poem closes comes from the recognition that he reaches, more than a year after Hazel’s death, in the epiphany after the fountain-mountain fiasco:
take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme.
(PF 62)
He wishes to “play a game of worlds,” and “Pale Fire” itself does so overtly through the counterpoint of parents and child one deadly March night. But throughout the poem he also weaves much stealthier webs of sense.
The “abyss-this” rhyme here has occurred once before, in Shade’s report of the night he
decided to explore and fight
The foul, the inadmissible abyss,
180 Devoting all my twisted life to this
One task. Today I’m sixty-one. Waxwings
Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings.
Here Shade shifts back into the present from the resolution he came to so long ago. The details of his here and now are far from mere orientation: the waxwings confirm that the opening image of his poem already reflects his lifelong task, and the cicada will prove equally part of the pattern.
The lines that follow seem to dip near bathos as Shade pares his nails. But this, too, is far from casual since it leads to Maud Shade, to her slide toward death, to Shade’s renewed anxieties about death, and to an empty cicada case that he and Sibyl see on the day Maud dies:
Espied on a pine’s bark,
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
240 A gum-logged ant.
That Englishman in Nice,
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales—meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls!
Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song.
And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear
Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear.
(PF 41–42)
Shade leads us from his past self-dedication to exploring death and his present perception of waxwings and cicada, as he pares his nails, through Maud’s death and another cicada—unmentioned in English but explicit in its description, in the French cigales, and in the allusion to La Fontaine’s “La Cigale et La Fourmi”—back to him still paring his nails. Shade here confirms by texture what he affirms as text. “Dead is the mandible, alive the song,” he claims—and as we know, a cicada indeed sings while he pares his nails.
Later, after discovering “fountain” should have been “mountain,” Shade comes to the realization that he needs to find “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game”
of life. Here in the ring composition from cicada and nails via Maud’s death back to cicada and nails, he has done just this, a fact he reinforces through “Lafontaine was wrong”: the fabulist whose French name means “fountain” was wrong, as fountain was wrong in the report of Mrs. Z.’s near-death experience. Echoing texture underwrites text.
But Shade’s key move within this associative chain is to smuggle in Hazel via the blunder (cigale, “cicada,” for sea gull) made by the English tourist in Nice—where Hazel was conceived when her parents “visited in thirty-three, / Nine months before her birth.” Why does Shade covertly implicate his daughter?
“Pale Fire” has a motif of metamorphoses, of which the tourist’s inadvertent transformation of cicadas into seagulls is the most comical but not the least serious.9 The pattern starts with Shade’s imaginative transformation of himself into the waxwing in the first verse paragraph. It continues in the second verse paragraph with the poem’s next bird, a ring-necked pheasant, a “torquated beauty” (Phasianus colichus torquatus) playfully imagined as a “sublimated grouse.” Discussing I.P.H., Shade asserts, “I’m ready to become a floweret, / Or a fat fly, but never, to forget,” while I.P.H. itself offers
560 Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad
Plump in the middle of a busy road,
Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,
Or a book mite in a revived divine.
(PF 54)
Shade, in his recognition after the fountain fiasco, hopes to imitate those designers of life “Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns.” And the concentration of composition transforms his everyday world into one of magic metamorphosis: “I rhyme and roam / Throughout the house with, in my fist, a comb / Or a shoehorn, which turns into the spoon / I eat my egg with.”
Through Hazel’s conception in Nice, Shade incorporates his daughter into this pattern by way of the sea gulls absurdly becoming cicadas and the cicada whose empty case, in simple insect metamorphosis, suggests to him, “alive [is] the song”“—an assertion whose structural centrality he quietly underscores by linking the cicada’s singing with the waxwings’ berry picking, and both with his determination to explore death’s abyss: another “link-and-bobolink.”
But he forges the central and saddest link in the failure of Hazel’s looks to improve with time: “Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned / Into a wood duck.” Here Shade puns on the scientific name of the wood duck, Aix sponsa (its species name means “bride, betrothed”)10 and plays with the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of “The Ugly Duckling” through his wry recognition that the wood duck’s spectacular colors outdo cygnet or even adult swan. (The Cornell Ornithology Laboratory notes that many consider the wood duck “the most beautiful of all waterfowl.”)11
Just after the cicada digression, Shade returns to his present, paring his nails, and, hearing “your steps upstairs,” he declares “all is right, my dear.” At this point he introduces Sybil, as a way of leading into the Hazel theme that dominates the remainder of the canto. He describes Sybil’s “loveliness,” and invites her to “Come and be worshipped, come and be caressed, / My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest, / My Admirable butterfly!” Here Shade metaphorically metamorphoses his wife into a Vanessa atalanta, a sumptuous butterfly (once known as a Red Admirable but now called a Red Admiral). Affirming his love for her, he segues from the wife he now addresses to the daughter they can only recall:
I love you when you’re standing on the lawn
Peering at something in a tree: “It’s gone.
It was so small. It might come back” (all this
Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss)
…………………………………………
And I love you most
290 When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost
And hold her first toy on your palm, or look
At a postcard from her, found in a book.
She might have been you, me, or some quaint blend:
Nature chose me so as to wrench and rend
Your heart and mine.
(PF 43)
In a poem as controlled as this, and as focused as this on death and beyond, Shade does not bring Hazel explicitly into the poem with the phrase “her ghost” by accident.
As soon as he introduces her in these terms, he notes she does not take after her mother’s good looks and records how her unfortunate appearance blights her personality and her happiness and ultimately drives her to suicide. But at the end of the poem, Shade does all he can to make a Vanessa atalanta feature at least as an emblem of Hazel’s surviving after death in a happily transformed state.
Canto 4 opens with the word “Now” and closes in on Shade’s here and now, on the poet at work, and, in the final fifty lines, on the end of his last day composing “Pale Fire,” July 21, 1959. Shade draws us with him into his present, as he treasures the evening scene around him. He responds serenely to his immediate world with a steady glow of confidence in this world and its patterns, and his art and its patterns, that gives him confidence in something more.
After Hazel’s death Shade had said that I.P.H. had taught him that “no phantom would / Rise gracefully to welcome you and me / In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree.” Nevertheless at the end of his poem, as he looks at the world unwinding around him, he fuses together, through the force of his art, the shagbark, the setting sun, the “phantom” recollection of Hazel’s swing, Sybil’s “shadow” near the tree, and, explicitly, another butterfly, the Vanessa: implicitly, his and Sybil’s tenderly stored image of Hazel. What seems an ordinary evening turns out to be part of an intricate texture Shade has woven to celebrate all he shares with his wife and to commemorate what they have lost in their daughter. Here in his last evening so far with Sybil, more delicately and deceptively than in the starker scoring of the counterpoint of Hazel’s last night, he plays his “game of worlds,” answering the turmoil of that night with his own design and his own sense of confidence in ultimate design, even amid the accidents of the passing day.
We can see a larger Nabokovian context for the way Shade finds sense in the patterns his art can reveal in his life. In his autobiography Nabokov had posed himself the artistic challenge of affirming his confidence in life’s ultimately generous design by taking as test case his own life, despite its routines and upsets, its incursions of anguish, and his lifelong frustration at the confines of human consciousness. Speak, Memory weaves intricate “thematic trails or currents”12 into his account of his life, and its horrors—his exile from his homeland, his father’s assassination, his forced flight with his family from the sanctuary Western Europe had provided—and his own metaphysical quest. He admits planning his book “according to the way his life had been planned by unknown players of games,”13 exactly as Shade feels it sufficed that in life he could find “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game, /… and something of the same / Pleasure in it as they who played it found.” Nabokov has poet and biographer Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the Russian-speaking character in his work closest to himself, also pose and meet similar challenges, in very different ways, in The Gift. And he has poet and scholar John Shade, the English-speaking character closest to himself, pose himself a similar, perhaps even more formidable challenge: to affirm his confidence in life’s design first by seeing his own life in terms of its whole pattern and rhythm, which he does especially in terms of his lifelong metaphysical quest; then by facing squarely his life’s worst turn, his daughter’s suicide, which he makes the heartrending centerpiece of his poem; and then by turning to the here and now, the unplanned circumstances of composing and closing his magnum opus.
Shade starts “Pale Fire” with abrupt action, the waxwing’s fatal crash against the reflected azure sky. He ends the poem in calm, the end of a day and a season of composing. A
s he opens his last day’s composition, he turns to his wife, with the kind of anaphoric patterns he has used again and again (“I was the shadow…I was the smudge…—and I…” at the start of canto 1; “There was a time…There was the day…And finally there was the sleepless night” at the start of canto 2; “Now I shall spy…Now I shall cry out…Now I shall try…Now I shall do…” at the start of canto 4). “And all the time, and all the time, my love” especially echoes the powerful anaphora in canto 2: “I love you when you’re…I love you when you…And I love you most / When…you greet her ghost.”
In the verse paragraph that starts his last day of composition (“And all the time, and all the time, my love, / You too are there, beneath the word, above / The syllable”), Shade plays with pattern in multiple ways. The previous day’s composition had ended with “And that odd muse of mine, / My versipel, is with me everywhere, / In carrel and in car, and in my chair.” Versipel both puns on verse and means “a creature capable of changing from one form to another” (see Nabokov’s favorite dictionary, Webster’s Second New International)—another metamorphic image, the imagination, perhaps, which allows him to become “the shadow of the waxwing,” or “the smudge of ashen fluff,” or to live on in the reflected sky. Shade prolongs this note into his last day’s composition, as he turns to Sybil, and her contribution to his art, punning on her name in “above / The syllable,” and resonating with versipel, which now seems to have an undertone of “Sybil” and “syllable.”
At the end of canto 3, Shade had eloquently elaborated the conclusions he had reached in his recognition that “this / Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme.” When he returns home from his quest for the fountain, eager to announce his new conviction, he finds the distracting rhythms of the real will not allow him to share his new confidence even with the woman who shares his life and his art:
Making ornaments