Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Of accidents and possibilities.

  830 Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is

  My firm conviction—“Darling, shut the door.

  Had a nice trip?” Splendid—but what is more

  I have returned convinced that I can grope

  My way to some—to some—“Yes, dear?” Faint hope.

  (PF 63)

  There ends canto 3, in apparent deflation, despite the brilliant quadruple rhyme—rare enough in itself, even rarer in such a serious context, rarer still in matching polysyllabic possibilities against monosyllables and high reflection against casual speech. But on his last day of composition Shade picks up on the “ornaments / Of accidents and possibilities” and “Sybil, it is” in the syllable play on versipel and Sybil, and the stress on his wife’s inclusion in and inspiration for his art.

  The verse paragraph devoted to Sybil plays not only on her name but also on the “you” by which Shade naturally calls her: “You too,” “underscore… yore… your,” “And all in you is youth, and you make new /… old things I made for you.” But Shade also puns on the tree, the yew, with which he has pointedly opened canto 3, at the midpoint of his poem, “L’if, lifeless tree”—a phrase itself punning on the French name for the tree, on “life” and this tree of death, on “lifeless” and “leafless” (the yew and cypress adorn cemeteries precisely because they do not become leafless), and on the outfit Shade dubs “I.P.H., a lay / Institute (I) of Preparation (P) / For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we / Called it—big if!” at a location he names as “Yewshade, in another, higher state.” The yew enters the poem the moment after Hazel—herself named for a tree—steps to her death. And in playing so insistently on “you” near the end of the poem, Shade prepares for his final glimpse of Sybil, near another tree, the shagbark hickory that he and Sybil cannot help associating with Hazel and the “phantom” of her swing.

  Shade brings us right into the present, into the end of this summer’s day, in the antepenultimate paragraph:

  Gently the day has passed in a sustained

  Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained

  And a brown ament, and the noun I meant

  To use but did not, dry on the cement.

  (PF 68)

  He begins here with “Gently,” a word he first uses in the poem as he describes the white butterflies that “turn lavender as they / Pass through its [the shagbark’s] shade where gently seems to sway / The phantom of my little daughter’s swing.” He has used the word once more, at the start of the verse paragraph that records the arrival of the patrol cars bringing news of Hazel’s death: “You gently yawned and stacked away your plate. / We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw / Twigs at the windowpane. Phone ringing? No.”

  He has written well all day, “in a sustained / Low hum of harmony.” Harmony indeed, as he describes his present state and surroundings: not only the ms (and hs) in “hum of harmony,” but the nasals throughout these lines (gently, sustained, hum, harmony, brain, drained, ament, noun, meant, not, on, cement); the -ain sound in sustained, brain, drained; the -rain sounds in brain and drained; the brain-brown consonance; the internal rhyme on ament harmonizing with the end rhymes in meant and cement; the complex “brown ament-noun I meant” echo, and the drained-dry match of sound and sense. And the noun Shade meant to use but did not, to maximize the possibilities of pattern his circumstances allow, is catkin, the much commoner homonym of ament. The only tree in the Shades’ garden that has catkins or aments is the shagbark hickory so strongly associated with Hazel—although a tree more famous for its catkins is the hazel itself.

  Shade explicitly thematizes the meant/cement rhyme in the remainder of this verse paragraph:

  Maybe my sensual love for the consonne

  D’appui, Echo’s fey child, is based upon

  A feeling of fantastically planned,

  970 Richly rhymed life.

  (PF 68)

  The consonne d’appui (support consonant) is the consonant preceding the rhyming vowel, in this case the ms of the meant-cement rhymes. English versification tends to regard this as a blemish, a marring of the purity of the rhyme; French versification, by contrast, tends to see this as an enrichment, an extra grace. Indeed, Shade puns here on the French term “rime riche.”

  In the next verse paragraph, the penultimate, he then expands on his “feeling of fantastically planned, / Richly rhymed life”: “I feel I understand / Existence… /… only through my art.” He states this as text, but he also shows it as texture, as correlated pattern. For the previous verse paragraph starts with the first of an unprecedentedly intense series of rhyme sounds harking back to the -ain/-ane rhyme that opens the poem and becomes a structural motif throughout: first, sustained/drained at the start of the ante-penultimate verse paragraph; then, slightly modulating sustained/drained and marking the transition between the end of this paragraph and the start of the penultimate, planned/understand; next, starting the final verse paragraph, and still more explicitly echoing the poem’s first slain/windowpane rhyme, attains/windowpanes; one additional rhyme exactly echoing the planned/understand rhyme, band/sand, a rhyme I will return to; and finally the last line of the poem, ending in “lane,” and missing a rhyme partner, though it would have not only a rhyme but even Shade’s favorite rime riche if we were to return to the poem’s first line and its rhyme word, slain. And in the paragraph that elaborates on “Richly rhymed life” by declaring “I feel I understand / Existence… /… only through my art, / In terms of combinational delight,” Shade has ten consecutive rhymes that are not rime riche but begin with the same vowel, the diphthong i: delight/right, divine/line, survive/alive, I/July, fifty-nine/fine. Supporting these end rhymes Shade incorporates a persistent pattern of assonance on the same sound, minute, my, my, my private, I, iambic, I’m, my, I, nineteen, myself, emphasizing, as it were, his own responsibility, or as if echoing an earlier burst of i-sounds: “It sufficed that I in life could find / Some kind of link-and bobolink, some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game.”

  The last paragraph comes closest of all to the present moment and, despite its seeming casualness, to the kind of pattern that makes Shade “reasonably sure” that his darling Hazel “somewhere is alive.” Thinking first of Sybil, he asks “Where are you?” and answers himself:

  In the garden. I can see

  990 Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree…

  ………………………………………

  A dark Vanessa with a crimson band

  Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand

  And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.

  (PF 69)

  Although Shade responds to chance circumstances around him, he also knows the pattern of his recent summer evenings and has presumably witnessed the recurrence of this Vanessa atalanta, a member of a sportive butterfly species, individuals of which fly most vigorously at dusk and may repeatedly frequent the same spot and engage with the same people at the same time day after day.14 Shade, in other words, being a close observer of nature, could have expected he might end the poem this way, even as he looks out at his unplanned present: life, watched acutely, cooperates in the pattern of his art. And he knows that he can echo the unstated but implied pattern of bright red on the wing of the waxwing that starts his poem through the “dark Vanessa with the crimson band” settling here on the sand—the last of the pattern of rhymes in ain-ane and their congeners. For Shade, the Vanessa wheeling in the low sun also recalls the “nymph” who “came pirouetting” in the beauty-product advertisement on television the night Hazel dies, for lepidopterologically a nymph is any species of the subfamily Nymphalinae, especially of the genus Vanessa. The “nymph” in the beauty ad seems a sadly ironic counterpart to Hazel: Shade recoils from the television after seeing it, just at the time Hazel’s blind date recoils from her, but the Vanessa in the poem’s last paragraph seems almost Shade’s evocation of or tribute to his daughter.

  Sybil “In the gar
den” at this sunset hour and “near the shagbark tree” and the dark Vanessa evoke and conclude a series of patterns running through the poem and directed at memories of Hazel and at hopes of meeting her again: the shagbark Shade describes at sunset and the white butterflies that “turn lavender as they / Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway / The phantom of my little daughter’s swing”; Shade’s direct address to Sybil, in canto 2, “Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed, / My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest / My Admirable butterfly,” and his “I love you when you’re standing on the lawn / Peering at something in a tree,” an insect or small bird, and his “I love you most / When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost”; the echo of peer, tree, and ghost here in Shade’s last description of Hazel’s action before she steps off the bank into the lake: “she peered / At ghostly trees”; and the conclusion Shade draws from the folly of his experience at I.P.H.:

  I learnt what to ignore in my survey

  Of death’s abyss. And when we lost our child

  I knew there would be nothing:

  …………………………………

  650 no phantom would

  Rise gracefully to welcome you and me

  In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree.

  (PF 57)

  In the final mention of the shagbark and the Vanessa, Shade resolves a pattern that, after his declaring his new confidence in pattern and in his darling Hazel’s being “somewhere… alive,” seems almost to rebut this “no phantom.” Hazel, appropriately enough given her name, has been at the center of a pattern of trees, including the shagbark, the cedars that the patrol-car headlights illuminate just before her parents hear of her death (which, via the cedar waxwing, link to the poem’s beginning), the yew at the start of the second half of the poem, and the pine with the cicada case that prompted Shade to declare: “Lafontaine was wrong: / Dead is the mandible, alive the song.”

  Shade seems to have made the Vanessa passing by Sybil’s shadow near the shagbark tree just before his poem’s end as close as he can get, in the texture and plexed artistry of his poem, to evoking Hazel herself as present with him and Sybil: the Vanessa, whose crimson stripe echoes the waxwing that killed itself in the poem’s opening but that also, through Shade’s imagination, “lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky”; the pattern of birds and insects, including Hazel associated with the shy butterfly, the Toothwort White,15 or the “dingy cygnet” who never turned into a wood duck;16 the pattern of trees, phantoms or ghosts associated with trees, and a cicada that has flown free of its case stuck to a pine’s bark; the rhyme patterns, like the “band” and “sand” describing the final appearance of the Vanessa, that link the poem’s opening and close and Shade’s affirmation of his confidence in the implications of his patterned life and art. Shade has said he would like to try out the role of those “Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns.” He seems to have promoted Hazel from dingy cygnet to wood duck, from drab Toothwort White to splendid Sibylesque Red Admiral, from dull hazel grouse to the “torquated beauty” of the ring-necked pheasant.

  Of course, Shade knows that his confidence and his command of pattern prove nothing. He knows that he will not know for sure until death writes the last line of his life. He pointedly evokes his own childhood foretastes of death—his fits at the age of eleven, the first as he lay on the floor watching “a clockwork toy—/ A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy”—in the chance circumstances of the poem’s close, as he winds his alarm clock, then, immediately after the Vanessa, notices

  through the flowing shade and ebbing light

  A man, unheedful of the butterfly—

  Some neighbor’s gardener, I guess—goes by

  Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.

  But by leaving his own last couplet incomplete here, Shade both affirms that there can be no closure, no end within life, and that nevertheless the poem of his life may somehow return, in a way consonant with the rhyme pattern, to the start. No one has seen such still untapped possibilities in the closed couplet, yet no one has waged the twentieth-century war against poetic closure so pointedly as Shade, when he insists that the pattern of his life and his poem cannot be completed until the unknown last line of death.

  25. Ada: The Bog and the Garden

  Or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in Ada

  In November 2009, on the eve of publication of The Original of Laura, I spoke with Martin Amis at a Nabokov celebration at the Poetry Center in New York. Beforehand, I asked Martin about his review of The Original of Laura, which I had read just that day, where he confessed that despite his deep love of Nabokov he had tried to read Ada half a dozen times, unsuccessfully, before at last forcing himself through it earlier that year. He made it clear to me that he thought Nabokov not in control in Ada either ethically or aesthetically. I have written hundreds of pages on the precision of Nabokov’s allusions and patterns in Ada, and the penetration of their ethical, psychological, and epistemological implications. This essay offers just one of many possible angles on Ada. I would be pleased if it converted anybody to an appreciation of a novel even some Nabokov admirers dislike but others recognize as his richest.

  Nabokov confessed that “Ada caused me more trouble than all my other novels” (SO 138). At the time he was most troubled, in the second third of the 1960s, when plans for works tentatively entitled Letters from (or to) Terra and The Texture of Time seemed bogged down, he explained to an interviewer the process of preparing for a new novel: “At a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles” (SO 31). This is already a kind of inspiration, he notes, but in his essay “Inspiration” he describes the forefeeling of a novel’s approach, then a sudden flash, “a shimmer of exact details … a tumble of merging words” that the “experienced writer immediately takes … down” (SO 309). He cites the first surge of Ada, at the end of 1965:

  Sea crashing, retreating with shuffle of pebbles, Juan and beloved young whore—is her name, as they say, Adora? is she Italian, Roumanian, Irish?—asleep on his lap, his opera cloak pulled over her … in a corner of a decrepit, once palatial whorehouse, Villa Venus.

  (SO 310)

  Nabokov comments on the contrast between the coloration of this passage and the finished Ada but draws attention to the “pleasing neatness” of the fact that it “now exists as an inset scene right in the middle of the novel (which was entitled at first Villa Venus, then The Veens, then Ardor, and finally Ada)” (SO 310). He had settled on the name Ada by February 1966, and over the next few months was astonished at the speed of the novel’s compositional flow.

  Ada has many obvious sources: personal, like Nabokov’s memories of Russia, Vyra, and first love, and impersonal, like Chateaubriand, Tolstoy, Proust, and the history of the novel. I want to focus on three unlikely pieces of fluff and straw, whose appeal lay partly in their unlikeliness and whose dates belong to the years immediately before Nabokov began writing Ada.

  VEEN, BOG, VENUS

  As Paul H. Fry first noted in 1985 and Wilma Siccama and Jack Van der Weide discussed again in 1995,1 Nabokov discovered the Dutch meaning of “veen” and rediscovered the Dutch surnames Veen and Van Veen in a detective novel published in 1964 by Nicolas Freeling, Double-Barrel.2 Freeling, who died in 2003, was “credited with elevating the crime genre by creating probing examinations of complex personalities,”3 but Nabokov had little interest in crime fiction except for the purposes of parody, in Despair, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Lolita. Freeling’s novel presumably came to Nabokov’s attention because at one point the detective and narrator, Van der Valk, sifting through criminal records in a dreary little town in Drente, the province in the north of the Netherlands to which he has been sent from Amsterdam, notes: “The State Recherche—very very thorough indeed—had even unearthed the fact that the burgomaster, earlier in his career, had once been thought rather too fond of sitting litt
le girls on his lap. Charming; Burgomaster Humbert N. Petit of Larousse, Ill.” (DB 25).

  The nod to Lolita and even to Quilty’s alias in the cryptogrammic paper chase (Lolita 250) follows a few pages after this:

  The keyword in this north-eastern corner of Holland is ‘Veen.’ It occurs as a suffix in place-names. Over to the west are Hoogeveen and Heerenveen—larger towns these, around the twenty thousand mark. To the south, Klazinaveen, Vriezeveen—smaller, hardly more than villages… . ‘Veen’ means turf: the boggy peaty moorland that was cut for fuel in the depression days, before the oil pipelines and the natural gas.

  (DB 17)

  On first being assigned to Drente, Van der Valk remarks: “All I know about Drente is that it is up in the north-east corner of Holland… . A poor province; the ground is not much good for agriculture. Wet, peaty sort of moorland. What in Ireland is called ‘the bog’ ” (DB 12). Two pages after commenting on “veen” in Drente place-names, Freeling returns again to the “boggy peaty moorland” theme: “The local people, and with them a swelling tide of strangers from congested metropolitan Holland, took with enthusiasm to easy work in sunny, canteen-and-canned-music factories. Pleasant change from trying to dig a living out of wet, black, stinking ground” (DB 19). Freeling seems less interested in the mystery story than in a sociological evocation of stifling provincialism and provincial resentment at the new influx from the cities: “None of this told me much about the people who lived there. Were they too just like the ones in metroland? Had a thousand years in the ‘Veen’ ground produced a local type? There were local names—I saw several ‘Van Veen’ and ‘Van der Veen’ nameplates on doors” (DB 20). As if in reply to Freeling, Ada stresses the Veens, inhabitants at Ardis of the Ladore region of “lovely rich marshes” (Ada 108) and “Ladoga bogs” (288), not as a “local type” but as a unique “happy famil[y] more or less dissimilar” (3) to any other on earth or Antiterra.4

  Never one not to do his homework, Nabokov appears to have followed up Freeling’s hint by consulting a map of the Netherlands. Freeling sets his novel in the province of Drenthe (as my atlas spells it), and there the concentration of veen towns common throughout the country—from Anerveen through Veendal, Veendijk, and Veenwouden to Witteveen—reaches its highest. Although Freeling’s stress is on the province as a whole, he locates the action in the real town of Zwinderen and specifically mentions as an example of the veen towns the nearby Klazinaveen (Klazienaveen according to my atlas: the Dutch continually reform their spelling). Between the two, five kilometers from Klazienaveen by road, lies another village called Erica. When Nabokov saw, as he surely did, the town of Erica in Drenthe nestled among other places named veen, he must have thought of Venus Erycina, the temple to Venus as the goddess of prostitutes in the Sicilian town of Eryx, now Erice, and from that have developed Eric Veen, the boy “of Flemish extraction” (Ada 347) who dreams up a chain of palatial whorehouses, the Villa Venuses.