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EDITOR's NOTE. The Sherlock Holmes thread, initiated (I think) by James
Womack has been extraordinarily productive. Just the sort of thing I
envisioned for NABOKV-L eight years ago. Below, Brian Boyd adds yet
another splendid installment.
-------------------------------
From: Brian Boyd <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
Thanks to James Womack for the fine find in Lolita that started this
Sherlock Holmes thread spinning.
May I add to the Sherlock Holmes references line 368 of the poem Pale
Fire:
" 'Mother, what's grimpen?' 'What is what?' 'Grim Pen.' " To those who
never
read prose, this may at first seem to refer only to T.S. Eliot. Hazel is
reading "some phony modern poem that was said / In English Lit to be a
document / 'Engazhay and compelling,'" and asks her mother three rare
words
from Four Quartets. But as I note in Nabokov's Pale Fire, p. 193: "As he
recalls Hazel's query, Shade almost lets us glimpse his smile of
appreciation at Eliot's turning the treacherous Grimpen Mire, where the
villain of The Hound of the Baskervilles keeps his murdering hound, into
a
common noun. Yet it is a grim smile, for at the end of Conan Doyle's
story
Holmes's adversary sinks into the mire and drowns. As Shade knows Hazel,
too, stepped 'Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.'"
Two further points:
1) In a letter to Edmund Wilson of February 16, 1946, VN discusses
Sherlock
Holmes and the villain in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Vandeleur alias
Stapleton, a lepidopterist, of all sinister passions, who is supposed to
have had a moth named after him. VN declares to EW he has named a new
butterfly vandeleuri (if he was ever serious, he changed his mind).
2) In relation to my argument that Hazel's shade inspires her father to
write the poem:
As I have noted in N's PF, the exchange in Shade's poem about the rare
words
in Eliot's poem is the only verbatim communication we are able to
observe
between Hazel and her father. Perhaps for that reason, Eliot becomes an
important covert motif in Shade's "Pale Fire," focused especially, I
argue,
so as to illuminate Hazel.
Because of the villain's death by drowning in Grimpen Mire in The Hound
of
the Baskervilles, "Grimpen" also prefigures Hazel's death, and that in
turn
couples oddly with Shade's earlier lines: "Was he in Sherlock Holmes,
the
fellow whose / Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?"
The allusion in what Kinbote calls "The Case of the Reversed Footprints"
is
actually to the stories "The Final Problem," in which Holmes's footsteps
lead to the edge of a cliff over the Reichenbach Falls, where he is
supposed
to have plunged to a watery death together with Moriarty, and to "The
Adventure of the Empty House," in which Watson discovers that Holmes is
not
dead, after all. Holmes explains to his astonished friend that he
escaped
pursuit by Moriarty's henchmen not through reversing his boots, as he
has
done on previous occasions, but through climbing up the cliff from the
path
where their fight had led to Moriarty's solitary plunge into the waters.
(I
discuss these stories in Nabokov Studies 4 [1997]: 208-09.)
Shade's query, "Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose / Tracks
pointed
back when he reversed his shoes?" invites us to look for clues. What the
clues point to is someone who seems to have drowned, in a "grimpen,"
indeed,
but who, if we follow the reversed footprints, we can discover, has
somehow
survived.
Let me quote the whole context of the first Holmes reference:
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
20 Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back . . . A pheasant's feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?
If we take the hint and retrace our steps from the Sherlock Holmes
allusion
to the marvelous lines just before, which prompt Shade to think of
Holmes
("dot, arrow pointing back . . . A pheasant's feet! / Torquated beauty,
sublimated grouse"), we might be prompted to recall Nabokov's
familiarity
(over-familiarity, even) with the hazel grouse: "the hazel grouse of
which I
had enough in my childhood" (SM 286; see also EO II, 75 and Ada 256).
Those
reversed tracks, those backward arrows, point, I suggest, to the
sublimated
Hazel, who seems to have drowned, but who, against all the odds, has
returned.
The bird theme and the sublimation theme both involve Hazel
elsewhere. Shade sobs (l.314) at the indignities Hazel suffers because
of
her looks; the passage continues:
Another winter was scrape-scooped away.
The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May.
Summer was power-mowed, and autumn, burned.
Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned
Into a wood duck. And again your voice:
320 "But this is prejudice! You should rejoice
That she is innocent. Why overstress
The physical? She wants to look a mess. . . . "
As I suggest in Nabokov's Pale Fire (p. 133-45), Hazel as dingy cygnet
may
not turn into a wood duck in this life, but the dingy, withdrawn
Toothworth
White (the butterfly Pieris virginiensis), associated with Hazel, seems
to
return transformed into the numinous and resplendent Red Admirable
butterfly
(Vanessa atalanta) that greets Shade in the hour of his death. And here
at
the beginning of "Pale Fire," the bird that has left the reversed-arrow
tracks, a pheasant, is called a "sublimated grouse" because the colors
of
grouse are much drabber than those of pheasants (also members of the
order
Galliformes), although the rough resemblance of ruffed grouse to the
brighter birds means they are sometimes called "pheasants" (see
Webster's
Second, "pheasant").
One final point: Hazel, of course, is associated with reversal: "She
twisted words: pot, top, / Spider, redips. And 'powder' was 'red wop.' "
Kinbote notes in his commentary to lines 347-48: "I am quite sure it was
I
who one day, when we were discussing 'mirror words,' observed (and I
recall
the poet's expression of stupefaction) that 'spider' in reverse is
'redips,'
and 'T. S. Eliot,' 'toilest.' But then it is also true that Hazel Shade
resembled me in certain respects." Readers of Nabokov's Pale Fire will
also
recall the near-reversed "T.S. Eliot" in "Where various articles of
toilet
stood," in the television advertisement for some female beauty product
that
Shade flees on the night of Hazel's death, which I suggest is a complex
allusion to both Eliot's image of a woman before the mirror in The Waste
Land's "A Game of Chess" and Pope's Belinda before her mirror in The
Rape of
the Lock, and another way Hazel has of signing in her part in her
father's
life and art after her death. In "grimpen," too, Nabokov alludes to an
Eliot
allusion precisely in order to suggest he can outdo Eliot in compounding
allusions, and at the same time points to another series of clues,
another
trail of reversed tracks, that intimate a sublimated Hazel's survival
beyond
the apparent inexorability of her death by drowning.
Womack has been extraordinarily productive. Just the sort of thing I
envisioned for NABOKV-L eight years ago. Below, Brian Boyd adds yet
another splendid installment.
-------------------------------
From: Brian Boyd <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
Thanks to James Womack for the fine find in Lolita that started this
Sherlock Holmes thread spinning.
May I add to the Sherlock Holmes references line 368 of the poem Pale
Fire:
" 'Mother, what's grimpen?' 'What is what?' 'Grim Pen.' " To those who
never
read prose, this may at first seem to refer only to T.S. Eliot. Hazel is
reading "some phony modern poem that was said / In English Lit to be a
document / 'Engazhay and compelling,'" and asks her mother three rare
words
from Four Quartets. But as I note in Nabokov's Pale Fire, p. 193: "As he
recalls Hazel's query, Shade almost lets us glimpse his smile of
appreciation at Eliot's turning the treacherous Grimpen Mire, where the
villain of The Hound of the Baskervilles keeps his murdering hound, into
a
common noun. Yet it is a grim smile, for at the end of Conan Doyle's
story
Holmes's adversary sinks into the mire and drowns. As Shade knows Hazel,
too, stepped 'Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.'"
Two further points:
1) In a letter to Edmund Wilson of February 16, 1946, VN discusses
Sherlock
Holmes and the villain in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Vandeleur alias
Stapleton, a lepidopterist, of all sinister passions, who is supposed to
have had a moth named after him. VN declares to EW he has named a new
butterfly vandeleuri (if he was ever serious, he changed his mind).
2) In relation to my argument that Hazel's shade inspires her father to
write the poem:
As I have noted in N's PF, the exchange in Shade's poem about the rare
words
in Eliot's poem is the only verbatim communication we are able to
observe
between Hazel and her father. Perhaps for that reason, Eliot becomes an
important covert motif in Shade's "Pale Fire," focused especially, I
argue,
so as to illuminate Hazel.
Because of the villain's death by drowning in Grimpen Mire in The Hound
of
the Baskervilles, "Grimpen" also prefigures Hazel's death, and that in
turn
couples oddly with Shade's earlier lines: "Was he in Sherlock Holmes,
the
fellow whose / Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?"
The allusion in what Kinbote calls "The Case of the Reversed Footprints"
is
actually to the stories "The Final Problem," in which Holmes's footsteps
lead to the edge of a cliff over the Reichenbach Falls, where he is
supposed
to have plunged to a watery death together with Moriarty, and to "The
Adventure of the Empty House," in which Watson discovers that Holmes is
not
dead, after all. Holmes explains to his astonished friend that he
escaped
pursuit by Moriarty's henchmen not through reversing his boots, as he
has
done on previous occasions, but through climbing up the cliff from the
path
where their fight had led to Moriarty's solitary plunge into the waters.
(I
discuss these stories in Nabokov Studies 4 [1997]: 208-09.)
Shade's query, "Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose / Tracks
pointed
back when he reversed his shoes?" invites us to look for clues. What the
clues point to is someone who seems to have drowned, in a "grimpen,"
indeed,
but who, if we follow the reversed footprints, we can discover, has
somehow
survived.
Let me quote the whole context of the first Holmes reference:
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
20 Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back . . . A pheasant's feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?
If we take the hint and retrace our steps from the Sherlock Holmes
allusion
to the marvelous lines just before, which prompt Shade to think of
Holmes
("dot, arrow pointing back . . . A pheasant's feet! / Torquated beauty,
sublimated grouse"), we might be prompted to recall Nabokov's
familiarity
(over-familiarity, even) with the hazel grouse: "the hazel grouse of
which I
had enough in my childhood" (SM 286; see also EO II, 75 and Ada 256).
Those
reversed tracks, those backward arrows, point, I suggest, to the
sublimated
Hazel, who seems to have drowned, but who, against all the odds, has
returned.
The bird theme and the sublimation theme both involve Hazel
elsewhere. Shade sobs (l.314) at the indignities Hazel suffers because
of
her looks; the passage continues:
Another winter was scrape-scooped away.
The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May.
Summer was power-mowed, and autumn, burned.
Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned
Into a wood duck. And again your voice:
320 "But this is prejudice! You should rejoice
That she is innocent. Why overstress
The physical? She wants to look a mess. . . . "
As I suggest in Nabokov's Pale Fire (p. 133-45), Hazel as dingy cygnet
may
not turn into a wood duck in this life, but the dingy, withdrawn
Toothworth
White (the butterfly Pieris virginiensis), associated with Hazel, seems
to
return transformed into the numinous and resplendent Red Admirable
butterfly
(Vanessa atalanta) that greets Shade in the hour of his death. And here
at
the beginning of "Pale Fire," the bird that has left the reversed-arrow
tracks, a pheasant, is called a "sublimated grouse" because the colors
of
grouse are much drabber than those of pheasants (also members of the
order
Galliformes), although the rough resemblance of ruffed grouse to the
brighter birds means they are sometimes called "pheasants" (see
Webster's
Second, "pheasant").
One final point: Hazel, of course, is associated with reversal: "She
twisted words: pot, top, / Spider, redips. And 'powder' was 'red wop.' "
Kinbote notes in his commentary to lines 347-48: "I am quite sure it was
I
who one day, when we were discussing 'mirror words,' observed (and I
recall
the poet's expression of stupefaction) that 'spider' in reverse is
'redips,'
and 'T. S. Eliot,' 'toilest.' But then it is also true that Hazel Shade
resembled me in certain respects." Readers of Nabokov's Pale Fire will
also
recall the near-reversed "T.S. Eliot" in "Where various articles of
toilet
stood," in the television advertisement for some female beauty product
that
Shade flees on the night of Hazel's death, which I suggest is a complex
allusion to both Eliot's image of a woman before the mirror in The Waste
Land's "A Game of Chess" and Pope's Belinda before her mirror in The
Rape of
the Lock, and another way Hazel has of signing in her part in her
father's
life and art after her death. In "grimpen," too, Nabokov alludes to an
Eliot
allusion precisely in order to suggest he can outdo Eliot in compounding
allusions, and at the same time points to another series of clues,
another
trail of reversed tracks, that intimate a sublimated Hazel's survival
beyond
the apparent inexorability of her death by drowning.