Vladimir Nabokov

20 days in Pale Fire

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 4 December, 2021

At the end of his almost finished poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions a Vanessa butterfly:

 

A dark Vanessa with crimson band

Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand

And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.

And 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. (ll. 993-999)

 

To a Butterfly is a poem by William Wordsworth:

 

I've watched you now a full half-hour;

Self-poised upon that yellow flower

And, little Butterfly! indeed

I know not if you sleep or feed.

How motionless!--not frozen seas

More motionless! and then

What joy awaits you, when the breeze

Hath found you out among the trees,

And calls you forth again!

 

This plot of orchard-ground is ours;

My trees they are, my Sister's flowers;

Here rest your wings when they are weary;

Here lodge as in a sanctuary!

Come often to us, fear no wrong;

Sit near us on the bough!

We'll talk of sunshine and of song,

And summer days, when we were young;

Sweet childish days, that were as long

As twenty days are now.

 

According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), it took Shade twenty days to write his poem:

 

We possess in result a complete calendar of his work. Canto One was begun in the small hours of July 2 and completed on July 4. He started the next canto on his birthday and finished it on July 11. Another week was devoted to Canto Three. Canto Four was begun on July 19, and as already noted, the last third of its text (lines 949-999) is supplied by a Corrected Draft. This is extremely rough in appearance, teeming with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions, and does not follow the lines of the card as rigidly as the Fair Copy does. Actually, it turns out to be beautifully accurate when you once make the plunge and compel yourself to open your eyes in the limpid depths under its confused surface. It contains not one gappy line, not one doubtful reading. This fact would be sufficient to show that the imputations made (on July 24, 1959) in a newspaper interview with one of our professed Shadeans - who affirmed without having seen the manuscript of the poem that it "consists of disjointed drafts none of which yields a definite text" - is a malicious invention on the part of those who would wish not so much to deplore the state in which a great poet's work was interrupted by death as to asperse the competence, and perhaps honesty, of its present editor and commentator.

Another pronouncement publicly made by Prof. Hurley and his clique refers to a structural matter. I quote from the same interview: "None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbable that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly." Nonsense again! Aside from the veritable clarion of internal evidence ringing throughout Canto Four, there exists Sybil Shade's affirmation (in a document dated July 25, 1959) that her husband "never intended to go beyond four parts." For him the third canto was the penultimate one, and thus I myself have heard him speak of it, in the course of a sunset ramble, when, as if thinking aloud, he reviewed the day's work and gesticulated in pardonable self-approbation while his discreet companion kept trying in vain to adapt the swing of a long-limbed gait to the disheveled old poet's jerky shuffle. Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse 1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music. Knowing Shade's combinational turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth. And if all this were not enough - and it is, it is enough - I have had the dramatic occasion of hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See my note to line 991.) (Foreword)

 

Kinbote is right when he says that the unwritten Line 1000 of Shade's poem is identical to Line 1: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain." But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade’s poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Pushkin's Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1830) has the epigraph from Wordsworth: "Scorn not the sonnet, critic." Scorn not the coda, reader.

 

In his Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood Wordsworth (a Lake poet) says:

 

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

 

In Canto One of his poem Shade makes a similar complaint and mentions Lake Road:

 

I cannot understand why from the lake

I could make out our front porch when I'd take

Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree

Has intervened, I look but fail to see

Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space

Has caused a fold or furrow to displace

The fragile vista, the frame house between

Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green. (ll. 41-48)

 

Judge Goldsworth is Shade's neighbor whose house is rented by Kinbote. Shade and Kinbote teach at Wordsmith University. Goldsworth + Wordsmith = Goldsmith + Wordsworth.

 

In Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think (1832) Charles Caleb Colton mentions immortality and Oliver Goldsmith:

 

"All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid."

 

In the same work C. C. Colton says: "True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost."

 

The chief adviser of the Queen Elizabeth I, Lord Burleigh (or Burghley, 1520-98) brings to mind Professor Hurley, the Head of the English Department at Wordsmith University. At the beginning of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act I, Scene 1) the Second Witch mentions the hurlyburly:

 

First Witch

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

 

In his “Sonnet” Pushkin mentions tvorets Makbeta (the author of Macbeth) who loved the sonnet’s play.

 

During a conversation at the Faculty Club Kinbote calls the slapdash disheveled hag whom Shade is said to resemble "the third in the witch row:"

 

Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only disappear, eh, Charles?"

"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.

"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."

"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.

"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon - American History - "that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."

"I hear," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time -" (note to Line 894)