Subject
[NABOKOV-L] PF's room and "poor Baudelaire" ( Nabokovian
Prosody); "Bend Sinister"
Prosody); "Bend Sinister"
From
Date
Body
In a letter dated May 25,1950 (n.211) Edmund Wilson writes: "I liked very much your New Yorker poem - but it involves a false accent on automobile - autómobile - which evidently betrays your mistaken ideas about English metrics." (p.274/5)
Simon Karlinski notes on the "New Yorker" poem: " 'The Room', in The New Yorker of May 13,1950." and quotes the stanza in question*.
Nabokov replies to Bunny (May 28,1950)
"Automobile. If you insist on having a primary or strong secondary accent on "au" then you are really making two words of it - "auto" and 'mobile" and then you can never use "automobile" in iambic or trochaic verse unless you accent "mo" (which is vulgar - though in the iambizational tradition and tendency of English) or drop the second syllable - thus: "aut'mobile" ( "Black aut'mobiles stood waiting at her door"), a trick I dare you to find in any English poem of the classical period - in regard to similarly weighed words. My pronunciation of "automobile" being less topheavy than yours ( although there is, I admit, a slight strees on "au"), I use it as fluently as I would use, in an iambic line [three words in Russian] (lover of angels) - all of which are pronounced exactly as "automobile" (of Webster's second choice)...Once [and] for all you should tell yourself that in these questions of prosody - no matter the language involved - you are wrong and I am right, always."
..................................................
THE ROOM
The room a dying poet took
at midnight fall in a dead hotel
had both directories - the Book
of Heaven and the Book of Bell.
It had a mirror and a chair,
it had a window and a bed,
its ribs let in the darkness where
rain glistened and shop sign bled.
Not tears, not terror, but a blend
of anonimity and doom,
it seemed, that room, to condescend
to imitate a normal room.
*Whenever some automobile
subliminally slit the night,
the walls and ceiling would reveal
a wheeling skeleton of light.
Soon afterward the room was mine.
A similar striped cageling, I
groped for the lamp and found the line
"Alone, unknown, unloved, I die"
in pencil, just above the bed.
It had a false quotation air,
was it a she, wild-eyed, well-read,
or a fat man with thinning hair?
I asked a gentle Negro maid,
I asked a captain and his crew,
I asked the night clerk. Undismayed,
I asked a drunk. Nobody knew.
Perhaps when he had found the switch
he saw the picture on the wall
and cursed the red eruption which
tried to be maples in the fall?
Artistically in the style
of Mr. Churchill at his best,
those maples marched in double file
from Glen Lake to Restricted Rest.
Perhaps my text is incomplete,
A poet's death is, after all,
a question of technique, a neat
enjambement, a melodic fall. #
And here a life had come apart
in darkness, and the room had grown
a ghostly thorax, with a heart
unknown, unloved - but not alone.
Vladimir Nabokov
# a familiar variation on "death is, after all, a question of technique" led me to "Bend Sinister" "I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words. But the very last lap of his life had been happy and it had been proven to him that death was but a question of style.Some tower clock which I could never exactly locate, which, in fact, I never heard in the daytime, struck twice, then hesitated and was left behind by the smooth fast silence that continued to stream through the veins of my aching temples; a question of rhythm.(241), and : “Krug, in a sudden moonburst of madness, understands that he is in good hands: nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution." 1963, Introduction, xviii,147.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/