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----- Forwarded message from wmiale@acbm.qc.ca -----
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:06:43 -0500
From: Walter Miale <wmiale@acbm.qc.ca>
Reply-To: Walter Miale <wmiale@acbm.qc.ca>
Subject: The Pale Fire poem
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
From Walter Miale <wm@greenworldcenter.org>
Subject: The Pale Fire poem
It's fascinating to see disagreement over such a
question as whether a poem is a masterpiece or
maybe not very good at all. It's especially
interesting to me when one side is taken by a
critic of the calibre of Brian Boyd, whose
writing on Pale Fire so greatly enhances the
experience of that book, and when I find myself
on the opposite side.
Certainly Shade's poem by Nabokov is a
masterpiece, imbued as it is with the emanations
of its creator, who is there winking at us
between the lines, having a lot of fun, and
sharing it with us. But the thing itself, Shade's
poem by Shade? A rare bug in its own write, but
is this part of the whole whole in itself?
Shade of course has fun too. But his "Yanks beat
Sox on Chapman's homer" is not his own wild
fantasy but an autobiographical tidbit, a detail
amid evocations of eccentricity and incest.
One finds from the first page a curious shifting
back and forth of tone. After the sublime and
etherial opening, the poet looks around and takes
photographs --literally!-- with his eyes. The
poem is grand stuff, but this is parody. We
encounter parododic style and the shift from the
sublime to the bathetic throughout.
On the next page, four lines after the haunting
The phantom of my little daughter's swing
we have
TV's huge paperclip.
The shift in diction is incongruous and jarring.
Nabokov is wittily situating the homely old poet
and his house redolent with homely family history
in a conventional modern townscape. But Shade the
author is incorporating what for Nabokov would be
a throwaway image (like "crystal to crystal") in
a major work.
The house has been remodeled with "one wing
revamped" and tasteful modern furninshings added,
including a new tv set. Is Shade the author
getting close to what "J. Wallace Larwood" called
"embarrassingly personal"?
Yes. In the next stanza we read
But certain words, chance words I hear or read,
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.
This is certainly touching, and a precious
instance of a phenomenon of emotional language,
but "cancer of the pancreas," though hardly a
funny subject, strikes me with such bathos that
it raises a smile, in me at least if not in Brian
Boyd.
The fictional John Shade is an unforgettable
American Gothic character of an unforgettable
gothic novel. The autobiographical John Shade
is--a poet yes, but the author not only of some
wonderful verse but also of some lines near as
homely as himself:
There he is, paring his fingernails and their
"scarfskin," and four lines later, (after telling
of Aunt Maude's stroke in the interim):
We moved her to Pinedale,
Famed for its sanitarium.
Isn't this resonant of Happydale, where the the
dear old ladies or their nephew who thought he
was Teddy Roosevelt (I forget exactly) ended up
in Arsenic and Old Lace?
And so on. In the wonderful romantic lines to Sybil, we have
At least
Four thousand times your pillow has been creased
By our two heads. Four hundred thousand times
The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes
Has marked our common hour. How many more
Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?
The calendars were free. Don't the banal
overtones of this modifier break the trance?
When T.S. Eliot had Mrs. Porter and her daughter
wash their feet in soda water it was a kind of
joke. Isn't the poet behind the poet behind the
lines here having fun, and in fact a laugh at his
character's expense?
And then there is the introduction of the main theme:
At first we'd smile and say:
"All little girls are plump" or "Jim McVey
(The family oculist) will cure that slight
Squint in no time."
The lines are homelier than the girl. Some of the
funniest fantasies are about unfunny subjects.
(From Lolita and Dr. Strangelove on down.) But
why would Shade want to strike so ironic, almost
comic, a keynote of the tragedy?
The portrait of Hazel continues in this bathetic vein:
Less starch, more fruit!
And
...or with that nice
Frail roommate, now a nun...
And
which made
Her almost fetching
"Almost fetching" is not a factual description of
a troubled girl, but a description by a troubled
father and/or a parody of a homely style
(American homely).
Good looks may be some kind of objective category
(for the Watusi as well as upstate New Yorkers in
the 1950's), but we all know terribly homely
girls who lived lives of relative or even great
contentment and fulfillment. I know Hazel was as
exceptionally homely in her father's eyes as
Dolores was beautiful in her stepfather's eyes,
but John Shade's feelings about Hazel's looks
must have amounted to an intolerable and
unhealing emotional wound. More evidence of
Nabokov's ironic detachment from Shade.
I think Brian Boyd is right: the Pale Fire poem
is a work of genius. And the thought experiment
of imagining it on its own is a worthwhile one.
The article was by Jim Coates. To Jim
Forthwith I wrote.
But doesn't Kinbote have a point in his assertion
that the commentary is indispensable?
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