In his note to Line 230 (a domestic ghost) of Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Aunt Maud’s oil Cypress and Bat:
It appears that in the beginning of 1950, long before the barn incident (see note to line 347), sixteen-year-old Hazel was involved in some appalling "psychokinetic" manifestations that lasted for nearly a month. Initially, one gathers, the poltergeist meant to impregnate the disturbance with the identity of Aunt Maud who had just died; the first object to perform was the basket in which she had once kept her half-paralyzed Skye terrier (the breed called in our country "weeping-willow dog"). Sybil had had the animal destroyed soon after its mistress's hospitalization, incurring the wrath of Hazel who was beside herself with distress. One morning this basket shot out of the "intact" sanctuary (see lines 90-98) and traveled along the corridor past the open door of the study, where Shade was at work; he saw it whizz by and spill its humble contents: a ragged coverlet, a rubber bone, and a partly discolored cushion. Next day the scene of action switched to the dining room where one of Aunt Maud's oils (Cypress and Bat) was fond to be turned toward the wall. Other incidents followed, such as short flights accomplished by her scrapbook (see note to line 90) and, of course, all kinds of knockings, especially in the sanctuary, which would rouse Hazel from her, no doubt, peaceful sleep in the adjacent bedroom. But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept a Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the making of lines 5-12).
In Canto One of his poem Shade describes Aunt Maud's room and mentions the verse book open at the Index (Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral):
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1816) is sonnet by John Keats. In the first line of his sonnet Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream Keats mentions owls and bats:
Before he went to live with owls and bats,
Nebuchadnezzar had an ugly dream,
Worse than a housewife’s, when she thinks her cream
Made a naumachia for mice and rats:
So scared, he sent for that “good kind of cats,”
Young Daniel, who did straightway pluck the beam
From out his eye, and said – “I do not deem
Your sceptre worth a straw, your cushions old door mats.”
A horrid nightmare, similar somewhat,
Of late has haunted a most valiant crew
Of loggerheads and chapmen; – we are told
That any Daniel, though he be a sot,
Can make their lying lips turn pale of hue,
By drawing out – “Ye are that head of gold!”
In his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881) Oscar Wilde says that no cypress shades Keats’ grave, no funeral yew:
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
In Keats' narrative poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818) there is a message from the ghost. Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1856) is a painting by William Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Maud (1855) is a narrative long poem by Tennyson (whose In Memoriam is mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary). "Alfred Tennyson reading Maud " is a drawing (1855) by D. G. Rossetti (another member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood).
The characters in Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) include Basil Hallward (the painter) and Sibyl Vane (the actress), a namesake of Shade's wife. At the beginning of Canto Three Shade mentions l’if (the yew in French) and Yewshade:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato.
I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it--big if!--engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber).
You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state. (ll. 500-509)
Kinbote calls Gradus (Shade’s murderer) “a cross between bat and crab:”
It was now correctly conjectured that if Odon had fled, the King had fled too: At an extraordinary session of the Extremist government there was passed from hand to hand, in grim silence, a copy of a French newspaper with the headline: L'EX-ROI DE ZEMBLA EST-IL À PARIS? Vindictive exasperation rather than state strategy moved the secret organization of which Gradus was an obscure member to plot the destruction of the royal fugitive. Spiteful thugs! They may be compared to hoodlums who itch to torture the invulnerable gentleman whose testimony clapped them in prison for life. Such convicts have been known to go berserk at the thought that their elusive victim whose very testicles they crave to twist and tear with their talons, is sitting at a pergola feast on a sunny island or fondling some pretty young creature between his knees in serene security - and laughing at them! One supposes that no hell can be worse than the helpless rage they experience as the awareness of that implacable sweet mirth reaches them and suffuses them, slowly destroying their brutish brains. A group of especially devout Extremists calling themselves the Shadows had got together and swore to hunt down the King and kill him wherever he might be. They were, in a sense, the shadow twins of the Karlists and indeed several had cousins or even brothers among the followers of the King. No doubt, the origin of either group could be traced to various reckless rituals in student fraternities and military clubs, and their development examined in terms of fads and anti-fads; but, whereas an objective historian associates a romantic and noble glamor with Karlism, its shadow group must strike one as something definitely Gothic and nasty. The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon's epileptic half-brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter. (note to Line 171)
In the first stanza of his poem Paris nocturne ("Paris by Night") Tristan Corbière (1845-75) mentions les crabes de la nuit (the crabs of night):
C’est la mer : — calme plat — et la grande marée,
Avec un grondement lointain, s’est retirée.
Le flot va revenir, se roulant dans son bruit.
Entendez-vous gratter les crabes de la nuit ?
C’est le Styx asséché : le chiffonnier Diogène,
La lanterne à la main, s’en vient errer sans gêne.
Le long du ruisseau noir, les poètes pervers
Pêchent : leur crâne creux leur sert de boîte à vers.
C’est le champ : pour glaner les impures charpies
S’abat le vol tournant des hideuses harpies.
Le lapin de gouttière, à l’affût des rongeurs
Fuit les fils de Bondy, nocturnes vendangeurs.
C’est la mort : la police gît. — En haut, l’amour
Fait la sieste en têtant la viande d’un bras lourd
Où le baiser éteint laisse sa plaque rouge.
L’heure est seule. — Ecoutez : … pas un rêve ne bouge.
C’est la vie : écoutez : la source vive chante
L'éternelle chanson sur la terre gluante
D’un dieu marin tirant ses membres nus et verts
Sur le lit de la morgue… et les yeux grands ouverts !
Corbière’s Paris diurne ("Paris by Day") is a sonnet with a coda:
Vois aux cieux le grand rond de cuivre rouge luire,
Immense casserole où le Bon Dieu fait cuire
La manne, l’arlequin, l'éternel plat du jour.
C’est trempé de sueur et c’est poivré d’amour.
Les Laridons en cercle attendent près du four,
On entend vaguement la chair rance bruire,
Et les soiffards aussi sont là, tendant leur buire ;
Le marmiteux grelotte en attendant son tour.
Tu crois que le soleil frit donc pour tout le monde
Ces gras graillons grouillants qu’un torrent d’or inonde ?
Non, le bouillon de chien tombe sur nous du ciel.
Eux sont sous le rayon et nous sous la gouttière
À nous le pot-au-noir qui froidit sans lumière…
Notre substance à nous, c’est notre poche à fiel.
Ma foi j’aime autant ça que d'être dans le miel.
Corbière’s little cycle (Paris diurne and Paris nocturne) was translated into Russian (as Dva Parizha: Parizh dnyom. Parizh noch’yu, 1904) by Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody,” I. Annenski’s penname). In his Russian version of Corbière’s sonnet Annenski omitted the coda:
Гляди, на небесах, в котле из красной меди
Неисчислимые для нас варятся снеди.
Хоть из остаточков состряпано, зато
Любовью сдобрено и потом полито!
Пред жаркой кухнею толкутся побирашки,
Свежинка с запашком заманчиво бурлит,
И жадно пьяницы за водкой тянут чашки,
И холод нищего оттёртого долит.
Не думаешь ли, брат, что, растопив червонцы,
Журчаще-жаркий жир для всех готовит солнце?
Собачьей мы и той похлёбки подождём.
Не всем под солнцем быть, кому и под дождём.
С огня давно горшок наш чёрный в угол сдвинут,
И желчью мы живём, пока нас в яму кинут.
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, 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”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski (whom Shade listed among Russian humorists) and a poem (1904) by Annenski:
Не я, и не он, и не ты,
И то же, что я, и не то же:
Так были мы где-то похожи,
Что наши смешались черты.
В сомненьи кипит ещё спор,
Но, слиты незримой четою,
Одной мы живём и мечтою,
Мечтою разлуки с тех пор.
Горячешный сон волновал
Обманом вторых очертаний,
Но чем я глядел неустанней.
Тем ярче себя ж узнавал.
Лишь полога ночи немой
Порой отразит колыханье
Моё и другое дыханье,
Бой сердца и мой и не мой...
И в мутном круженьи годин
Все чаще вопрос меня мучит:
Когда наконец нас разлучат,
Каким же я буду один?
Not I, and not he, and not you,
Both what I am, and what I am not:
We were so alike somewhere
That our features got mixed.
……..
And, in the turbid whirling of years,
The question torments me ever more often:
When we will be separated at last,
What kind of person I will be alone?
Annenski is the author of Kiparisovyi larets (“The Cypress Box,” 1910), a posthumous collection of poetry that consists of trilistniki (trefoils). Each trefoil is a little cycle of three poems. The three main characters in PF, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of Botkin's personality. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of Kinbote's Commentary). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
The head of Kinbote's department at Wordsmith University, Dr Oscar Nattochdag (nicknamed Netochka by his colleagues) is a namesake of Oscar Wilde. In Swedish natt och dag means "night and day." Night and Day (1919) is a novel by Virginia Woolf, the author of A Room of One's Own (1929). Netochka Nezvanov (1849) is an unfinished novel by Dostoevski. In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski's seventeenth birthday), to his brother Dostoevski says that it is difficult to live without nadezhda and twice uses the word gradus (degree).
April 23, 2020 (VN’s 121st birthday)