In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes shaving and says that now he will speak of evil and despair as none has spoken before:
My Adam's apple is a prickly pear:
Now I shall speak of evil and despair
As none has spoken. Five, six, seven, eight,
Nine strokes are not enough. Ten. I palpate
Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess
And find unchanged that patch of prickliness.
I have my doubts about the one-armed bloke
Who in commercials with one gliding stroke
Clears a smooth path of flesh from ear to chin,
Then wipes his face and fondly tries his skin.
I'm in the class of fussy bimanists.
As a discreet ephebe in tights assists
A female in an acrobatic dance,
My left hand helps, and holds, and shifts its stance.
Now I shall speak... Better than any soap
Is the sensation for which poets hope
When inspiration and its icy blaze,
The sudden image, the immediate phrase
Over the skin a triple ripple send
Making the little hairs all stand on end
As in the enlarged animated scheme
Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks. (ll. 901-930)
In J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey the narrator mentions the aesthetic evil of a footnote:
By profession, Zooey was an actor, a leading man, in television, and had been for a little more than three years. He was, in fact, as "sought after" (and, according to vague second-hand reports that reached his family, as highly paid) as a young leading man in television perhaps can be who isn't at the same time a Hollywood or Broadway star with a ready-made national reputation. But possibly either of these statements, without elaboration, can lead to an overly clearcut line of conjecture. As it happened, Zooey had made a formal and serious debut as a public performer at the age of seven. He was the second youngest of what had originally been seven) brothers and sisters* [*The aesthetic evil of a footnote seems in order just here, I'm afraid. In all that follows, only the two youngest of the seven children will be directly seen or heard. The remaining five, however, the senior five, will be stalking in and out of the plot with considerable frequency, like so many Banquo's ghosts. The reader, then, may care to know at the outset that in 1955 the eldest of the Glass children, Seymour, had been dead almost seven years. He committed suicide while vacationing in Florida with his wife. If alive, he would have been thirty-eight in 1955. The second-eldest child, Buddy, was what is known in campus-catalogue parlance as "writer-in-residence" at a girls' junior college in upper New York State. He lived alone, in a small, unwinterized, unelectrified house about a quarter of a mile away from a rather popular ski-run. The next-eldest of the children, Boo Boo, was married and the mother of three children. In November, 1955, she was travelling in Europe with her husband and all three of their children. In order of age, the twins, Walt and Waker, come after Boo Boo. Walt had been dead just over ten years. He was killed in a freakish explosion while he was with the Army of Occupation in Japan. Waker, his junior by some twelve minutes, was a Roman Catholic priest, and in November, 1955, he was in Ecuador, attending a Jesuit conference of some kind.] - five boys and two girls-all of whom, at rather conveniently spaced intervals during childhood, had been heard regularly on a network radio program, a children's quiz show called "It's a Wise Child." An age difference of almost eighteen years between the eldest of the Glass children, Seymour, and the youngest, Franny, had helped very considerably to allow the family to reserve a kind of dynastic seating arrangement at the "Wise Child" microphones, which lasted just over sixteen years-from 1927 well into 1943, a span of years connecting the Charleston and B-17 Eras. (All this data, I think, is to some degree relevant.) For all the gaps and years between their individual heydays on the program, it may be said (with few, and no really important, reservations) that all seven of the children had managed to answer over the air a prodigious number of alternately deadly-bookish and deadly-cute questions-sent in by listeners-with a freshness, an aplomb, that was considered unique in commercial radio. Public response to the children was often hot and never tepid. In general, listeners were divided into two, curiously restive camps: those who held that the Glasses were a bunch of insufferably "superior" little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth, and those who held that they were bona-fide underage wits and savants, of an uncommon, if unenviable, order. At this writing (1957), there are former listeners to "It's a Wise Child" who remember, with basically astonishing accuracy, many of the individual performances of each of the seven children. In this same thinning but still oddly coterie-like group, the consensus is that, of all the Glass children, the eldest boy, Seymour, back in the late twenties and early thirties, had been the "best" to hear, the most consistently "rewarding." After Seymour, Zooey, the youngest boy in the family, is generally placed second in order of preference, or appeal. And since we have a singularly workaday interest in Zooey here, it may be appended that, as an ex-panelist on "It's a Wise Child," he had one almanaclike distinction among (or over) his brothers and sisters. Off and on, during their broadcasting years, all seven of the children had been fair game for the kind of child psychologist or professional educator who takes a special interest in extra-precocious children. In this cause, or service, Zooey had been, of all the Glasses, hands down, the most voraciously examined, interviewed, and poked at. Very notably, with no exceptions that I know of, his experiences in the apparently divergent fields of clinical, social, and newsstand psychology had been costly for him, as though the places where he was examined had been uniformly alive with either highly contagious traumas or just plain old-fashioned germs. For example, in 1942 (with the everlasting disapproval of his two eldest brothers, both of whom were in the Army at the time) he had been tested by one research group alone in Boston, on five separate occasions. (He was twelve during most of the sessions, and it's possible that the train rides-ten of them-held some attraction for him, at least in the beginning.) The main purpose of the five tests, one gathered, was to isolate and study, if possible, the source of Zooey's precocious wit and fancy. At the end of the fifth test, the subject was sent home to New York with three or four aspirins in an engraved envelope for his sniffles, which turned out to be bronchial pneumonia. Some six weeks later, a long-distance call came through from Boston at eleven-thirty at night, with much dropping of small coins in an ordinary pay phone, and an unidentified voice-with no intention, presumably, of sounding pedantically waggish-informed Mr. and Mrs. Glass that their son Zooey, at twelve, had an English vocabulary on an exact par with Mary Baker Eddy's, if he could be urged to use it.
Zooey Glass is an actor. According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), the King escaped from Zembla with the help of his friend Odon (the stage and screen name of Donald O’Donnell), a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot. Like Bessie Glass (née Gallagher), Franny’s and Zooey’s mother in Salinger’s novella, Odon’s mother Sylvia O’Donnell (née O’Connell) is Irish. In his Eugene Onegin Commentary (vol. II, p. 27) VN points out that the mother of Pushkin’s friend Vyazemski was Irish:
Prince (knyaz’) Pyotr Vyazemski (1792-1878), a minor poet, was disastrously influenced by the French poetaster Pierre Jean Béranger; otherwise he was a verbal virtuoso, a fine prose stylist, a brilliant (though by no means always reliable) memoirist, critic and wit. Pushkin was very fond of him and vied with him in scatological metaphors (see their letters). He was Karamzin’s ward, Reason’s godchild, Romanticism’s champion, and an Irishman on his mother’s side (O’Reilly).
In his poem Davno plyvu zhiteyskim morem (“I’ve been long in the ups and downs of life,” 1864) Vyazemski uses the phrase s al’fy na omegu (from alpha to omega):
Давно плыву житейским морем,
Не раз при мне вздымался вал,
Который счастьем или горем
Пловцов случайно заливал.
Но в красный день и под ненастьем
Не мог я хорошо понять,
Что люди признавали счастьем
И что способны горем звать.
Их поиски мне были чужды,
И чужды их забот плоды.
В их счастье не имел я нужды,
В их горе не видал беды.
Чужому мненью, словно игу,
Не подставлял я головы;
Как знал, читал я жизни книгу,
Но не со слов людской молвы.
Теперь, что с альфы на омегу
Я окончательно попал,
Теперь, что после бурь ко брегу
Несет меня последний вал,
Еще с толпою разнородней
Своим фарватером плыву,
И мнится мне, всё сумасбродней —
Все люди бредят наяву.
Я прав иль нет? Не мне задачу
Решить, но с грустью сознаюсь;
О торжествах я часто плачу,
А над страданьями смеюсь.
...Now that from alpha to omega
I finally found myself come,
Now that, after the storms, to the shore
The last wave carries me...
Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter) drowned in Lake Omega, the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes near New Wye:
Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names garbled by early settlers in such a way as to accommodate specious derivations and commonplace allusions). On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because all kinds of descriptive booklets should be available to the reader by writing to the University's Publicity Office, but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences. (note to Lines 47-48)
Lake Omega brings to mind Cayuga Lake, the longest of central New York's glacial Finger Lakes. The city of Ithaca, site of Ithaca College and Cornell University (where VN lectured), is located at the southern end of Cayuga Lake. In Salinger's Franny and Zooey Zooey mentions Kaliyuga (in Hinduism, the fourth and worst of the four yugas, world ages, in a Yuga Cycle, preceded by Dvapara Yuga and followed by the next cycle's Krita, or Satya, Yuga; it is believed to be the present age, which is full of conflict and sin):
Franny, looking at him, now had a hand visored over her eyes. Zooey was sitting in the main shaft of sunlight in the room. She might have altered her position on the couch, if she meant to go on looking at him, but that would have disturbed Bloomberg, in her lap, who appeared to be asleep. "Do you really have an ulcer?" she asked suddenly. "Mother said you have an ulcer."
"Yes, I have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer's a goddam spy." He gave the snowman another, more vigorous shake. "The funny part is," he said, "I like Hess. Or at least I like him when he's not shoving his artistic poverty down my throat. At least he wears horrible neckties and funny padded suits in the middle of that frightened, super-conservative, super-conforming madhouse. And I like his conceit. He's so conceited he's actually humble, the crazy bastard. I mean he obviously thinks television's good enough to deserve him and his big, bogus-courageous, 'offbeat' talent-which is a crazy kind of humility, if you feel like thinking about it." He stared at the glass ball till the snowstorm had abated somewhat. "In a way, I sort of like LeSage, too. Everything he owns is the best-his overcoat, his two-cabin cruiser, his son's grades at Harvard, his electric razor, everything. He took me home to dinner once and stopped me in the driveway to ask me if I remembered 'the late Carole Lombard, in the movies.' He warned me I'd get a shock when I met his wife, she was such a dead ringer for Carole Lombard. I suppose I'll like him for that till I die. His wife turned out to be a really tired, bosomy, Persian-looking blonde." Zooey looked around abruptly at Franny, who had said something. "What?" he asked.
"Yes!" Franny repeated - pale, but beaming, and apparently fated, too, to like Mr. LeSage till death.
Mr. LeSage (Zooey’s colleague) is a namesake of Alain-René Le Sage (1668-1747), a French novelist and dramatist, the author of Le Diable boiteux (“The Devil upon Two Sticks,” 1707). Boiteux is French for “lame.” In Chapter Ten (XVI: 9-14) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions khromoy Turgenev (lame Turgenev):
Одну Россию в мире видя,
Лаская в ней свой идеал,
Хромой Тургенев им внимал
И, слово рабство ненавидя,
Предвидел в сей толпе дворян
Освободителей крестьян.
seeing but Russia in the world,
in her caressing his ideal,
to them did lame Turgenev hearken
and the word slavery hating,
in this crowd of nobles foresaw
the liberators of the peasants.
Describing shaving, Shade mentions slaves who make hay between his mouth and nose:
And while the safety blade with scrape and screak
Travels across the country of my cheek;
Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep
Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,
And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla's fields where my gay stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose. (ll. 931-938)
In his EO Commentary (vol. III, p. 358) VN points out that Pushkin’s epigram on Neptune was prompted by rumors (which later proved false) to the effect that Great Britain had surrendered the political émigré, the Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev, to the Russian government:
Так море, древний душегубец,
Воспламеняет гений твой?
Ты славишь лирой золотой
Нептуна грозного трезубец.
Не славь его. В наш гнусный век
Седой Нептун земли союзник.
На всех стихиях человек —
Тиран, предатель или узник.
So ’tis the sea, the ancient assassin
that kindles into flame your genius?
You glorify with golden lyre
Neptune's dread trident?
No, praise him not! In our vile age
gray Neptune is the Earth's ally.
Upon all elements man is a tyrant,
a traitor or a prisoner.
(transl. by VN)
In a canceled variant (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) Shade says that his age is the worst of all:
Line 922: held up by Our Cream
This is not quite exact. In the advertisement to which it refers, the whiskers are held up by a bubbly foam, not by a creamy substance.
After this line, instead of lines 923-930, we find the following, lightly deleted, variant:
All artists have been born in what they call
A sorry age; mine is the worst of all:
An age that thinks spacebombs and spaceships take
A genius with a foreign name to make,
When any jackass can rig up the stuff;
An age in which a pack of rogues can bluff
The selenographer; a comic age
That sees in Dr. Schweitzer a great sage.
Having struck this out, the poet tried another theme, but these lines he also canceled:
England where poets flew the highest, now
Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough;
Now the prosemongers of the Grubby Group,
The Message Man, the owlish Nincompoop
And all the Social Novels of our age
Leave but a pinch of coal dust on the page.
The selenographer (a person who charts the moon's surface or who studies selenography) brings to mind Selena’s brother, a character in J. D. Salinger’s story Just Before the War with the Eskimos. In Salinger’s story Selena’s brother tells Ginnie that Joan is busy as a little goddam beaver:
“Where do you know Joan from?" she asked. "I never saw you at the house or anything."
"Never been at your goddam house."
Ginnie waited, but nothing led away from this statement. "Where'd you meet her, then?" she asked.
"Party," he said.
"At a party? When?"
"I don't know. Christmas, '42." From his breast pajama pocket he two-fingered out a cigarette that looked as though it had been slept on. "How 'bout throwing me those matches?" he said. Ginnie handed him a box of matches from the table beside her. He lit his cigarette without straightening out its curvature, then replaced the used match in the box. Tilting his head back, he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself lefthanded.
"Why's Joan a snob?" Ginnie asked.
"Why? Because she is. How the hell do I know why?"
"Yes, but I mean why do you say she is?"
He turned to her wearily. "Listen. I wrote her eight goddam letters. Eight. She didn't answer one of 'em."
Ginnie hesitated. "Well, maybe she was busy."
"Yeah. Busy. Busy as a little goddam beaver."
According to Kinbote, he was nicknamed “the great beaver” because of his brown beard:
One day I happened to enter the English Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: "I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the great beaver." Of course, I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and after calmly taking the magazine from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. (Foreword)
In Chapter One of EO Pushkin describes Onegin’s day in St. Petersburg and (in One: XVI: 4) mentions Onegin’s bobrovyi vorotnik (beaver collar):
Уж тёмно: в санки он садится.
"Пади, пади!" - раздался крик;
Морозной пылью серебрится
Его бобровый воротник.
К Talon4 помчался: он уверен,
Что там уж ждёт его Каверин.
Вошёл: и пробка в потолок,
Вина кометы брызнул ток,
Пред ним roast-beef окровавленный,
И трюфли, роскошь юных лет,
Французской кухни лучший цвет,
И Стразбурга пирог нетленный
Меж сыром Лимбургским живым
И ананасом золотым.
It’s already dark. He gets into a sleigh.
The cry “Way, way!” resounds.
With frostdust silvers
his beaver collar.
To Talon's4 he has dashed off: he is certain
that there already waits for him [Kaverin];
has entered – and the cork goes ceilingward,
the flow of comet wine has spurted,
a bloody roast beef is before him,
and truffles, luxury of youthful years,
the best flower of French cookery,
and a decayless Strasbourg pie
between a living Limburg cheese
and a golden ananas.
Pushkin’s note 4: Well-known restaurateur.
The Eugene Onegin stanza is “patterned on a sonnet.” Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus (just before the poet’s death, Kinbote, a confirmed vegetarian, invites Shade to a glass of Tokay at his place and promises him a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas for dinner). 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”). In VN’s novel Otchayanie (“Despair,” 1934) Hermann kills Felix, a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double. Before shooting his victim dead, Hermann shaves off Felix’s mustache and pares Felix’s fingernails and toenails. After the murder of Felix Hermann stops shaving and grows a beard. In Canto Two of his poem (ll. 183-194) Shade describes the paring of his fingernails and mentions certain flinching likenesses (the poet compares his fingers to various acquaintances). According to Kinbote, Zembla is a corruption not of zemlya (Russian for "earth"), but of Semberland, a land of reflections, of 'resemblers.' Sember is the Tatar name of Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk, the home city of both Lenin and Kerenski, the head of the Provisional government before the Bolshevist coup).
See also the updated full version of my previous post, “Lake Omega & King Alfin in Pale Fire.”