Poet Humbert Wolfe

Trying to remember his family name, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) mentions the surname or pseudonym of a presumably notorious Bulgarian, or Babylonian, or, maybe, Betelgeusian writer with whom scatterbrained émigrés from some other galaxy constantly confused him:

 

To the best of my knowledge my Christian name was  Vadim; so was my father's. The U.S.A. passport recently issued me--an elegant booklet with a golden design on its green cover perforated by the number 00678638--did not mention my ancestral  title; this had figured, though, on my British passport, throughout its several editions. Youth, Adulthood, Old Age, before the last one was mutilated beyond recognition by friendly forgers, practical jokers at  heart.  All this I  re-gleaned one night, as certain brain cells, which  had been frozen, now bloomed anew. Others, however, still puckered like retarded buds, and although I could freely twiddle (for the first time since I collapsed) my toes under  the  bedclothes, I just could not make out in that  darker corner of my mind what surname came after my Russian patronymic. I felt  it began with an N, as did the term for the beautifully spontaneous arrangement of words at moments of inspiration like the rouleaux of red corpuscles in freshly drawn blood under the microscope--a word I once used in See under Real, but could not remember either, something to do with a roll of coins, capitalistic metaphor, eh, Marxy? Yes, I definitely felt my family name began with an N and bore an odious resemblance to the surname or pseudonym of a presumably notorious (Notorov? No) Bulgarian, or Babylonian, or, maybe, Betelgeusian writer with whom scatterbrained émigrés from some other galaxy constantly confused me; but whether it was something on the lines of Nebesnyy or Nabedrin or Nablidze (Nablidze? Funny) I simply could not tell. I preferred not to overtax my willpower (go away, Naborcroft) and so gave up trying--or perhaps it began with a B and the n just clung to it like some desperate parasite? (Bonidze? Blonsky?--No, that belonged to the BINT business.) Did I have some princely Caucasian blood? Why had allusions to a Mr. Nabarro, a British politician, cropped up among the clippings I received from England concerning the London edition of A Kingdom by the Sea (lovely lilting title)? Why did Ivor call me "MacNab"? (7.3)

 

Vadim's novel A Kingdom by the Sea (1962) corresponds to VN's Lolita (1955). On Betelgeuse (1925) is a poem by Humbert Wolfe:

 

On Betelgeuse
the gold leaves hang in golden aisles
for twice a hundred million miles,
and twice a hundred million years
they golden hang and nothing stirs,
on Betelgeuse.

Space is a wind that does
not blow on Betelgeuse,
and time—oh time—is a bird,
whose wings have never stirred
the golden avenues of leaves
on Betelgeuse.

On Betelgeuse
there is nothing that joys or grieves
the unstirred multitude of leaves,
nor ghost of evil or good haunts
the gold multitude
on Betelgeuse.

And birth they do not use
nor death on Betelgeuse,
and the God, of whom we are
infinite dust, is there
a single leaf of those
gold leaves on Betelgeuse.

 

Humbert Wolfe brings to mind not only the narrator and main character in VN's Loilita, but also Prizrak Aleksandra Vol'fa ("The Spectre of Aleksandr Wolf," 1947), a novel by Gaito Gazdanov (1903-71), VN's fellow émigré writer (who earned his living as a cab driver in Paris). At the end of Lolita Humbert Humbert mentions his spectre:

 

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my spectre shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)

 

Btw., Vadim's princely surname that he remembers but never tells the reader is Yablonski. At the beginning of LATH Vadim mentions his three of four successive wives. Marriage of Harlequin (1927) is a novel by Pamela Frankau, Humbert Wolfe's mistress.

According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert’s manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita’s married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:

 

For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore. “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. ‘Vivian Darkbloom’ has written a biography, ‘My Cue,’ to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.

 

In his poem Susal'nym zolotom goryat ("With the gold leaves are shining," 1908) Mandelshtam mentions rozhdestvenskie yolki (the Christmas fir-trees) and igrushechnye volki (the toy wolves):

 

Сусальным золотом горят
В лесах рождественские елки;
В кустах игрушечные волки
Глазами страшными глядят.

О, вещая моя печаль,
О, тихая моя свобода
И неживого небосвода
Всегда смеющийся хрусталь!

 

The Christmas trees are shining
With tinsel gold in the forests,
The toy wolves are gazing
With scary eyes in the bushes.

O my prophetic sorrow,
O my silent freedom,
And the ever-laughing crystal
Of the lifeless heavenly vault!

(tr. Smirnov-Sadovski)

 

In his poem Za gremuchuyu doblest' gryadushchikh vekov ("For the sake of the resonant valor of ages to come," 1935) Mandelshtam says that he is no wolf by blood and mentions a pine that reaches up to the star:

 

За гремучую доблесть грядущих веков,
За высокое племя людей —
Я лишился и чаши на пире отцов,
И веселья, и чести своей.
Мне на плечи кидается век-волкодав,
Но не волк я по крови своей:
Запихай меня лучше, как шапку, в рукав
Жаркой шубы сибирских степей.

Чтоб не видеть ни труса, ни хлипкой грязцы,
Ни кровавых костей в колесе;
Чтоб сияли всю ночь голубые песцы
Мне в своей первобытной красе.

Уведи меня в ночь, где течет Енисей
И сосна до звёзды достает,
Потому что не волк я по крови своей
И меня только равный убьет.

[И неправдой искривлен мой рот]

 

1 For the sake of the resonant valor of ages to come,

for the sake of a high race of men,

I forfeited a bowl at my fathers' feast

4 and merriment, and my honour.

On my shoulders there pounces the wolfhound age,

but no wolf be blood I am;

better, like a fur cap, thrust me into the sleeve

8 of the warmly fur-coated Siberian steppes,

— so that I may not see the coward, the bit of soft muck,

the bloody bones on the wheel,

so that all night the blue-fox furs may blaze

12 for me in their pristine beauty.

Lead me into the night where the Enisey flows,

and the pine reaches up to the star,

because no wolf by blood am I,

16 and injustice has twisted my mouth.

(VN's translation)

 

Lolita dies in childbirth. At the end of his poem A nebo budushchim beremenno... ("And the sky is pregnant with the future..." 1923) Mandelshtam says that the sky is pregnant with the azure (zabremenevshee lazur'yu) and calls it al'fa i omega buri (alpha and omega of the tempest):  

 

А ты, глубокое и сытое,
Забременевшее лазурью,
Как чешуя многоочитое,
И альфа и омега бури;
Тебе — чужое и безбровое,
Из поколенья в поколение, —
Всегда высокое и новое
Передаётся удивление.

 

At the beginning of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions the false azure in the windowpane:

 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll. 1-4)

 

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). (note to Lines 47-48)

 

In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his heart attack, calls 1958 (when Lolita was published in the USA) "a year of Tempests" and mentions Hurricane Lolita that swept from Florida to Maine:

 

It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane

Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.

Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.

Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)

 

Btw., at the end of his poem Denmark Humbert Wolfe mentions the fir-trees and the evening-star:

 

I have seen great Kronborg standing in the red king's robes he wore
when Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was a prince at Helsingor –
I have seen Fredensborg whiter than the pale white hand of a queen,
and – a water-lily floating – Frederichsborg I have seen.
And yet these castles are shadows, lovely they were and are,
but all their man-made beauty fades by the light of the star,
that struck through the stems of the fir-trees – the evening-star, the pale
cool-throated star, that rises with the Danish nightingale.

 

Great Kronborg (a castle and stronghold in the town of Helsingør, Denmark) brings to mind Kronberg mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary and Index to Shade's poem:

 

Kronberg, a snow-capped rocky mountain with a comfortable hotel, in the Bera Range, 70, 130, 149. (Index)

 

According to Kinbote, the King escaped from Zembla clad in bright red clothes. A bare bodkin mentioned by Hamlet in his famous monologue reminds one of botkin or bodkin, a Danish stiletto:

 

Botkin, V., American scholar of Russian descent, 894; king-bot, maggot of extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic end, 247; bottekin-maker, 71; bot, plop, and boteliy, big-bellied (Russ.); botkin or bodkin, a Danish stiletto. (Index)

 

In his Parizhskaya poema (“The Paris Poem,” 1943) VN mentions kosmatye mamonty (the shaggy mammoths) that are dying out:

 

Вымирают косматые мамонты,

чуть жива красноглазая мышь.

Бродят отзвуки лиры безграмотной:

с кандачка переход на Буль-Миш.

С полурусского, полузабытого

переход на подобье арго.

Бродит боль позвонка перебитого

в чёрных дебрях Бульвар Араго.

 

Dying out are the shaggy mammoths,

barely alive is the red-eyed mouse.

Echoes of an illiterate lyre here wander,

from the slipshod to Boul’Mich you pass.

From a tongue half-Russian and half-forgotten

here you pass to a form of argot.

The pain of a severed vertebra wanders

in the black depths of Boulevard Arago.

 

François Arago (1786-1853) was a French astronomer. In The Paris Poem VN mention nekto Vul'f (a certain Wolf), a lean and red-haired engineer of about fifty who lives on rue Pierre Loti, 5:

 

А теперь мы начнем. Жил в Париже,

в пятом доме по рю Пьер Лоти,

некто Вульф, худощавый и рыжий

инженер лет пятидесяти.

А под ним - мой герой: тот писатель,

о котором писал я не раз,

мой приятель, мой работодатель.

 

Mandelshtam is the author of Oda Bethovenu ("Ode to Beethoven," 1914). In the final (fourth) movement of his Ninth Symphony Beethoven used Schiller's poem An die Freude ("Ode to Joy," 1785). When he composed the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven was deaf. A veteran of a distant war, Dick Schiller (Lolita's husband) is hard of hearing.

 

The author of The Spectre of Aleksandr Wolf (1947), Gaito Gazdanov was an Ossetian. In the last line of his poem "We live not feeling land beneath us" (1934) Mandelshtam mentions Stalin's broad chest of an Ossetian.