ࡱ> ;=:Y bjbjWW B==] 7$""2j *wThanks to James Womack for the fine find in Lolita that started this Sherlock Holmes thread spinning. May I add to the Sherlock Holmes references line 368 of the poem Pale Fire: Mother, whats grimpen? What is what? Grim Pen. To those who never read prose, this may at first seem to refer only to T.S. Eliot. Hazel is reading some phony modern poem that was said / In English Lit to be a document / Engazhay and compelling, and asks her mother three rare words from Four Quartets. But as I note in Nabokovs Pale Fire, p. 193: As he recalls Hazels query, Shade almost lets us glimpse his smile of appreciation at Eliots turning the treacherous Grimpen Mire, where the villain of The Hound of the Baskervilles keeps his murdering hound, into a common noun. Yet it is a grim smile, for at the end of Conan Doyles story Holmess adversary sinks into the mire and drowns. As Shade knows Hazel, too, stepped Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank. Two further points: 1) In a letter to Edmund Wilson of February 16, 1946, VN discusses Sherlock Holmes and the villain in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Vandeleur alias Stapleton, a lepidopterist, of all sinister passions, who is supposed to have had a moth named after him. VN declares to EW he has named a new butterfly vandeleuri (if he was ever serious, he changed his mind). 2) In relation to my argument that Hazels shade inspires her father to write the poem: As I have noted in Ns PF, the exchange in Shades poem about the rare words in Eliots poem is the only verbatim communication we are able to observe between Hazel and her father. Perhaps for that reason, Eliot becomes an important covert motif in Shades Pale Fire, focused especially, I argue, so as to illuminate Hazel. Because of the villains death by drowning in Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Grimpen also prefigures Hazels death, and that in turn couples oddly with Shades earlier lines: Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose / Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? The allusion in what Kinbote calls The Case of the Reversed Footprints is actually to the stories The Final Problem, in which Holmess footsteps lead to the edge of a cliff over the Reichenbach Falls, where he is supposed to have plunged to a watery death together with Moriarty, and to The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Watson discovers that Holmes is not dead, after all. Holmes explains to his astonished friend that he escaped pursuit by Moriartys henchmen not through reversing his boots, as he has done on previous occasions, but through climbing up the cliff from the path where their fight had led to Moriartys solitary plunge into the waters. (I discuss these stories in Nabokov Studies 4 [1997]: 208-09.) Shades query, Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose / Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? invites us to look for clues. What the clues point to is someone who seems to have drowned, in a grimpen, indeed, but who, if we follow the reversed footprints, we can discover, has somehow survived. Let me quote the whole context of the first Holmes reference: And in the morning, diamonds of frost 20 Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed From left to right the blank page of the road? Reading from left to right in winters code: A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat: Dot, arrow pointing back . . . A pheasants feet! Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse, Finding your China right behind my house. Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? If we take the hint and retrace our steps from the Sherlock Holmes allusion to the marvelous lines just before, which prompt Shade to think of Holmes (dot, arrow pointing back . . . A pheasants feet! / Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse), we might be prompted to recall Nabokovs familiarity (over-familiarity, even) with the hazel grouse: the hazel grouse of which I had enough in my childhood (SM 286; see also EO II, 75 and Ada 256). Those reversed tracks, those backward arrows, point, I suggest, to the sublimated Hazel, who seems to have drowned, but who, against all the odds, has returned. The bird theme and the sublimation theme both involve Hazel elsewhere. Shade sobs (l.314) at the indignities Hazel suffers because of her looks; the passage continues: Another winter was scrape-scooped away. The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May. Summer was power-mowed, and autumn, burned. Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned Into a wood duck. And again your voice: 320 But this is prejudice! You should rejoice That she is innocent. Why overstress The physical? She wants to look a mess. . . . As I suggest in Nabokovs Pale Fire (p. 133-45), Hazel as dingy cygnet may not turn into a wood duck in this life, but the dingy, withdrawn Toothworth White (the butterfly Pieris virginiensis), associated with Hazel, seems to return transformed into the numinous and resplendent Red Admirable butterfly (Vanessa atalanta) that greets Shade in the hour of his death. And here at the beginning of Pale Fire, the bird that has left the reversed-arrow tracks, a pheasant, is called a sublimated grouse because the colors of grouse are much drabber than those of pheasants (also members of the order Galliformes), although the rough resemblance of ruffed grouse to the brighter birds means they are sometimes called pheasants (see Websters Second, pheasant). One final point: Hazel, of course, is associated with reversal: She twisted words: pot, top, / Spider, redips. And powder was red wop. Kinbote notes in his commentary to lines 347-48: I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing mirror words, observed (and I recall the poets expression of stupefaction) that spider in reverse is redips, and T. S. Eliot, toilest. But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects. Readers of Nabokovs Pale Fire will also recall the near-reversed T.S. Eliot in Where various articles of toilet stood, in the television advertisement for some female beauty product that Shade flees on the night of Hazels death, which I suggest is a complex allusion to both Eliots image of a woman before the mirror in The Waste Lands A Game of Chess and Popes Belinda before her mirror in The Rape of the Lock, and another way Hazel has of signing in her part in her fathers life and art after her death. In grimpen, too, Nabokov alludes to an Eliot allusion precisely in order to suggest he can outdo Eliot in compounding allusions, and at the same time points to another series of clues, another trail of reversed tracks, that intimate a sublimated Hazels survival beyond the apparent inexorability of her death by drowning. ,3eEb  % B ]")/B ?gz 6CJmH CJmH 6CJCJ+fgG H \]@s"#()fgG H \]@s"#()R+Q ()R+Q . 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