Don-- I don't recall that this interesting letter has been posted
on the list. It appeared in the TLS for October 21 but has only been
on line for a couple of days. Jim Twiggs
times literary
supplement
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25360-1885686,00.html
The TLS
October 21, 2005
Kinbote and
Shade
Sir, -Commenting
on Nabokov's Pale Fire one runs the risk of turning into its
protagonist, Professor Charles Kinbote, madly disgorging digressive
information and misinformation.
Abraham P. Socher ("Shades of Frost", July 1) mostly escapes
this danger, though he skirts it by withholding for six columns his
discovery of the "one short poem" of Frost's that Nabokov
said he "really knew", one "without which Nabokov's
novel is almost unimaginable". We might expect "Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening", which Kinbote (optimistically) calls
the "poem that every American schoolboy knows by heart", but
Socher offers instead the little-known "Questioning Faces":
The winter owl banked just in time to pass And save herself from
breaking window glass And her wings straining suddenly aspread Caught
color from the last of evening red In a display of underdown and quill
To glassed-in children at the window sill.
When Kinbote alludes to a John Shade poem appearing in "the New
York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958"
(playing on the New Yorker's annual spring cover cartoon), he raises
Socher's hopes that one of Frost's had really been printed there and
then. However, he reports, "Questioning Faces" was first
published in the Saturday Review (of Literature) on April 12,
1958.
"Unfortunately", Socher found, "Frost did not publish a
poem in the New Yorker that year." One might assume from this
statement, and given Frost's immense fame, that his poems had appeared
in the New Yorker in other years, but this is not so.
Even though Frost had called it "our best literary
magazine", he never published a poem there.
Socher makes a case that Nabokov partially echoed "Questioning
Faces" -"a minor poem by a major poet" -in the opening
of Shade's "Pale Fire", where a waxwing fails to "bank
in time", leaving a "smudge of ashen fluff" on the
windowpane though not "breaking glass".
This is good for both Frost and Nabokov scholars to know, but Frost's
own evaluation of "Questioning Faces" hints that it may
deserve more respect than Socher and others allow it. Speaking to a
huge, appreciative audience in Boston on December 2, 1962, eight weeks
before his death, Frost commented pointedly, "This is one I'd
like you to remember. This one is my favorite".
A larger question is how to evaluate John Shade's poem. One hopes that
Nabokov composed "Pale Fire" in the same spirit that moved
Chaucer to assign himself "The Tale of Sir Thopas" in The
Canterbury Tales. "Pale Fire" is not a "major"
poem on its own but a lengthy piece of light verse, heavy at times and
wholly subsumed in the crazed narration of its fictitious annotator's
commentary. It is crudely crafted in an often mechanical iambic
pentameter -what Chaucer's Host calls "rym doggerel" - with
sentences flying off and crashing against the invisible line ends:
I cannot understand why from the lake /
I could make out our
front porch when I'd take /
Lake Road to school,
whilst now, although no tree /
Has intervened, I
look but fail to see /
Even the roof.
(41-45)
Whether the
"drasty rymyng" of "Pale Fire" is "worth a
toord" or not, Professor Kinbote's droppings on it have
fertilized the whole field of what Abraham Socher admires as
"fantastically ingenious Pale Fire scholarship".
JOHN RIDLAND
1725 Hillcrest Road, Santa Barbara, California 93103.
Copyright
2005 The
Times Literary Supplement Ltd.