Message One:
JM to CHW: ...I asked you why you only saw two parts (
Poem and Commentary) as comprising "Pale Fire", not the Index, not the
Foreword.
CHW to
JM: ...Are you saying that the Index and/or Foreword are by
someone other than either JS or CK? Does PF consist of halves, thirds or
quarters? Or none of these? State the alternative preferred.
JM to CHW: The third
alternative, among two impossible hotspurs*.
If Johnson, Virginia Woolf, besides other non-English writers ( in
the early sixties I read a Brazilian book, "Manicaporão", with a
character named Quimboto, that also sported a pedantic annotator) used
foot-notes as "an art form", why not Nabokov?**
He must
have intended Index, Commentary and even Foreword to be read as
constitutive parts of "Pale Fire". If we accept that John
Shade wrote the poem and the rest was added by Kinbote ( and not by
VN, who simply wrote the entire novel), then these three
Kinotean parts must belong to one of your halves.
*Quoted by CHW: From Dr.Johnson's "Notes to
Shakespeare": Henry IV, Part I; 3.1.96
(On "moiety".) Hotspur is here
just such a divider as the Irishman who made three halves: Therefore, for the
honour of Shakespeare, I will suppose, with the Oxford Editor, that he wrote
portion. --- WARBURTON. I will not suppose it. ---
JOHNSON
**...VN's elevation of the footnote into a literary
art-form in its own right was foreshadowed by Johnson. I suppose.
Message Two:
(a) "Through the window of that index/ Climbs a rose/ And
sometimes a gentle wind ex/ Ponto blows." Foreword to SM,
1966;
(b) "Nobody will heed my index, I suppose,/ But through it a gentle
wind ex/ Ponto blows" (cited in Boyd, VNAY 445).
(c) The lines CHW and JF
quote are the poem attributed to John Shade in VN's 1965 draft foreword to SM.
Brian Boyd makes much of it in VNAY. Before going to press, VN apparently
thought better of it and replaced those lines (MR)
(d) .."Nabokov clearly saw nothing wrong with mentioning something of
cardinal importance to him in a poem that uses a strained rhyme associated with
'comic and curious verse'. I'm suggesting that he intended no misjudgement
or inartistry on Shade's part when he made Shade do the same thing." (JF)
(e)
JM: I thought you had agreed that
writing "verse" is not the same as writing "poetry" and, also, that a
poet may use both without ceasing to be a poet ( in a non-Platonic
world...). What was "of cardinal importance", a compass rose? Or, as CHW
implied:
"astonishing because it attributes the Index ...
www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/boydpf7.htm
"
Message Three:Tidbits on Various Indexations and (why not)
... Indications:
(a)Shade’s
poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic: my gray-haired friend, my
beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards into his hat — and shook out a
poem.
(b) A still life in her style: the
paperweight/ Of
convex glass enclosing a lagoon, The verse book open at the Index
(Moon,...
(c) My fingernails...certain flinching likenesses: the
thumb,/ Our
grocer’s son; the index, lean and glum/
(d) this good ink, this rhyme,/ This index card, this slender rubber
band /
(e) In
the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded
batches of index cards.
(f)
his
contempt for Prof. H. (not in Index),/ his
participation in a Common Room discussion of his resemblance to the King, and
his final rupture with E. (not in the Index), 894 he
and S shaking with mirth over tidbits in a college textbook by Prof. C.
(not in the Index), 929;
JF wrote to Don Johnson: I think the "weeping cedar" is a
cultivar of the Cedar of Lebanon, maybe specifically /Cedrus libani/ "Pendula",
so it's not quite "the Lebanon Cedar a.k.a. the Weeping Cedar". I can't
help wondering whether this is a reminiscence of the obvious and hidden cedars
in /Pale Fire/. Unfortunately, I didn't find "shade" in the passage (though
"shadow" is there). (JF)
JM to JF and DBJ: In one of my sources I saw there
are various kinds of Cedrus libani and one, the weeping cedar, is mentioned
as belonging to the "Atlas" ("Atlantic") kind.
I also found a reference that "Biblical or Koranic names are frequently
used outside the Near East for indigenous plants that never grew in the lands
where these two books originated. The flora of eastern North America, for
example, has many “cedars”, which are not related to the cedar of Lebanon
(Cedrus libani) of the Bible. Perhaps because the cedar of Lebanon was such a
well-recognized symbol from the Bible, the early Christian settlers in North
America gave this name to many different trees (and even to many herbaceous
plants),whether or not they were true cedars or even members of the same
botanical family. For example, the widespread red cedar of eastern North America
(Juniperus virginiana), like Cedrus libani, is an evergreen and has a pleasant,
enduring fragrance, but its cone is fleshy and berry-like, unlike the large
spindle-shaped cone of the cedar of Lebanon."
Of interest to "Ada, or Ardor", might be the link with Eden' s Tree of
Knowledge in "Religion: Theology, Rite and Myth." Samuel Noah Kramer
(" Ezekiel mentions the cedars of Lebanon in the Garden of Eden, ..."
www.bibleorigins.net/EdensTreeofKnowledgeLife.html ; Roberts
- Trees as Tribute in the Ancient Near East - Transoxiana .. "The Cedars of
Lebanon", pp. 89-96; "Cypress and Juniper in Hebrew and Assyrian Texts", ...
"The Paradise Myth", pp 2-7. George Brazilier, New
York, 1979. ...
www.transoxiana.org/11/roberts-near_east_trees.html
-
To complete the data gathered now:
Giulia
Visintin: Lebanon Cedar a.k.a. the Weeping Cedar in Strong
Opinions, p. 55
SES: [EDNOTE. Just to save everyone
from finding the citation: In his comments for a 1965 television interview in
SO, VN remarks that "A good
deal of Kinbote's commentary was written here in
the Montreux Palace garden[. . . .] I'm especially fond of its weeping
cedar, the arboreal
counterpart of a very shaggy dog with hair hanging over
its eyes" (55). ]