Jim Twiggs responds to Joseph Aisenberg
Dear Aisenberg--
I appreciate your compliments and am glad you found something worthwhile in the passages that Jansy Mello posted. For my part, even when I disagree with some detail or other, I’ve been generally sympathetic to your relentlessly secular readings of VN and impressed by your insights into VN’s narrative techniques.
As for our disagreements in the present case, I will not repeat here my reasons for thinking the poem to be in many places deliberately bad. It’s worth noting, however, that a dim view of the poem’s merits is not as idiosyncratic as you seem to think. The topic was, for example, hotly debated on the List before I became a member. And we doubters on the List were preceded by a number of well-known and well-respected critics, including William Monroe, George Cloyne, F.W. Dupee, Alvin B. Kernan, Richard Rorty, Michael Wood, Robert M. Adams, and Elizabeth Hardwick. If you’re interested in pursuing the matter further, I’ll be glad to send you, off-List, links to some of the relevant reviews and essays.
My only originality, if I can claim any at all, is in tying the question of the merits of the poem to the epigraph. I also tried to stress the particular kind of humor that I believe starts with the epigraph and runs through the book. Finally, I believe that Nabokov the novelist is never in more control than when the poem is at its shakiest. At the very least, I would claim that Nabokov the novelist had his reasons which Nabokov the poet, if in fact he was striving for perfection in every line, didn’t know. In the right context, a piece of flawed poetry can be a key element in a powerful work of literary art.
On the question of Shade’s character, the prevailing view, I think it’s fair to say, is of Shade as an exemplary man, stable and upright and blessed with a wife that everyone, except of course Kinbote, would envy and adore. But you came to the List at a time when the only people still writing on the subject--Kunin, Roth, Mello, and I--are the very ones who, each in his/her own way and for his/her own purposes, have tried, from time to time, to knock Shade and his wife off their pedestals. It’s easy to see, therefore, how you might form a sense that Shade the man is not much appreciated on the List.
To take but one example of why some of us don’t think too highly of Shade, consider again the passage that Matt Roth recently put up for discussion--i.e., Kinbote’s note to line 230, which is, surely, one of the key passages of the novel. The picture that I (as a nonbeliever in supernatural manifestations) have always gotten from this passage is of a bitter young woman throwing a month-long tantrum over the cruel or at least thoughtless behavior of her mother and father. Given her dad’s interest in the spirit-world, this is, to me at least, a hideously funny, deeply ironic passage. It’s true, as you pointed out, that the supernatural elements of the story may have been supplied by Jane Provost. Or perhaps it’s an idea that Jane and Hazel concocted together. In any case, the truth in the matter seems to be that Sybil had unceremoniously dispatched Maud’s beloved little dog and that Hazel was in a rage about it. I think it’s also clear that Sybil and John did not handle the matter well and can be held accountable, in their thoughtlessness, for Hazel’s behavior. And of course later on, when Hazel takes an interest in the supernatural, her father arranges the destruction of the old barn where the supposed manifestations were taking place.
It is for these and a few other reasons that some of us do not worship at the shrine of John Shade. I do, however, take seriously your arguments (in the form of quotes from VN) and admit that they pose a problem. My answer, for now anyway, is that similar problems arise with other writers. Consider, for example, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Nobody, not even Flannery herself, will ever convince me that that wonderful, and wonderfully mean and bitter story, has anything to do with grace, Christian or otherwise. As John Hawkes said a long time ago, O’Connor, regardless of her explicit claims, was of the Devil’s party. So, I think, was Nabokov--and never more so than in Pale Fire.
It’s worth adding that I do not consider Shade himself a “joke” (whatever that might mean) or his poem completely worthless.
Yours,
Jim Twiggs
I rather like Twigg's reading here quite a bit. I actually think I've been suggesting something like this, except I hadn't thought of casting in quite so elegant, and eloquent, a fashion such a very cold eye indeed on the figure of Shade and his poem. I'm rather more doubtful, however, that Nabokov intended Shade's poem to be bad; it's not bad. Maybe not great, but there a few terrific patches. I have to say, I'm also surprised so many people on the list seem to find Shade's character so suspicious and unpleasant, since by Nabokovian standards he is, with the exception of Pnin, the kindest, most optimistic, least egocentric, best adjusted of any of his characters, but I suppose this is a judgment call. And I believe that Nabokov did refer to Shade in interviews as one of his positive, and not perverse characters. I'll search for it. Also, I keep
thinking of a scene from Stacy Shciff's bio Vera. During possibly the most interesting part of the book, while Nabokov was composing Shade's poem, he and his wife were visited by an intriguing neurotic woman by the name of Filippa Rolf early in 1961. At one point he asks her if she'd like to hear what he's been working on. "He had been complaining that he was trying to make the thing obscure, a difficult task as he was by nature so eminently lucid. Vera and Rolf sat together on the couch as Vladimir, from his armchair, recited the first two cantos of Pale Fire, his voice swelling "like a happy church organ." Was it moving? he asked when he had finished. It was very much meant to be. The three were nearly drunk on his poetry; Vera's face was wet afterward, glistening with sweat and tears. Out into the street they spilled after discussing the work, Rolf singing, Vladimir shouting, "What a delightful evening, what a perfectly
wonderful evening!" (Vera, hardcover, p278) All this is attributed to a letter written by Rolf January 16th of '61. Certainly this would seem to suggest pretty heavily that Nabokov did not intend this poem to be bad. Ah, I found the quote from Nabokov I was looking for in Strong Opinions. Pg 119, he is rather sillily asked: "Would it be fair to say that you see life as very funny but cruel joke?" After questioning the use of the word "life" for almost a page, Nabokov says this: "As to the lives of my characters, not all are grotesque and not all are tragic: Fyodor in The Gift is blessed with a faithful love and an early recognition of his genuius; Joh Shade in Pale Fire leads an intense inner existence, far removed from what you call a joke." Although this doesn't competely refute Twigg's understanding of N's "intention" as concerns John Shade's character and work, I think it strongly suggests a
rethinking.
--- On Tue, 4/21/09, Jansy <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote: From: Jansy <jansy@AETERN.US> |
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