Jerry Friedman [to Jim
Twiggs]:"You may have another claim to originality--if I understand
correctly that you're saying Nabokov unconsciously sabotaged his poem for comic
and thematic purposes. I don't agree with this view, but I find it
interesting [...]Though I think Shade is an admirable person in some ways, I
also think he sees himself as a werewolf because he knows his irrational
attitude toward Hazel's looks was part of what drove her to
suicide."
JM: I'm glad that Friedman
clarified his considerations about James Twiggs' originality. For
Jerry, VN might have "unconsciously sabotaged his poem for comic and
thematic purposes." I don't think it was
any "unconscious sabotage" on the part of VN.
As I understood Jim's ideas (he can correct us
both) Shade, as a character and fictional poet is used, by the author
Nabokov, as an instrument to express his critical
views on romantic, victorian and decadent writers, to describe
the conflictual urges inherent in man, to deal with his ambition and
hesitations concerning his wish to have Shade's "Pale Fire" acquire
recognition outside its setting in fiction,etc.
Jim, I think that Nabokov's words in praise
of Shade in the SO interviews, or referring to their affinities,
don't create a new contradiction, but are, exactly, the expression of every
person's "werewolf" specious contradictions, the hidden heart, the "child within
the monster" (CF.Updike's remarks on Luzhin in the end).
Plodding along the collection of old
articles about VN made for a birthday homage, I came acros
one that is not part of the New Republic
collection, but a classic, from the NYRB,Volume 4, Number 12 · July 15,
1965.
It is Edmund Wilson on Nabokov's translation of
Pushkin.
The title of his review is revelatory! It's a
reference to our dear R.L.Stevenson's novel: " The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov"...
Translators, as "versipelers", are a
kind of J&H, of werewolves, too.
Let's check certain items ( on "metamorphosis"
and hidden immanencies of beast and beauty.)
C.Kinbote's words on John Shade:"
My sublime neighbor’s face
had something ... His misshapen body...the bags under his lusterless eyes, were
only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his
intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his
verse. He was his own cancellation."
VN, adds on Luzhin: "He is uncouth, unwashed, uncomely [...]
but there is something in him that transcends...the coarseness of his gray
flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius." when describing a
diffusion of "great warmth" and Luzhin's lovable features.
Cf.John Updike's The New Republic:
Grandmaster Nabokov, September 26, 1964: "His foreword...specifies the
forked appeal of 'this attractive novel'--the intricate immanence in plot and
imagery of chess as a prevailing metaphor, and the weird lovableness of the
virtually inert hero" [...]
Updike gets closer to the "J&H" split when
he divides Luzhin's charm into (a) the delineation of his childhood (b) the
evocation of his chess prowess. As to (a),
Nabokov has always warmed to the subject of children, precocious children
[...]--all this is witty, tender, delicate, resonant. By abruptly switching to
Luzhin as a chess-sodden adult, Nabokov islands the childhood, frames its
naive brightness so that, superimposed upon the grown figure, it operates as
a kind of heart, as an abruptly doused light reddens the subsequent
darkness.[...] He is lovable, this child within a monster, this
"chess moron," and we want him to go on, to finish his classic game[...]He seems
blocked by something outside the novel, perhaps by the lepidopterist's habit
of killing what it loves; how remarkably few, after all, of Nabokov's
characters do evade the mounting pin....
Btw: Personally, as a
reader, I can warm up to idiot-savant Luzhin but never to John
Shade...with or without affinities with his creator. Nor with the
foaming werewolf Kitsch
sceneries...