Speaking of winter, if Yvor Winters was the
model for Shade, I wonder how Nabokov felt about reality's having pre-empted the
Frost-Winters pun...(to Tom Rymour: Tiger's eye or tiger-eye is sold in all
American gem shops, too .... The Wikipedia article says most of it comes
from South Africa, though.)
Clayton
Smith "...While Frost was not the only model for Shade,
Nabokov was certainly very aware of the man and his work, having lived almost in
his shadow--renting Frost's house (a la Kinbote's habituation) and appearing
along with him at several poetry readings." (CS also adds the address to
Zemblan Socher)
JM: I wish Jerry and Tom
Rymour had mentioned VN's inclusion of a "Felix tigris" in the
American landscape, or my point concerning Nabokov's putative indication of
Joyce's "nymphant/tigris eye/happy fault" in Lolita.
Fran Assa's instigation brought up many
important references and themes. I selected parts of Socher's article to quote
below because the discussion about Frost and Shade might be
extended through his arguments.
Shade envisioned his
(reversed?) footsteps, treading after
his "antecessor's", as "oozy," with their gluey swampy
associations to decay referred again in line 501 (with Hazel's suicide
"in a night of frost"). Thanks to A.P.Socher's article in Zembla (Shades of
Frost: A Hidden Source for Nabokov's Pale Fire) the two poet's distinct
visions of a transcendent hereafter ellucidates what appears to be a pessimistic
"darkness" in Frost set in contrast to Nabokov's "luminosity," which may be
obtained by warring against cruelty and guilty
sexuality. The most delicate butterflies after all gorge on
decay...
For Socher, over "the past five decades a fantastically ingenious body of Pale
Fire scholarship has developed. But the seemingly simple question of the
relationship between the fictional Shade and the actual Frost has been touched
on only glancingly, and unsatisfactorily..." He quotes Michael Wood:
"Shade resembles Frost a little: in looks; slow, sly style of wit; fund of wily
common sense. He is a milder character than Frost though; kinder"..."Wood does
make a more substantive comparison between Frost and Shade a little later. In
the fourth canto, John Shade detects (desperately, poignantly, but also
trenchantly) signs of artistic design in the arrangements of his universe...Wood
finds this aesthetic theodicy, which Nabokov certainly shared with Shade,
profoundly unappealing, and compares it to Frost's famous sonnet of a spider and
its prey... Frost's "Design," ("What brought the kindred spider to that
height/Then steered the moth thither in the night?") is also about the seeming
artistry of nature and the problem of evil, though it comes to a conclusion that
admits no shade of Nabokovian consolation." Socher observes
that "Nature, in all its intricate 'plexed artistry,' can bear
opposing interpretations, if anything can, and theodicy can be a deep
recognition of the terrors of life as well as a retreat from
them."
The recurrence of the Arcadian theme in "Pale
Fire" comes through Kinbote who, mad as he seems, also admits the presence
of a chained dementia, evil and death in paradise, but who
never denies beauty and goodness. CK's adventures in fantastic Zembla at times
may parody Gothic novels's ominous castles with
their mouldy hidden passages and their opposite dimension,
with sunny worlds and undying wax-wings set in
a pastoral, provincial, idyllic America.
It seems to me that even though VN may
have modelled on Frost certain aspects of Shade, he realistically appraised his
competence as "an American regional poet" so he made Shade behave modestly
in relation to Frost. According to Socher, when Nabokov gave a poetry
reading "at Filene's Department Store in Boston, to an audience assembled to
hear (Frost,) New England's leading poet, not Nabokov" It was when
"Nabokov read his recently composed 'An Evening of Russian Poetry,' which is
about the virtual impossibility of writing poetry in English as a Russian
exile." He quotes:"Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,/ I hear
the neighing of my dappled nouns,/ Soft participles coming down the
steps,/Treading on leaves and trailing their rustling gowns..."
Nevertheless the voice that praises Frost, Kinbote's, is not devoid of
irony.