In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his childhood and says that he was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
Shade's Aunt Maud is a namesake of Maud Babington (1844-1919), born Matilda Whytt Wilson, Robert Louis Stevenson's beloved cousin on his maternal side. Like Sutton (the old doctor whom Shade several times mentions in his poem), the surname Babington ends in ton. According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), Sutton is a recombination of letters taken from two names, one beginning in "Sut," the other ending in "ton:"
This is a recombination of letters taken from two names, one beginning in "Sut," the other ending in "ton." Two distinguished medical men, long retired from practice, dwelt on our hill. Both were very old friends of the Shades; one had a daughter, president of Sybil's club - and this is the Dr. Sutton I visualize in my notes to lines 181 and 1000. He is also mentioned in Line 986. Two distinguished medical men, long retired from practice, dwelt on our hill. Both were very old friends of the Shades; one had a daughter, president of Sybil's club - and this is the Dr. Sutton I visualize in my notes to lines 181 and 1000. He is also mentioned in Line 986. (note to Line 119)
Dr. Sutton's daughter (a war widow), Mrs. Starr brings to mind the local Star (a newspaper mentioned by Shade), Gray Star (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, a settlement in the remotest Northwest where Mrs. Richard F. Schiller dies in childbed) and Dr. Startsev, the main character in Chekhov's story Ionych (1898). The surname Sutton seems to combine sutki (the Russian word meaning twenty-four hours) with Anton, Dr. Chekhov's first name. Chekhov is the author of Baby ("Peasant Wives," 1891) and its companion piece, Muzhiki ("Peasants," 1897). Like baba (a peasant wife) and babochka (a butterfly), Babington begins with Bab. Chekhov's Baby and Muzhiki make one think of R. L. Stevenson's essay Virginibus Puerisque (1881), whose Latin title translates as "For Girls and Boys." Chekhov is the author of several stories for children. The author of Treasure Island (1882), R. L. Stevenson in jest called himself "a writer for boys." Both R. L. Stevenson (1850-94) and Chekhov (1860-1904) died at the age of forty-four. Samuel Shade's sister, Maud Shade (1869-1950) died at eighty-one. When Shade writes his poem, old Dr. Sutton (who was born in 1877) is eighty-two:
But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains
Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes.
The man must be - what? Eighty? Eighty-two?
Was twice my age the year I married you.
Where are you? In the garden. I can see
Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click, Clunk.
(Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.)
A dark Vanessa with crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly -
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 985-999)
According to Kinbote, John Shade and Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls the poet's wife, née Sybil Irondell) were married in 1919. Maud Babington died in 1919. In 1919 VN left Russia forever and moved to England (where he became a student at Cambridge).
Like Babington, the surname Wellington ends in ington. In a letter of March 31, 1882, R. L. Stevenson mentions Poetical Works of Arthur, Iron Dook of Wellington, including a Monody on Napoleon:
Your list of books that Cassells have refused in these weeks is not quite complete; they also refused:
- 1. Six undiscovered Tragedies, one romantic Comedy, a fragment of Journal extending over six years, and an unfinished Autobiography reaching up to the first performance of King John. By William Shakespeare.
2. The journals and Private Correspondence of David, King of Israel.
3. Poetical Works of Arthur, Iron Dook of Wellington, including a Monody on Napoleon.
4. Eight books of an unfinished novel, SOLOMON CRABB. By Henry Fielding.
5. Stevenson's Moral Emblems.
Iron Dook of Wellington brings to mind the king's uncle Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare), Duke of Aros, and Colonel Peter Gusev, Duke of Rahl (King Alfin's 'aerial adjutant'). Gusev (1890) is a story by Chekhov. Monody is a poem lamenting a person's death. Napoleon died on St. Helena, a small island in the Atlantic Ocean. R. L. Stevenson died on Samoa, an island in the Pacific.