In Canto One and then again at the end of Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions the windows of old Dr. Sutton's house:
And there's the wall of sound: the nightly wall
Raised by a trillion crickets in the fall.
Impenetrable! Halfway up the hill
I'd pause in thrall of their delirious trill.
That's Dr. Sutton's light. That's the Great Bear.
A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead. (ll. 115-124)
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)
In his note to Line 119 (Dr. Sutton) Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
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.
Old Dr. Sutton and his tall daughter, Mrs. Starr, are among the guests at Shade's birthday party:
From behind a drapery, from behind a box tree, through the golden veil of evening and through the black lacery of night, I kept watching that lawn, that drive, that fanlight, those jewel-bright windows. The sun had not yet set when, at a quarter past seven, I heard the first guest's car. Oh, I saw them all. I saw ancient Dr. Sutton, a snowy-headed, perfectly oval little gentleman arrive in a tottering Ford with his tall daughter, Mrs. Starr, a war widow. I saw a couple, later identified for me as Mr. Colt, a local lawyer, and his wife, whose blundering Cadillac half entered my driveway before retreating in a flurry of luminous nictitation. I saw a world-famous old writer, bent under the incubus of literary honors and his own prolific mediocrity, arrive in a taxi out of the dim times of yore when Shade and he had been joint editors of a little review. I saw Frank, the Shades' handyman, depart in the station wagon. I saw a retired professor of ornithology walk up from the highway where he had illegally parked his car. I saw, ensconced in their tiny Pulex, manned by her boy-handsome tousle-haired girl friend, the patroness of the arts who had sponsored Aunt Maud's last exhibition, I saw Frank return with the New Wye antiquarian, purblind Mr. Kaplun, and his wife, a dilapidated eagle. I saw a Korean graduate student in dinner jacket come on a bicycle, and the college president in baggy suit come on foot. I saw, in the performance of their ceremonial duties, in light and shadow, and from window to window, where like Martians the martinis and highballs cruised, the two white-coated youths from the hotel school, and realized that I knew well, quite well, the slighter of the two. And finally, at half past eight (when, I imagine, the lady of the house had begun to crack her finger joints as was her impatient wont) a long black limousine, officially glossy and rather funereal, glided into the aura of the drive, and while the fat Negro chauffeur hastened to open the car door, I saw, with pity, my poet emerge from his house, a white flower in his buttonhole and a grin of welcome on his liquor-flushed face. (note to Line 181)
In his note to Line 1000 Kinbote mentions Dr. Sutton's daughter who drove up to the murder scene with the poet's wife:
"Come along, Jack, we'll put something on that head of yours," said a calm but purposeful cop stepping over the body, and then there was the awful moment when Dr. Sutton's daughter drove up with Sybil Shade.
Dr. Sutton's daughter, Mrs. Starr (a war widow and president of Sybil Shade's club) brings to mind Dr. Startsev, the main character of Chekhov's story Ionych (1898). As he speaks to Kitten, Dr. Startsev uses the proverbial phrase den' da noch' - sutki proch' (day in, day out):
Эх! — сказал он со вздохом. — Вы вот спрашиваете, как я поживаю. Как мы поживаем тут? Да никак. Старимся, полнеем, опускаемся. День да ночь — сутки прочь, жизнь проходит тускло, без впечатлений, без мыслей... Днем нажива, а вечером клуб, общество картежников, алкоголиков, хрипунов, которых я терпеть не могу. Что хорошего?
"Alas!" he sighed. "You ask what I have been doing! What do we all do here? Nothing! We grow older and fatter and more sluggish. Day in, day out our colourless life passes by without impressions, without thoughts. It is money by day and the club by night, in the company of gamblers, alcoholics, wheezers whom I cannot endure. What is there in that?" (IV)
According to Kinbote, Sutton is a recombination of letters taken from two names, one beginning in "Sut," the other ending in "ton." Actually, it seems to combine sutki (the Russian word meaning twenty-four hours) with Anton, Dr. Chekhov's first name. A. P. Chekhov died in July 1904, aged forty-four, in Badenweiler (a German spa). Both Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer) are forty-four in 1959. Shade's birthday, July 5 is also Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1898). Den' da noch' (day and night), the first part of the saying used by Dr. Startsev, makes one think of Dr. Nattochdag, the head of Kinbote's department at Wordsmith University and a distiguished Zemblan scholar whose name means in Swedish "night and day." Dr. Nattochdag's nickname, Netochka hints at Dostoevski's unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanov (1849). According to Kinbote, Shade listed Dostoevski and Chekhov among Russian humorists:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
Khripuny (wheezers) mentioned in Chekhov's story by Dr. Startsev bring to mind khripun, udavlennik, fagot (the tight-uniformed wheezer, bassoon), as in Griboedov's Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit," 1824), a play in verse, Chatski calls Colonel Skalozub. Just as Skalozub hints at zuboskal (a scoffer), the name Kinbote is a similar transportation of syllables. In a conversation at the Faculty Club Professor Pardon tells Kinbote that he was under the impression that his name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine:
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla” [sarcastically stressing the "Nova"]. (note to Line 894)
In Griboedov’s comedy Skalozub tells Mme Khlyostov that he was in His Highness’ Novozemlyansk regiment of musketeers:
Хлёстова (сидя)
Вы прежде были здесь… в полку… в том… гренадёрском?
Скалозуб (басом)
В Его Высочества, хотите вы сказать,
Новоземлянском мушкетёрском.
Хлёстова
Не мастерица я полки-та различать.
Скалозуб
А форменные есть отлички:
В мундирах выпушки, погончики, петлички.
Mme K h l y o s t o v (sitting)
You were here... in the regiment of . . . grenadiers?
S k a l o z u b (in a bass voice)
You mean, His Highness’ Novozemlyansk regiment of musketeers?
Mme K h l y o s t o v
I’m not skilled in distinguishing regiments.
S k a l o z u b
There is a difference in uniforms,
The shoulder loops, the tabs and shirts. (Act Three, scene 12)
On a photograph found by Gerald Emerald (a young instructor at Wordsmith University) the young Zemblan King wears a fancy uniform:
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
"Well," said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor.) "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."
"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."
"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.
"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, are young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."
"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand--which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)
In Chekhov's story Student ("The Student," 1894) the hero mentions the Last Supper:
Точно так же в холодную ночь грелся у костра апостол Петр, — сказал студент, протягивая к огню руки. — Значит, и тогда было холодно. Ах, какая то была страшная ночь, бабушка! До чрезвычайности унылая, длинная ночь!
Он посмотрел кругом на потемки, судорожно встряхнул головой и спросил:
— Небось, была на двенадцати евангелиях?
— Была, — ответила Василиса.
— Если помнишь, во время тайной вечери Петр сказал Иисусу: «С тобою я готов и в темницу, и на смерть». А господь ему на это: «Говорю тебе, Петр, не пропоет сегодня петел, то есть петух, как ты трижды отречешься, что не знаешь меня». После вечери Иисус смертельно тосковал в саду и молился, а бедный Петр истомился душой, ослабел, веки у него отяжелели, и он никак не мог побороть сна. Спал. Потом, ты слышала, Иуда в ту же ночь поцеловал Иисуса и предал его мучителям. Его связанного вели к первосвященнику и били, а Петр, изнеможенный, замученный тоской и тревогой, понимаешь ли, не выспавшийся, предчувствуя, что вот-вот на земле произойдет что-то ужасное, шел вслед... Он страстно, без памяти любил Иисуса, и теперь видел издали, как его били...Лукерья оставила ложки и устремила неподвижный взгляд на студента.
— Пришли к первосвященнику, — продолжал он, — Иисуса стали допрашивать, а работники тем временем развели среди двора огонь, потому что было холодно, и грелись. С ними около костра стоял Петр и тоже грелся, как вот я теперь. Одна женщина, увидев его, сказала: «И этот был с Иисусом», то есть, что и его, мол, нужно вести к допросу. И все работники, что находились около огня, должно быть, подозрительно и сурово поглядели на него, потому что он смутился и сказал: «Я не знаю его». Немного погодя опять кто-то узнал в нем одного из учеников Иисуса и сказал: «И ты из них». Но он опять отрекся. И в третий раз кто-то обратился к нему: «Да не тебя ли сегодня я видел с ним в саду?» Он третий раз отрекся. И после этого раза тотчас же запел петух, и Петр, взглянув издали на Иисуса, вспомнил слова, которые он сказал ему на вечери... Вспомнил, очнулся, пошел со двора и горько-горько заплакал. В евангелии сказано: «И исшед вон, плакася горько». Воображаю: тихий-тихий, темный-темный сад, и в тишине едва слышатся глухие рыдания...
"At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself," said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, "so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!"
He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:
"No doubt you have heard the reading of the Twelve Apostles?"
"Yes, I have," answered Vasilisa.
"If you remember, at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, 'I am ready to go with Thee into darkness and unto death.' And our Lord answered him thus: 'I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.' After the supper Jesus went through the agony of death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on earth, followed behind. . . . He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten. . . . "
Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.
"They came to the high priest's," he went on; "they began to question Jesus, and meantime the laborers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: 'He was with Jesus, too' -- that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned. And all the laborers that were standing near the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused and said: 'I don't know Him.' A little while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus' disciples and said: 'Thou, too, art one of them,' but again he denied it. And for the third time someone turned to him: 'Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden today?' For the third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the words He had said to him in the evening. . . . He remembered, he came to himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly -- bitterly. In the Gospel it is written: 'He went out and wept bitterly.' I imagine it: the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible, smothered sobbing.. . . ."
On the other hand, Dr. Sutton made me think of Mr Utterson, the lawyer, and Dr Lanyon, the characters in R. L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). R. L. Stevenson (who said "the body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us”) died on Dec. 3, 1894, less than three weeks after his forty-fourth birthday. As Carolyn Kunin pointed out, R. L. Stevenson gave his birthday, November 13, to a little girl. Dr. Nattochdag's name may also hint at R. L. Stevenson's poem Night and Day from his collection A Child's Garden of Verses.
Dr. Oscar Nattochdag is a namesake of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). In Wilde's poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) the prase "night and day" occurs three times. In De Profundis (1897), a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde mentions Christ's little supper with his comapnions, one of whom (Judas) has already sold him for a price:
I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets. That is true. Shelley and Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also is the most wonderful of poems. For ‘pity and terror’ there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and Pelops’ line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain. Nor in Æschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer simplicity of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic effect, can be said to equal or even approach the last act of Christ’s passion. The little supper with his companions, one of whom has already sold him for a price; the anguish in the quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend coming close to him so as to betray him with a kiss; the friend who still believed in him, and on whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a house of refuge for Man, denying him as the bird cried to the dawn; his own utter loneliness, his submission, his acceptance of everything; and along with it all such scenes as the high priest of orthodoxy rending his raiment in wrath, and the magistrate of civil justice calling for water in the vain hope of cleansing himself of that stain of innocent blood that makes him the scarlet figure of history; the coronation ceremony of sorrow, one of the most wonderful things in the whole of recorded time; the crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes of his mother and of the disciple whom he loved; the soldiers gambling and throwing dice for his clothes; the terrible death by which he gave the world its most eternal symbol; and his final burial in the tomb of the rich man, his body swathed in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though he had been a king’s son. When one contemplates all this from the point of view of art alone one cannot but be grateful that the supreme office of the Church should be the playing of the tragedy without the shedding of blood: the mystical presentation, by means of dialogue and costume and gesture even, of the Passion of her Lord; and it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass.
In Oscar Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1891) written in dialogue form Vivian tells Cyril that the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet (a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal):
"Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively no other name for it. There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet."
A lancet is a cutting instrument with a double-edged blade and a pointed end for making small incisions or drainage punctures. Khirurgiya ("Surgery," 1884) is a humorous story by Chekhov. According to Kinbote, Shade's father had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Linner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (note to Line 71)
Like the name Sutton, Exton and sexton (a person who looks after a church and churchyard, typically acting as bell-ringer and gravedigger) end in "ton." To a Sexton (1799) is a poem by Wordsworth. An empty barrow mentioned by Shade in Line 999 of his poem brings to mind a sexton's wheel-barrow in Wordsworth's poem:
Let thy wheel-barrow alone—
Wherefore, Sexton, piling still
In thy Bone-house bone on bone?
'Tis already like a hill
In a field of battle made,
Where three thousand skulls are laid.
—These died in peace each with the other,
Father, Sister, Friend, and Brother.
Shade's poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade’s poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846) is a short novel by Dostoevski.