Re: Brown Study

Well, your mentioning of Catkin Week (I was completely oblivious to it till now), made me browse Pale Fire and I see the sentence come up as: "He [Gradus] started as a maker of Cartesian devils—imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards."

'Imps of Bottle Glass' is a striking phrase, at first I thought it referred to something of Poe's, MS found in a Bottle or Imp. of Perverse, but I see now it refers to a story of Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp". I will be reading that soon enough, as Nabokov was very familiar with Stevenson, even writing once "His style is more florid than mine." Kinbote's completely random inventions on the fly continue to amaze me. Just an addendum, Matthew Roth annotates the lines quoted as:

965: ament: A catkin.

968-69: consonne D’appui: In French poetry, it is common for not just the vowel to rhyme, but also for the preceding (or supporting) consonant to match, as in Shade’s “meant/cement” rhyme.

As a preliminary thought, I would adduce the juxtaposition of "catkin and cement" as being cut from the same cloth as "link-and-bobolink". Somehow, catkins I feel follow, Shade's previous lines:

Old Zembla’s fields where my gray stubble grows,
And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose

Unless, someone can provide some more instances of use of catkins (in the botanical sense) from the rich heritage of English Poetry. Is there something from Keats? I don't why I'm nudged towards him. Maybe because of the autumnal colour of catkins?

SA

No the last lines regarding the preliminary thoughts are mine; Matthew Roth's annotations have now been put in a Quotation box. I meant the follow through from "gray stubbles/and slaves make hay..". I was thinking of a different thing, its a distorted echo from Keats's letters "about somehow the way stubble plains look warm - better than the chilly green of Spring" - a different context.

SA

I imagine (as I'm sure you already know) these specific catkins are found near cement. Perhaps they're from the deciduous trees mentioned in the Foreword:

“Henceforth I began seeing more and more of my celebrated neighbor. The view from one of my windows kept providing me with first-rate entertainment, especially when I was on the wait for some tardy guest. From the second story of my house the Shades’ living-room window remained clearly visible so long as the branches of the deciduous trees between us were still bare, and almost every evening I could see the poet’s slippered foot gently rocking. One inferred from it that he was sitting with a book in a low chair but one never managed to glimpse more than that foot and its shadow moving up and down to the secret rhythm of mental absorption, in the concentrated lamplight. Always at the same time the brown morocco slipper would drop from the wool-socked foot which continued to oscillate, with, however, a slight slackening of pace. One knew that bedtime was closing in with all its terrors; that in a few minutes the toe would prod and worry the slipper, and then disappear with it from my golden field of vision traversed by the black bend-let of a branch.”

I wonder whether it's worth comparing the brown morocco slipper with the brown ament: they both fall in a similar indication of Shade's spent mental energy, and the time for sleep, and are perhaps both associated with these deciduous trees.

Note: the same single brown shoe is mentioned in the middle of Canto Four:

“And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe.
880  And then I realized that this half too
Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke
Safe in my bed as day its eggshell broke,
And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp
Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay!"
(Lines 878-884)

Structurally, the "brown ament, and the noun I meant to use but did not" are the bookend to this line from the beginning of his "last" creative day:

“Too weary to delete, I drop my pen;
I ambulate—and by some mute command
The right word flutes and perches on my hand.”
(Lines 870-872)

As for the "slaves make hay," I've always wondered whether it was meant as a parody of Robert Frost's Mowing, the last half of which reads:

"Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make."

I've heard an interpretation that goes something like: "the rows are the lines of his poem, and the reader participates in the act of poetry by collecting the lines and making hay." It might seem almost democratic in this interpretation, but in Nabokov, there's no such thing (think Note to Line 962: “I am not slave! Let be my critic slave." And his comment on Forster: "My characters are galley slaves.")

Ironically, Shade's poem is left "unfinished" in the hands of Kinbote, who does end up participating in the hay-making, rather freely. And remember the line following "slaves make hay" is:

“Man’s life as commentary to abstruse
Unfinished poem.”

"And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe.
And then I realized that this half too
Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke
Safe in my bed as day its eggshell broke,
And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp
Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay!"

The lines which follow this "...the mystery inborn, mirages, miracles, midsummer morn" is even more interesting for the artistic integrity of the poem nicely rounding off Aunt Maud's verse book "open at Index: Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral" from Canto One. I think someone (Tony Fazio?) had annotated this.

Thanks for bringing up Frost's Mowing but I feel the lines from Frost are more of a play on the saying "make hay while the sun shines". Don't want to disregard the interpretation: "the rows are the lines...." or anything, but that's what I think.