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VN close encounter (fwd)
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The Dec. '99/Jan. '00 issue (v.1, no.4, pp.216-223) of the new popular
magazine _Talk_ includes "the first publication of an epic poem by the
celebrated British writer" Craig Raine, entitled "The Way It Was,"
which includes the following lines:
Your father was the bastard son
of Battistini, the Italian baritone or bass.
At Cambridge, he brought _Ulysses_
back from Paris and earned two lines
in _Speak, Memory_ -- refined
to a pair of initials, P.M.
Meeting him was like meeting a statesman.
He didn't shake hands.
He was silent. He was grand.
You were the suppliant.
He gave you his pronate left hand.
Tunis. Rome. He'd lived abroad.
He pronounced 'billiards' _biyards_.
He was like de Gaulle
awaiting destiny's call,
when the moment for France was ripe.
He called me the 'gutter-snipe'
(years later: he'd forgotten my name)
and frightened the young Michael Frayn
who was keen on another daughter.
You took after your father,
but you were a literary snob...
The relevant "two lines" (really, one line plus a fraction of a line
on either side) in _Speak, Memory_ come from the end of Chapter 13
(p.272 in the 1966 Putnam's edition) as follows: "P.M. storming
into my room with a copy of _Ulysses_ freshly smuggled from Paris."
Nabokov recalls this event more fully in the Herbert Gold interview
published as Chapter 7 of _Strong Opinions_: "My first brief encounter
with _Ulysses_ was around 1920 at Cambridge University, when a friend,
Peter Mrozovski, who had brought a copy from Paris, chanced to read to
me, as he stomped up and down my digs, one or two spicy passages from
Molly's monologue, which, _entre nous soit dit_, is the weakest chapter
in the book." (Thanks to Boyd's _Russian Years_ for the cross-reference.)
The premise of the Raine poem is, as the poet is quoted in the
introductory remarks, "to bring back to life a person who was once
living. I thought the only way to write it was to write it
truthfully, and that is what I've done." Though he doesn't identify
his lover by name, he does give rather specific details of her
professional activities ("You translated Flaubert for Penguin/ _La
Tentation de Saint Antoine_") -- in addition to the private (often
physiological) details that are the bulk of the work.
(Perhaps also of interest: the introduction says that "Raine's
last book, _History: The Home Movie_ -- which was billed as 'a novel
in verse' -- is a vivid historical narrative of two intertwined
families, the famous literary Russian Pasternaks, and the
quintessentially English Raines.")
It could be my imagination, but there seems to be something slightly Shady
about the epic poem: its (often almost) rhyming couplets, its elegiac
purpose, its length (something like 720 lines -- it didn't seem worthwhile
to count carefully), and -- I'll take the Kinbait -- an obvious reference
in one of the central couplets, which recalls "Listening to 'A Whiter
Shade of Pale',/ galley slaves of the bar football." Coincidence? You
decide.
Perhaps the details (if they are in fact reliable) about P.M. will be
of use to someone.
And as for the poem itself-- I found it an odd and pleasurable read.
Glen Worthey