In his Commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly in which Shade’s short poem "The Nature of Electricity" appeared after the author’s death:
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set) electricity was banned after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century (1.3). Describing Ada’s dramatic career, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) mentions the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly:
After some exploration, they tracked down a rerun of The Young and the Doomed (1890) to a tiny theater that specialized in Painted Westerns (as those deserts of nonart used to be called). Thus had Mlle Larivière’s Enfants Maudits (1887) finally degenerated! She had had two adolescents, in a French castle, poison their widowed mother who had seduced a young neighbor, the lover of one of her twins. The author had made many concessions to the freedom of the times, and the foul fancy of scriptwriters; but both she and the leading lady disavowed the final result of multiple tamperings with the plot that had now become the story of a murder in Arizona, the victim being a widower about to marry an alcoholic prostitute, whom Marina, quite sensibly, refused to impersonate. But poor little Ada had clung to her bit part, a two-minute scene in a traktir (roadside tavern). During the rehearsals she felt she was doing not badly as a serpentine barmaid — until the director blamed her for moving like an angular ‘backfish.’ She had not deigned to see the final product and was not overeager to have Van see it now, but he reminded her that the same director, G.A. Vronsky, had told her she was always pretty enough to serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline, who at twenty had been as attractively gauche as she, raising and tensing forward her shoulders in the same way, when crossing a room. Having sat through a preliminary P.W. short, they finally got to The Young and the Doomed only to discover that the barmaid scene of the barroom sequence had been cut out — except for a perfectly distinct shadow of Ada’s elbow, as Van kindly maintained.
Next day, in their little drawing room, with its black divan, yellow cushions, and draftproof bay whose new window seemed to magnify the slow steady straight-falling snowflakes (coincidentally stylized on the cover of the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly which lay on the window ledge), Ada discussed her ‘dramatic career.’ The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor). For him the written word existed only in its abstract purity, in its unrepeatable appeal to an equally ideal mind. It belonged solely to its creator and could not be spoken or enacted by a mime (as Ada insisted) without letting the deadly stab of another’s mind destroy the artist in the very lair of his art. A written play was intrinsically superior to the best performance of it, even if directed by the author himself. Otherwise, Van agreed with Ada that the talking screen was certainly preferable to the live theater for the simple reason that with the former a director could attain, and maintain, his own standards of perfection throughout an unlimited number of performances.
Neither of them could imagine the partings that her professional existence ‘on location’ might necessitate, and neither could imagine their traveling together to Argus-eyed destinations and living together in Hollywood, U.S.A., or Ivydell, England, or the sugar-white Cohnritz Hotel in Cairo. To tell the truth they did not imagine any other life at all beyond their present tableau vivant in the lovely dove-blue Manhattan sky. (2.9)
Finally, in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Vadim Vadimovich mentions The Beau and the Butterfly, the kindest magazine in the world:
Although I was adequately remunerated for my two weekly lectures on European Masterpieces and one Thursday seminar on Joyce's Ulysses (from a yearly 5000 dollars in the beginning to 15,000 in the Fifties) and had furthermore several splendidly paid stories accepted by The Beau and the Butterfly, the kindest magazine in the world, I was not really comfortable until my Kingdom by the Sea (1962) atoned for a fraction of the loss of my Russian fortune (1917) and bundled away all financial worries till the end of worrisome time. (3.1)
The Butterfly Beau is a poem by Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839):
I'm a volatile thing, with an exquisite wing,
Sprinkled o'er with the tints of the rainbow;
All the Butterflies swarm to behold my sweet form,
Though the Grubs may all vote me a vain beau.
I my toilet go through, with my rose-water dew,
And each blossom contributes its essence;
Then all fragrance and grace, not a plume out of place,
I adorn the gay world with my presence—
In short, you must know,
I'm the Butterfly Beau.
At first I enchant a fair Sensitive plant,
Then I flirt with the Pink of perfection:
Then I seek a sweet Pea, and I whisper, “For thee
I have long felt a fond predilection”
A Lily I kiss, and exult in my bliss,
But I very soon search for a new lip;
And I pause in my flight to exclaim with delight,
“Oh! how dearly I love you, my Tulip!”
In short, you must know,
I'm the Butterfly Beau.
Thus for ever I rove, and the honey of love
From each delicate blossom I pilfer;
But though many I see pale and pining for me,
I know none that are worth growing ill for:
And though I must own, there are some that I've known,
Whose external attractions are splendid;
On myself I most doat, for in my pretty coat
All the tints of the garden are blended—
In short, you must know,
I'm the Butterfly Beau.
T. H. Bayly is the author of Long, Long Ago and I'd be a Butterfly. In The Ballad of Longwood Glen (1957), VN's poem that was several times rejected by The New Yorker, Art Longwood turns into a butterfly and flies away. Vita brevis, ars longa, occasio praeceps, experientia fallax, iudicium difficile.