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Re: [NABOKOV-L] A dead end: Dr. Sutton in Pale Fire
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Jerry Friedman: I'd like to point out that though the two doctors both live on the same hill (which I'd forgotten), they don't have the same last name. One name might be Suttinan and the other might be Danton, though I'm sure I wasn't the first to suggest Sutcliff and Clifton. I find the whole two-doctors thing puzzling. Why is it more interesting for Shade to have combined two doctors into one than for him to just know one Dr. Sutton? Are we supposed to be able to tell one from the other in his poem? [...] And why does Kinbote say he "visualizes" one of the two Doctors Sutton when he's describing scenes he claims he witnessed (n. 119)? Maybe to cast a blur of unreality over those scenes that he seems to remember in such sharp detail?
JM: It is Kinbote who informs us that there are two doctors whom Shade designates as Dr. Sutton, but a "sane" Shade wouldn't have substituted the names of two different neighboring doctors by only one.
Shade mentions the Sutton windows twice - both in relation to "sun and star" - and the last reference comes close to the end of Shade's poem and to his death ("That’s Dr. Sutton’s light. That’s the Great Bear," on line 119; "But it’s not bedtime yet. The sun attains/old Dr. Sutton’s last two windowpanes," lines 985-86). Kinbote's two doctors constitute a misleading information, perhaps because Sutton's windows hide something important (it must be related to the position of the Goldsworth and Shade houses).*
Kinbote says that he visualizes the snowy-headed gentleman from note to line 181 and to line 1000, and perhaps also on Shade's line 986 **. However it seems that he cannot visualize the other Sutton, the one who is mentioned in notes to lines 230 and 347, perhaps because he may never have seen him or simply invented him (he is the psychiatrist doctor (?), who instructs the Shades about Hazel's poltergeist and the light in the barn.)
According to Kinbote, the elderly snowy-headed Sutton (according to Shade he must be 80-82) has a widowed daughter and Kinbote suggestively calls her a "Mrs. Starr," stressing again Shade's lines about the position of the sun emitting last rays from a Sutton window.
The non-visualized (invented?) Sutton appears on Line 230: ( ...they disliked modern voodoo-psychiatry, but mainly because they were afraid of Hazel, and afraid to hurt her. They had however a secret interview with old-fashioned and learned Dr. Sutton, and this put them in better spirits) and Line 347: ( One can well imagine how the Shades dreaded a recrudescence of the poltergeist nuisance but the ever-sagacious Dr. Sutton affirmed — on what authority I cannot tell — that cases in which the same person was again involved in the same type of outbreaks after a lapse of six years were practically unknown.)
Perhaps also on Line 986 (but Kinbote isn't clear about that...).
We know that the "visualized" Sutton lives in an old clapboard house but, quite strangely, Kinbote has doubts that it would still be standing at the time he writes the commentary ("stood... and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton's old clapboard house), as if not more than a couple of months had elapsed Shade included his name in the poem.
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* Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith: The first name refers to the house in Dulwich Road that I rented from Hugh Warren Goldsworth, authority on Roman Law and distinguished judge....Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south ...On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University ..I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences. After winding for about four miles in a general eastern direction... lawns sloping down on both sides, the highway bifurcates: one branch goes left to New Wye and its expectant airfield [is this a reference to Gradus? Chess-move expectations?] and the other continues to the campus.
** - Line 119: Dr. Sutton: 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.
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JM: It is Kinbote who informs us that there are two doctors whom Shade designates as Dr. Sutton, but a "sane" Shade wouldn't have substituted the names of two different neighboring doctors by only one.
Shade mentions the Sutton windows twice - both in relation to "sun and star" - and the last reference comes close to the end of Shade's poem and to his death ("That’s Dr. Sutton’s light. That’s the Great Bear," on line 119; "But it’s not bedtime yet. The sun attains/old Dr. Sutton’s last two windowpanes," lines 985-86). Kinbote's two doctors constitute a misleading information, perhaps because Sutton's windows hide something important (it must be related to the position of the Goldsworth and Shade houses).*
Kinbote says that he visualizes the snowy-headed gentleman from note to line 181 and to line 1000, and perhaps also on Shade's line 986 **. However it seems that he cannot visualize the other Sutton, the one who is mentioned in notes to lines 230 and 347, perhaps because he may never have seen him or simply invented him (he is the psychiatrist doctor (?), who instructs the Shades about Hazel's poltergeist and the light in the barn.)
According to Kinbote, the elderly snowy-headed Sutton (according to Shade he must be 80-82) has a widowed daughter and Kinbote suggestively calls her a "Mrs. Starr," stressing again Shade's lines about the position of the sun emitting last rays from a Sutton window.
The non-visualized (invented?) Sutton appears on Line 230: ( ...they disliked modern voodoo-psychiatry, but mainly because they were afraid of Hazel, and afraid to hurt her. They had however a secret interview with old-fashioned and learned Dr. Sutton, and this put them in better spirits) and Line 347: ( One can well imagine how the Shades dreaded a recrudescence of the poltergeist nuisance but the ever-sagacious Dr. Sutton affirmed — on what authority I cannot tell — that cases in which the same person was again involved in the same type of outbreaks after a lapse of six years were practically unknown.)
Perhaps also on Line 986 (but Kinbote isn't clear about that...).
We know that the "visualized" Sutton lives in an old clapboard house but, quite strangely, Kinbote has doubts that it would still be standing at the time he writes the commentary ("stood... and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton's old clapboard house), as if not more than a couple of months had elapsed Shade included his name in the poem.
...........................................................................................................................
* Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith: The first name refers to the house in Dulwich Road that I rented from Hugh Warren Goldsworth, authority on Roman Law and distinguished judge....Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south ...On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University ..I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences. After winding for about four miles in a general eastern direction... lawns sloping down on both sides, the highway bifurcates: one branch goes left to New Wye and its expectant airfield [is this a reference to Gradus? Chess-move expectations?] and the other continues to the campus.
** - Line 119: Dr. Sutton: 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.
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