John Morris: I appreciate your opposing views expressed with such elegant tolerance. I’ll read your essay pronto. I rather regret my description of Shade as a ‘lousy poet.’ Perhaps ‘minor-shady’ is nearer to my intent. But, but, but! Of course, there’s no such person, no such real poet whose real, total poetic output can be judged. Merely a central, intriguing character in my second-favourite novel of all time! (I have two foxed re-re-read copies of Pale Fire, as recommended by Kinbote). Shade as a fictional character is a rather sad, unfulfilled red-brick-provincial professor, brilliantly portrayed with much sympathy, but coloured by what we can all detect as VN’s amused parodic tilts at academic, donnish pedantry, of which he had considerable experience (cf Pnin and even HH).
The PF cantos were penned by VN whose own poetic corpus (signed VN!) I greatly admire in both languages (with much help from Victor Fet, who burnishes my rusty po-Ruskii). But is it not true (adding all the cautions about impossible comparisons) that VN’s novels and short stories far outshine his poetry.
A tricky what-if: what if the Cantos had appeared (possibly serialized in the New Yorker or Playboy!) as a New Poem Set into Cantod by Vladimir Nabokov (mandatory: Author of Lolita in parentheses). The verdict, I submit, would be ‘brilliant in parts, but very uneven,’ with TLS comment such as
‘This is a remarkable change of direction in Nabokov’s poetic output. Never before has he written in pseudo-Drydenesque-Papal [sic] rhyming-couplets. And at such length. The opening stanzas are the finest ever written in the English language, guaranteed a place in all future anthologies, but later, the rhymes and prosody often become so strained and affected as to immediately suggest that the master is having fun, more Thomas Hood, Longfellow or even Mrs Hemans.(there are hidden references to Casabianca!) than Pope or Dryden. Perhaps the writer is relaxing after the strains of Lolita’s publicational travails. He touches on the familiar themes of life-after-death, and refers to marital problems and a family tragedy set in what appears to be an American east-coast campus. Exactly what’s going on is obscure, but it’s all in the best Nabokovian multi-level, word-play manner. The literary allusions hauntingly many, and will keep the scholars a-hunting contentiously for ever after; not least in deciding whether the poem’s circular structure (is there a missing line at the end or do we GOTO START as Basic programmers say?) One has the strange feeling that Pale Fire has been pulled out from some larger contextual framework, rather as you might stumble across a stolen Russian icon in the attic ...’
Pale-Fire-the-isolated-poem (no CK preamble, notes, glosses or index, recall. No distractions! The poem, the poem and nothing but the poem) would , continuing my what-if, enter the honoured VN canon, in fully annotated editions WITH NUMBERED LINES ASSIGNED! One can even imagine editions accruing near-Kimbotean footnotes and critical baggage, since, at least some of the novel’s CK notes are genuine, accurate comments on allusions and events in the-PF-poem-qua-poem, and could be independently divined by scholars without CK’s help.
Of course, my fantasy is just that. PF-the-cantos could not really exist as self-contained poem signed by VN. The PF-poem was specifically engineered as an integral part of the complex masterpiece known as PF-the-novel. While VN’s poetic powers shine through, the novel places severe restrictions, plot-wise on what Shade, the poet-character is purported to have written. Indeed, some PF interpretations morph the poet & annotator. It’s meta-text taxing [sic] enough to decipher the novel without expecting a MINOR-poet character such as Shade to produce a supreme poetic masterpiece. I use minor-poet, with all due humility, as applying to the New England poets, Lowell, Emerson, MacLeish, and Frost (all of whom, I gather, have been mentioned, some obliquely, some directly in connection with Shade’s poetic locus). Indeed Shade mentions himself as being ‘one oozy footstep’ behind Frost. I would also include Longfellow in the minor camp, but Emily Dickinson, ah, that’s a personal minor+++ near-major on my list. VN was certainly unrestrained in rating writers from zero, via degrees of minor, up to the Pushkin/Shakepeare top-majors. But I digress.
Casting Shade [sic] as a minor-in-the-shade-sad poet (the clues abound; [note: minors come in sad-failed and happy-successful categories]) did not mean that VN had to produce cantos of unalloyed mediocrity. A MacGonagall Shade throughout would not work, but my ears just revolt WITH LAUGHTER too often reading PF-the-poem. I’ve just been reading from an on-line version trying cut’n’paste examples of mundane thoughts set in iambic doggerel (iambic being the worst kind of di-dum-di-dum dogerrel if maintained too long), and so clearly, deliberately bad that VN. In high-genius inventive form, must be telling us something vital about Shade-the-minor-poet, and, via Kinbote’s ultra-obsessive-pedantic-self-important-deluded-lit-crit-annotations the funny-sad side of academe, rather than VN the major wordsmith. Each sample I saved (chum rhymed with dumb) was replaced by something worse, i.e., BETTER for the novel. I selected the following, recalling that James Twigg had quoted it on the VN-list lasi year:
It was a night of thaw, a night of blow,
With great excitement in the air. Black spring
Stood just around the corner, shivering
In the wet starlight and on the wet ground.
The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned.
A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank
Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank. [500]
John: I’ve no doubt VN could recite long passages from PF without overdoing the irony. I’ll be searching for an audio- or video-recording. I’ld love to know if VN included this stanza in his recital. BB seems to omit it from his fascinating (but unconvincing) essay
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/boyd-pale.html?_r=1
BTW: it MAY be relevant. The above online version had a typo that VN would have [of] LOVED:
MY GOD THEY DIED YOUNG!!
The instrusive THEY rather ruins Shade’s following musings on THEOLATRY.
Stan Kelly-Bootle, MA (Cantab)
On 17/01/2010 22:22, "John Morris" <morris.jr@COMCAST.NET> wrote:
On Jan 16, 2010, at 10:46 PM, Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:
My judgment is ... (unpopular with many Nabokovians) that Shade is a lousy poet, presented as such via brilliantly-balanced but mean-low-down parody by VN.
Opinions understandably differ about whether Shade is a lousy poet, but it seems clear to me that VN did not present him as such. On the contrary, it is almost inconceivable that VN would have spent the first many pages of his follow-up novel to Lolita presenting lousy poetry. This flies in the face of everything we know of the man. Furthermore, the fact that he offered long excerpts from the poem at public readings, to which his audience responded with evident and unironic enjoyment, also argues for VN's faith in the poem's merits. Most signficant of all, the poem is, let's face it, Nabokovian in the highest degree! See my article "Genius and Plausibility: Suspension of Disbelief in Pale Fire" on the Zembla website.
Best,
J.