In Shades of Frost, Abraham P. Socher notes that
"Nabokov had been blocked in the composition of Pale Fire...collecting 'bits of
straw and fluff and eating pebbles'," like a bird building a nest. After
he composed "a narrative in heroic couplets, 'The Ballad of Longwood Glen'," and only three
months later in October 1957, he "jotted down the following note on an
index card: 'Waxwings: knocking themselves out in full flight against the
reflected world of our picture window. Leaving a little gray fluff on the
pane'." Indirectly, Socher's article made me perceive
various discrete elements, not only their narrative in heroic
couplets, that were shared by "The Ballad of Longwood Glen"
and "Pale Fire":
1.Both hide one or more riddles with a mix
of suicidal fantasy and metaphysics (For example, Art can reach heaven
by climbing a "sky-bound oak" and disappear from human sight, like
Millhauser's illusionist. Shade, with his Art, is a verbal conjurer who
suffers from chronophobia and insomnia).
2. In the first one Nabokov kills off a pair of kids*, in the second,
he kills off the parental couple.
3. In the short ballad he emphasizes that the couple's outing
included "three old men"(father Longwood, stepfather and father-in-law)
and, later, the different pair named Deforest, rides with "four" elder
men
(btw: what does VN's stressing number "four"
indicate?)
4. The Longwood children, Pauline and Paul, are frail children
who "could not run much...Pauline had asthma, Paul used a
crutch" whereas in Pale Fire a similar physical disability
is concentrated in one character, the poet Shade ("Then as
now/ I walked at
my own risk: whipped by the bough,/ Tripped by the stump.
Asthmatic, lame and fat,/ I never bounced
a ball or swung a bat.")
5. In the ballad, we
can hear Mrs. Longwood's demands addressed, perhaps, to her
physically timid husband (" 'I wish, said his mother to
crippled Paul,/'Some man would teach you to pitch that ball'."),
indicating that Art, her husband, may be as physically disabled as
Shade.
6. Although the poet's
dead parents had been ornithologists, he seems to have been an "artistically caged...preterist...who collects cold nests."
In contrast, in the ballad "an ancient nest with a
new-laid ball" was discovered among the branches of the felled
oak...
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* the Longwood girl
is named Pauline and we see "a nest with a new-laid ball." In
Transparent Things we find another Pauline and the suggestion of a
nest, or something nestled. The protagonists, Armande and Hugh, share a
femme-de-ménage with a Belgian artist, who lives in the penthouse above
them, the "obese Pauline." And, as "had happened on previous
occasions, around ten o'clock a most jarring succession of bumps and scrapes
suddenly came from above: it was the cretin upstairs dragging a heavy piece of
inscrutable sculpture (catalogued as "Pauline anide") from the center of his
studio to the corner it occupied at night."