Sandy Pallot Klein sends
http://www.upperleftedge.com/2013/02/16/dmitris-father/, posted
by Frank_Lynch on February 16, 2013. The author remembers seeing Véra:
"While I never spoke with her, I saw her sitting on stage far right with
Vladimir (Professor Nabokov) at the podium three days a week lecturing on
“Masters of European Fiction.” The main lecture room in Goldwin-Smith Hall on
the Cornell University Arts quadrangle was then a big space. My memory of sixty
years ago says he filled it with about three hundred people...."
Jansy Mello: Being unfamiliar with the Arts quadrangle in
Cornell, the slight connection between "Goldwin-Smith Hall" and
Pale Fire's Judge Goldsworth and Wordsmith College failed me
until now ("Maybe some quirk in space/Has caused a fold or furrow to
displace/ The fragile vista, the frame house
between/Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green").The lines
about the Shade's frame house seem to partake of a "quirk in space," if I
believe that Charles Kinbote's explanation is true. There's no other
reference to Goldsworth by Shade, nor to any neighbor who is a
judge.
CK: "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. I
never had the pleasure of meeting my landlord but I came to know his handwriting
almost as well as I do Shade’s. The second name denotes, of course, Wordsmith
University. In seeming to suggest a midway situation between the two places, our
poet is less concerned with spatial exactitude than with a witty exchange of
syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet, between whom he
embowers his own muse. Actually, the "frame house on its square of green" was
five miles west of the Wordsmith campus but only fifty yards or so distant from
my east windows."
According to CK,
Shade "regaled me with a number of anecdotes
concerning the judge’s dry wit and courtroom mannerisms; most of these anecdotes
were doubtless folklore exaggerations, a few were evident inventions, and all
were harmless. He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous
stories about the terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth’s gown threw across
the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying
of raghdirst (thirst for revenge) —
crass banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless — by all those
for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes
of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this..."
Further on CK adopts Shade's
"gradual" style when he repeats his observation about how he is
shaping topographical ideas while
confessing that he wishes "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 all, the "dull pain
of distance" is something that CK, rather than JS, would experience and try
to express stylistically..
Did Charles Kinbote invent Judge Goldsworth? What other
"Goldsworth" could Shade have intended to include in his poem? There's no
other authority, beside CK's, that this character existed, or the anedoctes that
might explain his murder motivated by a
Zemblan "raghdirst."
............................................................................................................................................................
btw (in connection to Gradus ad Parnassum): Search
instruments led me to two kinds of butterflies related to the two summits in the
Greek mountain range of Parnassus: Lycorea and Tithorea (and the
frustrated attempt to work out a clear link to PF).
(a)The Harmonia Tiger-wing or Harmonia Tiger (Tithorea
harmonia) is a species of butterflies belonging to the Nymphalidae
family...
(b) Lycorea ceres. Orange and black tiger
striped butterfly.or The Tropical Milkweed Butterfly (Lycorea
halia), a species of nymphalid butterfly in the Danainae
subfamily. As it happens, the only reference I located in ADA
was to the Parnassiinae and Mademoiselle's inspiration for a
pseudonym "A pale diaphanous butterfly with a very
black body followed them and Ada cried ‘Look!’ and explained it was closely
related to a Japanese Parnassian. Mlle Larivière said suddenly she would use a
pseudonym when publishing the story." The diaphanous butterfly seem
to be a bad omen, like Pale Fire's Vanessa, when Van feels that at
"the moment his foot touched the pine-needle strewn earth of
the forest road, a transparent white butterfly floated past, and with utter
certainty Van knew that he had only a few minutes to live." .
However, in retrospect I've started to suspect that Zemblan mirror-effects
and imitators, involving the Vanessa, the Monarch (a King) and the
Viceroy butterflies, are suggested in ADA!:.
."It was the newly described, fantastically rare vanessian,
Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white foretips,
mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly
directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch’s best
known imitators. In Ada’s angry
hand..."