In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his childhood and says that he was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816) is a sonnet by John Keats. In his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1877) Oscar Wilde calls Keats "poet-painter of our English Land:"
Rid of the world’s injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water—it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
God's veil of blue (as Wilde calls the sky) brings to mind W. B. Yeats' book The Trembling of the Veil (1922). In the Preface W. B. Yeats explains his choice of the title:
I have found in an old diary a quotation from Stephane Mallarmé, saying that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title.
Except in one or two trivial details, where I have the warrant of old friendship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or described occurrence from the private life of named or recognisable persons. I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the friends of my youth are dead and over the dead I have an historian’s rights. They were artists and writers and certain among them men of genius, and the life of a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment that needs analysis and record. At least my generation so valued personality that it thought so. I have said all the good I know and all the evil: I have kept nothing back necessary to understanding.
In his autobiographical book Yeats mentions Miss Maud Gonne who looks the Sybil he would have had played by Florence Farr (a British actress, composer and director, 1860-1917):
Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O’Leary, the Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake, not as the creator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in excitement itself. I supported her against my father, which vexed him the more, though he might have understood that, apart from the fact that Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage were somehow involved, a man so young as I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and so young. To-day, with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she looks the Sybil I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian commendation “She walks like a goddess” made for her alone. Her complexion was luminous, like that of apple blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window. In the next few years I saw her always when she passed to and fro between Dublin and Paris, surrounded, no matter how rapid her journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by cages full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs, a parrot, and once a full-grown hawk from Donegal. Once when I saw her to her railway carriage I noticed how the cages obstructed wraps and cushions and wondered what her fellow travellers would say, but the carriage remained empty. It was years before I could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much beauty and so much energy. (Chapter V)
By the Sybil Yeats means the Cumaean Sibyl, a character in Virgil's Aeneid. The poet's wife, Sybil Shade (née Irondell), and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin (lastochka is Russian for "swallow"). Her husband, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name), went mad and became Shade, Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and Gradus (Shade's murderer) after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s "real" name). According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), kinbote means in Zemblan 'regicide.' In his poem January 29, 1837 Tyutchev calls d'Anthès (Pushkin's adversary in the poet's fatal duel) tsareubiytsa (a regicide). In his biography of de Heeckeren d’Anthès (reprinted by Shchyogolev in The Duel and Death of Pushkin, 1928) Louis Metman (George d’Anthès’s grandson) mentions his grandfather’s portrait (1878) by Carolus-Duran:
Портрет Каролюса Дюран, помеченный 1878 годом, одна из лучших работ художника, изображает барона Геккерена в его бодрой старости, которая, невзирая на жестокие припадки подагры, сохранила его уму всю его ясность.
Он изображён прямо сидящим в кресле и держащим в свисающей руке ещё горящую сигару, с несколько высокомерно закинутой головой, что было для него привычно и что мы видим и на маленьком портрете, писанном с него в Петербурге, на котором он изображён в кавалергардском мундире.
Серебристо-белые, откинутые назад волосы, длинные усы и густая бородка обрамляют мужественное лицо, с крупными чертами, со свежим цветом кожи. Темно-голубые глаза смотрят прямо и пристально, что было отличительной чертой его своеобразного лица, и дополняют живой образ барона Геккерена за последние двадцать лет его жизни...
According to Metman, the artist portrayed old Baron d'Anthès with a glowing cigar in his hand. In VN’s story Poseshchenie Muzeya (“A Visit to the Museum,” 1938) a joker wants to borrow a light from the portrait:
-- Кто эта старая обезьяна?-- спросил относительно портрета некто в полосатом нательнике, а так как дед моего приятеля был изображен с сигарой в руке, другой балагур вынул папиросу и собрался у портрета прикурить.
"Who's the old ape?" asked an individual in a striped jersey, and, as my friend's grandfather was depicted holding a glowing cigar, another funster took out a cigarette and prepared to borrow a light from the portrait.
A French portrait painter whom Yeats mentions in the above quoted chapter of The Trembling of the Veil, Carolus-Duran (1838-1917) brings to mind Caroline Lukin (the maiden name of Shade's mother):
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building a "hurley-house." But enough of this. (note to Line 71)
St. Luke the Painter is a sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti included in his sonnet sequence The House of Life:
Give honor unto Luke Evangelist;
For he it was (the aged legends say)
Who first taught Art to fold her hands and pray.
Scarcely at once she dared to rend the mist
Of devious symbols: but soon having wist
How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day
Are symbols also in some deeper way,
She looked through these to God and was God's priest.
And if, past noon, her toil began to irk,
And she sought talismans, and turned in vain
To soulless self-reflections of man's skill,
Yet now, in this the twilight, she might still
Kneel in the latter grass to pray again,
Ere the night cometh and she may not work.