In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions a wild dream and a domestic ghost:
So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why
Scorn a hereafter none can verify:
The Turk's delight, the future lyres, the talks
With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks,
The seraph with his six flamingo wings,
And Flemish hells with porcupines and things?
It isn't that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most
We can think up is a domestic ghost. (ll. 221-230)
Too wild a dream and a domestic ghost make one think of Oscar Wilde's humorous short story The Canterville Ghost. It was the first of Wilde's stories to be published, appearing in two parts in The Court and Society Review, 23 February and 2 March 1887. The story is about an American family who moved to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead English nobleman, who killed his wife and was then walled in and starved to death by his wife's brothers.
Shade's statement ("It isn't that we dream too wild a dream: the trouble is we do not make it seem sufficiently unlikely") is in keeping with Wildean paradoxes. "The talks with Socrates and Proust in cypress walks" and Yewshade mentioned by Shade at the beginning of the next Canto bring to mind "No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew," a line in Oscar Wilde's sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881):
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.
Describing the last moments of Shade's life, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Keats:
Well did I know he could never resist a golden drop of this or that, especially since he was severely rationed at home. With an inward leap of exultation I relieved him of the large envelope that hampered his movements as he descended the steps of the porch, sideways, like a hesitating infant. We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road. Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music from Mystery Lodge. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.
I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart. (note to Line 991)
In Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Lord Henry says that, if the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different:
"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different." (Chapter 3)
So why join in the vulgar laughter? Btw., "If the caveman had known how to laugh" also reminds one of "L'if, lifeless tree," and "big if!" at the beginning of Canto Three of Shade's poem:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato.
I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it--big if!--engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber).
You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state. (ll. 501-509)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
Line 502: The grand potato
An execrable pun, deliberately placed in this epigraphic position to stress lack of respect for Death. I remember from my schoolroom days Rabelais' soi-disant "last words" among other bright bits in some French manual: Je m'en vais chercher le grand peut-être.
Oscar Wilde's last words were: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go.” There is no wallpapaper inside the coffin. Therefore, after Wilde's death, his wallpaper has gone, too. This makes one think of the end of Tolstoy's story The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886):
Он искал своего прежнего привычного страха смерти и не находил его. Где она? Какая смерть? Страха никакого не было, потому что и смерти не было. Вместо смерти был свет.
— Так вот что! — вдруг вслух проговорил он. — Какая радость!
Для него все это произошло в одно мгновение, и значение этого мгновения уже не изменялось. Для присутствующих же агония его продолжалась еще два часа. В груди его клокотало что-то; изможденное тело его вздрагивало. Потом реже и реже стало клокотанье и хрипенье.
— Кончено! — сказал кто-то над ним.
Он услыхал эти слова и повторил их в своей душе. «Кончена смерть, — сказал он себе. — Ее нет больше».
Он втянул в себя воздух, остановился на половине вздоха, потянулся и умер.
He sought his old habitual fear of death and could not find it. Where was it? What death? There was no more fear because there was no more death. Instead of death there was light.
"So that's it!" he suddenly said aloud. "What joy!"
For him all this happened in an instant and the significance of that instant never changed. For those present, his agony went on for two more hours. Something gurgled in his chest; his emaciated body kept twitching. Then the gurgling and wheezing gradually subsided.
"It's finished!" someone said over him. He heard those words and repeated them in his soul.
"Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more."
He drew in air, stopped at midbreath, stretched out, and died. (Chapter 12)
In Tolstoy's story Ivan Ilyich himself choses oboi (the wallpaper) for his new flat:
Иван Ильич уехал, и веселое расположение духа, произведенное удачей и согласием с женой, одно усиливающее другое, все время не оставляло его. Нашлась квартира прелестная, то самое, о чем мечтали муж с женой. Широкие, высокие, в старом стиле приемные комнаты, удобный грандиозный кабинет, комнаты для жены и дочери, классная для сына — все как нарочно придумано для них. Иван Ильич сам взялся за устройство, выбирал обои, подкупал мебель, особенно из старья, которому он придавал особенный комильфотный стиль, обивку, и все росло, росло и приходило к тому идеалу, который он составил себе. Когда он до половины устроился, его устройство превзошло его ожиданье. Он понял тот комильфотный, изящный и не пошлый характер, который примет все, когда будет готово. Засыпая, он представлял себе залу, какою она будет. Глядя на гостиную, еще не оконченную, он уже видел камин, экран, этажерку и эти стульчики разбросанные, эти блюды и тарелки по стенам и бронзы, когда они все станут по местам. Его радовала мысль, как он поразит Пашу и Лизаньку, которые тоже имеют к этому вкус. Они никак не ожидают этого. В особенности ему удалось найти и купить дешево старые вещи, которые придавали всему особенно благородный характер. Он в письмах своих нарочно представлял все хуже, чем есть, чтобы поразить их. Все это так занимало его, что даже новая служба его, любящего это дело, занимала меньше, чем он ожидал. В заседаниях у него бывали минуты рассеянности: он задумывался о том, какие карнизы на гардины, прямые или подобранные. Он так был занят этим, что сам часто возился, переставлял даже мебель и сам перевешивал гардины. Раз он влез на лесенку, чтобы показать непонимающему обойщику, как он хочет драпировать, оступился и упал, но, как сильный и ловкий человек, удержался, только боком стукнулся об ручку рамы. Ушиб поболел, но скоро прошел — Иван Ильич чувствовал себя все это время особенно веселым и здоровым. Он писал: чувствую, что с меня соскочило лет пятнадцать. Он думал кончить в сентябре, но затянулось до половины октября. Зато было прелестно, — не только он говорил, но ему говорили все, кто видели.
Ivan Ilyich left, and the cheerful state of mind produced by his success and his agreement with his wife, the one intensifying the other, stayed with him all the while. A, charming apartment was found, exactly what the husband and wife were dreaming of. Vast, high-ceilinged reception rooms in the old style, a comfortable and grandiose study, rooms for his wife and daughter, a schoolroom for his son--everything as if purposely designed for them. Ivan Ilyich himself took up the decoration, chose the wallpaper, bought furniture, especially antiques, which he had upholstered in an especially comme it fout style, and it all grew, grew and approached that ideal which he had formed for himself. When it was half done, the result exceeded his expectations. He perceived what a comme it fout,exquisite, and by no rrieans banal character it would all take on when it was finished. Falling asleep, he imagined how the reception room was going to be. Looking at the as yet unfinished drawing room, he already saw the fireplace, the screen, the whatnot, and those little chairs scattered around, those dishes and plates on the walls, and the bronzes, when they were all put in place. He rejoiced at the thought of how he would astonish Pasha and Lizanka, who also had a taste for these things. They would never expect it. In particular, he managed to find and buy cheaply antique objects that endowed everything with a particularly noble character. In his letters he deliberately presented everything as . worse than it was, in order to' astonish them. All this occupied him so much that even his new duties, fond as he was of the work, occupied him less than he had expected. During sessions he had moments of distraction: he was pondering what sort of cornices to have for the curtains, straight or festooned. He was so taken up with it that he often pottered about himself, even moved furniture and rehung curtains himself. Once he climbed a ladder to show the uncomprehending upholsterer how he wanted the drapery done, missed his footing, and fell, but, being a strong and agile man, held on and only bumped his side on the knob of the window frame. The bruised place ached for a while, but soon stopped. All this time Ivan Ilyich felt especially cheerful and healthy. He wrote: "I feel as if I've shaken off fifteen years." He hoped to finish in September, but it took until the middle of October. The result was charming-as not only he said, but all those who saw it said to him. (Chapter 3)
Ivan Ilyich falls ill and dies because of his fatal fall from the ladder. When Tolstoy's story begins, Ivan Ilyich is already dead. At the beginning of Kinbote's Foreword (dated Oct. 19, 1959) to Shade's poem Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus's "real" name) is dead. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer) after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s "real" name). There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (immediately after completing his poem), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
Russian for “yew” is tis. There is tis in Otis (in The Canterville Ghost the family of Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister to the Court of St. James's, moves into Canterville Chase, an English country house) and in Outis (Gr., Nobody). In his essay Ob Annenskom (“On Annenski,” 1921) Hodasevich compares Innokentiy Annenski (1855-1909) to Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich and points out that Annenski regarded his penname Nik. T-o (“Mr. Nobody”) as a translation of Greek Outis, the pseudonym under which Odysseus conceals his identity from Polyphemus (the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey):
Чего не додумал Иван Ильич, то знал Анненский. Знал, что никаким директорством, никаким бытом и даже никакой филологией от смерти по-настоящему не загородиться. Она уничтожит и директора, и барина, и филолога. Только над истинным его "я", над тем, что отображается в "чувствах и мыслях", над личностью -- у неё как будто нет власти. И он находил реальное, осязаемое отражение и утверждение личности -- в поэзии. Тот, чьё лицо он видел, подходя к зеркалу, был директор гимназии, смертный никто. Тот, чьё лицо отражалось в поэзии, был бессмертный некто. Ник. Т-о -- никто -- есть безличный действительный статский советник, которым, как видимой оболочкой, прикрыт невидимый некто. Этот свой псевдоним, под которым он печатал стихи, Анненский рассматривал как перевод греческого "утис", никто, -- того самого псевдонима, под которым Одиссей скрыл от циклопа Полифема своё истинное имя, свою подлинную личность, своего некто. Поэзия была для него заклятием страшного Полифема -- смерти. Но психологически это не только не мешало, а даже способствовало тому, чтобы его вдохновительницей, его Музой была смерть.
According to Hodasevich, Annenski's Muse was death. In his poem Theocritus Oscar Wilde mentions poor Polypheme who bemoans his fate:
Still by the light and laughing sea
Poor Polypheme bemoans his fate:
O Singer of Persephone!
Wilde's poem (subtitled A Villanelle) ends in the quatrain:
Slim Lacon keeps a goat for thee,
For thee the jocund shepherds wait,
O Singer of Persephone!
Dost thou remember Sicily?
According to Kinbote, New Wye (a small University town where Shade lives) is located at the latitude of Palermo (the capital of and the largest city in Sicily):
February and March in Zembla (the two last of the four "white-nosed months," as we call them) used to be pretty rough too, but even a peasant's room there presented a solid of uniform warmth - not a reticulation of deadly drafts. It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years - and this at the latitude of Palermo. On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially (I was to learn later that they assumed I wished to be left alone), were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice. John Shade busied himself clumsily with a bucket from which, with the gestures of a sower, he distributed handfuls of brown sand over the blue glaze. He wore snowboots, his vicuña collar was up, his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun. I knew he had been ill a few months before, and thinking to offer my neighbors a ride to the campus in my powerful machine, I hurried out toward them. A lane curving around the slight eminence on which my rented castle stood separated it from my neighbors' driveway, and I was about to cross that lane when I lost my footing and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. My fall acted as a chemical reagent on the Shades' sedan, which forthwith budged and almost ran over me as it swung into the lane with John at the wheel strenuously grimacing and Sybil fiercely talking to him. I am not sure either saw me. (Foreword)
Oscar Wilde is the author of Double Villanelle (the villanelle is a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains). Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski, a poem by Nik. T-o (1904) and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband (1895) brings to mind Dostoevski's short novel Vechnyi muzh ("The Eternal Husband," 1870). In his poem Vstrechnoy ("To a Woman Occasionally Met," 1908) Blok mentions tomik Uayl'da (a volume of Wilde) with which the lady's husband does not part:
Я только рыцарь и поэт,
Потомок северного скальда.
А муж твой носит томик Уайльда,
Шотландский плэд, цветной жилет...
Shotlandskiy pled (the Scottish plaid) mentioned by Blok brings to mind Walter Capmbell, Kinbote's Scottish tutor:
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, née 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, Linner (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)
Campbell, Walter, b .1890, in Glasgow; K.'s tutor, 1922-1931, an amiable gentleman with a mellow and rich mind; dead shot and champion skater; now in Iran; 130. (Index)