Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [62]
There are always “three nights” in fairy tales, and in this sad fairy tale there was a third one too. This time she wanted her parents to witness the “talking light” with her. The minutes of that third session in the barn have not been preserved but I offer the reader the following scene which I feel cannot be too far removed from the truth:
THE HAUNTED BARN
Pitch-darkness. Father, Mother and Daughter are heard breathing gently in different corners. Three minutes pass.
FATHER (to Mother)
Are you comfortable there?
MOTHER
Uh-huh. These potato sacks make a perfect—
DAUGHTER (with steam-engine force)
Sh-sh-sh!
Fifteen minutes pass in silence. The eye begins to make out here and there in the darkness bluish slits of night and one star.
MOTHER
That was Dad’s tummy, I think—not a spook.
DAUGHTER (mouthing it)
Very funny!
Another fifteen minutes elapse. Father, deep in workshop thoughts, heaves a neutral sigh.
DAUGHTER
Must we sigh all the time?
Fifteen minutes elapse.
MOTHER
If I start snoring let Spook pinch me.
DAUGHTER (overemphasizing self-control)
Mother! Please! Please, Mother!
Father clears his throat but decides not to say anything.
Twelve more minutes elapse.
MOTHER
Does anyone realize that there are still quite a few of those creampuffs in the refrigerator?
That does it.
DAUGHTER (exploding)
Why must you spoil everything? Why must you always spoil everything? Why can’t you leave people alone? Don’t touch me!
FATHER
Now look, Hazel, Mother won’t say another word, and we’ll go on with this—but we’ve been sitting an hour here and it’s getting late.
Two minutes pass. Life is hopeless, afterlife heartless. Hazel is heard quietly weeping in the dark. John Shade lights a lantern. Sybil lights a cigarette. Meeting adjourned.
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem “The Nature of Electricity,” which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man’s departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley’s incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world.
Lines 347-348: She twisted words
One of the examples her father gives is odd. I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing “mirror words,” observed (and I recall the poet’s expression of stupefaction) that “spider” in reverse is “redips,” and “T. S. Eliot,” “toilest.” But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects.
Lines 367-370: then—pen, again—explain
In speech John Shade, as a good American, rhymed “again” with “pen” and not with “explain.” The adjacent position of these rhymes is curious.
Line 376: poem
I believe I can guess (in my bookless mountain cave) what poem is meant; but without looking it up I would not wish to name its author. Anyway, I deplore my friend’s vicious thrusts at the most distinguished poets of his day.
Lines 376-377: was said in English Litt to be
This is replaced in the draft by the more significant—and more tuneful—variant:
the Head of our Department deemed
Although it may be taken to refer to the man (whoever he was) who occupied this post at the time Hazel Shade was a student, the reader cannot be blamed for applying it to Paul H., Jr., the fine administrator and inept scholar who since 1957 headed the English Department of Wordsmith College. We met now and then (see Foreword and note to line 894) but not often. The Head of the Department to which I belonged was Prof. Nattochdag