Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [63]
Several members of the Department of English are painfully concerned over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript poem, left by the late John Shade. The manuscript fell into the hands of a person who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it, belonging as he does to another department, but is known to have a deranged mind. One wonders whether some legal action, etc.
“Legal action,” of course, might be taken by somebody else too. But no matter; one’s just anger is mitigated by the satisfaction of foreknowing that the engagé gentleman will be less worried about the fate of my friend’s poem after reading the passage commented here. Southey liked a roasted rat for supper—which is especially comic in view of the rats that devoured his Bishop.
Line 384: book on Pope
The title of this work which can be found in any college library is Supremely Blest, a phrase borrowed from a Popian line, which I remember but cannot quote exactly. The book is concerned mainly with Pope’s technique but also contains pithy observations on “the stylized morals of his age.”
Lines 385-386: Jane Dean, Pete Dean
The transparent pseudonyms of two innocent people. I visited Jane Provost when passing through Chicago in August. I found her still unmarried. She showed me some amusing photos of her cousin Peter and his friends. She told me—and I have no reason to disbelieve her words—that Peter Provost (whom I desired very very much to meet, but he was, alas, selling automobiles in Detroit) might have exaggerated a wee bit, but certainly did not fib, when explaining that he had to keep a promise made to one of his dearest fraternity friends, a glorious young athlete whose “garland” will not, one hopes, be “briefer than a girl’s.” Such obligations are not to be treated lightly or disdainfully. Jane said she had tried to talk to the Shades after the tragedy, and later had written Sybil a long letter that was never acknowledged. I said, displaying a bit of the slang I had recently started to master: “You are telling me!”
Lines 403-404: it’s eight fifteen (And here time forked)
From here to line 474 two themes alternate in a synchronous arrangement: television in the Shades’ parlor and the replay, as it were, of Hazel’s (already adumbrated) actions from the moment Peter met his blind date (406-407) and apologized for having to leave in a hurry (426-428) to Hazel’s ride in the bus (445-447 and 457-459), ending with the watchman’s finding her body (475-477). I have italicized the Hazel theme.
The whole thing strikes me as too labored and long, especially since the synchronization device has been already worked to death by Flaubert and Joyce. Otherwise the pattern is exquisite.
Line 408: A male hand
On July 10, the day John Shade wrote this, and perhaps at the very minute he started to use his thirty-third index card for lines 406-416, Gradus was driving in a hired car from Geneva to Lex, where Odon was known to be resting, after completing his motion picture, at the villa of an old American friend, Joseph S. Lavender (the name hails from the laundry, not from the laund). Our brilliant schemer had been told that Joe Lavender collected photographs of the artistic type called in French ombrioles. He had not been told what exactly these were and dismissed them mentally as “lampshades with landscapes.” His cretinous plan was to present himself as the agent of a Strasbourg art dealer and then, over drinks with Lavender and his house guest, endeavor to pick up clues to the King’s whereabouts. He did not reckon with the fact that Donald Odon with his absolute sense of such things would have immediately deduced from the way Gradus displayed his empty palm before shaking hands or made a slight bow after every sip, and other tricks of demeanor (which Gradus himself did not notice in people but had acquired from them) that wherever he had been born he had certainly lived for a considerable time in a low-class Zemblan environment and was therefore a spy or worse. Gradus was also unaware that the ombrioles Lavender collected (and I am sure Joe will not resent this indiscretion) combined exquisite beauty with highly indecent subject matter