Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [89]
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
“Well,” said he, “here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome” (“Oh, that won’t do,” wailed the German visitor.) “Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform,” continued Emerald. “Quite the fancy pansy, in fact.”
“And you,” I said quietly, “are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket.”
“But what have I said?” the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo’s Last Supper.
“Now, now,” said Shade. “I’m sure, Charles, our young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and name-sake.”
“He could not, even if he had wished,” I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand—which at the moment of writing still remains in that position.
Lines 895-899: The more I weigh … or this dewlap
Instead of these facile and revolting lines, the draft gives:
895 I have a certain liking, I admit,
For Parody, that last resort of wit:
“In nature’s strife when fortitude prevails
The victim falters and the victor fails.”
899 Yes, reader, Pope
Line 920: little hairs stand on end
Alfred Housman (1859-1936), whose collection The Shropshire Lad vies with the In Memoriam of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) in representing, perhaps (no, delete this craven “perhaps”), the highest achievement of English poetry in a hundred years, says somewhere (in a foreword?) exactly the opposite: The bristling of thrilled little hairs obstructed his barbering; but since both Alfreds certainly used an Ordinary Razor, and John Shade an ancient Gillette, the discrepancy may have been due to the use of different instruments.
Line 922: held up by Our Cream
This is not quite exact. In the advertisement to which it refers, the whiskers are held up by a bubbly foam, not by a creamy substance.
After this line, instead of lines 923-930, we find the following, lightly deleted, variant:
All artists have been born in what they call
A sorry age; mine is the worst of all:
An age that thinks spacebombs and spaceships take
A genius with a foreign name to make,
When any jackass can rig up the stuff;
An age in which a pack of rogues can bluff
The selenographer; a comic age
That sees in Dr. Schweitzer a great sage.
Having struck this out, the poet tried another theme, but these lines he also canceled:
England where poets flew the highest, now
Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough;
Now the prosemongers of the Grubby Group,
The Message Man, the owlish Nincompoop
And all the Social Novels of our age
Leave but a pinch of coal dust on the page.
Line 929: Freud
In my mind’s eye I see again the poet literally collapsing on his lawn, beating the grass with his fist, and shaking and howling with laughter, and myself, Dr. Kinbote, a torrent of tears streaming down my beard, as I try to read coherently certain tidbits from a book I had filched from a classroom: a learned work on psychoanalysis, used in American colleges, repeat, used in American colleges. Alas, I find only two items preserved in my notebook:
By picking the nose in spite of all commands to the contrary, or when a youth is all the time sticking his finger through his buttonhole … the analytic teacher knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phantasies.
(Quoted by Prof. C. from Dr. Oskar Pfister, The
Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, N.Y., p. 79)
The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation.
(Quoted by Prof. C. from Erich Fromm, The
Forgotten Language, 1951, N.Y., p. 240.)
Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
Line 934: big trucks
I must say I do not remember hearing very often “big trucks” passing in our vicinity. Loud cars, yes—but not trucks.
Line 937: Old Zembla
I am a weary and sad commentator today.
Parallel to the left-hand side of this card (his seventy-sixth) the poet has written, on the eve of his death, a line (from Pope