From Walter Miale <wm@greenworldcenter.org>
Subject: The Pale Fire poem


It's fascinating to see disagreement over such a question as whether a poem is a masterpiece or maybe not very good at all. It's especially interesting to me when one side is taken by a critic of the calibre of Brian Boyd, whose writing on Pale Fire so greatly enhances the experience of that book, and when I find myself on the opposite side.

Certainly Shade's poem by Nabokov is a masterpiece, imbued as it is with the emanations of its creator, who is there winking at us between the lines, having a lot of fun, and sharing it with us. But the thing itself, Shade's poem by Shade? A rare bug in its own write, but is this part of the whole whole in itself?

Shade of course has fun too. But his "Yanks beat Sox on Chapman's homer" is not his own wild fantasy but an autobiographical tidbit, a detail amid evocations of eccentricity and incest.

One finds from the first page a curious shifting back and forth of tone. After the sublime and etherial opening, the poet looks around and takes photographs --literally!-- with his eyes. The poem is grand stuff, but this is parody. We encounter parododic style and the shift from the sublime to the bathetic throughout.

On the next page, four lines after the haunting

The phantom of my little daughter's swing

we have

TV's huge paperclip.

The shift in diction is incongruous and jarring. Nabokov is wittily situating the homely old poet and his house redolent with homely family history in a conventional modern townscape. But Shade the author is incorporating what for Nabokov would be a throwaway image (like "crystal to crystal") in a major work.

The house has been remodeled with "one wing revamped" and tasteful modern furninshings added, including a new tv set. Is Shade the author getting close to what "J. Wallace Larwood" called "embarrassingly personal"?

Yes. In the next stanza we read

But certain words, chance words I hear or read,
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.

This is certainly touching, and a precious instance of a phenomenon of emotional language, but "cancer of the pancreas," though hardly a funny subject, strikes me with such bathos that it raises a smile, in me at least if not in Brian Boyd.

The fictional John Shade is an unforgettable American Gothic character of an unforgettable gothic novel. The autobiographical John Shade is--a poet yes, but the author not only of some wonderful verse but also of some lines near as homely as himself:

There he is, paring his fingernails and their "scarfskin," and four lines later, (after telling of Aunt Maude's stroke in the interim):

        We moved her to Pinedale,
Famed for its sanitarium.

Isn't this resonant of Happydale, where the the dear old ladies or their nephew who thought he was Teddy Roosevelt (I forget exactly) ended up in Arsenic and Old Lace?


And so on. In the wonderful romantic lines to Sybil, we have

                At least
Four thousand times your pillow has been creased
By our two heads. Four hundred thousand times
The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes
Has marked our common hour. How many more
Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?

The calendars were free. Don't the banal overtones of this modifier break the trance?

When T.S. Eliot had Mrs. Porter and her daughter wash their feet in soda water it was a kind of joke. Isn't the poet behind the poet behind the lines here having fun, and in fact a laugh at his character's expense?

And then there is the introduction of the main theme:

                At first we'd smile and say:
"All little girls are plump" or "Jim McVey
(The family oculist) will cure that slight
Squint in no time."

The lines are homelier than the girl. Some of the funniest fantasies are about unfunny subjects. (From Lolita and Dr. Strangelove on down.) But why would Shade want to strike so ironic, almost comic, a keynote of the tragedy?

The portrait of Hazel continues in this bathetic vein:

                Less starch, more fruit!

And

                ...or with that nice
Frail roommate, now a nun...

And
                Šwhich made
Her almost fetchingŠ

"Almost fetching" is not a factual description of a troubled girl, but a description by a troubled father and/or a parody of a homely style (American homely).

Good looks may be some kind of objective category (for the Watusi as well as upstate New Yorkers in the 1950's), but we all know terribly homely girls who lived lives of relative or even great contentment and fulfillment. I know Hazel was as exceptionally homely in her father's eyes as Dolores was beautiful in her stepfather's eyes, but John Shade's feelings about Hazel's looks must have amounted to an intolerable and unhealing emotional wound. More evidence of Nabokov's ironic detachment from Shade.

I think Brian Boyd is right: the Pale Fire poem is a work of genius. And the thought experiment of imagining it on its own is a worthwhile one.

The article was by Jim Coates. To Jim
Forthwith I wrote.

But doesn't Kinbote have a point in his assertion that the commentary is indispensable?

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