In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his daughter and says that she twisted words:
She twisted words: pot, top
Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop."
She called you a didactic katydid.
She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,
It was a sign of pain. She'd criticize
Ferociously our projects, and with eyes
Expressionless sit on her tumbled bed
Spreading her swollen feet, scratching her head
With psoriatic fingernails, and moan,
Murmuring dreadful words in monotone. (ll. 347-356)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), it was he who observed one day that “spider” in reverse is “redips,” and “T.S. Eliot,” “toilest:”
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. (note to Lines 347-348)
In Gerontion (1920) T. S. Eliot mentions a wilderness of mirrors and the spider:
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
In Robert Browning’s poem A Light Woman the poet saw his friend tangled in the toils of his mistress:
I.
So far as our story approaches the end,
Which do you pity the most of us three?---
My friend, or the mistress of my friend
With her wanton eyes, or me?
II.
My friend was already too good to lose,
And seemed in the way of improvement yet,
When she crossed his path with her hunting-noose
And over him drew her net.
III.
When I saw him tangled in her toils,
A shame, said I, if she adds just him
To her nine-and-ninety other spoils,
The hundredth for a whim!...
A poem by Robert Browning, How it Strikes a Contemporary is also the title of the last essay in Virginia Woolf’s “The Common Reader” (1925). In a footnote to it VW mentions T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land:
The diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever, but at the back of every reader's mind would have been the consciousness that there was at least one man who kept the main principles of literature closely in view: who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity of the moment, would have brought it into touch with permanence and tethered it by his own authority in the contrary blasts of praise and blame.1
1 How violent these are two quotations will show. "It [Told by an Idiot] should be read as the Tempest should be read, and as Gulliver's Travels should be read, for if Miss Macaulay's poetic gift happens to be less sublime than those of the author of the Tempest, and if her irony happens to be less tremendous than that of the author of Gulliver's Travels, her justice and wisdom are no less noble than theirs."--The Daily News.
The next day we read: "For the rest one can only say that if Mr. Eliot had been pleased to write in demotic English The Waste Land might not have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists, and literati, so much waste-paper."--The Manchester Guardian.
VW quotes Matthew Arnold’s words in his essay The Study of Poetry:
"We enter on burning ground," wrote Matthew Arnold, "as we approach the poetry of times so near to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion," and this, they remind us, was written in the year 1880.
Describing Shade's murder by Gradus, Kinbote quotes a line from Matthew Arnold's poem The Scholar-Gipsy (1853):
His first bullet ripped a sleeve button off my black blazer, another sang past my ear. It is evil piffle to assert that he aimed not at me (whom he had just seen in the library--let us be consistent, gentlemen, ours is a rational world after all), but at the gray-locked gentleman behind me. Oh, he was aiming at me all right but missing me every time, the incorrigible bungler, as I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem, "still clutching the inviolable shade," to quote Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888), in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit, while he, my sweet awkward old John, kept clawing at me and pulling me after him, back to the protection of his laurels, with the solemn fussiness of a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren, once a familiar sight in all countries. I felt--I still feel--John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life. (note to Line 1000)
"The inviolable shade" brings to mind not only John Shade (the author of the poem that Kinbote holds in his left hand) but also Viola, Sebastian's twin sister in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. At the end of VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) the narrator (Sebastian's half-brother V.) says that, despite Sebastian's death, the hero remains:
The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end. They all go back to their everyday life (and Clare goes back to her grave) - but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows. (Chapter 20)
Similarly, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus can be someone whom neither of them knows. In fact, they seem to represent three different aspects of Botkin's personality. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of Kinbote's Commentary). Nadezhda means in Russian "hope." In Matthew Arnold's Scholar-Gipsy the line quoted by Kinbote is preceded by the line "Still nursing the unconquerable hope:"
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver'd branches of the glade-
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales
Freshen thy flowers as in former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark tingles, to the nightingales!
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,” 1846) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski. In her essay The Russian Point of View (included in “The Common Reader”) Virginia Woolf compares the novels of Dostoevsky to "Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in." According to VW, "out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading."
In his sonnet Shakespeare Matthew Arnold mentions the Heaven of Heavens that Shakespeare made his dwelling-place:
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality;
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.
The name of Zemblan capital, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. According to Kinbote, his uncle Conmal (who translated all Shakespeare into Zemblan) called Zemblan “the tongue of the mirror:”
The other poem, Andrew Marvell's "The Nymph on the Death of Her Fawn," seems to be, technically, even tougher to stuff into French verse. If in the Donne translation, Miss Irondell was perfectly justified in matching English pentameters with French Alexandrines, I doubt that here she should have preferred l'impair and accommodated with nine syllables what Marvell fits into eight. In the lines:
And, quite regardless of my smart,
Left me his fawn but took his heart
which come out as:
Et se moquant bien de ma douleur
Me laissa son faon, mais pris son Coeur
one regrets that the translator, even with the help of an ampler prosodic womb, did not manage to fold in the long legs of her French fawn, and render "quite regardless of" by "sans le moindre égard pour" or something of the sort.
Further on, the couplet
Thy love was far more better than
The love of false and cruel man
though translated literally:
Que ton amour était fort meilleur
Qu'amour d'homme cruel et trompeur
is not as pure idiomatically as might seem at first glance. And finally, the lovely closule:
Had it lived long it would have been
Lilies without, roses within
contains in our lady's French not only a solecism but also that kind of illegal run-on which a translator is guilty of, when passing a stop sign:
Il aurait été, s'il eut longtemps
Vécu, lys dehors, roses dedans.
How magnificently those two lines can be mimed and rhymed in our magic Zemblan ("the tongue of the mirror," as the great Conmal has termed it)!
Id wodo bin, war id lev lan,
Indran iz lil ut roz nitran. (note to Line 678)
Indran iz lil ut roz nitran brings to mind Indra and Nitra, the twin islands off Blawick (a pleasant seaside resort on the Western Coast of Zembla) mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary and Index:
King Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. (note to Line 71)
It was a lovely breezy afternoon. with a western horizon like a luminous vacuum that sucked in one's eager heart. The King, now at the most critical point of his journey, looked about him, scrutinizing the few promenaders and trying to decide which of them might be police agents in disguise, ready to pounce upon him as soon as he vaulted the parapet and made for the Rippleson Caves. Only a single sail dyed a royal red marred with some human interest the marine expanse. Nitra and Indra (meaning "inner" and "outer"), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley, were being photographed from the parapet by a Russian tourist, thickset, many-chinned, with a general's fleshy nape. His faded wife, wrapped up floatingly in a flowery écharpe, remarked in singsong Moscovan "Every time I see that kind of frightful disfigurement I can't help thinking of Nina's boy. War is an awful thing." "War?" queried her consort. "That must have been the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951 - not war." They slowly walked past the King in the direction he had come from. On a sidewalk bench, facing the sea, a man with his crutches beside him was reading the Onhava Post which featured on the first page Odon in an Extremist uniform and Odon in the part of the Merman. Incredible as it may seem the palace guard had never realized that identity before. Now a goodly sum was offered for his capture. Rhythmically the waves lapped the shingle. The newspaper reader's face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion, and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror. (note to Line 149)
The name Conmal seems to hint at hint at kon’ mal (a small horse), the first two words in the Russian riddle about the swallow:
Конь мал за морем бывал:
Спереди — шильце,
Сзади — вильце,
Сверху — чёрное суконце,
Снизу — белое полотенце.
A small horse was oversees:
a little awl in front,
a little fork behind,
a piece of black cloth on the top,
a white towel underneath.
On the other hand, Conmal seems to blend Conrad (a Polish author who wrote in English) with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Joseph Conrad is the penultimate essay in Virginia Woolf’s “Common Reader.” In How it Strikes a Contemporary VW pairs Conrad with Thomas Hardy:
Mr. Hardy has long since withdrawn from the arena, and there is something exotic about the genius of Mr. Conrad which makes him not so much an influence as an idol, honoured and admired, but aloof and apart.
A poem (“Friends Beyond”) by Thomas Hardy is mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
How persistently our poet evokes images of winter in the beginning of a poem which he started composing on a balmy summer night! The mechanism of the associations is easy to make out (glass leading to crystal and crystal to ice) but the prompter behind it retains his incognito. One is too modest to suppose that the fact that the poet and his future commentator first met on a winter day somehow impinges here on the actual season. In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word. My dictionary defines it as "a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop." I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop. We should, also note the cloak-and-dagger hint-glint in the "svelte stilettos" and the shadow of regicide in the rhyme. (note to Lines 35-36: Stilettos of a frozen stillicide)
In a discarded variant (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) Shade mentions poor old man Swift and poor Baudelaire:
A beautiful variant, with one curious gap, branches off at this point in the draft (dated July 6):
Strange Other World where all our still-born dwell,
And pets, revived, and invalids, grown well,
And minds that died before arriving there:
Poor old man Swift, poor —, poor Baudelaire
What might that dash stand for? Unless Shade gave prosodic value to the mute e in “Baudelaire,” which I am quite certain he would never have done in English verse (cp. “Rabelais,” line 501), the name required here must scan as a trochee. Among the names of celebrated poets, painters, philosophers, etc., known to have become insane or to have sunk into senile imbecility, we find many suitable ones. Was Shade confronted by too much variety with nothing to help logic choose and so left a blank, relying upon the mysterious organic force that rescues poets to fill it in at its own convenience? Or was there something else—some obscure intuition, some prophetic scruple that prevented him from spelling out the name of an eminent man who happened to be an intimate friend of his? Was he perhaps playing safe because a reader in his household might have objected to that particular name being mentioned? And if it comes to that, why mention it at all in this tragical context? Dark, disturbing thoughts. (note to Line 231)
Kinbote is afraid that this dash stands for his name. Actually, it stands for Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name).
Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (“Flowers of Evil”) bring to mind Fleur de Fyler, Countess de Fyler’s daughter who attempts to seduce Prince Charles after Queen Blenda’s death:
Her presence at night did not kill insomnia, but at least kept at bay the strong ghost of Queen Blenda. Between exhaustion and drowsiness, he trifled with paltry fancies, such as getting up and pouring out a little cold water from a decanter onto Fleur's naked shoulder so as to extinguish upon it the weak gleam of a moonbeam. Stentoriously the Countess snored in her lair. And beyond the vestibule of his vigil (here he began falling asleep), in the dark cold gallery, lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep against the locked door, some dozing, some whimpering, were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland.
He awoke to find her standing with a comb in her hand before his - or rather, his grandfather's - cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young - little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing.
On the third night a great stomping and ringing of arms came from the inner stairs, and there burst in the Prime Councilor, three Representatives of the People, and the chief of a new bodyguard. Amusingly, it was the Representatives of the People whom the idea of having for queen the granddaughter of a fiddler infuriated the most. That was the end of Charles Xavier's chaste romance with Fleur, who was pretty yet not repellent (as some cats are less repugnant than others to the good-natured dog told to endure the bitter effluvium of an alien genus). With their white suitcases and obsolete musical instruments the two ladies wandered back to the annex of the Palace. There followed a sweet twang of relief - and then the door of the anteroom slid open with a merry crash and the whole heap of putti tumbled in. (note to Line 80)
Jakob Gradus in reverse, Sudarg of Bokay also seems to hint at gosudar’ (sovereign). In his epistle to Bryusov, Proshchal’naya poeza (“The Farewell Poem,” 1912), Severyanin says that he is bored with his korolevskiy titul (royal title) and calls Bryusov gosudar’:
Я так устал от льстивой свиты
И от мучительных похвал...
Мне скучен королевский титул,
Которым Бог меня венчал.
Вокруг — талантливые трусы
И обнаглевшая бездарь...
И только Вы, Валерий Брюсов,
Как некий равный государь...
Не ученик и не учитель,
Над чернью властвовать устав,
Иду в природу, как в обитель,
Петь свой осмеянный устав...
И там, в глуши, в краю олонца,
Вне поощрений и обид,
Моя душа взойдёт, как солнце,
Тому, кто мыслит и скорбит.
The penname Severyanin comes from sever (North). Kinbote’s Zembla is a distant Northern land.
Shade’s murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). Bryusov is the author of Zerkalo teney (“The Mirror of Shadows,” 1912). Marina Tsvetaev’s memoir essay on Bryusov is entitled Geroy truda (“The Hero of Toil,” 1925).