In a message dated 1/27/2010 7:23:31 AM Central Standard Time, jerryfriedman1@GMAIL.COM writes:
One place I disagree with Dupee is that he calls Shade "rustic", and others here have agreed. Yes, Shade grew up and still lives in a country house, but I don't see what's so rustic about the poem. Certainly not the language. I admit, though, that I haven't known many country people, and the rather rural area where I live now (northern New Mexico) has important differences from Appalachia. If the idea is that his interest in nature is rustic, I find it suburban, like mine. Country people I've known have been interested in nature from the angles of hunting, fishing, gathering, logging, and protecting their farms against pests, as well as in its more spectacular manifestations, but not in scientific names or in dingy butterflies. My idea of a rustic American poet is James Dickey, not Robert Frost. Maybe those who know the real Appalachia better than I do can comment.
Shade sure has a lot of close neighbors (especially CK!) if he lives in a "country house." Whittier may have been one of our few truly "rustic" poets and Frost merely "rural," but Dickey was as suburban as they come, born and raised in the toney Buckhead part of Atlanta, educated at Vanderbilt, and spending his adult life as an advertising executive and, both earlier and later, an academic. Deliverance may portray some nasty rustics, but they're seen from the perspective of a group of faux good ol' boys out for a weekend's adventure, nicely outfitted by Abercrombie and Fitch (as it then was). And if anyone is the ur-model of the contemporary "academic" poet (and most of the poets I know these days, myself included, are academics--if you need verification of this claim, just attend the annual AWP convention) it's Frost, who was steadily employed by colleges and universities from the 1920s onward--Amherst, Michigan, Dartmouth, Harvard, et al. I don't think recent times have seen a true American rustic poet, with the possible exceptions of Wendell Berry, who writes from his small farm in Kentucky, or the early John Haines, writing from the Alaskan outback.
Shade isn't rustic, not even rural, just born and bred suburban and academic. A college town in "Appalachia" doesn't differ much from one in upstate New York or one in Georgia or one, I suspect, in northern New Mexico. With the exception of his summer excursions, VN spent virtually all of his American years in academic environs, beginning with Stanford the first summer he was in the U. S., where he met and socialized with Yvor Winters, at the time one of the few American poets with academic tenure.
It's important to note that the American college town, with its peculiar culture, it's sometimes uneasy "town and gown" mix, must have made a huge impression on a writer who had had almost no contact with any kind of academic setting since his Cambridge years. Pnin and PF are both "campus novels," as is, to a lesser degree, Lolita, with Hum and Lo's trips being tied to and timed with the academic calendar. If VN knew any American setting intimately, it was the college community.
VN certainly assimilated well to his new life on American campuses, but, with his aristocratic background, his "foreignness," and his lack of advanced academic degrees, must have always felt something of an outsider as a faculty member, not that he didn't play the part to perfection. In this regard, it's easy to see both Pnin and CK as mutations of himself, the former as one who is incapable of adapting (language!) and the latter as one whose metamorphosis has taken him to the lunatic extreme.
Both Pnin and Kinbote are figures of fun in their respective academic communities, though CK seems to be seen as dangerous as well (with good reason, given his ping pong table and student guests). Was VN also imitated, for his accent and his manners, behind his back by colleagues and students? As a former student and longtime professor, I can firmly say, "Yes." Students make fun of virtually all their professors' mannerisms and eccentricities; I did it then, and they do it now. Sometimes it gets called to one's attention; I was unaware until recently that I had the reputation of standing outside our building's door (the distant northern realm of expatriate smokers) talking to myself. And it's true. Sometimes I'm singing (can't do that in the office!) and sometimes mumbling lines of a poem I'm working on. One eccentricity noted--I won't go into the others. So VN, respected and sometimes beloved teacher that he may have been, surely knew that there were those who made fun of his accent or his "airs." Being secure in his ego, he probably wasn't much bothered by this, but he also knew that someone less secure could have been wounded (Pnin) or made paranoid (CK) by such common antics, which aren't necessarily cruel.
To return to Shade, who still seems to me as conventionally "upright" as any character invented by VN, I recall that someone recently referred to his "drinking problem." Huh? Sybil probably doesn't like him to drink (he does have health problems, after all), so he surreptitiously buys a secret pint of brandy and is lured with the promise of a bottle of Tokay. This means he's a drunk? And, of course, there are all the allusions that have popped up here from time to time about that student in the leotards. He's got an eye for good-looking female students (especially one whom his colleagues have also noticed) and this makes him the father of an illegitimate child? Shade has his dark side, to be sure, but I doubt that alcoholism and philandering (given the sharp eye of Sybil) are parts of this.
All private editorial communications, without
exception, are
read by both co-editors.