Stalking Nabokov (64 page)

Just after the cicada digression, Shade returns to his present, paring his nails, and, hearing “your steps upstairs,” he declares “all is right, my dear.” At this point he introduces Sybil, as a way of leading into the Hazel theme that dominates the remainder of the canto. He describes Sybil’s “loveliness,” and invites her to “Come and be worshipped, come and be caressed, / My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest, / My Admirable butterfly!” Here Shade metaphorically metamorphoses his wife into a
Vanessa atalanta
, a sumptuous butterfly (once known as a Red Admirable but now called a Red Admiral). Affirming his love for her, he segues from the wife he now addresses to the daughter they can only recall:

I love you when you’re standing on the lawn

Peering at something in a tree: “It’s gone.

It was so small. It might come back” (all this

Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss)

…………………………………………

And I love you most

290  When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost

And hold her first toy on your palm, or look

At a postcard from her, found in a book.

She might have been you, me, or some quaint blend:

Nature chose me so as to wrench and rend

Your heart and mine.

(
PF
43)

In a poem as controlled as this, and as focused as this on death and beyond, Shade does not bring Hazel explicitly into the poem with the phrase “her ghost” by accident.

As soon as he introduces her in these terms, he notes she does not take after her mother’s good looks and records how her unfortunate appearance blights her personality and her happiness and ultimately drives her to suicide. But at the end of the poem, Shade does all he can to make a
Vanessa atalanta
feature at least as an emblem of Hazel’s surviving after death in a happily transformed state.

Canto 4 opens with the word “Now” and closes in on Shade’s here and now, on the poet at work, and, in the final fifty lines, on the end of his last day composing “Pale Fire,” July 21, 1959. Shade draws us with him into his present, as he treasures the evening scene around him. He responds serenely to his immediate world with a steady glow of confidence in this world and its patterns, and his art and
its
patterns, that gives him confidence in something more.

After Hazel’s death Shade had said that I.P.H. had taught him that “no phantom would / Rise gracefully to welcome you and me / In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree.” Nevertheless at the end of his poem, as he looks at the world unwinding around him, he fuses together, through the force of his art, the shagbark, the setting sun, the “phantom” recollection of Hazel’s swing, Sybil’s “shadow” near the tree, and, explicitly, another butterfly, the
Vanessa
: implicitly, his and Sybil’s tenderly stored image of Hazel. What seems an ordinary evening turns out to be part of an intricate texture Shade has woven to celebrate all he shares with his wife and to commemorate what they have lost in their daughter. Here in his last evening so far with Sybil, more delicately and deceptively than in the starker scoring of the counterpoint of Hazel’s last night, he plays his “game of worlds,” answering the turmoil of that night with his own design and his own sense of confidence in ultimate design, even amid the accidents of the passing day.

We can see a larger Nabokovian context for the way Shade finds sense in the patterns his art can reveal in his life. In his autobiography Nabokov had posed himself the artistic challenge of affirming his confidence in life’s ultimately generous design by taking as test case his own life, despite its routines and upsets, its incursions of anguish, and his lifelong frustration at the confines of human consciousness.
Speak, Memory
weaves intricate “thematic trails or currents”
¹²
into his account of his life, and its horrors—his exile from his homeland, his father’s assassination, his forced flight with his family from the sanctuary Western Europe had provided—and his own metaphysical quest. He admits planning his book “according to the way his life had been planned by unknown players of games,”
¹³
exactly as Shade feels it sufficed that in life he could find “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game, /… and something of the same / Pleasure in it as they who played it found.” Nabokov has poet and biographer Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the Russian-speaking character in his work closest to himself, also pose and meet similar challenges, in very different ways, in
The Gift
. And he has poet and scholar John Shade, the English-speaking character closest to himself, pose himself a similar, perhaps even more formidable challenge: to affirm his confidence in life’s design first by seeing his own life in terms of its whole pattern and rhythm, which he does especially in terms of
his
lifelong metaphysical quest; then by facing squarely his life’s worst turn, his daughter’s suicide, which he makes the heartrending centerpiece of his poem; and then by turning to the here and now, the unplanned circumstances of composing and closing his magnum opus.

Shade starts “Pale Fire” with abrupt action, the waxwing’s fatal crash against the reflected azure sky. He ends the poem in calm, the end of a day and a season of composing. As he opens his last day’s composition, he turns to his wife, with the kind of anaphoric patterns he has used again and again (“I was the shadow…I was the smudge…—and I…” at the start of canto 1; “There was a time…There was the day…And finally there was the sleepless night” at the start of canto 2; “Now I shall spy… Now I shall cry out…Now I shall try…Now I shall do…” at the start of canto 4). “And all the time, and all the time, my love” especially echoes the powerful anaphora in canto 2: “I love you when you’re…I love you when you…And I love you most / When…you greet her ghost.”

In the verse paragraph that starts his last day of composition (“And all the time, and all the time, my love, / You too are there, beneath the word, above / The syllable”), Shade plays with pattern in multiple ways. The previous day’s composition had ended with “And that odd muse of mine, / My versipel, is with me everywhere, / In carrel and in car, and in my chair.”
Versipel
both puns on
verse
and means “a creature capable of changing from one form to another” (see Nabokov’s favorite dictionary,
Webster’s Second New International
)—another metamorphic image, the imagination, perhaps, which allows him to become “the shadow of the waxwing,” or “the smudge of ashen fluff,” or to live on in the reflected sky. Shade prolongs this note into his last day’s composition, as he turns to Sybil, and her contribution to his art, punning on her name in “above / The syllable,” and resonating with
versipel
, which now seems to have an undertone of “
Sybil
” and “
syllable
.”

At the end of canto 3, Shade had eloquently elaborated the conclusions he had reached in his recognition that “
this
/ Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme.” When he returns home from his quest for the fountain, eager to announce his new conviction, he finds the distracting rhythms of the real will not allow him to share his new confidence even with the woman who shares his life and his art:

Making ornaments

Of accidents and possibilities.

830  Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is

My firm conviction—“Darling, shut the door.

Had a nice trip?” Splendid—but what is more

I have returned convinced that I can grope

My way to some—to some—“Yes, dear?” Faint hope.

(
PF
63)

There ends canto 3, in apparent deflation, despite the brilliant quadruple rhyme—rare enough in itself, even rarer in such a serious context, rarer still in matching polysyllabic possibilities against monosyllables and high reflection against casual speech. But on his last day of composition Shade picks up on the “ornaments / Of accidents and possibilities” and “Sybil, it is” in the
syllable
play on
versipel
and
Sybil
, and the stress on his wife’s inclusion in and inspiration for his art.

The verse paragraph devoted to Sybil plays not only on her name but also on the “you” by which Shade naturally calls her: “
You too
,” “undersc
ore
…
yore
…
your
,” “And all in
you
is
you
th, and
you
make
new
/… old things I made for
you
.” But Shade also puns on the tree, the
yew
, with which he has pointedly opened canto 3, at the midpoint of his poem, “
L’if
, lifeless tree”—a phrase itself punning on the French name for the tree, on “life” and this tree of death, on “lifeless” and “leafless” (the yew and cypress adorn cemeteries precisely because they do not become leafless), and on the outfit Shade dubs “I.P.H., a lay / Institute (I) of Preparation (P) / For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we / Called it—big if!” at a location he names as “Yewshade, in another, higher state.” The
yew
enters the poem the moment after Hazel—herself named for a tree—steps to her death. And in playing so insistently on “you” near the end of the poem, Shade prepares for his final glimpse of Sybil, near another tree, the shagbark hickory that he and Sybil cannot help associating with Hazel and the “phantom” of her swing.

Shade brings us right into the present, into the end of this summer’s day, in the antepenultimate paragraph:

Gently the day has passed in a sustained

Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained

And a brown ament, and the noun I meant

To use but did not, dry on the cement.

(
PF
68)

He begins here with “Gently,” a word he first uses in the poem as he describes the white butterflies that “turn lavender as they / Pass through its [the shagbark’s] shade where gently seems to sway / The phantom of my little daughter’s swing.” He has used the word once more, at the start of the verse paragraph that records the arrival of the patrol cars bringing news of Hazel’s death: “You gently yawned and stacked away your plate. / We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw / Twigs at the windowpane. Phone ringing? No.”

He has written well all day, “in a sustained / Low hum of harmony.” Harmony indeed, as he describes his present state and surroundings: not only the
m
s (and
h
s) in “hu
m
of har
m
ony,” but the nasals throughout these lines (ge
n
tly, sustai
n
ed, hu
m
, har
m
o
n
y, brai
n
, drai
n
ed, a
m
e
n
t,
n
ou
n
,
m
ea
n
t,
n
ot, o
n
, ce
m
e
n
t); the
-ain
sound in sust
ain
ed, br
ain
, dr
ain
ed; the
-rain
sounds in b
rain
and d
rain
ed; the
br
ai
n
-
br
ow
n
consonance; the internal rhyme on a
ment
harmonizing with the end rhymes in
meant
and ce
ment
; the complex “br
own
ament-n
oun
I meant” echo, and the
dr
ained-
dr
y match of sound and sense. And the noun Shade meant to use but did not, to maximize the possibilities of pattern his circumstances allow, is
catkin
, the much commoner homonym of
ament
. The only tree in the Shades’ garden that has catkins or aments is the shagbark hickory so strongly associated with Hazel—although a tree more famous for its catkins is the hazel itself.

Shade explicitly thematizes the
meant
/
cement
rhyme in the remainder of this verse paragraph:

Maybe my sensual love for the
consonne

D’appui
, Echo’s fey child, is based upon

A feeling of fantastically planned,

970  Richly rhymed life.

(
PF
68)

The
consonne d’appui
(support consonant) is the consonant preceding the rhyming vowel, in this case the
m
s of the
m
eant-ce
m
ent rhymes. English versification tends to regard this as a blemish, a marring of the purity of the rhyme; French versification, by contrast, tends to see this as an enrichment, an extra grace. Indeed, Shade puns here on the French term “
rime riche
.”

In the next verse paragraph, the penultimate, he then expands on his “feeling of fantastically planned, / Richly rhymed life”: “I feel I understand / Existence… /… only through my art.” He states this as text, but he also shows it as texture, as correlated pattern. For the previous verse paragraph starts with the first of an unprecedentedly intense series of rhyme sounds harking back to the
-ain
/
-ane
rhyme that opens the poem and becomes a structural motif throughout: first, sust
ained
/dr
ained
at the start of the ante-penultimate verse paragraph; then, slightly modulating sust
ained
/dr
ained
and marking the transition between the end of this paragraph and the start of the penultimate, pl
anned
/underst
and
; next, starting the final verse paragraph, and still more explicitly echoing the poem’s first sl
ain
/windowp
ane
rhyme, att
ains
/windowp
anes
; one additional rhyme exactly echoing the pl
anned
/underst
and
rhyme, b
and
/s
and
, a rhyme I will return to; and finally the last line of the poem, ending in “lane,” and missing a rhyme partner, though it would have not only a rhyme but even Shade’s favorite
rime riche
if we were to return to the poem’s first line and its rhyme word, sl
ain
. And in the paragraph that elaborates on “Richly rhymed life” by declaring “I feel I understand / Existence… /… only through my art, / In terms of combinational delight,” Shade has ten consecutive rhymes that are not
rime riche
but begin with the same vowel, the diphthong
i
: del
ight
/r
ight
, div
ine
/l
ine
, surv
ive
/al
ive
,
I
/Jul
y
, fifty-n
ine
/f
ine
. Supporting these end rhymes Shade incorporates a persistent pattern of assonance on the same sound, m
i
nute, m
y
, m
y
, m
y
pr
i
vate,
I
,
i
ambic,
I’
m, m
y
,
I
, n
i
neteen, m
y
self, emphasizing, as it were, his own responsibility, or as if echoing an earlier burst of
i
-sounds: “It suff
i
ced that
I
in l
i
fe could f
i
nd / Some k
i
nd of link-and bobolink, some k
i
nd / Of correlated pattern in the game.”