Stalking Nabokov (62 page)

Nabokov knew that “Pale Fire” might look homely against its exotic commentary, flat and cool against the annotations’ spiky impetuosity, meekly traditional within
Pale Fire’
s bold poem-and-apparatus experiment. But as he wrote not long after the novel itself, “in art, as in nature, a glaring disadvantage may turn out to be a subtle protective device” (
KQK
viii). If the texture of “Pale Fire” seems less rich than we might expect in view of the density of twentieth-century poetry and of Shade’s “not text, but texture” motto, that is only because of Shade’s and his master’s mastery of the psychology of attention as well as the aesthetics of invention. They offer us immediately explicit sense and overt patterns while concealing for later discovery—further delayed by the distractions of the commentary—covert patterns and more poignant implications.

“Pale Fire” is easy to understand but hard to exhaust: its patterns continue to proliferate. And that not only bears out Shade’s “not text, but texture,” his search for “correlated pattern,” but links his art with so much else in life and mind.

All art and all science make sense of our world through pattern. Minds of all kinds are highly efficient pattern extractors. They have evolved to detect effortlessly and almost instantly patterns especially appropriate to particular modes of life—smells for ants or dogs, ultrasound for bats, magnetic fields or nocturnal skies for migrating birds. But only humans have the curiosity to seek out patterns in the open-ended way that once led our ancestors to see constellations in the skies then to infer first the revolution of the earth from the motion of the stars and planets, then the expansion of the universe, then possibilities before or after or beyond or within our patch of our multiverse. As one distinguished chemist remarks, “Patterns are the lifeblood of science and the seeds of theories.”
⁴

Because life builds from the simple to the complex by endless recombination, we live in a world teeming with patterns. Art secures our attention by concentrating the multiple intersecting patterns that matter most to us and therefore stimulating our capacity to make the kinds of rich inferences patterns allow. In storytelling, the key patterns of social life are concentrated into character, event, and plot. In poetry, the indispensable pattern is the line, the poet’s control of our attention in measured verbal doses. Poets can therefore invite our close scrutiny and amplify attention by offering more intense patterns within the line and from line to line.

Poetry need not focus on figures of speech, but it must always operate with patterns, and indeed patterns of patterns. Even metaphor offers a new link between one more or less familiar pattern and others: between, for instance, flight and freedom from the earth, between birds and the soul, between waxwings’ propensity to fly into windows and the tendency of human thought to hurtle against its own limitations. And we understand such images through spreading patterns of neural activation that then offer us new starting blocks for swift-heeled thought.

The pattern folded on pattern that we call metaphor aids our imaginations both inside and outside poetry. But poetry has its own exclusive patterns, tied to the poetic line and the concentrated attention the line allows. In drama, whether in verse or prose, Shakespeare operates with an unequalled density of metaphor, but in his sonnets, to compensate for the patterns of character, event, scene, and plot he no longer has at his disposal, he makes the most of the new patterns the sonnet’s line structure permits. His sonnets, the best-loved collection of lyrics in English, maximize the intensity of pattern that distinguishes lyric poetry. And Shade and Nabokov follow no one so closely as Shakespeare, who supplies the title for “Pale Fire” and the ambience for both Shade’s New Wye and his commentator’s fabled capital.

One of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets sets the pleasures of memory against its pains, the balm of recollection against the astringent recognition that what we have to recall we cannot have at hand:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,

And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

    But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

    All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

In statement, but not in effect, the poem could be condensed to: “When I think over the past, I grieve anew at all I have lost, but if I think of thee, dear friend, all losses are restored, and sorrows end.” What makes this one of Shakespeare’s greatest sonnets is that after its elaborations, after its long retrospectives of sorrow, even in the sweet backcast of memory, there comes, but only at the very end, the surprise of its final shift: a speaker who had seemed alone with his losses suddenly has a dear friend to address, who dispels all this reminiscential grief. Is that conclusion a sweet compliment, a fine hyperbole, a heartfelt tribute, or a particular mood, to be complicated by later moods?

Like most Shakespeare sonnets, sonnet 30 signposts the alignment of its structural, logical and syntactical patterns: “When… I” opens quatrain 1, “Then can I” quatrains 2 and 3, and “But if… I” the couplet. We usually think of verbs as concrete, but this sonnet swarms with verbs—almost all with the speaker as subject—that remain abstract or at least unimagistic, registering not so much action as emotion. The first thirteen lines have eleven finite verbs, all with
I
as subject (summon, sigh, sought, wail, can drown, weep, moan, can grieve, tell, pay, think). But once the speaker, seemingly isolated in retrospective sorrows, thinks of the unexpected “thee, dear friend,”
I
drops out as subject and two new subjects in the sonnet’s last line reverse the poem’s entire direction: “All losses are restored, and sorrows end.”

Unlike many other Shakespeare sonnets, sonnet 30 almost ignores the visual and the figurative. Instead, the poet saturates his poem with patterns of sound. And although he does demarcate structure, sense, and syntax, he does not differentiate the subject from quatrain to quatrain: each quatrain shows the speaker sunk in the repetitions of grief, since Shakespeare needs time to accumulate the apparent monotony of grief before suddenly dismissing it. Within and between quatrains, he amasses phonic repetitions: the
s
s and
w
s of quatrain 1; the “silent thought… sigh… sought” echoed by quatrain 2’s “sight”; the “thought… thing… thing… sought” echoed in the couplet’s “think”; and the first line’s “s
il
ent
thought”
answered in the penultimate line’s “wh
il
e I
think
.” Quatrain 2’s “p
reci
ous… af
resh”
meshes with the first quatrain’s “s
essi
ons.” In the tour de force of quatrain 3, each line accentuates the repetition of griefs through the repetition of sound, “moan… many,” “grieve at grievances,” “woe to woe,” and “fore-bemoaned moan,” but the “f
ore
-…
o’er
… f
ore
-… bef
ore”
pattern finds its requital in the last line’s “rest
ore
d.” And after the round of seemingly relentless repetition of word and sound, in the last line, suddenly, every word save “and” is new.

Shakespeare expresses the repetition of remembered woe and the restoration that present friendship allows not only in idea but in the patterns of word, sound, and structure, in ways that would draw unwelcome attention to their design in drama but that perfectly suit the sonnet’s capacity to concentrate attention on a line, a quatrain, or a whole poem at once.

Helen Vendler, perhaps the best living critic of poetry in English (and an admirer of Shade’s and Nabokov’s verse) remarks that since Shakespeare’s sonnets “often participate in several patterns simultaneously”—she specifies phonetic, syntactic, relational, and conceptual patterns—“their true ‘meaning’ is chartable only by charting their pattern-sets.” She shows how “Shakespeare’s elated variety of invention” “encourages alertness in his reader” and adds that in many of the sonnets he invents “some game or other and play[s] it out to its conclusion in deft and surprising ways… rarely amus[ing] himself the same way twice.”
⁵
Everything she says here of Shakespeare applies at least as much to Shade.

Take the first fourteen lines of “Pale Fire”: not a sonnet but, perhaps in homage to Shakespeare, forming three quatrains, a break to a new verse paragraph, and a new couplet—itself part of a new quatrain, but we can stop after line fourteen.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

 10   Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake

Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque.

(
PF
33)

Each of the first three four-line groups, like each quatrain in many Shakespeare sonnets, supplies a self-contained variant on a common theme, in this case, Shade’s exact but imaginative visions of the outside world from inside his house. In a passage in his Cornell lectures, Nabokov asks his students to envision the difference in a patch of countryside as apprehended by a stolid businessman on vacation, eager only to get via the nice new road to the nice new eating place in Newton that an office friend recommends, or a botanist who recognizes every plant, or a farmer who has lived there all his life and knows every trail and shadow (
LL
252–55). Shade as poet stands as
antithesis
of the traveler, transforming his world in imagination rather than taking it as commonly received, and he
embodies
both the botanist—he is an astute naturalist, with a detailed knowledge of local insects, birds, flowers, and trees—and the farmer—everything he can see around his home comes amplified by the attachments of memory. Imagination, knowledge, and emotion, the three mental axes Nabokov’s classroom example implies, enrich every feature of the world Shade’s poem records.

In “Pale Fire” Shade can avail himself of the patterns of narrative—character, event, scene, and plot—as well as lyric’s concentration on word, image, and line. Here his opening lines work inter alia as self-characterization, disclosing his acute observation and intense appreciation of the world around him, his inclination to transform what he sees, and his tendency to turn that transformation into an expression of his pleasure in this world, his apprehension at the prospect of losing it, his search for something permanent beyond.

There can be few more striking openings in poetry. Unlike “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” but like other Shakespeare sonnets, Shade’s poem focuses on the visual, recording exactly what he saw from his house but slightly shifting his stance each time: elaborate identification and metaphor in the first “quatrain,” a playful role as coproducer of natural effects in the second (“I’d duplicate / … Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass”), an enthusiastic spectator of nature’s performance in the third. Even when he sat at his desk his imaginative response could turn the world outside into an elaborate show.

The rich observation-cum-reverie-cum-metaphor of Shade’s opening introduces the thematic pattern that dominates the poem. The waxwing’s hurtling itself against the illusion of continued cloudless blue stands for Shade’s own attempts to project himself beyond himself and perhaps beyond death, flying on “in the reflected sky.” That becomes more apparent near the end of canto 1, when an elegant echo (“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By feigned remoteness in the windowpane”) introduces the boyhood fits he now sees as almost a foreglimpse of death, or at the start of canto 2 (“I decided to explore and fight / The foul, the inadmissible abyss”), or at the start of canto 3, with its amused resistance to I.P.H.’s nostrums.

Although the opening image continues to accumulate resonance, it remains vivid, immediate, accessible. Yet at the same time Shade also incorporates patterns he knows we will take time to see. Even on a first reading, we will notice the modulated reprise of the opening couplet later in canto 1 and the unfinished couplet at the end of the poem, “Trundling an empty barrow up the lane,” which would offer a
rime riche—
Shade’s admitted addiction—with the first line of the poem. It takes much longer to see that a pattern of rhymes in
ain
and
ane
or near equivalents (-
ains
, -
anes
; -
ained
; -
anned
, -
and
) weaves its strategic way through the poem, in ways I will shortly explore (see
NPFMAD
191–95).

If most first-time readers notice the incomplete couplet at the end of the poem, and its possible completion by the opening line, few will register without help another link between start and finish: the waxwing in the opening and the butterfly the
Vanessa atalanta
(Red Admiral) at the close. Shade the naturalist knows and intends the link, the flash of bright red on the wings of each, explicit in the case of the butterfly (“A dark Vanessa with a crimson band”), left implicit in the waxwing. Readers will also discover only gradually that the various winged creatures—both birds and insects—that fly through the poem do more than reflect Shade as observant naturalist in a wooded suburban setting (or Nabokov as irrepressible lepidopterist) and in fact form part of another deliberate pattern that, like so much in the poem, revolves both around Hazel and around Shade’s sense that pattern matters (“It sufficed that I in life could find / Some kind of link-and-bobolink”—a bobolink being another American bird). We will also soon follow some of these bird and insect trails.