Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [91]
Line 810: a web of sense
One of the five cabins of which this motor court consists is occupied by the owner, a blear-eyed, seventy-year-old man whose twisted limp reminds me of Shade. He runs a small gas station nearby, sells worms to fishermen, and usually does not bother me, but the other day he suggested I “grab any old book” from a shelf in his room. Not wishing to offend him, I cocked my head at them, to one side, and then to the other, but they were all dog-eared paperback mystery stories and did not rate more than a sigh and a smile. He said wait a minute—and took from a bedside recess a battered clothbound treasure. “A great book by a great guy,” the Letters of Franklin Lane. “Used to see a lot of him in Rainier Park when I was a young ranger up there. You take it for a couple of days. You won’t regret it!”
I did not. Here is a passage that curiously echoes Shade’s tone at the end of Canto Three. It comes from a manuscript fragment written by Lane on May 17, 1921, on the eve of his death, after a major operation: “And if I had passed into that other land, whom would I have sought?… Aristotle!—Ah, there would be a man to talk with! What satisfaction to see him take, like reins from between his fingers, the long ribbon of man’s life and trace it through the mystifying maze of all the wonderful adventure.… The crooked made straight. The Daedalian plan simplified by a look from above—smeared out as it were by the splotch of some master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful straight line.”
Line 819: Playing a game of worlds
My illustrious friend showed a childish predilection for all sorts of word games and especially for so-called word golf. He would interrupt the flow of a prismatic conversation to indulge in this particular pastime, and naturally it would have been boorish of me to refuse playing with him. Some of my records are: hate-love in three, lass-male in four, and live-dead in five (with “lend” in the middle).
Line 822: killing a Balkan king
Fervently would I wish to report that the reading in the draft was:
killing a Zemblan king
—but alas, it is not so: the card with the draft has not been preserved by Shade.
Line 830: Sybil, it is
This elaborate rhyme comes as an apotheosis crowning the entire canto and synthesizing the contrapuntal aspects of its “accidents and possibilities.”
Lines 835-838: Now I shall spy, etc.
The canto, begun on July 19th, on card sixty-eight, opens with a typical Shadism: the cunning working-in of several inter-echoing phrases into a jumble of enjambments. Actually, the promise made in these four lines will not be really kept except for the repetition of their incantatory rhythm in lines 915 and 923-924 (leading to the savage attack in 925-930). The poet like a fiery rooster seems to flap his wings in a preparatory burst of would-be inspiration, but the sun does not rise. Instead of the wild poetry promised here, we get a jest or two, a bit of satire, and at the end of the canto, a wonderful radiance of tenderness and repose.
Lines 841-872: two methods of composing
Really three if we count the all-important method of relying on the flash and flute of the subliminal world and its “mute command” (line 871).
Line 873: My best time
As my dear friend was beginning with this line his July 20 batch of cards (card seventy-one to card seventy-six, ending with line 948), Gradus, at the Orly airport, was walking aboard a jetliner, fastening his seat belt, reading a newspaper, rising, soaring, desecrating the