Stalking Nabokov (63 page)

Sensitive rereaders can see that Shade has Hazel in mind in the poem’s first fourteen lines, even if he does not mention her there. He sees the waxwing smash itself against the “false
azure
of the windowpane.” Hazel takes her own life after her first-ever blind date goes horribly wrong; when they arrive at the Hawaiian bar, in itself a kind of “false azure,” an idyll that can never happen for her, her would-be partner makes a lame excuse and leaves her standing outside with the other couple, “Before the
azure
entrance for a while,” until she takes a bus home, only to exit early from the bus and then from life itself.

The images of inside and outside the house through the first fourteen lines also anticipate the counterpoint Shade establishes on the night of Hazel’s death, himself and Sybil inside, anxiously waiting for their daughter’s return from this first date, and Hazel outside facing her fatal last humiliation. Outside, we know, Hazel has drowned herself; inside, her parents keep vigil:

You gently yawned and stacked away your plate.

We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw

480  Twigs at the windowpane. Phone ringing? No.

I helped you with the dishes. The tall clock

Kept on demolishing young root, old rock.

“Midnight,” you said. What’s midnight to the young?

And suddenly a festive blaze was flung

Across five cedar trunks, snowpatches showed,

And a patrol car on our bumpy road

Came to a crunching stop. Retake, retake!

(
PF
50)

Notice the details that recur from the opening passage: the explicit, emphatic link, “Retake, retake!”; the seemingly everyday but actually pointed recurrence of
windowpane
and
plate
; the even more covert link in the cedar trunks lit up by an ironically festive blaze, for the waxwing at the start of the poem can only be a cedar waxwing,
Bombycilla cedrorum
(and not the Bohemian waxwing,
Bombycilla garrulus
).
⁶

In Shakespeare’s sonnet 30, we tuned into the supple orchestration of sound, singular even by Shakespeare’s standards. As part of a longer poem, the opening of “Pale Fire” can connect with multiple patterns in ways impossible within the small scope of a sonnet, but how do these lines compare with Shakespeare’s sonnets in their
internal
phonic play? Because visual effects dominate so much, we may overlook the aural, but here, too, Shade voices his passion for pattern:

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.

Notice the unusual alliteration in
w
(
w
as,
w
ax
w
ing,
w
indowpane), reinforced by the terminal
w
s, and the repeated
dow
, in “sha
dow”
and “win
dow
pane,” interlaced with the repeated
win
in “wax
win
g” and “
win
dowpane.” Notice, too, that in addition to their end rhymes the first two lines, unusually, also have initial rhyme (
I
/B
y
), and that this initial rhyme then becomes the rhyme for the second couplet (
I
/sk
y
), and that the first line in this second couplet also continues the first couplet’s initial rhyme, so that line 3 has both initial and end rhyme. If we add to these immediate rhymes the reprise at lines 131–32 (“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By feigned remoteness in the windowpane”—and notice here the new internal rhyme on “f
eign
ed”), and the -
ain
/-
ane
rhyme pattern throughout the poem, and the shadow of a rich rhyme between the final line of the poem and the first, the opening couplet forms part of six rhyme patterns in addition to the immediately obvious end rhyme. “Some kind of link-and-bobolink,” indeed!

Shade not only claims to understand his world through “combinational delight,” to have “A feeling of fantastically planned, / Richly rhymed life,” but he also takes issue with those who have rejected rhyme as if its possibilities had been exhausted. In
Four Quartets—
the most admired recent long poem at the time Shade was writing, and his one overt target
⁷
—T. S. Eliot alternates between mostly unrhymed and occasionally rhymed passages and explicitly articulates what he sees as the problems of modern poetry. Shade implicitly identifies the main problem as a failure to see new possibilities in fertile old forms. Eliot’s sometime mentor and editor, Ezra Pound, famously rejected the crimes of rhyme, the evil of the cheville, and the anachronism of poetic inversion to secure a rhyme. I suspect that Shade has a polemic purpose at the end of his first line, in addition to all his other purposes, in placing “slain” after “waxwing,” as if he were seeking the poetic elevation English poets have found from Milton’s “with wandering steps and slow” to Arnold’s “with tremulous cadence slow” and beyond, or as if he were placing the adjective after the noun in a way that modernists no longer tolerated but other poets of note could still use (Kathleen Raine, in “Passion” [1943], shows exactly what modernists had good reason to reject: “Then the sky spoke to me in language clear, / familiar as the heart, than love more near”).
⁸
For a moment, Shade seems to have sinned—only to follow with an adverbial phrase, “By the false azure in the windowpane,” that makes any other placement of “slain” unnatural.

Although Shade maintains the Shakespearean intensity of poetic craft of his first fourteen lines through all 999 lines of “Pale Fire,” I will now jump to the end of the poem and the effects that he makes converge there.

The core of the concealed patterns that Shade embeds in his poem is an almost syllogistic series of images associating Hazel with phantoms and ghosts. He first refers to Hazel obliquely in terms of “The
phantom
of my little daughter’s swing” under the shagbark tree in the garden. He next mentions her in terms of loving his wife most of all “When with a pensive nod you greet her
ghost
.” After Hazel’s death, his recollection of I.P.H. confirms for him that

no
phantom
would

Rise gracefully to welcome you and me

In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree.

Nevertheless as he brings his poem to a close he admits, “I’m reasonably sure that we survive / And that my darling somewhere is alive.” And, as we will see, he does his poetic utmost to call up Hazel’s presence at his conclusion.

In part, his change from “no phantom… near the shagbark tree” to the sense of Hazel somehow near as his poem closes comes from the recognition that he reaches, more than a year after Hazel’s death, in the epiphany after the fountain-mountain fiasco:

take the hint,

And stop investigating my abyss?

But all at once it dawned on me that
this

Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme.

(
PF
62)

He wishes to “play a game of worlds,” and “Pale Fire” itself does so overtly through the counterpoint of parents and child one deadly March night. But throughout the poem he also weaves much stealthier webs of sense.

The “abyss-this” rhyme here has occurred once before, in Shade’s report of the night he

decided to explore and fight

The foul, the inadmissible abyss,

180  Devoting all my twisted life to this

One task. Today I’m sixty-one. Waxwings

Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings.

Here Shade shifts back into the present from the resolution he came to so long ago. The details of his here and now are far from mere orientation: the waxwings confirm that the opening image of his poem already reflects his lifelong task, and the cicada will prove equally part of the pattern.

The lines that follow seem to dip near bathos as Shade pares his nails. But this, too, is far from casual since it leads to Maud Shade, to her slide toward death, to Shade’s renewed anxieties about death, and to an empty cicada case that he and Sibyl see on the day Maud dies:

Espied on a pine’s bark,

As we were walking home the day she died,

An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,

Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,

240  A gum-logged ant.

That Englishman in Nice,

A proud and happy linguist:
je nourris

Les pauvres cigales—
meaning that he

Fed the poor sea gulls!

Lafontaine was wrong:

Dead is the mandible, alive the song.

And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear

Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear.

(
PF
41–42)

Shade leads us from his past self-dedication to exploring death and his present perception of waxwings and cicada, as he pares his nails, through Maud’s death and another cicada—unmentioned in English but explicit in its description, in the French
cigales
, and in the allusion to La Fontaine’s “La Cigale et La Fourmi”—back to him still paring his nails. Shade here confirms by texture what he affirms as text. “Dead is the mandible, alive the song,” he claims—and as we know, a cicada indeed sings while he pares his nails.

Later, after discovering “fountain” should have been “mountain,” Shade comes to the realization that he needs to find “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game” of life. Here in the ring composition from cicada and nails via Maud’s death back to cicada and nails, he has done just this, a fact he reinforces through “Lafontaine was wrong”: the fabulist whose French name means “fountain” was wrong, as
fountain
was wrong in the report of Mrs. Z.’s near-death experience. Echoing texture underwrites text.

But Shade’s key move within this associative chain is to smuggle in Hazel via the blunder (
cigale
, “cicada,” for
sea gull
) made by the English tourist in Nice—where Hazel was conceived when her parents “visited in thirty-three, / Nine months before her birth.” Why does Shade covertly implicate his daughter?

“Pale Fire” has a motif of metamorphoses, of which the tourist’s inadvertent transformation of cicadas into seagulls is the most comical but not the least serious.
⁹
The pattern starts with Shade’s imaginative transformation of himself into the waxwing in the first verse paragraph. It continues in the second verse paragraph with the poem’s next bird, a ring-necked pheasant, a “torquated beauty” (
Phasianus colichus torquatus
) playfully imagined as a “sublimated grouse.” Discussing I.P.H., Shade asserts, “I’m ready to become a floweret, / Or a fat fly, but never, to forget,” while I.P.H. itself offers

560  Precautions to be taken in the case

Of freak reincarnation: what to do

On suddenly discovering that you

Are now a young and vulnerable toad

Plump in the middle of a busy road,

Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,

Or a book mite in a revived divine.

(
PF
54)

Shade, in his recognition after the
fountain
fiasco, hopes to imitate those designers of life “Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns.” And the concentration of composition transforms his everyday world into one of magic metamorphosis: “I rhyme and roam / Throughout the house with, in my fist, a comb / Or a shoehorn, which turns into the spoon / I eat my egg with.”

Through Hazel’s conception in Nice, Shade incorporates his daughter into this pattern by way of the sea gulls absurdly becoming cicadas and the cicada whose empty case, in simple insect metamorphosis, suggests to him, “alive [is] the song”“—an assertion whose structural centrality he quietly underscores by linking the cicada’s singing with the waxwings’ berry picking, and both with his determination to explore death’s abyss: another “link-and-bobolink.”

But he forges the central and saddest link in the failure of Hazel’s looks to improve with time: “Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned / Into a wood duck.” Here Shade puns on the scientific name of the wood duck,
Aix sponsa
(its species name means “bride, betrothed”)
¹⁰
and plays with the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of “The Ugly Duckling” through his wry recognition that the wood duck’s spectacular colors outdo cygnet or even adult swan. (The Cornell Ornithology Laboratory notes that many consider the wood duck “the most beautiful of all waterfowl.”)
¹¹