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Re: Yet another reconsideration of Pale Fire
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Nabokov was not unfamiliar with cats,*but it's always Charles Kinbote the one who mentions cats, not John Shade. Should any reference to Smart's Geoffrey by Shade be found, it would speak strongly in favour of the "Shade/Kinbote" theory. However, I don't think that slight similarities ("pure tongue" or "electrical fire is the spiritual substance...") are significant enough.
I bring them up here only as a sort of "curiosity," for the fun of it! (if our EDs are in agreement with that)
John Shade: But like some little lad forced by a wench/ With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench,/ I was corrupted, terrified, allured...
C. Smart : For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
John Shade's poems about the nature of electricity, following Kinbote's insertion and commentary: "Two minutes pass. Life is hopeless, afterlife heartless. Hazel is heard quietly weeping in the dark. John Shade lights a lantern. Sybil lights a cigarette. Meeting adjourned [...] The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity," which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death: The dead, the gentle dead - who knows? - / In tungsten filaments abide.../ Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe/Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine/... is an old friend of mine/Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell/The torments of a Tamerlane,/The roar of tyrants torn in hell.."
C. Smart: For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire. /
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
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* In a 2005 facebook-chat I found a question by 'Woyzeck': "While reading the biography of Vera Nabokov, Vladimir's wife, I encountered
such a passage:: "With the house came the first in a short series of rented pets, a tiger cat named Tom Jones, rechristened "Tomsky" by the Nabokovs. In a charming example of her slightly synthetic English, Vera remembered Tomsky as 'a gutter cat'. " As I am not a native English speaker, the "syntheticity" of this phrase escapes me. Could anyone shed some light on it? What's wrong with this gutter cat?.
In one of the replies, besides "gutter snipe, alley cat" I read: "We used to have a cat whose favorite spot to watch the world go by was on the edge of the roof, where the rain runs off, like a sort of fuzzy gargoyle...we called him gutter-percher..." ( the enchanting ways Nabokoviana travels about always amazes me). Brian Boyd (The American Years, 212) adds another link to VN's Tomsky-Jones: "Not simply, as it looks, a case of adding the "-ski" suffix to Russify the name; the Nabokovs compunded May Sarton's play on "tomcat" and "Tom Jones" by superimposing an allusion to the character Tomski in Pushkin's "Queen of Spades."
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I bring them up here only as a sort of "curiosity," for the fun of it! (if our EDs are in agreement with that)
John Shade: But like some little lad forced by a wench/ With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench,/ I was corrupted, terrified, allured...
C. Smart : For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
John Shade's poems about the nature of electricity, following Kinbote's insertion and commentary: "Two minutes pass. Life is hopeless, afterlife heartless. Hazel is heard quietly weeping in the dark. John Shade lights a lantern. Sybil lights a cigarette. Meeting adjourned [...] The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity," which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death: The dead, the gentle dead - who knows? - / In tungsten filaments abide.../ Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe/Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine/... is an old friend of mine/Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell/The torments of a Tamerlane,/The roar of tyrants torn in hell.."
C. Smart: For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire. /
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
............................................................................................................................................................................................................
* In a 2005 facebook-chat I found a question by 'Woyzeck': "While reading the biography of Vera Nabokov, Vladimir's wife, I encountered
such a passage:: "With the house came the first in a short series of rented pets, a tiger cat named Tom Jones, rechristened "Tomsky" by the Nabokovs. In a charming example of her slightly synthetic English, Vera remembered Tomsky as 'a gutter cat'. " As I am not a native English speaker, the "syntheticity" of this phrase escapes me. Could anyone shed some light on it? What's wrong with this gutter cat?.
In one of the replies, besides "gutter snipe, alley cat" I read: "We used to have a cat whose favorite spot to watch the world go by was on the edge of the roof, where the rain runs off, like a sort of fuzzy gargoyle...we called him gutter-percher..." ( the enchanting ways Nabokoviana travels about always amazes me). Brian Boyd (The American Years, 212) adds another link to VN's Tomsky-Jones: "Not simply, as it looks, a case of adding the "-ski" suffix to Russify the name; the Nabokovs compunded May Sarton's play on "tomcat" and "Tom Jones" by superimposing an allusion to the character Tomski in Pushkin's "Queen of Spades."
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/