Matt
Roth, in another fascinating find on a dust-jacket: While on vacation in New Hampshire, I happened to find, in a used
book store, a first edition of Housman's The Name and Nature of Poetry.
As others before me have noted, this book provides the source of Kinbote's
paraphrase in his note to line 920: "Housman . . . says somewhere (in a
foreword?) exactly the opposite: The bristling of thrilled little hairs
obstructed his barbering."
Roth notes that
" When Kinbote guesses that the Housman passage is from
a foreword, he is of course wrong[...] The edition I found still retains its
original dust jacket (unlike the library copies I have seen) and it happens that
the very passage paraphrased by Kinbote is quoted on the inside front flap of
the jacket. Not exactly a foreword, but this may be what Kinbote/Nabokov had in
mind, I think."
JM: Matt, in the book you quoted Housman criticized
eighteenth-century's pedantry and artificiality: "Man had ceased
to live from the depths of his nature"..."He occupied himself by choice with
thoughts which do not range beyond the sphere of his
understanding". John
Shade, perhaps prompted by Sybil ( Kinbote informs that it was Sybil who
weaned Shade from religion), tried to be as cynical and fatalistic as
Housman (lines 99 and 100 : My
God died young. Theolatry I found/ Degrading, and its
premises, unsound").
Although Shade tried to adopt a cynical attitude, as we
see in his barbering bath-soap
musing, he ended up embroiled in issues way beyond a common mortal's
"sphere of understanding".
Below, an almost "religious" exchange
bt. Kinbote and Shade, with echoes of Housman's fatalism running thru
Kinbote's sermon - and where I also detect a subtle
indication about Darwinist Granpa Huxley: "...knowing something of
the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. [...]
The chess board is the world, the pieces the phenomena of the universe, the
rules of the game are what we call the laws of
nature..".
kinbote: Now I have caught you, John: once
we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual
hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance
reaching into eternity. Consider the situation. Throughout eternity our poor
ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no
support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote’s ghost, poor Shade’s shade, may
have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere — oh, from sheer
absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the
preposterous game of nature — if there be any
rules.
shade: There are rules in chess
problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for
instance.
( btw, I learned that Housman had planned
to sign "A Shropshire Lad" under the pen-name Terence
Hearsay... )