In a message dated 4/27/2010 4:37:09 PM Central Daylight Time, chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET writes:
To the list,
It would seem that no one recalls (or I suppose even believes) that I solved this puzzle already: Shade is remembering the other suicide in his life, that of his paramour (the so-called other wife) "in ballerina black" who "haunts lit 101" (presumably Shade's class). She committed suicide with her child by Shade by driving into oncoming traffic on another "wild march night." The Erl König is implicated by Shade, but he is himself the real villain of the piece.
I found this out by tracking down the "next babe" whose cries Aunt Maud lived to hear. If interested, please to consult the archives.
very peevishly,
Carolyn Kunin
As you've said, Carolyn. Of course, this would mean that Shade fathered a child by a clearly living student (mentioned by colleagues and invited by Kinbote to dinner) who also died some years earlier (around 1950), shortly after she gave birth to an illegitimate child which Shade then presented to Aunt Maude so that she could hear the baby cry. Doesn't this perhaps seem illogical?
In a small, gossipy college town, Shade gets a student pregnant; the student has a child that Shade then shows to his aged aunt; the student then commits suicide along with the child; Sybil doesn't have a clue; and neither do the other members of the faculty; there is no scandal at all. Is this a fair summary?
"She lived to hear the next babe cry" is ambiguous. It could simply mean that she lived long enough to see the next generation (Hazel) born, which doesn't mean that she died immediately thereafter (Kinbote seems a little obtuse in his note here). Or it could mean, given the descriptions of Maud's taste in poetry and painting ("grotesque growths and images of doom") in l. 89, that she enjoyed such things as hearing babies cry (as in, "she lived to see suffering"). In this sense, the "next babe" doesn't necessarily mean Hazel (or an illegitimate child of Shade); it could mean the next baby that she sees--she perversely enjoys hearing babies crying.
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