While I was going thru assorted sources to learn
more about Andrea del Sarto and Browning, I found a picture of the poet and...
his beard! His beard...isn't it another example of the "newgate frill"? Perhaps
it's Browning who is indicated in Pale Fire, another
Robert, another poet under a different guise, all the time?
Here are interesting links to Nabokov's work. I
started with Beerbohm's "Brown" who led me to Browning's
poem ( cf. item II from the site that carries RB's image).
Next, various
interconnections linking peaches, Brown, Browning in Lolita, PF and
Ada.
I-
Max Beerbohm's playwright, "Brown Savonarola" (
who, as a boy, had been mocked at school because his parents christened him
Ladbroke Brown) had named him his "literary executor". The narrator tried
to find a producer for Brown's unfinished piece (the playwright was
struck dead by an omnibus right in front of the narrator, while he was in
the process of describing the risk of his dying in exactly the same
way). Next, he attempted to complete the missing act, with even less
success. In Brown's play, at the end of Act. III, a Pope enters to demand the arrest of Savonarola and
Lucrezia Borgia.
We read [ Re-enter Guelfs and Ghibellines
fighting. SAV. and LUC. are arrested by Papal officers.
Enter MICHAEL ANGELO. ANDREA DEL SARTO appears for a moment at a
window. PIPPA passes. Brothers of the Misericordia go by, singing a
Requiem for Francesca da Rimini. Enter BOCCACCIO, BENVENUTO CELLINI and
many others, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves but scarcely
audible...]
What an array of names and "scarcely
audible" allusions in Max B's short-piece. As in "Lolita" (revamped in Pale
Fire) we find a surprisingly displaced "Pippa passes" and then
Browning again, through Andrea del Sarto ( the poem he wrote in
Florence).
In Ada there are several Browns (twisting around
Robert B. and René Chateaubriand), there's Browning, the poet, a "Brown Hill
College," where Aqua studied. Also Ada once attended a
Brownhill school which keeps to old-fashioned rules under a
certain Miss Cleft, its headmistress.
This reference takes us back to
"Lolita" where there's the most obvious reference to the poet
Browning ( "She watched the listless pale fountain girl put
in the ice, pour in the coke...You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always
admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the
concoction." ) but now, it's not Ada's mistress, Miss Cleft,
who is mentioned, but a quote from Robert Browning ( Lolita: "Wow! Looks swank," remarked my vulgar darling ...and with a
childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had struck in the
peach-cleft-to quote Robert
Browning.")
Ada teems with
"Browning's peaches" ( "Her drawing teacher, Miss
Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were
considered (in 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the
celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind —
fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing
girl scouts in bursting shorts...")
In Pale Fire, Kinbote mentions Browning directly
( on lines 671-672, for Shade's "The Untamed Seahorse - "See Browning’s My Last Duchess. See it and condemn the fashionable
device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry — or a long
poem, alas — with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work
of the past..." There's Gradus, with digestive problems, when
he almost drops his gun ( a "Browning") in the toilet.
And yet, in
the beginning, there's always, "Lolita" (and other assorted Browns and
Brownings) ...
II -
"Edward Dowden in his fine but now forgotten book, The Life of Robert
Browning (London. Dent, 1915/1927), in a footnote on page 191, states that
"Mrs Andrew Crosse, in her article, 'John Kenyon and his Friends' (Temple
Bar Magazine, April 1900), writes: 'When the Brownings were living in Florence,
Kenyon had begged them to procure for him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti of
Andea del Sarto and his wife. Mr Browning was unable to get the copy made with
any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea del Sarto
- and sent it to Kenyon!'."...
I would argue that the voice in the Victorian poem is not only that of
Browning's 'Andrea' but is that of Browning himself, of a Browning deeply
resenting Elizabeth's greater fame during her lifetime, and that Robert Browning
has thus constructed of Andrea Del Sarto's double portrait his own 'Portrait of
a Marriage'. Reverberating with these portraits of wives is also that of
Browning's 'My Last Duchess'. "