Dear List,
Search-tools on Nabokov-Frost brougt old news and
with it, Ron Rosembaum. Would any Nab-L participant be able to send me a
copy of Professor Abraham Socher's TLS piece on Pale Fire and
Frost? Is it available online?
From the resume below, I got a glimpse of Ron R's relative
dismissal of Robert Frost, a poet who (thanks to VN!) I've been
reading with renewed insight and enjoyment - and an additional perplexity
(Frost's way of reading the Bible, for
example the story of Jonah and the book of Job, is not considered
by him as being worthy of explicitation, since he seems to imagine that
everybody will read the Bible in the same way as he does. I certainly do
not, therefore I ignore what his, "universal," reference was
meant to signify). His informal comments about rhyme, creative and poor rhymes
and the musicality of poetry are very enlightening.
I'm uncapable to rate - over-rate or under-rate - Frost's or
Shade's poetry but, for me, there's not a shadow of a doubt that Frost
is "a real American poet", not a fictional one whose "passport is
Art," ie, I consider that, for better or for worse,
Frost's social engagement and literary standing belongs
to another order as that of John Shade. For one thing, his place is
not metaphorical, but made of flesh and blood, like Vladimir V.
Nabokov's - who signed the whole package titled "Pale
Fire".
The extracted reviews:
Last
winter, I received an e-mail from David Glenn, a writer at The Chronicle of
Higher Education, who said he'd been traveling through Oberlin, Ohio, and had
seen a flyer for a forthcoming Oberlin College lecture on Nabokov's debt to
Robert Frost in Pale Fire. I believe Mr. Glenn thought I'd be interested
because of past columns I'd devoted to Pale Fire—either that or my more recent
essay on the “cryptomnesia” controversy (The Observer, April 19, 2004)
[ ... ] the controversy raised issues about the creative process of perhaps
the greatest writer of the modern age and the secondhand description of the
forthcoming Oberlin lecture on Pale Fire seemed to promise to raise similar
questions. I immediately got in touch with the Oberlin lecturer, Abraham Socher,
a professor of intellectual history, who told me that his talk would focus on
the famous opening lines—“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”—of the poem in
Nabokov's Pale Fire.[...]composed by Nabokov's fictional John Shade and
entitled “Pale Fire” [...] The poem is, I believe—even embedded in a
novel—perhaps the greatest American verse work of the 20th century.
Professor Socher wasn't claiming plagiarism or cryptomnesia, or anything
quite so scandalous, but an influence that gave us an insight into the way
Nabokov conceals and reveals his sources. To me, in the literary realm it was a
headline-making assertion. I'm sure I don't have to explain this for most
Observer readers, a literate bunch. But just to remind those who haven't reread
Pale Fire recently, here is that opening quatrain:
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.
The reason that
the origin of these four lines is worthy of attention and investigation is that
they capture, in compressed form, the preoccupation of Pale Fire with the
question of art and life, art and afterlife, of artistic “originality,” with
fiction as the “reflected sky,” the distinction between primary experiences and
their afterlife in aesthetic reflections of it. Indeed, it is often forgotten
that the mystery of the afterlife itself is at the heart of the poem whose
ostensible subject is the suicide of the poet's daughter and his subsequent
meditation on the possibility of finding her in the afterlife. That waxwing—a
bird deceived by an image, by a reflection (the “false azure in the
windowpane”)—smashed into the window and died, but “lived on” after death, “flew
on” in the afterlife of art, the “reflected sky.”
While Robert Frost is a
figure in the poem, (John Shade, Nabokov's fictional author, ruefully
characterizes himself as “one oozy footstep” behind Frost in poetic reputation)
no one has heretofore suggested that Frost himself was a source of the “waxwing”
image. In the past, the passage from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens that gave
Nabokov his title (“The moon's an arrant thief / And her pale fire she snatches
from the sun”) has been considered the most salient thematic source for Pale
Fire. Professor Socher wasn't alleging theft from Frost on Nabokov's
part—far from it. But when I asked him to send me a draft of his Oberlin
lecture, it turned out that he believes he's found what you might call the sun
to the “waxwing” quatrain's moon: a little-known Robert Frost poem that could
well be the origin of the waxwing/window image. I thought Professor Socher's
lecture made a persuasive case; I suggested that he try to get it published in
the U. K. Times Literary Supplement, which had published Mr. Maar's
“cryptomnesia” essay. And, in fact, he did—you can read a 4,000-word version of
it in the July 1 TLS. (I hope he puts it online as well.) Now for the Frost poem
itself, a short work that first appeared in a 1958 issue of The Saturday Review
of Literature (Pale Fire was published in 1962) under the title “Of a Winter
Evening.” Professor Socher quotes these lines: The winter owl banked just in
time / to pass /And save herself from breaking/ window glass./And her wings
straining suddenly / aspread/ Caught color from the last of/ evening red/ In a
display of underdown and quill/ To glassed-in children at the window sill.
Professor Socher carefully builds his case for the owl being the source of the
waxwing by adducing some surprising (to me) connections between Nabokov and
Frost (the Nabokovs rented a house that had once been occupied by Frost; the two
did a couple of readings together; Frost lost a child to suicide, the ostensible
subject of “Pale Fire.” Also, Nabokov once said that he knew only “one short
poem” by Frost, never identified.) And Professor Socher notes that the issue of
The Saturday Review with Frost's owl poem featured a commentary by John Ciardi
on Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—more reason to suspect that
Nabokov, who knew Ciardi, might have read that issue. The most convincing
evidence (which Professor Socher expanded on in an e-mail to me after the TLS
piece came out), was that Kinbote, Nabokov's unreliable fictional narrator,
“seems to have profited from [Ciardi's Saturday Review commentary]”—in other
words, Kinbote's creator, Nabokov, seems to have read Ciardi, which would place
that issue of The Saturday Review in Nabokov's hands, with only a few pages
between the Ciardi piece and the owl poem. I'm persuaded by Professor
Socher's scrupulous essay that this could be a major discovery, the source or
inspiration for the signature image in one of the great works of literature of
our time, and a further clue to Nabokov's creative method: the way he invokes
Frost overtly while making use of him covertly. (Professor Socher told me that
Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd had e-mailed him to say that he'd also found his
conjecture convincing.)
I asked Professor Socher how he'd made the
connection, and he told me that while the book he was writing was on the
18th-century Jewish heretic Solomon Maimon, he'd been reading both Nabokov and
Frost since his youth, and that he'd come across the owl poem in Frost's last
collection of poems. That he'd traced it (under a different title) to the
original issue of The Saturday Review he'd found in a university library, where
the presence of the Ciardi commentary allowed him to solidify his conjecture
that Nabokov had read the owl poem further on in the issue.
I would only add
something that Professor Socher and I politely disagree upon. It seems to me
that the owl poem demonstrates something I've always felt: that Robert Frost is
a vastly overrated poet and that “Pale Fire,” the poem itself, is one of the
most underrated American poems of the past century.
That owl poem—so crude,
so poshlust, as Nabokov would say: “Oooh, look at Nature, so red in tooth and
claw!” So scary and all—the thin pane of glass demonstrates how little separates
us from predatory death, etc., etc. Snooze.Meanwhile, the poem called “Pale
Fire,” perhaps because of its peculiar place within a novel, has often been
denied its due as a poem. Some have mistakenly called it a parody; some have
shown that it demonstrates the justness of Shade's self-deprecatory
characterization of himself as an “oozy footstep” behind Frost. In fact, taken
on its own, it surpasses in every respect anything that Frost has ever done.
Deal with it, Frostians.
One
thing people sometimes forget when thinking about Pale Fire is just how funny it
is (another contrast with Frost, who is, to my mind, utterly humorless). And, in
fact, it was Pale Fire that led me to the discovery of—what should I call it?—a
new genre, the hilarious comic novels in progress being written [...]
From
Here To Obscurity: July 2005 Professor Socher wasn't alleging theft from
Frost on Nabokov's part—far from it. But when
I asked him to send me a draft of his Oberlin lecture, ...fater.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_archive.html -