JM: Could Nabokov have had
this Muldoon in mind at the time he prepared his novel? Probably not,
since Paul Muldoon was born on 20 June 1951 and would be too young at the
time...[ ] He is also the president of the Poetry Society (U.K.) and
Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.Coincidences? Prophetic powers?
Brian Boyd: Nabokov wouldn’t have
known the poet Paul Muldoon but he did know an Irish name when he came across
one (as in Clare Quilty). And in 1957 he was drafting a novel, Pale Fire, that
at that stage, he reported to a publisher, would feature another man of Irish
descent, President Kennedy—and this three years before Kennedy was
elected.
Jansy Mello: You stimulated me to search after an Irish Quilty, using
our sometimes opinionated modern encyclopedias online.
Here's from wiki:
Wikipedia: "The name 'Quilty' is an Anglicized form of the
ancient Gaelic name of "Caoilte" (pronounced: Kweelteh). There was a mythic
Celtic warrior (c. 3rd Century A.D.) by the name of Caoilte Mac Ronan
[ ] The book "If You're A Wee Bit Irish: a chart of old Irish
families collected from folk tradition" by William Durning (1978) recounts an
alleged ancestry of Caoilte back to Adam. James Joyce (1882–1941) in chapter
twelve of his masterpiece, Ulysses, (1922) has "The tribe of Caolte" as one of
the twelve tribes of Ireland in a biblical parallel to the twelve tribes of
Israel [ ] Quilty is also a small town in County Clare Ireland, though
this quilty is an anglicization of a different Irish word "coillte" meaning
"woods". [ ]
Fictional characters with the name Quilty: Bridie Quilty,
protagonist in the film I See a Dark Stranger (1941), played by Deborah Kerr;
Clare Quilty is a fictional character in the 1955 novel Lolita by Vladimir
Nabokov. Peter Sellers (1962) and Frank Langella (1997) played the role in
two subsequent movies. The name Clare Quilty was inspired by the town of
Quilty in County Clare."
Really? Why Quilty from County Clare, Ireland?
In a former posting, related to the word "livens" you mentioned three
names: Swinburne, Scott and Longfellow. The last reference came as a surprise.
Nevertheless it was always Longfellow's epic Hiawatha that came to my mind
whenever I pondered about John Shade's use of "versipel"*.
Having time to spare, since it's the holiday season for me, I tried a
quick search and, again thru wiki, came to the following:
"The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem, in trochaic tetrameter, by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero. Longfellow's sources for
the legends and ethnography found in his poem were the Ojibwe Chief
Kahge-ga-gah-bowh" [ ]Much of the scholarship on The Song
of Hiawatha in the twentieth century...has concentrated on its lack of fidelity
to Ojibwe ethnography and literary genre rather than the poem as a literary work
in its own right. In addition to Longfellow's own annotations, Stellanova Osborn
(and previously F. Broilo in German) tracked down "chapter and verse" for every
detail Longfellow took from Schoolcraft [ ] Intentionally epic in
scope, The Song of Hiawatha was described by its author as "this Indian
Edda". But Thompson judged that despite Longfellow's claimed "chapter and
verse" citations, the work "produce[s] a unity the original will not warrant,"
i.e., it is non-Indian in its totality."
And the versipel "mittens"?
"...parodies began to appear immediately the poem was published. Edward
Wagenknecht has called it "the most parodied poem in the English
language".
In 1856, a slim book entitled The Song of Milkanwatha: Translated
from the Original Feejee appeared, by "Marc Antony Henderson" (Rev. George A.
Strong (1832–1912) and published by "Tickell and Grinne." It is a 94-page-long
parody of Hiawatha, following it chapter by chapter. It contains the following
passage:
In one hand Peek-Week, the squirrel,
in the other hand the
blow-gun—
Fearful instrument, the blow-gun;
And Marcosset and
Sumpunkin,
Kissed him, 'cause he killed the squirrel,
'Cause it was a
rather big one.
From the squirrel-skin, Marcosset
Made some mittens for
our hero,
Mittens with the fur-side inside,
With the fur-side next his
fingers
So's to keep the hand warm inside;
That was why she put the
fur-side—
Why she put the fur-side, inside.
Over time, an elaborated version developed that was sometimes
attributed to Strong and titled "The Modern Hiawatha":
When he killed the
Mudjokivis,
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side
inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side
inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side
outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That's why he put the fur side
inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside
outside.
[ ] Lewis Carroll wrote Hiawatha's Photographing, which he
introduced by noting (in the same rhythm as the Longfellow poem) "In an age of
imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is
known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for
rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of The Song
of Hiawatha. Having then distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the
following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader
to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject." A poem of some 200
lines, it describes Hiawatha's attempts to photograph the members of a
pretentious middle-class family ending in disaster.
From his shoulder
Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding
rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay
compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the
hinges
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated
figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.
............................................................
* -J.S: lines 942-948
Throughout the
house with, in my fist, a comb
Or a
shoehorn, which turns into the spoon
I eat my egg with. In the afternoon
You drive me to the library. We dine
At
half past six. And that odd muse of
mine,
My versipel, is with me
everywhere,
In carrel and in car, and in my
chair.