Nabokov,
of course, takes his title from Timon of
Athens, Act IV, Scene 3, lines 431-35:
“The
sun’s a thief and with his great attraction
Robs
the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief
And
her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The
sea’s a thief whose liquid surge resolves
The
moon into salt tears . . .”
In
lines 961-62 of John Shade’s poem-within-the-novel “Pale Fire,” he writes: “But
this transparent thingum does require / Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.” Shade’s insane commentator,
Charles Kinbote, glosses Shade’s lines like this: “But in which of the Bard's
works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have
with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon
of Athens — in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be
regarded as an equivalent of `pale fire’ (if it had, my luck would have been a
statistical monster).” The true “statistical monster,” of course, is that the
only play he carries around is Timon of
Athens, a minor work by anyone’s calculation, and written in a language
that doesn’t exist except in Kinbote’s delusions of grandeur. In Pale Fire, Nabokov takes game-playing (“Word
Golf”) and puzzle-solving, pleasures his critics find irritatingly trivial, and
uses them in service to a profoundly sad and funny story. For its depiction of heart-broken
grief in twentieth-century fiction, Hazel Shade’s suicide is rivaled only by Leopold
Bloom’s vision of his dead son Rudy.
By
happenstance, a reader last week sent me a passage from Timon of Athens as a comment on something I had written. I wrote
back appreciatively and he replied with a story about his time in the airborne
school at Fort Benning, Ga. He had three friends there, all, like him,
university graduates and all humanities majors. Let him pick up the story:
“We
played several literary games during our time together, the main one being `What
poem is this line from?’ Another game was to pick the most beautiful passage
from Shakespeare, an impossible chore, of course, but we pretended. It helped
pass the time, and it was a lot of fun. In the Shakespeare game, I dug up the
below lines from Timon of Athens. I remembered these men and our games when I
quoted Timon…”
Here
is the passage, spoken by Timon, my reader favored:
“Timon
hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon
the beached verge of the salt flood,
Who
once a day with his embossed froth
The
turbulent surge shall cover; thither come,
And
let my grave-stone be your oracle.”
My
reader resumes:
“My
pals, bright men all, agreed the passage was lovely, but, as you might expect,
they had lines they thought more lovely—and their lines were at least as
lovely. I have often thought, particularly now than I am older that no oracle
speaks a greater truth, if truth can rest on gradients, than a grave-stone. I
wonder after the four of us went our separate ways if any of the three were
killed in Vietnam. I refuse to visit the wall and look.”
People
like my colleague and my reader help make life endurable and rewarding. Poetry
is not an academic recreation, a career move or a way to impress your friends
with your sophistication. Here are the lines that follow the passage above, the
final words spoken in the play by Timon:
“Lips,
let sour words go by and language end:
What
is amiss plague and infection mend!
Graves
only be men's works and death their gain!
Sun,
hide thy beams! Timon hath done his reign.”
Followed
by a simple stage direction: “Retires to
his cave.”
1 comment:
I went to London on the weekend and while there I bought Clive James's Poetry Notebook. It's a reasonably new collection of things he's written about poetry. You might like it. His clarity and intelligence seem to me to shine on most pages.
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