750 She told her interviewer of "The Land Beyond the Veil" and the account contained A hint of angels, and a glint of stained Windows, and some soft music, and a choice Of hymnal items, and her mother"s voice; But at the end she mentioned a remote Landscape, a hazy orchard - and I quote: "Beyond that orchard through a kind of smoke I glimpsed a tall white fountain - and awoke."
If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt 760 Sees a new animal and captures it, And if, a little later, Captain Smith Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.
Our fountain was a signpost and a mark Objectively enduring in the dark, Strong as a bone, substantial as a tooth, And almost vulgar in its robust truth!
The article was by Jim Coates. To Jim Forthwith I wrote. Got her address from him.
Drove west three hundred miles to talk to her.
770 Arrived. Was met by an impa.s.sioned purr.
Saw that blue hair, those freckled hands, that rapt Orchideous air - and knew that I was trapped.
"Who"d miss the opportunity to meet A poet so distinguished?" It was sweet Of me to come! I desperately tried To ask my questions. They were brushed aside: "Perhaps some other time." The journalist Still had her scribblings. I should not insist.
She plied me with fruit cake, turning it all 780 Into an idiotic social call.
"I can"t believe," she said, "that it is you!
I loved your poem in the Blue Review.
That one about Mon Blon. I have a niece Who"s climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece I could not understand. I mean the sense.
Because, of course, the sound - But I"m so dense!"
She was. I might have persevered. I might Have made her tell me more about the white Fountain we both had seen "beyond the veil"
790 But if (I thought) I mentioned that detail She"d pounce upon it. as upon a fond Affinity, a sacramental bond, Uniting mystically her and me, And in a jiffy our two souls would be Brother and sister trembling on the brink Of tender incest. "Well," I said, "I think It"s getting late..."
I also called on Coates.
He was afraid he had mislaid her notes.
He took his article from a steel file: - 800 "It"s accurate. I have not changed her style.
There"s one misprint - not that it matters much: Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch."
Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint, And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But a topsy-turvical coincidence, 810 Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found.
It did not matter who they were. No sound, No furtive light came from their involute Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute, Playing a game of worlds, promoting p.a.w.ns 820 To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns; Kindling a long life here, extinguishing A short one there; killing a Balkan king; Causing a chunk of ice formed on a high- Flying airplane to plummet from the sky And strike a farmer dead; hiding my keys, Gla.s.ses or pipe. Coordinating these Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.
830 Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is My firm conviction - "Darling, shut the door.
Had a nice trip?" Splendid - but what is more I have returned convinced that I can grope My way to some - to some - "Yes, dear?" Faint hope.
Canto Four.
Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
And speaking of this wonderful machine: 840 I"m puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet"s mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and B, The other kind, much more decorous, when He"s in his study writing with a pen.
In method B the hand supports the thought, The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar 850 A canceled sunset or restore a star, And thus it physically guides the phrase Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will Can interrupt, while the automaton Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store 860 To buy the paper he has read before.
Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because In penless work there is no pen-poised pause And one must use three hands at the same time, Having to choose the necessary rhyme, Hold the completed line before one"s eyes, And keep in mind all the preceding tries?
Or is the process deeper with no desk To prop the false and hoist the poetesque?
For there are those mysterious moments when 870 Too weary to delete, I drop my pen; I ambulate - and by some mute command The right word flutes and perches on my hand.
My best time is the morning; my preferred Season, midsummer. I once overheard.
Myself awakening while half of me Still slept in bed. I tore my spirit free, And caught up with myself - upon the lawn Where clover leaves cupped the topaz of dawn, And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe.
880 And then I realized that this half too Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke Safe in my bed as day its eggsh.e.l.l broke, And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay! My secret stamp, The Shade impress, the mystery inborn.
Mirages, miracles, midsummer morn.
Since my biographer may be too staid Or know too little to affirm that Shade Shaved in his bath, here goes: "He"d fixed a sort 890 Of hinge-and-screw affair, a steel support Running across the tub to hold in place The shaving mirror right before his face And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he"d Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed."
The more I weigh, the less secure my skin; In places it"s ridiculously thin; Thus near the mouth: the s.p.a.ce between its wick And my grimace, invites the wicked nick.
Or this dewlap: some day I must set free 900 The Newport Frill inveterate in me.
My Adam"s apple is a p.r.i.c.kly pear: Now I shall speak of evil and despair As none has spoken. Five, six, seven, eight, Nine strokes are not enough. Ten. I palpate Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess And find unchanged that patch of p.r.i.c.kliness.
I have my doubts about the one-armed bloke Who in commercials with one gliding stroke Clears a smooth path of flesh from ear to chin, 910 Then wipes his face and fondly tries his skin.
I"m in the cla.s.s of fussy bimanists.
As a discreet ephebe in tights a.s.sists A female in an acrobatic dance, My left hand helps, and holds, and shifts its stance.
Now I shall speak... Better than any soap Is the sensation for which poets hope When inspiration and its icy blaze, The sudden image, the immediate phrase Over the skin a triple ripple send 920 Making the little hairs all stand on end As in the enlarged animated scheme Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.
Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, cla.s.s-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930 Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.
And while the safety blade with sc.r.a.pe and screak Travels across the country of my cheek; Cars on the highway pa.s.s, and up the steep Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep, And now a silent liner docks, and now Sungla.s.sers tour Beirut, and now I plough Old Zembla"s fields where my gay stubble grows, And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose.
Man"s life as commentary to abstruse 940 Unfinished poem. Note for further use.
Dressing in all the rooms, I rhyme and roam 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.
And all the time, and all the time, my love, 950 You too are there, beneath the word, above The syllable, to underscore and stress The vital rhythm. One heard a woman"s dress Rustle in days of yore. I"ve often caught The sound and sense of your approaching thought.
And all in you is youth, and you make new, By quoting them, old things I made for you.
Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote Came next; then Hebe"s Cup, my final float In that damp carnival, for now I term 960 Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require Some moondrop t.i.tle. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) Gently the day has pa.s.sed in a sustained Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained And a brown ament, and the noun I meant To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne D"appui, Echo"s fey child, is based upon A feeling of fantastically planned, 970 Richly rhymed life.
I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art, In terms of combinational delight; And if my private universe scans right, So does the verse of galaxies divine Which I suspect is an iambic line.
I"m reasonably sure that we survive And that my darling somewhere is alive, As I am reasonably sure that I 980 Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine, And that the day will probably be fine; So this alarm clock let me set myself, Yawn, and put back Shade"s "Poems" on their shelf.
But it"s not bedtime yet. The sun attains Old Dr. Sutton"s last two windowpanes.
The man must be - what? Eighty? Eighty-two?
Was twice my age the year I married you.
Where are you? In the garden. I can see 990 Part of your shadow near the s.h.a.gbark tree.
Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click, Clunk.
(Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.) A dark Vanessa with crimson band Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light A man, unheedful of the b.u.t.terfly - Some neighbor"s gardener, I guess - goes by Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.
COMMENTARY.
Lines 1-4: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, etc.
The image in these opening lines evidently refers to a bird knocking itself out, in full flight, against the outer surface of a gla.s.s pane in which a mirrored sky, with its slightly darker tint and slightly slower cloud, presents the illusion of continued s.p.a.ce. We can visualize John Shade in his early boyhood, a physically unattractive but otherwise beautifully developed lad, experiencing his first eschatological shock, as with incredulous fingers he picks up from the turf that compact ovoid body and gazes at the wax-red streaks ornamenting those gray-brown wings and at the graceful tail feathers tipped with yellow as bright as fresh paint. When in the last year of Shade"s life I had the fortune of being his neighbor in the idyllic hills of New Wye (see Foreword), I often saw those particular birds most convivially feeding on the chalk-blue berries of junipers growing at the corner of his house. (See also lines 181-182.) My knowledge of garden Aves had been limited to those of northern Europe but a young New Wye gardener, in whom I was interested (see note to line 998), helped me to identify the profiles of quite a number of tropical-looking little strangers and their comical calls; and, naturally, every tree top plotted its dotted line toward the ornithological work on my desk to which I would gallop from the lawn in nomenclatorial agitation. How hard I found to fit the name "robin" to the suburban impostor, the gross fowl, with its untidy dull-red livery and the revolting gusto it showed when consuming long, sad, pa.s.sive worms!
Incidentally, it is curious to note that a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"); closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade, is the model of one of the three heraldic creatures (the other two being respectively a reindeer proper and a merman azure, crined or) in the armorial bearings of the Zemblan King, Charles the Beloved (born 1915), whose glorious misfortunes I discussed so often with my friend.
The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator"s temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5.
Line 12: that crystal land Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country. After this, in the disjointed, halfobliterated draft which I am not at all sure I have deciphered properly: Ah, I must not forget to say something That my friend told me of a certain king.
Alas, he would have said a great deal more if a domestic anti-Karlist had not controlled every line he communicated to her! Many a time have I rebuked him in bantering fashion: "You really should promise to use all that wonderful stuff, you bad gray poet, you!" And we would both giggle like boys. But then, after the inspiring evening stroll, we had to part, and grim night lifted the drawbridge between his impregnable fortress and my humble home.
That King"s reign (1936-1958) will be remembered by at least a few discerning historians as a peaceful and elegant one. Owing to a fluid system of judicious alliances, Mars in his time never marred the record. Internally, until corruption, betrayal, and Extremism penetrated it, the People"s Place (parliament) worked in perfect harmony with the Royal Council. Harmony, indeed, was the reign"s pa.s.sword. The polite arts and pure sciences flourished. Technicology, applied physics, industrial chemistry and so forth were suffered to thrive. A small skysc.r.a.per of ultramarine gla.s.s was steadily rising in Onhava. The climate seemed to be improving. Taxation had become a thing of beauty. The poor were getting a little richer, and the rich a little poorer (in accordance with what may be known some day as Kinbote"s Law). Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the puddles tinkled with Muscovy gla.s.s, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "back-draucht in a crowd of schoolchildren. Parachuting had become a popular sport. Everybody, in a word, was content - even the political mischiefmakers who were contentedly making mischief paid by a contented Sosed (Zembla"s gigantic neighbor). But let us not pursue this tiresome subject.
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fngers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla - partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39 - 40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, pa.s.sionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle"s raucous dying request: "Teach, Karlik!" Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnigans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid"s "incoherent transactions" and of Southey"s Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongs-skugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an a.s.sumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blueeyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894).
During these periods of teaching, Charles Xavier made it a rule to sleep at a pied-aterre he had rented, as any scholarly citizen would, in Coriola.n.u.s Lane: a charming, central-heated studio with adjacent bathroom and kitchenette. One recalls with nostalgic pleasure its light gray carpeting and pearl-gray walls (one of them graced with a solitary copy of Pica.s.so"s Chandelier, pot et ca.s.serole emaillee), a shelfful of calf-bound poets, and a virginal-looking daybed under its rug of imitation panda fur. How far from this limpid simplicity seemed the palace and the odious Council Chamber with its unsolvable problems and frightened councilors!
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade"s art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d"Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and parttime member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at gla.s.s factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican"s daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
Line 27: Sherlock Holmes A hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective, the main character in various stories by Conan Doyle. I have no means to ascertain at the present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints.
Lines 34-35: Stilettos of a frozen stillicide How persistently our poet evokes images of winter in the beginning of a poem which he started composing on a balmy summer night! The mechanism of the a.s.sociations is easy to make out (gla.s.s leading to crystal and crystal to ice) but the prompter behind it retains his incognito. One is too modest to suppose that the fact that the poet and his future commentator first met on a winter day somehow impinges here on the actual season. In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word. My dictionary defines it as "a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop." I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop. We should, also note the cloak-and-dagger hint-glint in the "svelte stilettos" and the shadow of regicide in the rhyme.
Lines 39-40: Was close my eyes, etc.
These lines are represented in the drafts by a variant reading:
39.
........... and home would haste my thieves
40.
The sun with stolen ice, the moon with leaves One cannot help recalling a pa.s.sage in Timon of Athens (Act IV, Scene 3) where the misanthrope talks to the three marauders. Having no library in the desolate log cabin where I live like Timon in his cave, I am compelled for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this pa.s.sage into English prose from a Zemblan poetical version of Timon which, I hope, sufficiently approximates the text, or is at least faithful to its spirit: The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
For a prudent appraisal of Conmal"s translations of Shakespeare"s works, see note to line 962.
Line 42: I could make out By the end of May I could make out the outlines of some of my images in the shape his genius might give them; by mid-June I felt sure at last that he would recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla burning in my brain. I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard"s wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse. Surely, it would not be easy to discover in the history of poetry a similar case - that of two men, different in origin, upbringing, thought a.s.sociations, spiritual intonation and mental mode, one a cosmopolitan scholar, the other a fireside poet, entering into a secret compact of this kind. At length I knew he was ripe with my Zembla, bursting with suitable rhymes, ready to spurt at the brush of an eyelash. I kept urging him at every opportunity to surmount his habitual sloth and start writing. My little pocket diary contains such jottings as: "Suggested to him the heroic measure"; "retold the escape"; "offered the use of a quiet room in my house"; "discussed making recordings of my voice for his use"; and finally, under date of July 3: "poem begun!" Although I realize only too clearly, alas, that the result, in its pale and diaphanous final phase, cannot be regarded as a direct echo of my narrative (of which, incidentally, only a few fragments are given in my notes - mainly to Canto One), one can hardly doubt that the sunset glow of the story acted as a catalytic agent upon the very process of the sustained creative effervescence that enabled Shade to produce a 1000-line poem in three weeks. There is, moreover, a symptomatic family resemblance in the coloration of both poem and story. I have reread, not without pleasure, my comments to his lines, and in many cases have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent light from my poet"s fiery orb, and unconsciously aping the prose style of his own critical essays. But his widow, and his colleagues, may stop worrying and enjoy in full the fruit of whatever advice they gave my good-natured poet. Oh yes, the final text of the poem is entirely his. If we discount, as I think we should, three casual allusions to royalty (605, 822, and 894) and the Popian "Zembla" in line 937, we may conclude that the final text of Pale Fire has been deliberately and drastically drained of every trace of the material I contributed; but we also find that despite the control exercised upon my poet by a domestic censor and G.o.d knows whom else, he has given the royal fugitive a refuge in the vaults of the variants he has preserved; for in his draft as many as thirteen verses, superb singing verses (given by me in note to lines 70, 79, and 130, all in Canto One, which he obviously worked at with a greater degree of creative freedom than he enjoyed afterwards) bear the specific imprint of my theme, a minute but genuine star ghost of my discourse on Zembla and her unfortunate king. Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith The first name refers to the house in Dulwich Road that I rented from Hugh Warren Goldsworth, authority on Roman Law and distinguished judge. I never had the pleasure of meeting my landlord but I came to know his handwriting almost as well as I do Shade"s. The second name denotes, of course, Wordsmith University. In seeming to suggest a midway situation between the two places, our poet is less concerned with spatial exact.i.tude than with a witty exchange of syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet, between whom he embowers his own muse. Actually, the "frame house on its square of green" was five miles west of the Wordsmith campus but only fifty yards or so distant from my east windows. In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line 691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world s.p.a.ciousness and graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-n.o.ble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda. Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophaneshrouded winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with s.e.xes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Pica.s.so: earth boy leading raincloud horse. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children"s Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth"s boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound alb.u.m in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler"s quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d"Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. What rather surprised me was that he, my learned landlord, and not his "missus," directed the household. Not only had he left me a detailed inventory of all such articles as cl.u.s.ter around a new tenant like a mob of menacing natives, but he had taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations, explanations, injunctions and supplementary lists. Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom, and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonne of its meager contents which included an a.s.sortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife (described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth"s father from the Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that came with the house: Mon, Wed, Fri: Liver Tue, Thu, Sat: Fish Sun: Ground meat (All it got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves and I farmed it out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman.) But perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and seasonal, was given for the several windows, and if I had heeded all this I would have been kept as busy as a partic.i.p.ant in a regatta. A footnote, however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of furniture (two embroidered armchairs and a heavy "royal console") but should do it carefully lest I scratch the wall moldings. I cannot, alas, reproduce the meticulous schedule of these transposals but seem to recall that I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning. My dear Shade roared with laughter when I led him on a tour of inspection and had him find some of those bunny eggs for himself. Thank G.o.d, his robust hilarity dissipated the atmosphere of d.a.m.num infectum in which I was supposed to dwell. On his part, he regaled me with a number of anecdotes concerning the judge"s dry wit and courtroom mannerisms; most of these anecdotes were doubtless folklore exaggerations, a few were evident inventions, and all were harmless. He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous stories about the terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth"s gown threw across the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of raghdirst (thirst for revenge) - cra.s.s ba.n.a.lities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless - by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskinlined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. Let us turn to our poet"s windows. I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel. Today it would be impossible for me to describe Shade"s house in terms of architecture or indeed in any terms other than those of peeps and glimpses, and window-framed opportunities. As previously mentioned (see Foreword), the coming of summer presented a problem in optics: the encroaching foliage did not always see eye to eye with me: it confused a green monocle with an opaque occludent, and the idea of protection with that of obstruction. Meanwhile (on July 3 according to my agenda) I had learned - not from John but from Sybil - that my friend had started to work on a long poem. After not having seen him for a couple of days, I happened to be bringing him some third-cla.s.s mail from his box on the road, adjacent to Goldsworth"s (which I used to ignore, crammed as it was with leaflets, local advertis.e.m.e.nts, commercial catalogues, and that kind of trash) and ran into Sybil whom a shrub had screened from my falcon eye. Straw-hatted and garden-gloved, she was squatting on her hams in front of a flower bed and pruning or tying up something, and her close-fitting brown trousers reminded me of the mandolin tights (as I jokingly called them) that my own wife used to wear. She said not to bother him with those ads and added the information about his having "begun a really big poem." I felt the blood rush to my face and mumbled something about his not having shown any of it to me yet, and she straightened herself, and swept the black and gray hair off her forehead, and stared at me, and said: "What do you mean - shown any of it? He never shows anything unfinished. Never, never. He will not even discuss it with you until it is quite, quite finished." I could not believe it, but soon discovered on talking to my strangely reticent friend that he had been well coached by his lady. When I endeavored to draw him out by means of good-natured sallies such as: "People who live in gla.s.s houses should not write poems," he would only yawn and shake his head, and retort that "foreigners ought to keep away from old saws." Nevertheless the urge to find out what he was doing with all the live, glamorous, palpitating, shimmering material I had lavished upon him, the itching desire to see him at work (even if the fruit of his work was denied me), proved to be utterly agonizing and uncontrollable and led me to indulge in an orgy of spying which no considerations of pride could stop.
Windows, as well known, have been the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages. But this observer never could emulate in sheer luck the eavesdropping Hero of Our Time or the omnipresent one of Time Lost, Yet I was granted now and then sc.r.a.ps of happy hunting. When my cas.e.m.e.nt window ceased to function because of an elm"s gross growth, I found, at the end of the veranda, an ivied corner from which I could view rather amply the front of the poet"s house. If I wanted to see its south side I could go down to the back of my garage and look from behind a tulip tree across the curving downhill road at several precious bright windows, for he never pulled down the shades (she did). If I yearned for the opposite side, all I had to do was walk uphill to the top of my garden where my bodyguard of black junipers watched the stars, and the omens, and the patch of pale light under the lone streetlamp on the road below. By the onset of the season here conjured up, I had surmounted the very special and very private fears that are discussed elsewhere (see note to line 62) and rather enjoyed following in the dark a weedy and rocky easterly projection of my grounds ending in a locust grove on a slightly higher level than the north side of the poet"s house.
Once, three decades ago, in my tender and terrible boyhood, I had the occasion of seeing a man in the act of making contact with G.o.d. I had wandered into the socalled Rose Court at the back of the Ducal Chapel in my native Onhava, during an interval in hymnal practice. As I mooned there, lifting and cooling my bare calves by turns against a smooth column, I could hear the distant sweet voices interblending in subdued boyish merriment which some chance grudge, some jealous annoyance with one particular lad, prevented me from joining. The sound of rapid steps made me raise my morose gaze from the sectile mosaic of the court - realistic rose petals cut out of rodstein and large, almost palpable thorns cut out of green marble. Into these roses and thorns there walked a black shadow: a tall, pale, long-nosed dark-haired young minister whom I had seen around once or twice strode out of the vestry and without seeing me stopped in the middle of the court. Guilty disgust contorted his thin lips. He wore spectacles. His chenched hands seemed to be gripping invisible prison bars. But there is no bound to the measure of grace which man may be able to receive. All at once his look changed to one of rapture and reverence. I had never seen such a blaze of bliss before but was to perceive something of that splendor, of that spiritual energy and divine vision, now, in another land, reflected upon the rugged and homely face of old John Shade. How glad I was that the vigils I had kept all through the spring had prepared me to observe him at his miraculous midsummer task! I had learned exactly when and where to find the best points from which to follow the contours of his inspiration. My binoculars would seek him out and focus upon him from afar in his various places of labor: at night, in the violet glow of his upstairs study where a kindly mirror reflected for me his hunched-up shoulders and the pencil with which he kept picking his ear (inspecting now and then the lead, and even tasting it); in the forenoon, lurking in the ruptured shadows of his first-floor study where a bright goblet of liquor quietly traveled from filing cabinet to lectern, and from lectern to bookshelf, there to hide if need be behind Dante"s bust; on a hot day, among the vines of a small arborlike portico, through the garlands of which I could glimpse a stretch of oilcloth, his elbow upon it, and the plump cherubic fist propping and crimpling his temple. Incidents of perspective and lighting, interference by framework or leaves, usually deprived me of a clear view of his face; and perhaps nature arranged it that way so as to conceal from a possible predator the mysteries of generation; but sometimes when the poet paced back and forth across his lawn, or sat down for a moment on the bench at the end of it, or paused under his favorite hickory tree, I could distinguish the expression of pa.s.sionate interest, rapture and reverence, with which he followed the images wording themselves in his mind, and I knew that whatever my agnostic friend might say in denial, at that moment Our Lord was with him.
On certain nights, when long before its inhabitants" usual bedtime the house would be dark on the three sides I could, survey from my three vantage points, that very darkness kept telling me they were at home. Their car stood near its garage - but I could not believe they had gone out on foot, since in that case they would have left the porch light turned on. Later considerations and deductions have persuaded me that the night of great need on which I decided to check the matter was July 11, the date of Shade"s completing his Second Canto. It was a hot, black, bl.u.s.tery night. I stole through the shrubbery to the rear of their house. At first I thought that this fourth side was also dark, thus clinching the matter, and had time to experience a queer sense of relief before noticing a faint square of light under the window of a little back parlor where I had never been. It was wide open. A tall lamp with a parchment-like shade illuminated the bottom of the room where I could see Sybil and John, her on the edge of a divan, sidesaddle, with her back to me, and him on a ha.s.sock near the divan upon which he seemed to be slowly collecting and stacking scattered playing cards left after a game of patience. Sybil was alternatively huddleshaking and blowing her nose; John"s face was all blotchy and wet. Not being aware at the time of the exact type of writing paper my friend used, I could not help wondering what on earth could be so tear-provoking about the outcome of a game of cards. As I strained to see better, standing up to my knees in a horribly elastic box hedge, I dislodged the sonorous lid of a garbage can. This of course might have been mistaken for the work of the wind, and Sybil hated the wind. She at once left her perch, closed the window with a great bang, and pulled down its strident blind. I crept back to my cheerless domicile with a heavy heart and a puzzled mind. The heart remained heavy but the puzzle was solved a few days later, very probably on St. Swithin"s Day, for I find in my little diary under that date the antic.i.p.atory "promnad vespers mid J. S.," crossed out with a petulance that broke the lead in midstroke. Having waited and waited for my friend to join me in the lane, until the red of the sunset had turned to the ashes of dusk, I walked over to his front door, hesitated, a.s.sessed the gloom and the silence, and started to walk around the house. This time not a glint came from the back parlor, but by the bright prosaic light in the kitchen I distinguished one end of a whitewashed table and Sybil sitting at it with so rapt a look on her face that one might have supposed she had just thought up a new recipe. The back door was ajar, and as I tapped it open and launched upon some gay airy phrase, I realized that Shade, sitting at the other end of the table, was in the act of reading to her something that I guessed to be a part of his poem. They both started. An unprintable oath escaped from him and he slapped down on the table the stack of index cards he had in his hand. Later he was to attribute this temperamental outburst to his having mistaken, with his reading gla.s.ses on, a welcome friend for an intruding salesman; but I must say it shocked me, it shocked me greatly, and disposed me at the time to read a hideous meaning into everything that followed.