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Abraham P. Socher: "The Jack Frost House"
Abraham P. Socher: "The Jack Frost House"
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
Seven years later, in 1952, Nabokov and his wife even briefly
rented Frost's house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They found it
too cold to stay in, but amusing to later pun about ("the Jack
Frost house"). It also troubled Nabokov that Frost had left the
study at the center of the house locked. In short, Nabokov almost
seemed to shadow the great American poet through his early
years in America. So Field had grounds for suspecting that the
relationship between John Shade and Robert Frost was more than
superficial, but he did not pursue them very far.
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
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
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
What, if any, pale fire did Nabokov snatch from Frost? The
imagery, metre and mood of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening" are glaringly absent from Shade's poem (though they
are both wintry lyrics). Is there another "short poem" concealed
behind Kinbote's misdirection? If there is, it might also reveal
something of the improvised methods and secret stratagems by
which Nabokov managed to enter, appropriate, and even
command the poetic tradition to which Frost was heir, in which
his Russian sceptre was powerless, his dappled nouns a distant
memory.
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
We shall return to these lines, but it's worth noting that they also
initiate the pervasive avian imagery of the Pale Fire. More than a
dozen species of bird fly through its pages; Shade describes his
favorite seat on the porch as "a nest," and his parents were
ornithologists. This makes the book unique in the Nabokov
corpus, where butterflies (which play a crucial, if less visible,
role here as well) famously predominate. In an interview given in
1962, shortly after the publication of Pale Fire, Nabokov slyly
underscored the importance of birds to his novel while pointedly
avoiding discussing its origins:
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
Nabokov was, like Frost and Shade, the sort of artist who hid his
traces, and the manuscript of Pale Fire now in the Library of
Congress is a fairly clean fair copy with few signs of "the fluff
and pebbles" with which he began. Nonetheless, it is worth
noting that both Shade's Sherlock Holmes couplet (which was, at
first, uncharacteristically clumsy: "Fellow in Sherlock Holmes
tried to confuse / Pursuit by putting on backwards his shoes")
and Kinbote's comment on Frost, Shade and the "temperature
charts of poetry," are thoroughly reworked. It was clearly
important to Nabokov to leave a telltale hint of Holmesian
mystery in those footprints on the "diamonds of frost," even
before the perfect couplet came to him, and later to handle the
Frost-frost-Shade connection in Kinbote's comment with
precision.
Nineteen sixty-two, when Pale Fire was published, was also the
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shades of frost: a hidden source for nabokov's pale fire https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm
year that Frost published In the Clearing, his final book. "Of a
Winter Evening" was included, though it was re-titled
"Questioning Faces." Frost had unknowingly helped to erase the
paper trail to the poem whose reflected light shines from the
opening lines of "Pale Fire," and without which Nabokov's novel
is almost unimaginable.
(Originally published in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), July 1, 2005, and
reprinted with its permission. This version restores 2 paragraphs which were
excised for reasons of space and includes a few other minor additions.)
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