Line 584: The mother and the child
Est ist die Mutter mit ihrem Kind (see note to line 664).
Line 596: Points at the puddle in his basement room
We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft — and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant: Should the dead murderer try to embrace His outraged victim whom he now must face? Do objects have a soul? Or perish must Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?
The last syllable of «Tanagra» and the first three letters of «dust» from the name of the murderer whose shargar (puny ghost) the radiant spirit of our poet was soon to face. «Simple chance!» the pedestrian reader may cry. But let him try to see, as I have tried to see, how many such combinations are possible and plausible. «Leningrad used to be Petrograd?»
«A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us?»
This variant is so prodigious that only scholarly discipline and a scrupulous regard for the truth prevented me from inserting it here, and deleting four lines elsewhere (for example, the weak lines 627-630) so as to preserve the length of the poem.
Shade composed these lines on Tuesday, July 14th. What was Gradus doing that day? Nothing. Combinational fate rests on its laurels. We saw him last on the late afternoon of July 10th when he returned from Lex to his hotel in Geneva, and there we left him.
For the next four days Gradus remained fretting in Geneva. The amusing paradox with these men of action is that they constantly have to endure long stretches of otiosity that they are unable to fill with anything, lacking as they do the resources of an adventurous mind. As many people of little culture, Gradus was a voracious reader of newspapers, pamphlets, chance leaflets and the multilingual literature that comes with nose drops and digestive tablets; but this summed up his concessions to intellectual curiosity, and since his eyesight was not too good, and the consumability of local news not unlimited, he had to rely a great deal on the torpor of sidewalk cafes and on the makeshift of sleep.
How much happier the wide-awake indolents, the monarchs among men, the rich monstrous brains deriving intense enjoyment and rapturous pangs from the balustrade of a terrace at nightfall, from the lights and the lake below, from the distant mountain shapes melting into the dark apricot of the afterglow, from the black conifers outlined against the pale ink of the zenith, and from the garnet and green flounces of the water along the silent, sad, forbidden shoreline. Oh my sweet Boscobel! And the tender and terrible memories, and the shame, and the glory, and the maddening intimation, and the star that no party member can ever reach.
On Wednesday morning, still without news, Gradus telegraphed headquarters saying that he thought it unwise to wait any longer and that he would be staying at Hotel Lazuli, Nice.
Lines 597-608: the thoughts we should roll-call, etc.
This passage should be associated in the reader’s mind with the extraordinary variant given in the preceding note, for only a week later Tanagra dust and «our royal hands» were to come together, in real life, in real death.
Had he not fled, our Charles II might have been executed; this would have certainly happened had he been apprehended between the palace and the Rippleson Caves; but he sensed those thick fingers of fate only seldom during his flight; he sensed them feeling for him (as those of a grim old shepherd checking a daughter’s virginity) when he was slipping, that night, on the damp ferny flank of Mt. Mandevil (see note to line 149), and next day, at a more eerie altitude, in the heady blue, where the mountaineer becomes aware of a phantom companion. Many times that night our King cast himself upon the ground with the desperate resolution of resting there till dawn that he might shift with less torment what hazard soever he ran. (I am thinking of yet another Charles, another long dark man above two yards high.) But it was all rather physical, or neurotic, and I know perfectly well that my King, if caught and condemned and led away to be shot, would have behaved as he does in lines 606-608: thus he would look about him with insolent composure, and thus he would Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride The dedicated imbeciles and spit Into their eyes just for the fun of it Let me close this important note with a rather anti-Darwinian aphorism: The one who kills is always his victim’s inferior.
Line 603: Listen to distant cocks crow
One will recall the admirable image in a recent poem by Edsel Ford: And often when the cock crew, shaking fire Out of the morning and the misty mow A mow (in Zemblan muwan) is the field next to a barn. Lines 609-614: Nor can one help, etc. This passage is different in the draft: 609 Nor can one help the exile caught by death In a chance inn exposed to the hot breath Of this America, this humid night: Through slatted blinds the stripes of colored light Grope for his bed — magicians from the past With philtered gems — and life is ebbing fast.
This describes rather well the «chance inn,» a log cabin, with a tiled bathroom, where I am trying to coordinate these notes. At first I was greatly bothered by the blare of diabolical radio music from what I thought was some kind of amusement park across the road — it turned out to be camping tourists — and I was thinking of moving to another place, when they forestalled me. Now it is quieter, except for an irritating wind rattling through the withered aspens, and Cedarn is again a ghost town, and there are no summer fools or spies to stare at me, and my little blue-jeaned fisherman no longer stands on his stone in the stream, and perhaps it is better so.
Line 615: two tongues
English and Zemblan, English and Russian, English and Lettish, English and Estonian, English and Lithuanian, English and Russian, English and Ukranian, English and Polish, English and Czech, English and Russian, English and Hungarian, English and Rumanian, English and Albanian, English and Bulgarian, English and Serbo-Croatian, English and Russian, American and European.
Line 619: tuber’s eye
The pun sprouts (see line 502).
Line 627: The great Starover Blue
Presumably, permission from Prof. Blue was obtained but even so the plunging of a real person, no matter how sportive and willing, into an invented milieu where he is made to perform in accordance with the invention, strikes one as a singularly tasteless device, especially since other real-life characters, except members of the family, of course, are pseudonymized in the poem.
This name, no doubt, is most tempting. The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover (accented, incidentally, on the ultima), that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. «blue.» This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube. So it goes. Honest Starover Blue will probably be surprised by the epithet bestowed upon him by a jesting Shade. The writer feels moved to pay here a small tribute to the amiable old freak, adored by everybody on the campus and nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle, evidently because of his exceptionally convivial habits. After all, there were other great men in our poet’s entourage — for example, that distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag.
Line 629: The fate of beasts
Above this the poet wrote and struck out: The madman’s fate
The ultimate destiny of madmen’s souls has been probed by many Zemblan theologians who
