«Well, said he, «here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome» («Oh, that won’t do,» wailed the German visitor). «Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform,» continued Emerald. «Quite the fancy pansy, in fact.»
«And you,» I said quietly, «are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket.»
«But what have I said?» the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo’s Last Supper.
«Now, now,» said Shade. «I’m sure, Charles, our young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake.»
«He could not, even if he had wished,» I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand — which at the moment of writing still remains in that position.
Lines 895-899: The more I weigh… or this dewlap
Instead of these facile and revolting lines, the draft gives: 895 I have a certain liking, I admit, For Parody, that last resort of wit: «In nature’s strife when fortitude prevails The victim falters and the victor fails.»
899 Yes, reader, Pope
Line 920: little hairs stand on end
Alfred Housman (1859-1936), whose collection The Shropshire Lad vies with the In Memoriam of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) in representing, perhaps (no, delete this craven «perhaps»), the highest achievement of English poetry in a hundred years, says somewhere (in a foreword?) exactly the opposite: The bristling of thrilled little hairs obstructed his barbering:, but since both Alfreds certainly used an Ordinary Razor, and John Shade an ancient Gillette, the discrepancy may have been due to the use of different instruments.
Line 922: held up by Our Cream
This is not quite exact. In the advertisement to which it refers, the whiskers are held up by a bubbly foam, not by a creamy substance.
After this line, instead of lines 923-930, we find the following, lightly deleted, variant: All artists have been born in what they call A sorry age; mine is the worst of all: An age that thinks spacebombs and spaceships take A genius with a foreign name to make, When any jackass can rig up the stuff; An age in which a pack of rogues can bluff The selenographer; a comic age That sees in Dr. Schweitzer a great sage.
Having struck this out, the poet tried another theme, but these lines he also canceled: England where poets flew the highest, now Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough; Now the prosemongers of the Grubby Group, The Message Man, the owlish Nincompoop And all the Social Novels of our age Leave but a pinch of coal dust on the page.
Line 929: Freud
In my mind’s eye I see again the poet literally collapsing on his lawn, beating the grass with his fist, and shaking and howling with laughter, and myself, Dr. Kinbote, a torrent of tears streaming down my beard, as I try to read coherently certain tidbits from a book I had filched from a classroom: a learned work on psychoanalysis, used in American colleges, repeat, used in American colleges. Alas, I find only two items preserved in my notebook: By picking the nose in spite of all commands to the contrary, or when a youth is all the time sticking his finger through his buttonhole… the analytic teacher knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phantasies.
(Quoted by Prof. C. from Dr. Oskar Pfister, The Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, N. Y., p .79)
The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation.
(Quoted by Prof. C. from Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language, 1951, N. Y., p .240.)
Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
Line 934: big trucks
I must say I do not remember hearing very often «big trucks» passing in our vicinity. Loud cars, yes — but not trucks.
Line 937: Old Zembla
I am a weary and sad commentator today.
Parallel to the left-hand side of this card (his seventy-sixth) the poet has written, on the eve of his death, a line (from Pope’s Second Epistle of the Essay on Man) that he may have intended to cite in a footnote: At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where So this is all treacherous old Shade could say about Zembla — my Zembla? While shaving his stubble off? Strange, strange…
Lines 939-940: Man’s life, etc.
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
Line 949: And all the time
Thus, some time in the morning of July 21, the last day of his life, John Shade began his last batch of cards (seventy-seven to eighty). Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man’s fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thugin New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper’s stopwatch.
Line 949: and all the time
And all the time he was coming nearer.
A formidable thunderstorm had greeted Gradus in New York on the night of his arrival from Paris (Monday, July 20). The tropical rainfall flooded basements and subway tracks: Kaleidoscopic reflections played in the riverlike streets. Vinogradus had never seen such a display of lightning, neither had Jacques d’Argus — or Jack Grey, for that matter (let us not forget Jack Grey!). He put up in a third-class Broadway hotel and slept soundly, lying belly up on the bedclothes, in striped pajamas — the kind that Zemblans call rusker sirsusker («Russian seersucker suit») -and retaining as usual his socks: not since July 11, when he had visited a Finnish bathhouse in Switzerland, had he seen his bare feet.
It was now July 21. At eight in the morning New York roused Gradus with a bang and a roar. As usual he started his blurry daily existence by blowing his nose. Then he took out of its nightbox of cardboard and inserted into his Comus-mask mouth an exceptionally large and fierce-looking set of teeth: the only bad flaw really in his otherwise harmless appearance. This done, he fished out of his briefcase two petit-beurres he had saved and an even older but still quite palatable small, softish, near-ham sandwich, vaguely associated with the train journey from Nice to Paris last Saturday night: not so much thriftiness on his part (the Shadows had advanced him a handsome sum, anyway), but an animal attachment to the habits of his frugal youth. After breakfasting in bed on these delicacies, he began preparations for the most important day in his life. He had shaved yesterday — that was out of the way. His trusty pajamas he stuffed not into his traveling bag but into the briefcase, dressed, unclipped from the inside of his coat a cameo-pink, interdentally clogged pocket comb, drew it through his bristly hair, carefully donned his trilby, washed both hands with the nice, modern liquid soap in the nice, modern, almost odorless lavatory across the corridor, micturated, rinsed one hand, and feeling clean and neat, went out for a stroll.
He had never visited New York before; but as many near-cretins, he was above novelty. On the previous night he had counted the mounting rows of windows in several skyscrapers, and now, after checking the height of a few more buildings, he felt that he knew all there was to know. He had a brimming cup and a half a saucerful of coffee at a crowded and wet counter and spent the rest of the smoke-blue morning moving from bench to bench and paper to paper in the Westside alleys of Central Park.
He began with the day’s copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov (whom they spelled «Khrushchev») had abruptly put off a visit to Scandinavia and was to visit Zembla instead (here I tune in: «Vi nazïvaete sebya zemblerami, you call yourselves Zemblans, a ya vas nazïvayu zemlyakami, and I call you fellow countrymen!» Laughter and applause.) The United States was about to launch its first atom-driven merchant ship (just to annoy the Ruskers, of course. J. G.). Last night in Newark, an apartment house at 555 South Street was hit by a thunderbolt that smmashed a TV set and injured two people watching an actress lost in a violent studio storm (those tormented spirits are terrible! C. X. K. teste J. S.). The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised in agate type for a jewelry polisher who «must have experience on costume jewelry (oh, Degré had!). The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: «$11, 000, 000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979,» and Gradus, grown young again, reread this this twice, with the background gray thought, perhaps, that he would be sixty-four four days after that (no comment). On another bench he found a Monday issue of the same newspaper. During a visit to a museum in Whitehorse (Gradus kicked at a pigeon that came too near), the Queen of England walked to a corner of the White Animals Room, removed her right glove and, with her back turned to several evidently observant people, rubbed her forehead and one of her eyes. A pro-Red revolt had erupted in Iraq. Asked about the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum, Carl Sandburg, a poet, replied, and I quote: «They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels.» A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description,
