BROOKE, GRAY, HOUSMAN, AND KIPLING

In order to illustrate “one of the barest emotions,” the “pining after the land of [one’s] birth,” Sebastian uses scenic images from poems by Brooke, Gray, and Housman (24). And, in expressing “the love with the country which was [his] home” Sebastian had his “Kipling moods,” his

“Rupert Brooke moods” and his “Housman moods” (66).

The festive evocation of the English countryside in lines 25/ 1–3 is cunningly composed, as the poets cited have earned their fame for quite different reasons than for their ability to eulogize England’s land-scapes. Brooke and Housman gained their prestige due to World War I because premature death is one of the great themes of their poetry

(Keynes 9; Sampson 845). Brooke is one of the so-called War Poets and his prophetic “The Soldier” is probably his most anthologized poem. Nabokov admired Brooke for similar reasons: “[n]o other poet has so often, with such tormented and creative vigilance, looked into the dusk of the beyond” (qtd. in Boyd, VNRY 182; see also Johnson,

“Brooke”). But Brooke’s “The Old Vicarage, Granchester” is a truly nostalgic poem that he wrote in Berlin in 1912 about the place where he stayed in 1911 and where he enjoyed “one of his happiest summers”

(Lehmann 46).

Housman’s poetry also has many Arcadian evocations, all inspired by his homeland Shropshire, but these cannot mask his real theme, that of doomed lads. In the poem referred to by Sebastian, numbered XL in Housman’s collection of poems, the bitterness of the poet’s melancholy is all to clear, as the wind that is blown from “those blue remembered hills” carries “an air that kills” (Housman 70). The same can be said of Thomas Gray who was one of the first man of letters to discover the picturesque beauties of Wordsworth’s Lake District but who had a splenetic disposition. His “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”

from which Nabokov quotes, has a jubilant opening (“Ye distant spires, ye antique towers That Crown the watery glade,”) but soon takes a morbid turn, disastrously so after the stanza beginning with

Alas! Regardless of their doom The little victims play (Gray 255)

What links Gray and Housman is the source of their melancholy.

Housman, writes John Sparrow, “could not confess to affections of which a poet could speak openly in ancient Greece. Like Gray, there-fore, and for the same reason, Housman ‘never spoke out’” (Sparrow 13).

Doubtless, Sparrow must have had Matthew Arnold’s essay on Thomas Gray in mind, in which the phrase “He never spoke out” is taken as a guiding motif (Arnold 267–281).

Arnold quotes Gray’s close friend Charles de Bonstetten who

“thinks that Gray’s life was poisoned by an unsatisfied sensibility, was withered by his having never loved” (277). Both men, Housman and Gray, became professors at Cambridge, the university serving as a refuge. Both, writes Edmund Wilson, “belong to the monastic order of English university ascetics” just as “Walter Pater, Lewis Carroll, Edward Fitzgerald and Gerard Manley Hopkins” (83). The relevance of Edward

Fitzgerald for Sebastian Knight is discussed in section 21; the relevance of Walter Pater is discussed in chapter 6).

“Not to speak out” is the theme of Housman’s poem beginning with the lines “Because I liked you better / Than suits a man to say”

or the one opening with “Ask me no more, for fear I should reply”

(Housman 191, 221). The “nameless” in “Additional Poems,” XVIII with its first line “Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?” is about Oscar Wilde who, sentenced to hard labor, was forced to stand handcuffed on the platform of a London station

“‘for the world to look at’” (Pearson 281). The “nameless” refers to the

“Love that dare not speak its name” of which Wilde was accused of and which he defended so bravely and eloquently during his trial (Pearson 268; the phrase “Love that dare not speak its name” comes from “Two Loves,” a poem by Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover [Wright 206]).

“Not to speak out,” characterizes Sebastian’s behavior when his relationship with Clare becomes unbearable. “He has stopped talking to me,” says Clare, and Sheldon’s appeal “out with it, man” is answered with silence (108).

Rupert Brooke lived from 1887 until1915 when he died on April 23 (Nabokov’s birthday) during a military expedition. He studied in Cambridge, at King’s College, from 1905 until 1912 and his verse amounts to 120 short poems. Brooke had varied sexual experiences and in Look at the Harlequins! Nabokov remarks that “the naked-neck photo of Rupert Brooke” is found “a-houri-sang,” a play on the French ahurissant, meaning ‘staggering’ or ‘stupefying,’ and ‘houri,’ meaning an alluring woman (28).

(The “photo” is most likely taken of Brooke’s memorial plaque in the chapel of his old school in Rugby, which shows a bas-relief sculpture of the poet’s head and neck, the latter rather pronounced. The bas-relief is photographically reproduced in Lehmann’s monograph.)

Kipling is certainly mentioned because of his dictum that the human heart can love only its native land (Boyd, VNRY 182), but possibly also because of his partiality for male characters. Nabokov was sensitive on this point as is clear from his comment on Gogol: “I am depressed and puzzled by his utter inability to describe young women” (SO 156.) Inevitably, Nabokov may have been struck by the “general shortage of women in Kipling’s world” (Page 90). In his article “Kipling’s World of Men” Norman Page discusses many critics who have observed that

“Kipling despised women” and how he preferred “the world of soldiers and sailors” (91, 85). (Incidentally, it was Joseph Conrad [see comment on line 40/ 9] who also preferred the company of “soldiers and sailors”;

see Seymour, Otteline Morrell 254.)