the direct influence upon my Russian structures of various contemporaneous (“Georgian”) English verse patterns that were running about my room and all over me like tame mice.
Mice are in their element in poetry’s l.-room, by the way. Robert Louis Stevenson has a line in his Child’s Garden of Verses about “mice among the lumber” (although he may well be talking about outdoor lumber — hay or stubble or brush, or even possibly wood — here);20 and there are ten other nineteenth-century poems in the English Poetry Database that contain lumber and mice or mouse in them, including a read-aloud piece of sentimentalism by Mary Montgomerie Lamb (1843–1905), also known as Violet Fane. (She would not want to be confused with Mary Ann Lamb, Charles Lamb’s matricidal sister.) It is called “The Old Rocking-Horse (In the Lumber-Room)”:
The mice, in their frolicsome revels,
Sport over him night and day,
And the burrowing moth
In his saddle-cloth
Has never been flick’d away.…
What a medley of eloquent lumber
Do his proud eyes lighten upon,
From those drums and flutes
To the high snow boots
And the mouldering stuff’d wild swan …
Yeats got the stuff’d wild swan of rhymed poetry to fly again at Coole a few decades later.21
It wasn’t Housman’s tame Georgian verse-mice, however, that swayed Nabokov in later years. Housman the critic (captious, haughty, ferulean) left his permanent mark on Nabokov’s nonfictional style, just as Francis Jeffrey’s harsh intelligence marked Housman. Here, for example, is Housman sounding sneeringly Nabokovian on the subject of translation:
“Scholars [Housman quotes] will pardon an attempt, however bald, to render into English these exquisite love-poems.” Why?
Those who have no Latin may pardon such an attempt, if they like bad verses better than silence; but I do not know why bald renderings of exquisite love-poems should be pardoned by those who want no renderings at all.… Misrepresentation of Propertius is indeed the capital defect of this performance; good or bad, in movement, in diction, in spirit, it is unlike the original.
22
Nabokov and Housman both used huge critical projects (Pushkin, Manilius) as ways of rationing self-expression — as counterweights to the trebuchet-flights of their lyricism.23
Naturally I looked semi-diligently in Housman’s writing for the 1. word, since any appearance of it would help me in my passing attempt to yoke him and Nabokov by violence to the same limber-load. But Housman, more power to him, prefers a quiet, beautiful word like marl, which collapses all the travertines of St. Peter’s into its earthen fold, and yet escapes any charge of pedantry because no word so short was ever crabbed:
In gross marl, in blowing dust,
In the drowned ooze of the sea,
Where you would not, lie you must,
Lie you must, and not with me.
(XXXIII, Last Poems)
In prose he uses lumber-nyms like dross-heap: “Thinly scattered on that huge dross-heap, the Caroline Parnassus, there were tiny gems of purer ray.” Where another writer might more gently speak of the lumber-room of Dryden’s diction, Housman brutally calls it a “dungeon.” The only real lumber I turned up in my hours with Housman was contained in a sentence by Francis Jeffrey, which Housman quotes disapprovingly in his review of The Cambridge History of English Literature:
The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber — and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, — and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth, — and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision.
“Little better than lumber” is a telling metaphorical choice for Jeffrey to have made, from the present vantage, since if you search “Southey, R. OR Wordsworth, W. OR Crabbe, G. OR Keats, J. OR Shelley, P.B.” for lumber in the English Poetry Database you will discover that none of them were lumberjacks, except for George Crabbe, once. (In a poem called “The Birth of Flattery,” Flattery, the offspring of Poverty and Cunning, is able to revive the bloom of graceless forms, and “bid the lumber live.”)24
Housman’s and the Romantic poets’ neglect didn’t deter Nabokov, who, surprisingly enough, gives our chosen keyword a prominent setting in Pale Fire. The deposed Zemblan king, Charles, is imprisoned in a “dismal lumber room” (p. 121) in the royal palace. This “old hole of a room” contains a closet, and in the closet is a Zemblan translation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, as well as some “old sport clothes and gymnasium shoes,” which will, for the ~-obsessed, recall Samuel Butler’s lines (in “Religion”) about the Sanctum of the Jews containing nothing but “lumber and old shoos,” and will perhaps also bring to mind Dickens’s mention of the old shoes and fish baskets in Ebenezer Scrooge’s lumber room.25 A sliding door in the Zemblan lumber-room closet leads to a long secret passageway through which the King escapes; stumbling over “an accumulation of loose boards” (p. 133), he enters a second “dimly lit, dimly cluttered” lumber room, or lumbarkamer (this time Kinbote is good enough to supply us with the actual Zemblan-language equivalent),26 a retreat that was once, as it happens, a dressing room in the Royal Theater, where Iris Acht, paramour of the King’s grandfather, puffed and patched herself in preparation for her role in The Merman. All this is complicated and full of quadrupal playful para-meanings with short half-lives that I don’t really follow, but it seems safe to say that the loose boards that block the door are Nabokov’s nod to the preferred American meaning of lumber, which causes us pedestrians to stumble and misstep in our comprehension of Anglicisms like lumber-room; and both ~-rooms, linked by so “angular and cryptic” a passageway, could without too much symbolic tussling be taken to represent the two received linguistic traditions, the two dictionaries filled with ready-made verbal scenery, that the commentator king, and by inference Nabokov himself, must unite through painful acts of verbal and physical translation. Nabokov escapes one Russian lumbarkamer of second-hand literary heirlooms only to have to contend with the dust and sheets of an Anglo-American substitute.
1 Mack loses restraint altogether when he writes: “I will make no secret of my belief that in his younger days Pope shows signs of the interest in word-catching that he scorned in others.” (“ ‘Books and the Man’: Pope’s Library,” in Collected in Himself, 1982, p. 318.)
2 Compare Nabokov: “A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official’s hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.” (Lectures on Literature, “Charles Dickens,” p. 89.)
3 As Harold Bloom points out in his thoughtful The Western Canon, 1994.
4 There are fifty-five instances of lumber on Disk 3 (1800–1900, A-K) and forty-five on Disk 4 (1800–1900, L — Z): a total of one hundred lumber-uses for the nineteenth century. Compare this with the 129 lumbers on Disk 2, for the period 1660–1800, A — Z: much more poetry in the nineteenth century, less lumber. Yet lumber and lumber-room often feel overused in nineteenth-century contexts, and don’t in the eighteenth century. Word-frequency studies, then, can’t tell you whether something is more or less of a cliché.