Summary for the chapter 'The Ballad of Longwood Glen' by Vladimir Nabokov.
____________________________________
Please give the summary for the chapter and not the Poet or the place and date when the ballad was written.
Answers
Answer:
In VN's poem The Ballad of Longwood Glen (1957) Art Longwood, a local florist, climbs a tree and gets lost in it: ... Art's father, stepfather and father-in-law. The three old men walked off to the cove. Through tinkling weeds Art slowly drove.
Answer:
Sunday morning, at half past ten,
Two cars crossed the creek and entered the glen.
In the first was Art Longwood, a local florist,
With his children and wife (now Mrs. Deforest).
In the one that followed, a ranger saw
Art's father, stepfather and father-in-law.
The three old men walked off to the cove.
Through tinkling weeds Art slowly drove.
Fair was the morning, with bright clouds afar.
Children and comics emerged from the car.
Silent Art, who could stare at a thing all day,
Watched a bug climb a stalk and fly away.
Pauline had asthma, Paul used a crutch.
They were cute little rascals but could not run much.
"I wish," said his mother to crippled Paul,
"Some man would teach you to pitch that ball."
Silent Art took the ball and tossed it high.
It stuck in a tree that was passing by.
And the grave green pilgrim turned and stopped,
The children waited, but no ball dropped.
"I never climbed trees in my timid prime,"
Thought Art; and forthwith started to climb.
Now and then his elbow or knee could be seen
In a jigsaw puzzle of blue and green.
Up and up Art Longwood swarmed and shinned,
And the leaves said yes to the questioning wind.
What tiaras of gardens! What torrents of light!
How accessible ether! How easy flight!
His family circled the tree all day.
Pauline concluded: "Dad climbed away."
None saw the delirious celestial crowds
Greet the hero from earth in the snow of the clouds.
Mrs. Longwood was getting a little concerned.
He never came down. He never returned.
She found some change at the foot of the tree.
The children grew bored. Paul was stung by a bee.
The old men walked over and stood looking up,
Each holding five cards and a paper cup.
Cars on the highway stopped, backed, and then
Up a rutted road waddled into the glen.
And the tree was suddenly full of noise,
Conventioners, fishermen, freckled -boys.
Anacondas and pumas were mentioned by some,
And all kinds of humans continued to come:
Tree surgeons, detectives, the fire brigade.
An ambulance parked in the dancing shade.
A drunken rogue with a rope and a gun
Arrived on the scene to see justice done.
Explorers, dendrologists – all were there;
And a strange pale girl with gypsy hair.
And from Cape Fear to Cape Flattery
Every paper had: Man Lost in Tree.
And the sky-bound oak (where owls had perched
And the moon dripped gold) was felled and searched.
The name Art Longwood seems to hint at the Latin proverb ars longa, vita brevis. Quercus being Latin for “oak-tree,” the sky-bound oak in VN’s poem brings to mind Quercus, the novel that Cincinnatus reads in the fortress in VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935). In VN’s novel there is a butterfly that the jailer Rodion brings to feed the spider (official friend of the jailed) and that manages to escape. In the fortress Cincinnatus is visited by his wife Marthe and her entire family, including her old grandparents and two children: lame Diomedon and obese little Pauline. M’sieur Pierre (the executioner in The Invitation to a Beheading), no doubt, helped to fell and search the oak tree in VN’s ballad. M’sieur Pierre’s hobbies are photography and fishing. Mr. Deforest (who married Mrs. Longwood after the death of her children) is a photographer. Art’s retouched widow brings to mind ein bisschen retouchiert, in VN’s autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) the words of disappointed Dietrich (whose hobby was collecting snapshots of execution) about a purchased series of photographs that depicted the successive series of a routine execution in China.
The Ballad of Longwood Glen seems to be VN's reply to Franz Kafka, the author of Die Verwandlung ("The Metamorphosis," 1915). Unlike Kafka's story (whose hero wakes up and finds himself transformed into a beetle), VN's poem has a happy ending