by Robert Roper
Famed for its sanitarium. There she’d sit
in the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit
Upon her dress and then upon her wrist.
Her mind kept fading in the growing mist.
The rhyme-and-meter-driven ordering of sense that Nabokov had weaned himself from in his translations of Eugene Onegin—sacrificing everything to strict literal fidelity—here wins out. Early on, Shade describes a strange episode of his youth:
One day,
When I’d just turned eleven69, as I lay
Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy—
A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy—
Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
The episode recalls the hero’s heart trouble in Pnin, when he has visions of Mira Belochkin. The poem is like Wordsworth’s70 The Prelude, about “the growth of my own mind;” it is the story of a mental crisis with a spiritual dimension, in the manner of other works of the canon as well (Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Whitman’s “A Word Out of the Sea” and parts of “Song of Myself”). “Pale Fire” contains many of Nabokov’s own beliefs. As he told an interviewer71 in the sixties, “It is … true that some of my more responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade… . He does borrow some of my own opinions.”
These include musty crotchets: “I loathe such things as jazz” and also bullfighting, a “white-hosed moron torturing” an animal. Like his creator, Shade detests
abstract bric-a-brac72;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.
Shade develops the nonreligious metaphysic that Nabokov hints at in some other books. In Pnin the hero reflects that he “did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts73. The souls of the dead … formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick”—as Mira, the murdered girl, does, sending antic squirrels into the world to cheer Pnin.
Speak, Memory is partly a communion with the dead, and while portraying his own life, explaining the development of his artistic consciousness, Nabokov reveals how it all makes sense for him. “The cradle rocks74 above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” He has made “colossal efforts75 to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers” in the darkness, and though séances did not work for him, nor did “ransack[ing] my oldest dreams for keys and clues,” he rejects the “common sense” view—common sense by its very commonness being displeasing. There is a realm of timelessness, he confidently asserts. He can access it through his imagination, a feature of artistic imagination being the ability to feel “everything that happens76 in one point of time.” The poet, lost in creative thought,
taps his knee77 with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus … and trillions of other such trifles occur—all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.
John Shade, writing “Pale Fire” in fictionalized Ithaca (“New Wye”), has authentic powers. Some lines of his poem attest to it, and Nabokov, although having fun at his expense (Shade is “behind” Robert Frost, and Frost is himself no Pushkin or Shakespeare), seems present in78 Shade. “Pale Fire” as a whole is a demonstration, an instance of the “plexed artistry79” that Shade, speaking for himself but also for Nabokov, finds meaningful, because in the artist’s ability to master time, to unite a childhood memory with the old man in Turkestan, and with other events of this specific instant, also with a likely future (one that includes a book in which the verse will appear), there is a richness far beyond the brief crack of light. Shade feels that he understands
Existence, or80 at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line.
I’m reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,
And that the day will probably be fine.
As it happens, he shall not awake then. He is shot to death the evening before.
Shade’s darling is his late daughter, Hazel. The poet’s life has been harrowed by, has been obsessed with, death:
There was a time81 in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.
There was the day when I began to doubt
Man’s sanity: How could he live without
Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom
Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?
And finally there was the sleepless night
When I decided to explore and fight
The foul, the inadmissible abyss,
Devoting all my twisted life to this
One task.
Hazel, dying young, is a pitiable case. Shade presents her in terms mostly of her unattractiveness: she is heavy-limbed, her eyes are funny, etc. “She may not be a beauty82, but she’s cute,” the parents tell each other, fearing it isn’t so.
“It was no use, no use83,” the poet laments. “And like a fool I sobbed in the men’s room,” his tears provoked by seeing his daughter in a Christmas pageant. Appearance means much, if not everything. In a poem that tries to speak of ultimate matters, to offer plainness as a tragic fate seems ill considered. “Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned / Into a wood duck,” Shade writes, and the girl becomes a depressive, with wounds that cannot heal:
And still the demons84 of our pity spoke:
No lips would share the lipstick of her smoke;
The telephone that rang before a ball
Every two minutes in Sorossa Hall
For her would never ring; and, with a great
Screeching of tires on gravel, to the gate
Out of the lacquered night, a white-scarfed beau
Would never come for her.
Hazel has a blind date. The young man, upon first seeing her in person, remembers he has something else to do. This is the last straw. She goes directly to a half-frozen lake and throws herself in. The unwitting parents are channel-surfing at home at the time, finding not much on, already the artistry of fate throwing forth unrecognized signs, ironies:
“Are we quite sure85 she’s acting right?” you asked.
“It’s technically a blind date, of course.
Well, shall we try the preview of Remorse?”
And we allowed, in all tranquility,
The famous film to spread its charmed marquee;
The famous face flowed in, fair and inane … .
Your ruby ring86 made life and laid the law.
Oh, switch it off! And as life snapped we saw
A pinhead light dwindle and die in bla
ck
Infinity.
This contrapuntal movement87—daughter drowning while parents watch TV—is echoed in several parts of the novel. Disparate stories reflect one another. The most disparate, and the source of most of the mad humor of the book, is Kinbote’s commentary to the poem and how it appears to us: Kinbote’s scholia are insanely off, a classic case of a reader stealing a text for his own purpose, and it seems that we are in the presence of another absurd Nabokovian solipsist, like Hermann of the early novel Despair, who kills a man he doesn’t resemble, thinking that he is his exact double, or Humbert, or the scheming lovers of King, Queen, Knave, or Albinus of Laughter in the Dark, a man so blind that he does go blind.
Kinbote believes himself to be—may even be—not an unhappy, lonely language instructor at a Cornell-ish university but Charles Xavier Vseslav88, “The Beloved,” the last king of Zembla, a “distant northern land89” near Russia. He has come to America to escape the revolutionaries who deposed him, who want to murder him. A devotee of Shade’s poetry, which he tried once to translate, he attaches himself to the poet in the last months of Shade’s life. Together they ramble of an evening in New Wye, in a neighborhood like Ithaca’s professor ghetto, Cayuga Heights. Kinbote feeds the poet story lines from the life of Charles II. Shade, he hopes, will feature them in his poem in progress.
“Pale Fire” may end up cluttered with “sundry Americana,” Kinbote knows. But Zembla will dominate:
Oh, I did not expect90 him to devote himself completely to [my] theme! … But I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described… . [But once he reads the actual poem] nothing of it was there! … Instead of the wild glorious romance—what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style … void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it.
The novel, like the poem, is solidly American—replete with Lolita-style, Pnin-style imagery, offering reports on scenes of contemporary academic life, summoning the natural surroundings with affectionate precision. All of the poem, and all of the novel, grow out of an image of a common perching bird seen year-round in Ithaca yards:
I was the shadow of the waxwing91 slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
Birds fly head-on into picture windows: sad, but true. Shade’s parents were ornithologists. Like Nabokov, and like Fyodor, hero of The Gift, Shade has inherited a semi-scientific way of looking at the world:
All colors made me92 happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I’d permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt—
An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide—
Was printed on my eyelids’ nether side … .
How fully I felt nature93 glued to me
And how my childish palate loved the taste
Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!
The cedar waxwing announces that doubling worlds exist, that they interpenetrate, project upon each other:
And from the inside, too94, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
Kinbote declares that he has “no desire to twist95 and batter an … apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel”—no, absolutely not. But he does have an ungovernable urge to comment. He tells his tale by ventriloquizing the poet and by composing just such an independent apparatus. In the end, the question of whether he is Charles II or a delusional paranoid is undetermined. On the side of believing him, in addition to narrative passages that enthrall and are logical and detailed, is his blithe kingliness, the majestic manner of his condescension and of his confident, ever active homosexuality:
I turned to go96… . I explained I could not stay long as I was about to have a kind of little seminar at home followed by some table tennis, with two charming identical twins and another boy, another boy.
We shall now go back97 from mid-August 1958 to a certain afternoon in May three decades earlier… . He had several dear playmates but none could compete with Oleg, Duke of Rahl. In those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive occasions … sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts… . [Oleg’s] soft blond locks had been cut since his last visit to the palace, and the young Prince thought: Yes, I knew he would be different.
How would a deposed king, homosexual to boot, forced to flee and hide alone on a distant continent, conduct himself? The combination of fear and superiority is finely calibrated, and Charles the Beloved replies to sometimes savage mockery, often based in homophobia, with the sweaty aplomb of an out-of-shape fencer:
Well did I know98 that among certain youthful instructors whose advances I had rejected there was at least one evil practical joker; I knew it ever since the time I came home from a very enjoyable and successful meeting of students and teachers (at which I had exuberantly thrown off my coat and shown several willing pupils a few of the amusing holds employed by Zemblan wrestlers) and found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note saying: “You have hal… . . s real bad, chum,” meaning evidently “hallucinations.”
One day I happened99 to enter the English Literature office … when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: “I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the Great Beaver.” Of course, I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and … I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald’s bowtie loose.
From Kinbote’s arch, circumlocutory speech, images leap to the reader. His style is one source of fun: it recalls Humbert Humbert’s brainy, lurid speech but with more cluelessness. Only a few days in town, Kinbote meets Shade for the first time at the faculty club:
His laconic100 suggestion that I “try the pork” amused me. I am a strict vegetarian… . Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable… . I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation.
Kinbote is under stress, despite his poise. Desperate words escape him: “Dear Jesus101, do something,” he exclaims at the end of a lyrical description of the college grounds. He is above all things confessional: hungry to contact a listener, a reader, to do so intimately. “There is a very loud amusement park102 right in front of my present lodgings,” and later, “damn that music,” he says, fairly tearing his hair. Though a king, he frequently stoops. The combination of Old World formality, incomprehension of the New, fear, desperate purpose, and sadness makes him appealing despite his unreliability. Shade, if Kinbote’s reports of him can be trusted, treats him with simple kindness. They often walk together. Shade is a university poet but not quite academic: his final work, the poem that he writes in the last weeks of his life, struggles to break through, to speak with a full throat, to consummate. Yet he chooses Popian prosody103 as his vehicle, the very mode of learning-stuffed, intellectualized verse that Wordsworthian effusions came into being to supersed
e. With his scientific precision he cannot quite conquer heaven, after all. The poem finds wisdom in its own failure104; there can be no fiery word from on high, no communication with the other side, but the poet’s creation, in the intricacy of its correspondences, suggests the structure of the cosmos.
Kinbote is no Pope. “I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes,” he confesses, but on balance his temperament is more Romantic than Augustan. Though a “desponder105” by nature, with “frozen mud106 and horror” in his heart, he also has “moments of volatility107 and fou rire.” Early on, thrilled to be knowing Shade, he says,
My admiration for him108 was for me a sort of alpine cure. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I looked at him … enhanced by my awareness of [other people] not feeling what I felt, of their not seeing what I saw, of their taking Shade for granted, instead of drenching every nerve … in the romance of his presence.
Shade is an artist: while he stands there chewing a piece of celery, he is taking in and recombining impressions so as to produce “an organic miracle109, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse” at some later time. After Shade’s murder, Kinbote is still in awe:
Clink-clank, came the horseshoe110 music from [a nearby game]. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards [of Shade’s final manuscript]. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery… . In a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats.
Deeply respectful of this lineage, he goes on:
Solemnly I weighed111 in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.