Pale Fire

by Vladimir Nabokov

  It did not matter who they were. No sound,

  No furtive light came from their involute

  Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,

  Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns

  820 To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns;

  Kindling a long life here, extinguishing

  A short one there; killing a Balkan king;

  Causing a chunk of ice formed on a high-Flying airplane to plummet from the sky

  And strike a farmer dead; hiding my keys,

  Glasses or pipe. Coordinating these

  Events and objects with remote events

  And vanished objects. Making ornaments

  Of accidents and possibilities.

  830 Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is

  My firm conviction--"Darling, shut the door.

  Had a nice trip?" Splendid--but what is more

  I have returned convinced that I can grope

  My way to some--to some--"Yes, dear?" Faint hope.

  CANTO FOUR

  Now I shall spy on beauty as none has

  Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as

  None has cried out. Now I shall try what none

  Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.

  And speaking of this wonderful machine:

  840 I'm puzzled by the difference between

  Two methods of composing: A, the kind

  Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,

  A testing of performing words, while he

  Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,

  The other kind, much more decorous, when

  He's in his study writing with a pen.

  In method B the hand supports the thought,

  The abstract battle is concretely fought.

  The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar

  850 A canceled sunset or restore a star,

  And thus it physically guides the phrase

  Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.

  But method A is agony! The brain

  Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.

  A muse in overalls directs the drill

  Which grinds and which no effort of the will

  Can interrupt, while the automaton

  Is taking off what he has just put on

  Or walking briskly to the corner store

  860 To buy the paper he has read before.

  Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because

  In penless work there is no pen-poised pause

  And one must use three hands at the same time,

  Having to choose the necessary rhyme,

  Hold the completed line before one's eyes,

  And keep in mind all the preceding tries?

  Or is the process deeper with no desk

  To prop the false and hoist the poetesque?

  For there are those mysterious moments when

  870 Too weary to delete, I drop my pen;

  I ambulate--and by some mute command

  The right word flutes and perches on my hand.

  My best time is the morning; my preferred

  Season, midsummer. I once overheard

  Myself awakening while half of me

  Still slept in bed. I tore my spirit free,

  And caught up with myself--upon the lawn

  Where clover leaves cupped the topaz of dawn,

  And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe.

  880 And then I realized that this half too

  Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke

  Safe in my bed as day its eggshell broke,

  And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp

  Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay! My secret stamp,

  The Shade impress, the mystery inborn.

  Mirages, miracles, midsummer morn.

  Since my biographer may be too staid

  Or know too little to affirm that Shade

  Shaved in his bath, here goes:

  "He'd fixed a sort

  890 Of hinge-and-screw affair, a steel support

  Running across the tub to hold in place

  The shaving mirror right before his face

  And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he'd

  Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed."

  The more I weigh, the less secure my skin;

  In places it's ridiculously thin;

  Thus near the mouth: the space between its wick

  And my grimace, invites the wicked nick.

  Or this dewlap: some day I must set free

  900 The Newport Frill inveterate in me.

  My Adam's apple is a prickly pear:

  Now I shall speak of evil and despair

  As none has spoken. Five, six, seven, eight,

  Nine strokes are not enough. Ten. I palpate

  Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess

  And find unchanged that patch of prickliness.

  I have my doubts about the one-armed bloke

  Who in commercials with one gliding stroke

  Clears a smooth path of flesh from ear to chin,

  910 Then wipes his face and fondly tries his skin.

  I'm in the class of fussy bimanists.

  As a discreet ephebe in tights assists

  A female in an acrobatic dance,

  My left hand helps, and holds, and shifts its stance.

  Now I shall speak ... Better than any soap

  Is the sensation for which poets hope

  When inspiration and its icy blaze,

  The sudden image, the immediate phrase

  Over the skin a triple ripple send

  920 Making the little hairs all stand on end

  As in the enlarged animated scheme

  Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.

  Now I shall speak of evil as none has

  Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

  The white-hosed moron torturing a black

  Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

  Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;

  Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;

  Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

  930 Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

  And while the safety blade with scrape and screak

  Travels across the country of my cheek,

  Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep

  Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,

  And now a silent liner docks, and now

  Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough

  Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows,

  And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose.

  Man's life as commentary to abstruse

  940 Unfinished poem. Note for further use.

  Dressing in all the rooms, I rhyme and roam

  Throughout the house with, in my fist, a comb

  Or a shoehorn, which turns into the spoon

  I eat my egg with. In the afternoon

  You drive me to the library. We dine

  At half past six. And that odd muse of mine,

  My versipel, is with me everywhere,

  In carrel and in car, and in my chair.

  And all the time, and all the time, my love,

  950 You too are there, beneath the word, above

  The syllable, to underscore and stress

  The vital rhythm. One heard a woman's dress

  Rustle in days of yore. I've often caught

  The sound and sense of your approaching thought.

  And all in you is youth, and you make new,

  By quoting them, old things I made for you.

  Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote

  Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float

  In that damp carnival, for now I term

  960 Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.

  (But this transparent thingum does require

  Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fi
re.)

  Gently the day has passed in a sustained

  Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained

  And a brown ament, and the noun I meant

  To use but did not, dry on the cement.

  Maybe my sensual love for the consonne

  D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon

  A feeling of fantastically planned,

  970 Richly rhymed life.

  I feel I understand

  Existence, or 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

  980 Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July

  The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,

  And that the day will probably be fine;

  So this alarm clock let me set myself,

  Yawn, and put back Shade's "Poems" on their shelf.

  But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains

  Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes.

  The man must be--what? Eighty? Eighty-two?

  Was twice my age the year I married you.

  Where are you? In the garden. I can see

  990 Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.

  Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click. Clunk.

  (Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.)

  A dark Vanessa with a crimson band

  Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand

  And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.

  And through the flowing shade and ebbing light

  A man, unheedful of the butterfly--

  Some neighbor's gardener, I guess--goes by

  Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.

  Commentary

  Lines 1-4: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, etc.

  The image in these opening lines evidently refers to a bird knocking itself out, in full flight, against the outer surface of a glass pane in which a mirrored sky, with its slightly darker tint and slightly slower cloud, presents the illusion of continued space. We can visualize John Shade in his early boyhood, a physically unattractive but otherwise beautifully developed lad, experiencing his first eschatological shock, as with incredulous fingers he picks up from the turf that compact ovoid body and gazes at the wax-red streaks ornamenting those gray-brown wings and at the graceful tail feathers tipped with yellow as bright as fresh paint. When in the last year of Shade's life I had the fortune of being his neighbor in the idyllic hills of New Wye (see Foreword), I often saw those particular birds most convivially feeding on the chalk-blue berries of junipers growing at the corner of his house. (See also lines 181-182.)

  My knowledge of garden Aves had been limited to those of northern Europe but a young New Wye gardener, in whom I was interested (see note to line 998), helped me to identify the profiles of quite a number of tropical-looking little strangers and their comical calls; and, naturally, every tree top plotted its dotted line toward the ornithological work on my desk to which I would gallop from the lawn in nomenclatorial agitation. How hard I found to fit the name "robin" to the suburban impostor, the gross fowl, with its untidy dull-red livery and the revolting gusto it showed when consuming long, sad, passive worms!

  Incidentally, it is curious to note that a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade, is the model of one of the three heraldic creatures (the other two being respectively a reindeer proper and a merman azure, crined or) in the armorial bearings of the Zemblan King, Charles the Beloved (born 1915), whose glorious misfortunes I discussed so often with my friend.

  The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator's temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5.

  Line 12: that crystal land

  Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country. After this, in the disjointed, half-obliterated draft which I am not at all sure I have deciphered properly:

  Ah, I must not forget to say something

  That my friend told me of a certain king.

  Alas, he would have said a great deal more if a domestic anti-Karlist had not controlled every line he communicated to her! Many a time have I rebuked him in bantering fashion: "You really should promise to use all that wonderful stuff, you bad gray poet, you!" And we would both giggle like boys. But then, after the inspiring evening stroll, we had to part, and grim night lifted the drawbridge between his impregnable fortress and my humble home.

  That King's reign (1936-1958) will be remembered by at least a few discerning historians as a peaceful and elegant one. Owing to a fluid system of judicious alliances, Mars in his time never marred the record. Internally, until corruption, betrayal, and Extremism penetrated it, the People's Place (parliament) worked in perfect harmony with the Royal Council. Harmony, indeed, was the reign's password. The polite arts and pure sciences flourished. Technicology, applied physics, industrial chemistry and so forth were suffered to thrive. A small skyscraper of ultramarine glass was steadily rising in Onhava. The climate seemed to be improving. Taxation had become a thing of beauty. The poor were getting a little richer, and the rich a little poorer (in accordance with what may be known some day as Kinbote's Law). Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the puddles tinkled with Muscovy glass, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "backdraucht" in a crowd of schoolchildren. Parachuting had become a popular sport. Everybody, in a word, was content--even the political mischiefmakers who were contentedly making mischief paid by a contented Sosed (Zembla's gigantic neighbor). But let us not pursue this tiresome subject.

  To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla--partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39-40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle's raucous dying request: "Teach, Karlik!" Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnigan's Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongsskuggsio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-cheeked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894).

  During these periods of teaching, Charles Xavier made it a rule to sleep at a pied-a-terre he had rented, as any scholarly citizen would, in Coriolanus Lane: a charming, central-heated studio with adjacent bathroom and kitchenette. One recalls with nostalgic pleasure its light gray carpeting and pearl-gray walls (one of them graced with a solitary copy of Picasso's Chandelier, pot et casserole emaillee), a shelfful of calf-bound poets, and a virginal-looking daybed under its rug of imitation panda fur. How far from this limpid simplicity seemed the palace and the odious Council Chamber with its unsolvabl
e problems and frightened councilors!

  Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray

  By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities--printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.

  Line 27: Sherlock Holmes