Writing on the Wall (4 page)

The misunderstandings of scholarship, cases of mistaken word-identity, also enchant this dear author.
E.g.,
“alderwood” and “alderking” keep cropping up in the gloss with overtones of northern forest magic. What can an alderking be, excluding chief or ruler, which would give king-king, a redundancy?
Erie
is the German word for alder, and the alder tree, which grows in wet places, has the curious property of not rotting under water. Hence it is a kind of magic tree, very useful for piles supporting bridges. And John Shade, writing of the loss of his daughter, echoes Goethe’s “The Erl-King.”

Who rides so late in the night and the wind?

It is the writer’s grief. It is the wild

March wind. It is the father with his child.

Now the German scholar Herder, in translating the elf-king story from the Danish, mistook the word for elf
(elle)
for the word for alder. So it is not really the alderking but the elf- or goblin-king, but the word “alder” touched by the enchanted word “elf” becomes enchanted itself and dangerous. Goethe’s erl-king, notes Kinbote, fell in love with the traveler’s little boy. Therefore alderking means an eerie, dangerous invert found in northern forest-countries. Similar sorcerers’ tricks are played with the word “stone.” The king in his red cap escaping through the Zemblan mountains is compared to a
Steinmann,
which, as Kinbote explains, is a pile of stones erected by alpinists to commemorate an ascent; these stone men, apparently, like snowmen, were finished off with a red cap and scarf. The
Steinmann,
then, becomes a synonym for one of the king’s disguised followers in red cap and sweater
(e.g.,
Julius Steinmann, Zemblan patriot). But the
Steinmann
has another meaning, not divulged by Kinbote; it is the
homme de Pierre
or
homme de St. Pierre
of Pushkin’s poem about Don Giovanni, in short the stone statue, the Commendatore of the opera. Anyone who sups with the stone man, St. Peter’s deputy, will be carried off to hell. The mountain that the
Steinmann
-king has to cross is wooded by Man-devil Forest; toward the end of his journey he meets a disguised figure, Baron Mandevil, man of fashion, catamite, and Zemblan patriot. Read man-devil, but read also Sir John Mandeville, medieval impostor and author of a book of voyages who posed as an English knight (perhaps a chess move is indicated?). Finally the stone (glancing by glass houses) is simply the stone thrown into a pool or lake and starting the tremulous magic of widening ripples that distort the clear mirroring of the image—as the word “stone” itself, cast into the pool of this paragraph has sent out wavelets in a widening circle.

Lakes—the original mirrors of primeval man—play an important part in the story. There are three lakes near the campus, Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names, notes Botkin, garbled by early settlers); the king sees his consort, Disa, Duchess of Payn (sadism; theirs was a “white” marriage) mirrored in an Italian lake. The poet’s daughter has drowned herself in Lake Omega; her name (“...in lone Glenartney’s hazel shade”) is taken from
The Lady of the Lake.
But a hazel wand is also a divining-rod, used to find water; in her girlhood, the poor child, witch Hazel, was a poltergeist.

Trees, lakes, butterflies, stones, peacocks—there is also the waxwing, the poet’s alter ego, which appears in the first line of the poem (duplicated in the last, unwritten line). If you look up the waxwing in the OED, you will find that it is “a passerine bird of the genus Ampelis, esp. A. garrulus, the Bohemian waxwing. Detached from the chatterers by Monsieur Vieillot.” The poet, a Bohemian, is detached from the chatterers with whom he is easily confused. The waxwing (belonging to the king’s party) has red-tipped quills like sealing wax. Another kind of waxwing is the Cedar Waxwing. Botkin has fled to Cedarn. The anagram of “Cedarn” is nacred.

More suggestively (in the popular sense), the anal canal or “back door” or
“porte étroite”
is linked with a secret passage leading by green-carpeted stairs to a green door (which in turn leads to the greenroom of the Onhava National Theatre), discovered by the king and a boyhood bedfellow. It is through this secret passage (made for Iris Acht, a leading actress) that the king makes his escape from the castle. Elsewhere a “throne,” in the child’s sense of “the toilet,” is identified naughtily with the king. When gluttonous Gradus arrives in Appalachia, he is suffering from a severe case of diarrhea, induced by a conflict of “French” fries, consumed in a Broadway restaurant, with a genuine French ham sandwich, which he had saved from his Nice-Paris railway trip. The discharge of his bowels is horribly paralleled with the discharge of the automatic pistol he is carrying; he is the modern automatic man. In discharging the chamber of his pistol he is exercising what to him is a “natural” function; earlier the slight sensory pleasure he will derive from the act of murder is compared to the pleasure a man gets from squeezing a blackhead.

This is no giggling, high-pitched, literary camp. The repetitions, reflections, misprints, and quirks of Nature are the stamp or watermark of a god or supreme intelligence. There is a web of sense in creation, old John Shade decides—not text but texture, the warp and woof of coincidence. He hopes to find “some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found.” The world is a sportive work of art, a mosaic, an iridescent tissue. Appearance and “reality” are interchangeable; all appearance, however deceptive, is real. Indeed it is just this faculty of deceptiveness (natural mimicry, trompe l’oeil, imposture), this power of imitation, that provides the key to Nature’s cipher. Nature has “the artistic temperament”; the galaxies, if scanned, will be an iambic line.

Kinbote and Shade (and the author) agree in a detestation of symbols, except those of typography and, no doubt, natural science (“H
₂
0 is a symbol for water”). They are believers in signs, pointers, blazes, notches, all of which point into a forest of associations, a forest in which other woodmen have left half-obliterated traces. All genuine works contain precognitions of other works or reminiscences of them (and in curved time the two are the same), just as the flying lizard already possessed a parachute, a fold of skin enabling it to glide through the air.

Shade, as an American, is an agnostic, and Kinbote, a European, is a vague sort of Christian who speaks of accepting “God’s presence—a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it.” Or, more concessive, “Somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe.” This Mind of Kinbote’s seems to express itself most lucidly in dualities, pairs, twins, puns, couplets, like the plots of Shakespeare’s early comedies. But this is only to be expected if one recalls that to make a cutout heart or lacy design for Valentine’s Day all a child needs is a scissors and a folded piece of paper—the fold makes the pattern, which, unfolded, appears as a miracle. It is the quaint principle of the butterfly. Similarly, Renaissance artificers used to make wondrous “natural” patterns by bisecting a veined stone, an agate or a carnelian, as you would bisect an orange. Another kind of magic is the child’s trick of putting a piece of paper on the cover of a schoolbook and shading it with a pencil; wonderfully, the stamped title,
Caesar’s Gallic Wars,
emerges, as though embossed, in white letters. This, upside down, is the principle of the pheasant’s hieroglyph in the snow or the ripple marks on the sand, to which we cry “How beautiful!” There is no doubt that duplication, stamping, printing (children’s transfers), is one of the chief forms of magic, a magic we also see in Jack Frost’s writing on the window, in jet trails in the sky—an intelligent spirit seems to have signed them. But it is not only in symmetry and reproduction that the magic signature of Mind is discerned, but in the very imperfections of Nature’s work, which appear as guarantees of authentic, hand-knit manufacture. That is, in those blemishes and freckles and streakings and moles already mentioned that are the sports of creation, and what is a vice but a mole?

Nabokov’s tenderness for human eccentricity, for the freak, the “deviate,” is partly the naturalist’s taste for the curious. But his fond, wry compassion for the lone black piece on the board goes deeper than classificatory science or the collector’s chop-licking. Love is the burden of
Pale Fire,
love and loss. Love is felt as a kind of homesickness, that yearning for union described by Plato, the pining for the other half of a once-whole body, the straining of the soul’s black horse to unite with the white. The sense of loss in love, of separation (the room
beyond,
projected onto the snow, the phantom moves of the chess knight, that deviate piece,
off
the board’s edge onto ghostly squares), binds mortal men in a common pattern—the elderly couple watching TV in a lighted room, and the “queer” neighbor watching
them
from his window. But it is most poignant in the outsider: the homely daughter stood up by her date, the refugee, the “queen,” the bird smashed on the windowpane.

Pity is the password, says Shade, in a philosophical discussion with Kinbote; for the agnostic poet, there are only two sins, murder and the deliberate infliction of pain. In the exuberant high spirits, the wild laughter of the book, there is a cry of pure pain. The compassion of Nabokov stops violently short of Gradus, that grey, degraded being, the shadow of a Shade. The modern, mass-produced, jet-propelled, newspaper-digesting killer is described with a fury of intimate hatred; he is Death on the prowl. Unnatural Death is the natural enemy of the delicate, gauzy ephemerids who are Nabokov’s special love. Kinbote makes an “anti-Darwinian” aphorism: “The one who kills is
always
his victim’s inferior.”

Gradus in his broad-brimmed hat, with his umbrella and black traveling bag, figures as a kind of Batman out of children’s comic books, whirring darkly through space; yet he is also Mercury (the mercury stands at so many
degrees
in the thermometer; there is a headless statue of Mercury in the secret passage leading from the palace to the theatre), conductor of souls to the underworld, Zeus’s undercover agent, god of commerce, travel, manual skill, and thievery. In short, a “Jack of small trades and a killer,” as Kinbote calls Jacques d’Argus, who was a pharmacology student at one time (the caduceus) and a messenger boy for a firm of cardboard-box manufacturers; Mercury or Hermes was the slayer of the giant Argus put to watch on Io by Juno-Hera; the hundred eyes of Argus were set in the tail of the peacock, Juno’s familiar. Hermes, born and worshipped in Arcady, is simply a stone or herm; he is thought to have been in early times the
daimon
that haunted a heap of stones (the
Steinmann
or grave-ghost), also the place-spirit of a roadside marker or milestone; as a road god, he was the obvious patron of traders and robbers. He was often represented as a rudimentary stock or stone with a human head carved on top and a phallus halfway up. The beheaded Gradus-d’Argus has reverted to a rudimentary state of insentient stoniness—a sex-hater, he once tried to castrate himself.

Not only Hermes-Mercury, most of the nymphs of Arcady and gods of Olympus are glimpsed in
Pale Fire,
transformed, metamorphosed into animal or human shapes. Botkin is identified by Sybil Shade with the botfly, a kind of parasitic horsefly that infests sheep and cattle. Io, in cow form, was tormented by a gadfly sent by Hera; one of the Vanessa butterflies is the Io, marked with peacock eyes. Another is the Limenitis Sibylla, the White Admiral, and the Red Admiral is the Vanessa Atalanta, which feeds on wounded tree stems, like the scarred hickory in Shade’s bosky garden. Atalanta was another Arcadian. The sibyls, on the other hand, are connected with Apollo, and Shade with his laurel trees is an Apollonian figure. But Sibyl was born Swallow; the land of Arcady was drained by swallow-holes, and the first sibyl was daughter of Dardanus, ancestor of the Trojans, an Arcadian king. The Hyperboreans (read Zemblans) were a legendary people sacred to Apollo living behind the north wind in a land of perpetual sunshine—a counter-Arcadia. Zeus, the sky-king, is heard in the thunderstorms that occur at crucial moments in the Zemblan story—at the arrival of Gradus in America and in Mandevil Forest, on Mount Mandevil, when the king is making his escape; Zeus’s thunderbolts, in classical times, were stones too, by which oaths were sworn.

The Arcadians and Olympians of
Pale Fire
are meteoric fugitives, like the deposed Kinbote, fitfully apprehended in a name, a passing allusion. Shade’s ornithologist mother was called Caroline Lukin—a triple reference to the Carolina waxwing, to Apollo Lukeios, and to the sacred wood,
lucus,
in Latin, full of singing birds? A reference to the Pléiade edition of Proust conjures up the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, who were turned into stars and set in the constellation Taurus. One of the seven Pleiades is Electra, “the shining one”; the word “electricity” in Greek was the word for amber, which was sent to Delphian Apollo by his Hyperboreans in the north. Shade has written a poem about electricity. But the Pleiad was also a group of seven poets who sought to revive tragedy at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria, one of whom, Lykophron, was the author of a curious riddling poem, like
Pale Fire
one of the hermetic puzzles of its time, called the
Alexandra
—another name for Cassandra, Priam’s daughter, who was loved by Apollo.

Amid such myriads of mica-like references to gods, nymphs, and demons there is hardly a glance at Christian myth and legend. I have found only two: the oblique allusion to St. Peter as gatekeeper of Heaven and the chess-jesting one to the Black King of the Magi. The book is adamantly classical, magical, and scientific. The author’s attitude toward the mystery of the universe is nearer to the old herborist’s charmed wonder than to the modern physicist’s “faith.” His practical morality is not far from Kant’s, while his practical pantheism contains Platonic gleams: Kinbote’s “phosphorescence” recalls the cave myth. Kinbote reverts to this notion when he concedes in his final remarks that Shade’s
Pale Fire,
for all its deficiencies, has “echoes and wavelets of fire and pale phosphorescent hints” of the real Zemblan magic. This madman’s concession may also be taken as the author’s apology for his own work, in relation to the fiery Beyond of the pure imagination—the sphere of pure light or fire. But Plato’s Empyrean is finished, a celestial storehouse or vault of models from which the forms of earthly life are copied. In Nabokov’s view (see Shade’s couplet,
“Man’s life as commentary to abstruse Unfinished poem.
Note for future use”), the celestial Poem itself is incomplete.