On
Donald Cammell's Adaptation of Pale Fire
"[Donald
Cammell] son of poet and critic Charles Richard Cammell – heir to the
Cammell-Laird fortune and biographer of Aleister Crowley ...."
"As
to the main character –
Kinbote, alias Charles Xavier, ex-King of Zembla – he is a true hero; a
lovable, brave, amusing, eccentric, tragic and totally believable hero.
To me,
anyway." Donald Cammell
Everything
in
this post is fascinating - - talk about "Sympathy for the
Devil(s)"! Not least intriguing to
read that Nabokov would have been interested in meeting such a person. I am truly amazed.
Carolyn
In response to Carolyn Kunin’s post on “Sympathy for Mick, Aleister, & Chas,” I would like to offer a couple points of clarification, the first one being slightly off-topic:
1. Charles Richard Cammell’s biography of Aleister Crowley (pub. 1951) is not as sensational as it may seem. In fact, the book sold quite poorly compared to John Symonds’ more deliberately scandalous one. Cammell admired Crowley’s erudition, his learning, and his poetry, which was the basis of their (brief) friendship. Essentially he felt that Crowley had squandered his gifts as a poet in order to pursue his interest in the occult; Crowley is not known as a poet today, but his earliest works demonstrated a clear poetic gift, even if his kind of poetry would be considered déclassé today. As well, although it may also seem silly today, C. R. Cammell admired Crowley’s sheer derring-do, as he was one of the world’s foremost mountain climbers in his day (when still a young man, obviously). The famed occultist even tried to scale Mount Everest, but failed, afterwards claiming to climb it was impossible, and it remained so during his lifetime. He died in 1947, some years before Hillary and Norgay’s first successful ascent in 1953. Cammell saw Crowley only once after the war, and they did not speak (they’d had an acrimonious split about the time the war started). Interviewed by John Symonds near the end of his life, Charles Cammell thought Crowley a charlatan, but nonetheless reiterated his admiration for his (early) poetry and his erudition, and lamented his squandered talent.
2. Donald Cammell had a powerful visual imagination, and the lesson, to me, is that his ideas stimulated Nabokov’s visual imagination as well. While it is, quite understandably, difficult to get an idea of what Cammell was going after in his adaptation of Pale Fire based on the few pages I presented to the list—perhaps someday I might be able to place it in a more formal publication, in its complete form—I think his approach is best understood by referring to his most famous film, Performance, in which Jorge Luis Borges’s collection, A Personal Anthology, makes an appearance. Donald was intrigued by one of the pieces in the Borges anthology, “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald,” in which Borges’s subject is the English poet Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), most famous for his translation/adaptation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. As is well known, Fitzgerald’s translation, first published in 1859, became one of the greatly admired poems in the English language. Fitzgerald was a wealthy recluse who indulged his love of exotic literature through extensive translations of Persian, Spanish, and Greek poetry. In contrast, Omar Khayyam was an eleventh-century Persian poet and astronomer. As Borges tells it, Fitzgerald’s encounter with the poetry of Omar Khayyam was so powerful as to convince Fitzgerald that he was not merely a translator of the Persian poet’s works, but that he was Omar Khayyam in a previous life. In short, he remembered being Omar Khayyam, an anamnesis (the remembering of what was once forgotten) that occurred after a prior dis-membering. His reading of the Rubaiyat triggered the re-membering. Because Omar Khayyam was forced to repress his poetic desires in favor of his mathematical (astronomical) calculations (more highly valued at that historical moment), he had to wait for a much later incarnation of his soul for those desires to be expressed fully. Borges is specific about when this might have occurred: “Perhaps the spirit of Umar lodged, around 1857, in Fitzgerald’s.” Borges maintains that the soul of the medieval Persian poet found a host in his nineteenth-century British translator, Fitzgerald, so that what began as a translation actually ended as an original expression, created by the collaboration of these two selves, one remembering being the other. Borges would seem to be exploring, in parabolic fashion, the daunting mystery of artistic creation, while at the same time the related mystery, that of individual identity (the illusory nature of the “Cartesian self”)—which, so I think, informed Donald Cammell’s reading of Pale Fire. While it is possible to imagine the dyad of Kinbote/Shade as being a Jekyll/Hyde relationship (or the “Eve White”/“Eve Black” relationship as in The Three Faces of Eve), alternatively it may be possible to imagine it as the more benign Fitzgerald/Khayyam relationship, where otherness isn’t by definition “the evil that lies within.” I haven’t fully thought through the implications of this, but I do think it is relevant to Pale Fire’s implicit preoccupation, what I referred to as the “mystery of artistic creation.” I assume Nabokov scholars have pursued this line of thought, and I apologize for any redundancy, as I haven’t thoroughly researched it. So there may have been a number of reasons why he was interested in Cammell’s approach.
Pursuing the Kinbote/Shade relationship, it seems entirely possible for an artist to treat his or her own work as a found object, by merely extending Duchamp’s “readymades” tactic. What’s to prevent Kinbote (Shade)—any artist—from approaching his own previous work (poem, painting) as a found object, and then use Duchamp’s strategy to remotivate it? I’m thinking, for instance, of Duchamp’s goateed Mona Lisa, “L.H.O.O.Q,” and his subsequent transformation, “Shaved,” which is simply a reproduction of the original painting, untouched. He has altered nothing, but has gained “possession” of the painting as his own, not maliciously, but humorously, and perhaps even for commercial profit (think Warhol). Most certainly Nabokov was aware of the artistic and aesthetic strategies that began to emerge in Europe in the early twentieth century as a response to the rise of mechanically reproduced art and the attendant mass culture, the postmodern response to this historical development perhaps being best exemplified by Marcel Duchamp (a formidable chess player, I might add; he even made his own pieces).
Thanks for prompting these thoughts!
Incidentally, I wish to thank Stephen Blackwell for distributing the letter and the materials on Cammell’s adaptation of Pale Fire. I am deeply grateful to Dmitri Nabokov for allowing the July 1971 letter to Cammell to be distributed on this list. I know that David Cammell, Donald’s brother, is very pleased to have the letter, finally, see the light of day, especially to the members of this list, who can appreciate it. Thirty-seven years in the dark is a long time.
Sam