Describing Gradus’ suicide in prison, Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) says “Exit Jack Grey:”
Because of these machinations I was confronted with nightmare problems in my endeavors to make people calmly see - without having them immediately scream and hustle me - the truth of the tragedy - a tragedy in which I had been not a "chance witness" but the protagonist, and the main, if only potential, victim. The hullabaloo ended by affecting the course of my new life, and necessitated my removal to this modest mountain cabin; but I did manage to obtain, soon after his detention, an interview, perhaps even two interviews, with the prisoner. He was now much more lucid than when he cowered bleeding on my porch step, and he told me all I wanted to know. By making him believe I could help him at his trial I forced him to confess his heinous crime - his deceiving the police and the nation by posing as Jack Grey, escapee from an asylum, who mistook Shade for the man who sent him there. A few days later, alas, he thwarted justice by slitting his throat with a safety razor blade salvaged from an unwatched garbage container. He died, not so much because having played his part in the story he saw no point in existing any longer, but because he could not live down this last crowning botch - killing the wrong person when the right one stood before him. In other words, his life ended not in a feeble splutter of the clockwork but in a gesture of humanoid despair. Enough of this. Exit Jack Grey. (note to Line 1000)
In Circe, Episode 15 of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Stephen Dedalus says “Exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit” (Judas leaves. And he hanged himself with a noose):
PRIVATE CARR
(With ferocious articulation.) I'll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!
OLD GUMMY GRANNY
(Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand.) Remove him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. (She prays.) O good God, take him!
BLOOM
(Runs to Lynch.) Can't you get him away?
LYNCH
He likes dialectic, the universal language. Kitty! (To Bloom.) Get him away, you. He won't listen to me.
(He drags Kitty away.)
STEPHEN
(Points.) Exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit.
BLOOM
(Runs to Stephen.) Come along with me now before worse happens. Here's your stick.
STEPHEN
Stick, no. Reason. This feast of pure reason.
John Shade is an authority on Pope. In Imitations of Horace (1734), bk. 2, Satire I, ll. 126-130, Alexander Pope says:
There, my retreat the best companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and Statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl,
The Feast of Reason and the Flow of soul.
In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski’s seventeenth birthday), to his brother Dostoevski mentions dusha (the soul) and gradus vdokhnoveniya (the degree of inspiration):
Друг мой! Ты философствуешь как поэт. И как не ровно выдерживает душа градус вдохновенья, так не ровна, не верна и твоя философия. Чтоб больше знать, надо меньше чувствовать, и обратно, правило опрометчивое, бред сердца.
My friend, you philosophize like a poet. And just because the soul cannot be forever in a state of exaltation, your philosophy is not true and not just. To know more one must feel less, and vice versa. Your judgment is featherheaded – it is a delirium of the heart.
According to Kinbote, the real name of Shade’s murderer is Jakob Gradus. Shade’s birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915).
According to Kinbote, in Zemblan 'tree' is grados. In his poem Podrazhanie ital’yanskomu (“Imitation of the Italian,” 1836), beginning Kak s dreva sorvalsya predatel' uchenik ("When the traitor disciple fell from the tree"), Pushkin mentions Judas' trup zhivoy (living corpse) cast by the devil into the maw of starved Gehenna:
Как с древа сорвался предатель ученик,
Диявол прилетел, к лицу его приник,
Дхнул жизнь в него, взвился с своей добычей смрадной
И бросил труп живой в гортань геенны гладной...
Там бесы, радуясь и плеща, на рога
Прияли с хохотом всемирного врага
И шумно понесли к проклятому владыке,
И сатана, привстав, с веселием на лике
Лобзанием своим насквозь прожег уста,
В предательскую ночь лобзавшие Христа.
The poem is Pushkin's rendering in the Alexandrines of a sonnet about Judas (Sopra Giuda) by the Italian poet Francesco Gianni (1760-1822).
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade’s poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem by Alexander Blok. In his poem Umri, Florentsiya, Iuda (“Die, Florence, you Judas”) from the cycle “Italian Verses” (1909) Blok mentions Leonardo:
Умри, Флоренция, Иуда,
Исчезни в сумрак вековой!
Я в час любви тебя забуду,
В час смерти буду не с тобой!
О, Bella, смейся над собою,
Уж не прекрасна больше ты!
Гнилой морщиной гробовою
Искажены твои черты!
Хрипят твои автомобили,
Твои уродливы дома,
Всеевропейской желтой пыли
Ты предала себя сама!
Звенят в пыли велосипеды
Там, где святой монах сожжен,
Где Леонардо сумрак ведал,
Беато снился синий сон!
Ты пышных Медичей тревожишь,
Ты топчешь лилии свои,
Но воскресить себя не можешь
В пыли торговой толчеи!
Гнусавой мессы стон протяжный
И трупный запах роз в церквах -
Весь груз тоски многоэтажный -
Сгинь в очистительных веках!
Describing a conversation at the Faculty Club, Kinbote compares Gerald Emerald (a young instructor at Wordsmith University) to a disciple in Leonardo’s Last Supper:
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
"Well, said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor). "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."
"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."
"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.
"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, our young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."
"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand - which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)
According to Shade, among the people he has been said to resemble is the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria:
"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone.
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
"Take my own case," continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. "I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
"I would rather say," remarked Mr. Pardon - American History - "that she looks like Judge Goldsworth" ("One of us," interposed Shade inclining his head), "especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner."
"I hear," hastily began Netochka, "that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time -" (ibid.)
The Levin Hall cafeteria brings to mind Jack Levine, the author of “Feast of Pure Reason” (1936), a painting (btw., levyi is Russian for “left”). Dr. Oscar Nattochdag’s nickname hints at Netochka Nezvanov (1849), the unfinished novel by Dostoevski.
Lynch (whom Stephen Dedalus calls "Judas") makes one think of Gradus lynching the wrong people:
Gradus, Jakob, 1915-1959; alias Jack Degree, de Grey, d'Argus, Vinogradus, Leningradus, etc.; a Jack of small trades and a killer, 12, 17; lynching the wrong people, 80; his approach synchronized with S 's work on the poem, 120, 131; his election and past tribulations, 171; the first lap of his journey, Onhava to Copenhagen, 181, 209; to Paris, and meeting with Oswin Bretwit, 286; to Geneva, and talk with little Gordon at Joe Lavender's place near Lex, 408; calling headquarters from Geneva, 469; his name in a variant, and his wait in Geneva, 596; to Nice, and his wait there, 697; his meeting with Izumrudov in Nice and discovery of the King's address, 741; from Paris to New York, 873; in New York, 949 1; his morning in New York, his journey to New Wye, to the campus, to Dulwich Rd., 949 2; the crowning blunder, 1000. (Index)
At the end of his note to Line 80 Kinbote writes:
He was to go through a far more dramatic ordeal thirteen years later with Disa, Duchess of Payn, whom he married in 1949, as described in notes to lines 275 and 433-434, which the student of Shade's poem will reach in due time; there is no hurry. A series of cool summers ensued. Poor Fleur was still around, though indistinctly so. Disa befriended her after the old Countess perished in the crowded vestibule of the 1950 Exposition of Glass Animals, when part of it was almost destroyed by fire, Gradus helping the fire brigade to clear a space in the square for the lynching of the non-union incendiaries, or at least of the persons (two baffled tourists from Denmark) who have been mistaken for them. Our young Queen may have felt some subtle sympathy for her pale lady in waiting whom from time to time the King glimpsed illuminating a concert program by the diagonal light of an ogival window, or heard making tinny music in Bower B. The beautiful bedroom of his bachelor days is alluded to again in a note to line 130, as the place of his "luxurious captivity" in the beginning of the tedious and unnecessary Zemblan Revolution.
Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) Queen Disa seems to blend Leonardo's Mona Lisa with Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. In his famous monologue in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act II, Scene 7) Jaques says that all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players who make their exits and their entrances:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
At the end of his Commentary Kinbote repeats the word "sans" four times and mentions a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus whom he will face sooner or later:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the other two characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide on Oct. 19, 1959 (the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum). There is a hope that, after Kinbote's death, Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "helf-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name).