When Gradus (Shade’s murderer in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) visits Villa Libitina in Switzerland, Joe Lavender (the villa’s owner) mistakes Gradus for a reporter and calls him over the ’phone “a mucking snooping son of a bitch:”
They had now reached the swimming pool. Gradus, in deep thought, sank down on a canvas stool. He should wire headquarters at once. No need to prolong this visit. On the other hand, a sudden departure might look suspicious. The stool creaked under him and he looked around for another seat. The young woodwose had now closed his eyes and was stretched out supine on the pool's marble margin; his Tarzan brief had been cast aside on the turf. Gradus spat in disgust and walked back towards the house. Simultaneously the elderly footman came running down the steps of the terrace to tell him in three languages that he was wanted on the telephone. Mr. Lavender could not make it after all but would like to talk to Mr. Degré. After an exchange of civilities there was a pause and Lavender asked: "Sure you aren't a mucking snooper from that French rag?"
"A what?" said Gradus, pronouncing the last word as "vot."
"A mucking snooping son of a bitch?"
Gradus hung up. (note to Line 408)
In J. D. Salinger’s story For Esmé – with Love and Squalor the narrator says that Corporal Z hoped to show that not by a long shot was he some new son of a bitch in the E.T.O. (European Theater of Operations):
He took a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it with fingers that bumped gently and incessantly against one another. He sat back a trifle in his chair and smoked without any sense of taste. He had been chain-smoking for weeks. His gums bled at the slightest pressure of the tip of his tongue, and he seldom stopped experimenting; it was a little game he played, sometimes by the hour. He sat for a moment smoking and experimenting. Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack. He quickly did what he had been doing for weeks to set things right: he pressed his hands hard against his temples. He held on tight for a moment. His hair needed cutting, and it was dirty. He had washed it three or four times during his two weeks' stay at the hospital in Frankfort on the Main, but it had got dirty again on the long, dusty jeep ride back to Gaufurt. Corporal Z, who had called for him at the hospital, still drove a jeep combat-style, with the windshield down on the hood, armistice or no armistice. There were thousands of new troops in Germany. By driving with his windshield down, combat-style, Corporal Z hoped to show that he was not one of them, that not by a long shot was he some new son of a bitch in the E.T.O.
In Salinger’s story the narrator meets Esmé (a precocious girl of thirteen) in Devon, England:
In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who took a rather specialized pre-Invasion training course, directed by British Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn't one good mixer in the bunch. We were all essentially letter-writing types, and when we spoke to each other out of the line of duty, it was usually to ask somebody if he had any ink he wasn't using. When we weren't writing letters or attending classes, each of us went pretty much his own way. Mine usually led me, on clear days, in scenic circles around the countryside. Rainy days, I generally sat in a dry place and read a book, often just an axe length away from a ping-pong table.
“A mucking snooper" and "a mucking snooping son of a bitch” bring to mind Snoopy, Dr. Mortimer’s cocker spaniel in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel set largely on Dartmoor, Devon. Baskerville Hall is surrounded by the moor and borders the Grimpen Mire, where animals and humans can sink to their deaths. In Canto Two of his poem Shade says that his daughter (Hazel Shade, who drowned in Lake Omega) asked her mother (Sybil Shade, the poet’s wife) what grimpen means:
She was my darling - difficult, morose -
But still my darling. You remember those
Almost unruffled evenings when we played
Mah-jongg, or she tried on your furs, which made
Her almost fetching; and the mirrors smiled,
The lights were merciful, the shadows mild,
Sometimes I'd help her with a Latin text,
Or she'd be reading in her bedroom, next
To my fluorescent lair, and you would be
In your own study, twice removed from me,
And I would hear both voices now and then:
"Mother, what's grimpen?" "What is what?" "Grim Pen."
Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:
"Mother, what's chtonic?" That, too, you'd explain,
Appending, "Would you like a tangerine?"
"No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?"
You'd hesitate. And lustily I'd roar
The answer from my desk through the closed door. (ll. 357-376)
At the beginning of Canto One of his poem Shade mentions Sherlock Holmes:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
"A hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective, the main character in various stories by Conan Doyle. I have no means to ascertain at the present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints." (note to Line 27)
In J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Holden Caulfield’s younger sister Phoebe writes fiction stories about a kid detective Hazel Weatherfield. The characters in J. D. Salinger’s story A Perfect Day for Bananafish include Sybil Carpenter (a girl of six who is able to see the bananafish) and Seymour Glass (the eldest of the seven Glass children who shoots himself dead at the end of the story). According to Kinbote (who once told Shade that people who live in glass houses should not write poems), Gradus never became a real success in the glass business. Describing the king’s escape from Zembla, Kinbote mentions the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951:
It was a lovely breezy afternoon. with a western horizon like a luminous vacuum that sucked in one's eager heart. The King, now at the most critical point of his journey, looked about him, scrutinizing the few promenaders and trying to decide which of them might be police agents in disguise, ready to pounce upon him as soon as he vaulted the parapet and made for the Rippleson Caves. Only a single sail dyed a royal red marred with some human interest the marine expanse. Nitra and Indra (meaning "inner" and "outer"), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley, were being photographed from the parapet by a Russian tourist, thickset, many-chinned, with a general's fleshy nape. His faded wife, wrapped up floatingly in a flowery écharpe, remarked in singsong Moscovan "Every time I see that kind of frightful disfigurement I can't help thinking of Nina's boy. War is an awful thing."
"War?" queried her consort. "That must have been the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951 - not war." They slowly walked past the King in the direction he had come from. On a sidewalk bench, facing the sea, a man with his crutches beside him was reading the Onhava Post which featured on the first page Odon in an Extremist uniform and Odon in the part of the Merman. Incredible as it may seem the palace guard had never realized that identity before. Now a goodly sum was offered for his capture. Rhythmically the waves lapped the shingle. The newspaper reader's face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion, and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror.
The short stretch of beach between the restaurant at the beginning of the promenade and the granite rocks at its end was almost empty: far to the left three fishermen were loading a rowboat with kelp-brown nets, and directly under the sidewalk, an elderly woman wearing a polka-dotted dress and having for headgear a cocked newspaper (EX-KING SEEN -) sat knitting on the shingle with her back to the street. Her bandaged legs were stretched out on the sand; on one side of her lay a pair of carpet slippers and on the other a ball of red wool, the leading filament of which she would tug at every now and then with the immemorial elbow jerk of a Zemblan knitter to give a turn to her yarn clew and slacken the thread. Finally, on the sidewalk a little girl in a ballooning skirt was clumsily but energetically clattering about on roller skates. Could a dwarf in the police force pose as a pigtailed child?
Waiting for the Russian couple to recede, the King stopped beside the bench. The mosaic-faced man folded his newspaper, and one second before he spoke (in the neutral interval between smoke puff and detonation), the King knew it was Odon.
"All one could do at short notice," said Odon, plucking at his cheek to display how the varicolored semi-transparent film adhered to his face, altering its contours according to stress. "A polite person," he added, "does not, normally, examine too closely a poor fellow's disfigurement."
"I was looking for shpiks [plainclothesmen]" said the King. "All day," said Odon, "they have been patrolling the quay. They are dining at present."
"I'm thirsty and hungry," said the King. "That's young Baron Mandevil - chap who had that duel last year. Let's go now."
"Couldn't we take him too?"
"Wouldn't come - got a wife and a baby. Come on, Charlie, come on, Your Majesty."
"He was my throne page on Coronation Day."
Thus chatting, they reached the Rippleson Caves. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note. (note to Line 149)
A single sail dyed a royal red brings to mind the royal blue of Seymour Glass’ bathing trunks:
"Next time, push her off," Sybil said.
"Push who off?"
"Sharon Lipschutz."
"Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire." He suddenly got to his feet. He looked at the ocean. "Sybil," he said, "I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll see if we can catch a bananafish."
"A what?"
"A bananafish," he said, and undid the belt of his robe. He took off the robe. His shoulders were white and narrow, and his trunks were royal blue. He folded the robe, first lengthwise, then in thirds. He unrolled the towel he had used over his eyes, spread it out on the sand, and then laid the folded robe on top of it. He bent over, picked up the float, and secured it under his right arm. Then, with his left hand, he took Sybil's hand.
“Mixing memory and desire” is a quote from The Burial of the Dead, the first poem in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Libitina (cf. Villa Libitina visited by Gradus) is an ancient Roman goddess of funerals and burial. The words “sempiternal,” “chtonic” and “grimpen” (queried by Hazel Shade) occur in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Its title brings to mind Conan Doyle’s novel The Sign of the Four featuring Sherlock Holmes. Shade's poem is divided into four cantos. Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote's landlaord) has four daughters (Alphina, Betty, Candida and Dee). The number 4 is considered an unlucky number in Chinese because it is nearly homophonous to the word "death." Death's, Doyle's and Dostoevski's initial, D is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet. In Salinger’s story For Esmé – with Love and Squalor the narrator mentions D Day:
The door banged open, without having been rapped on. X raised his head, turned it, and saw Corporal Z standing in the door. Corporal Z had been X's jeep partner and constant companion from D Day straight through five campaigns of the war. He lived on the first floor and he usually came up to see X when he had a few rumors or gripes to unload. He was a huge, photogenic young man of twenty-four. During the war, a national magazine had photographed him in Hurtgen Forest; he had posed, more than just obligingly, with a Thanksgiving turkey in each hand. "Ya writin' letters?" he asked X. "It's spooky in here, for Chrissake." He preferred always to enter a room that had the overhead light on.
and Sergeant X starts to write Dostoevski's name under the inscription:
When he let go of his head, X began to stare at the surface of the writing table, which was a catchall for at least two dozen unopened letters and at least five or six unopened packages, all addressed to him. He reached behind the debris and picked out a book that stood against the wall. It was a book by Goebbels, entitled "Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel." It belonged to the thirty-eight-year-old, unmarried daughter of the family that, up to a few weeks earlier, had been living in the house. She had been a low official in the Nazi Party, but high enough, by Army Regulations standards, to fall into an automatic-arrest category. X himself had arrested her. Now, for the third time since he had returned from the hospital that day, he opened the woman's book and read the brief inscription on the flyleaf. Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words "Dear God, life is hell." Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, "Fathers and teachers, I ponder `What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." He started to write Dostoevski's name under the inscription, but saw--with fright that ran through his whole body--that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book.
According to Kinbote, Shade listed Dostoevski among Russian humorists:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
In Salinger's story Esmé tells the narrator that her father (who was s-l-a-i-n in North Africa) said that she had no sense of humor at all:
Esmé gave me a long, faintly clinical look. "You have a dry sense of humor, haven't you?" she said--wistfully. "Father said I have no sense of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no sense of humor."
Watching her, I lit a cigarette and said I didn't think a sense of humor was of any use in a real pinch.
"Father said it was."
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: “By its own double in the windowpane.” Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. According to G. Ivanov, to his question "does a sonnet need a coda" Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. In his fragment Rim ("Rome," 1842) Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the great dead poet (il gran poeta morto) and his sonnet with a coda (sonetto colla coda):
Внимание толпы занял какой-то смельчак, шагавший на ходулях вравне с домами, рискуя всякую минуту быть сбитым с ног и грохнуться насмерть о мостовую. Но об этом, кажется, у него не было забот. Он тащил на плечах чучело великана, придерживая его одной рукою, неся в другой написанный на бумаге сонет с приделанным к нему бумажным хвостом, какой бывает у бумажного змея, и крича во весь голос: "Ecco il gran poeta morto. Ecco il suo sonetto colla coda!"
In a footnote Gogol says that in Italian poetry there is a kind of poem known as sonnet with the tail (con la coda) and explains what a coda is:
В итальянской поэзии существует род стихотворенья, известного под именем сонета с хвостом (con la coda), - когда мысль не вместилась и ведет за собою прибавление, которое часто бывает длиннее самого сонета.
Gogol points out that a coda can be longer than the sonnet itself. Not only Line 1001 of Shade's poem, but Kinbote's entire Foreword, Commentary and Index can thus be regarded as a coda of Shade's poem.
The characters in Gogol's Myortvye dushi ("Dead Souls," 1842) include Sobakevich, one of the landowners visited by Chichikov. At the end of VN's novel Pnin (1957) the narrator goes for a walk with Sobakevich, the Cockerels' cocker spaniel (a white dog in Pnin's sedan leans out and yaps at Sobakevich).
According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade compared Shakespeare to a Great Dane and himself, to a greatful mongrel:
The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull.” Kinbote: “You appreciate particularly the purple passages?” Shade: “Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.” (note to Line 172)
Gerald Emerald (a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus a lift to Kinbote's house in New Wye) mistakes Gradus for Professor Pnin's new assistant:
Gradus returned to the Main Desk.
"Too bad," said the girl, "I just saw him leave."
"Bozhe moy, Bozhe moy," muttered Gradus, who sometimes at moments of stress used Russian ejaculations.
"You'll find him in the directory," she said pushing it towards him, and dismissing the sick man's existence to attend to the wants of Mr. Gerald Emerald who was taking out a fat bestseller in a cellophane jacket.
Moaning and shifting from one foot to the other, Gradus started leafing through the college directory but when he found the address, he was faced with the problem of getting there.
"Dulwich Road," he cried to the girl. "Near? Far? Very far, probably?"
"Are you by any chance Professor Pnin's new assistant?" asked Emerald.
"No," said the girl. "This man is looking for Dr. Kinbote, I think. You are looking for Dr. Kinbote, aren't you?"
"Yes, and I can't any more," said Gradus.
"I thought so," said the girl. "Doesn't he live somewhere near Mr. Shade, Gerry?"
"Oh, definitely," said Gerry, and turned to the killer: "I can drive you there if you like. It is on my way."
Did they talk in the car, these two characters, the man in green and the man in brown? Who can say? They did not. After all, the drive took only a few minutes (it took me, at the wheel of my powerful Kramler, four and a half).
"I think I'll drop you here," said Mr. Emerald. "It's that house up there."
One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels. As he began hurriedly fumbling at the car door, unfastidious Emerald leaned, close to him, across him, almost merging with him, to help him open it - and then, slamming it shut again, whizzed on to some tryst in the valley. My reader will, I hope, appreciate all the minute particulars I have taken such trouble to present to him after a long talk I had with the killer; he will appreciate them even more if I tell him that, according to the legend spread later by the police, Jack Grey had been given a lift, all the way from Roanoke, or somewhere, by a lonesome trucker! One can only hope that an impartial search will turn up the trilby forgotten in the Library - or in Mr. Emerald's car. (note to Line 949)