Vladimir Nabokov

Shade, Ombre, almost 'man' in Pale Fire

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 12 August, 2022

According to 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), after line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:

 

I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man'
In Spanish... (note to Line 275)

 

Spanish for “man” is hombre. In O. Henry’s story The Missing Chord (1907) Rush Kinney calls Uncle Cal (a sheepman who was not even hated by the cowmen) “a little, old stoop-shouldered hombre about as big as a gun scabbard:”

 

"I will say that old Cal wasn't distinguished as a sheepman. He was a little, old stoop-shouldered hombre about as big as a gun scabbard, with scraggy white whiskers, and condemned to the continuous use of language. Old Cal was so obscure in his chosen profession that he wasn't even hated by the cowmen. And when a sheepman don't get eminent enough to acquire the hostility of the cattlemen, he is mighty apt to die unwept and considerably unsung.”

 

Describing his tussle with Quilty, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the cowman and the sheepman:

 

Fussily, busybodily, cunningly, he had risen again while he talked. I groped under the chest trying at the same time to keep an eye on him. All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.

In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A. D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love); and elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin. When at last I had possessed myself of my precious weapon, and the scenario writer had been reinstalled in his low chair, both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle. (2.35)

 

According to Humbert, a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb:

 

Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make presents - presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper case: it had an elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. Once glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes called for some reason “luizettas” that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept it - using it for a totally different purpose.

In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I had decided - despite Lo’s visible annoyance - to spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her) and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the “luizetta” were safe. There, snugly wrapped in a white woolen scarf, lay a pocket automatic: caliber. 32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a little under one ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily said in part: “Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the person.” There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb.

I was now glad I had it with me - and even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an admirable marksman, and with his. 38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird, though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proof - only a little iridescent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a tiny woodpecker - completely out of season, incidentally. Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did would a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. “You like here,” I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted it with a dram of gin. (2.17)

 

In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his heart attack and mentions Hurricane Lolita that swept from Florida to Maine:

 

It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane

Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.

Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.

Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-682)

 

In Canto Four Shade mentions Freud among the things that he loathes:

 

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,

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks. (ll. 923-930)

 

Shade’s list of dislikes ends in sharks. “Shark” Dodson is the main character in O. Henry’s story The Roads We Take (1910). The story ends in “Shark” Dodson’s words: "Bolivar cannot carry double." In Chapter One (XV: 10) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions Onegin’s shirokiy bolivar (a broad bolivar):

 

Бывало, он еще в постеле:
К нему записочки несут.
Что? Приглашенья? В самом деле,
Три дома на вечер зовут:
Там будет бал, там детский праздник.
Куда ж поскачет мой проказник?
С кого начнет он? Все равно:
Везде поспеть немудрено.
Покамест в утреннем уборе,
Надев широкий боливар,
Онегин едет на бульвар
И там гуляет на просторе,
Пока недремлющий брегет
Не прозвонит ему обед.

 

It happened, he'd be still in bed

when little billets would be brought him.

What? Invitations? Yes, indeed,

to a soiree three houses bid him:

here, there will be a ball; elsewhere, a children's fete.

So whither is my scamp to scurry?

Whom will he start with? Never mind:

'tis simple to get everywhere in time.

Meanwhile, in morning dress,

having donned a broad bolivar,

Onegin drives to the boulevard

and there goes strolling unconfined

till vigilant Bréguet

to him chimes dinner.

 

In his EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 68) VN points out that bolivar was a silk hat, slightly funnelform, with a wide, upturned brim, especially fashionable in Paris and Petersburg in 1819. In his Foreword to Shade’s poem Kinbote compares Shade to a conjurer and mentions the poet’s hat:

 

We never discussed, John Shade and I, any of my personal misfortunes. Our close friendship was on that higher, exclusively intellectual level where one can rest from emotional troubles, not share them. My admiration for him was for me a sort of alpine cure. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I looked at him, especially in the presence of other people, inferior people. This wonder was enhanced by my awareness of their not feeling what I felt, of their not seeing what I saw, of their taking Shade for granted, instead of drenching every nerve, so to speak, in the romance of his presence. Here he is, I would say to myself, that is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him. He is looking from the terrace (of Prof. C.'s house on that March evening) at the distant lake. I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. And I experienced the same thrill as when in my early boyhood I once watched across the tea table in my uncle's castle a conjurer who had just given a fantastic performance and was now quietly consuming a vanilla ice. I stared at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation, and especially at his marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could if he chose make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam by twiddling it, or turn his plate into a dove by tossing it up in the air.

Shade's poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic: my gray-haired friend, my beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards into his hat - and shook out a poem.

 

The characters in VN's story Kartofel'nyi el'f ("The Potato Elf," 1929) include Fred Dobson, the circus dwarf, and the conjuror Shock. According to Kinbote, on his deathbed the King's uncle Conmal (Shakespeare's translator into Zemblan) called his nephew Karlik (a dwarf):

 

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 fngers 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 Finnigans 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 Kongs-skugg-sio (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-checked, 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). (note to Line 12)

 

In O. Henry’s story The Prisoner of Zembla the King exclaims “Ods Bodkins!”:

 

The knights mounted and rode in a line past the grandstand, and the king stopped the poor student, who had the worst horse and the poorest caparisons of any of the knights and said:

"Sir Knight, prithee tell me of what that marvellous shacky and rusty-looking armor of thine is made?"

"Oh, king," said the young knight, "seeing that we are about to engage in a big fight, I would call it scrap iron, wouldn't you?"

"Ods Bodkins!" said the king. "The youth hath a pretty wit."

 

The interjection "odsbodkins" is a euphemistic form of "God's body," used as a mild oath (for instance, by Hamlet in Shakespeare's Hamlet). There is God in Godin (Gaston's surname in Lolita). Like Gaston Godin (Humbert's friend and chess partner at Beardsley), Kinbote loves little boys.