An interesting question. Nabokov put all he had into “Pale Fire” the poem, I think, though of course he made up Shade’s past—and I do not think this loving son and loving father could have invented a child’s suicide as the narrative center of the poem in a spirit of mockery.

To indicate ironic ineptitude or artistic limitation in a work within a work (as Michael Glynn thinks Nabokov has done in Pale Fire) the signals have to be unmistakeable: not necessarily as gross as Peter Quince’s clunky doggerel in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Pyramus and Thisbe, or as flat as Orlando’s sonnets in As You Like It, but perhaps as clumsy as Ilya Borisovich Tal’s in “Lips to Lips” or as florid as the work of the “Katya” addressed in “The Admiralty Spire,” or as thoroughly undermined by the circumstantial prosaisms of real life as the vapid insipidities of Stephen Dedalus’s villanelle in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In The Gift Fyodor partially repudiates and quickly outgrows his “Life of Chernyshevsky,” and Nabokov himself distances it, by making it the work of a young and rapidly maturing writer, by Koncheyev’s and other criticisms, and by the difference in texture and subtlety between the “biography” and its “autobiographical” envelope.

But Shade is a mature and acclaimed poet, whose taste, tact, knowledge, sensitivity and commitment to craftsmanship in the novel outside the poem seem beyond question.

That the quality of the poem was as high as Nabokov could achieve seems to be confirmed by every recorded comment he made about it:

“I should have written you sooner but I had an intense period of inspiration that I badly needed for a long poem (part of my new novel) and kept imbibing it while it lasted for hours on end” (to Edmund Wilson, 27 Feb 1961, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya).

Nabokov could have “badly needed” inspiration even to parody ineptitude or limitation, but he would surely have needed it even more to attain excellence in a language not his own. His gratitude seems to point toward the second reading.

In reply to some questions Andrew Field sent while preparing Nabokov: His Life in Art, Véra Nabokov answered on 11 December 1965, quoting VN directly:

“ ‘To be quite frank, Shade’s poem is a rather good Nabokov poem, and the allusion to Frost is incidental and meant only to give local color.’ We read somewhere in a review that the poem was mediocre, obscure and a parody of something or other. Sources: ‘A pinch of Pope perhaps, as form goes.’ My husband admits that apart from the poem about the little horse in the wintry woods, he has not read much Frost.”

Clearly V and V were surprised and amused to read that “the poem was mediocre, obscure and a parody.” And the comment about Frost may be set against Abe Socher’s claim to a source for the opening of “Pale Fire” in Frost’s poem “Of a Winter Evening” (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm).

Just after completing the poem in February 1961, Nabokov drafted a letter to the New Yorker, asking if they would be prepared to publish the whole of the “Pale Fire” poem in a single issue. It would have been a strange move to ask them to publish a poem by an invented poet that he thought was artistically flawed—and indeed as we know he would later call Shade “by far the greatest of invented poets” (SO 59). Since he had taken the trouble to compose fine poems for his invented Vasily Shishkov—which would be hailed as masterpieces by his critical foe Georgy Adamovich—this is no mean claim.

When the magazine Show asked Nabokov a few months later in 1961 if he had anything they could publish, Véra answered, offering “Pale Fire”:

“The poem has 999 lines, consists of four cantos, and, while it contains the essence of the poet’s life story, presents also his philosophy and its history. The last [1000th] line was never written because the poet was killed after the 999th” (VéN to Richard Schickel, 18 May 1961).

This would seem to address the concern of Anthony Stadlen (Nabokv-L, 10 Dec 2005, asking of me: “But how does he know that ‘we return to the first line’? Why should we accept Kinbote's assertion? How, even, do we know that there would have been only one more line?”). Nabokov had also noted in his draft letter to the New Yorker: “this long poem which its (invented) author the American poet John Shade did not quite complete (when he died before writing the last[,] one thousandth[,] line).” Nabokov at least intended that Shade intended just one more line, but never wrote it. It would presumably have rhymed with “lane” in 999. Since Shade particularly liked “the consonne d’appui,” it may have ended with the “l” of “lane,” as well as the rest of the syllable, as in “slain,” the first line of the poem. But we do not and cannot know.

To return to Volodya Mylnikov’s question, it is in this sense and this sense only that the poem MUST be seen in terms of Nabokov’s novel, and not just on its own terms: its incompleteness, and the reason for its incompleteness, and the way in which its first line is placed at its end by Kinbote in his note to line 1000, add complex and poignant ironies that enormously amplify the poem and its themes. The poem itself was as rich an accomplishment as Nabokov could make it, but he also intended from the first that it would be far richer still for the fictional reverberations he would arrange around it.

Walter Miale seems surprised that a poet should mingle the lofty and the low, the high and the homely. But this has been done in poetry since before Homer, and for many reasons, according to the local context. Why does he assume that Shade is unaware of these clashing levels, when there seems little else he is unaware of? Might not the interpenetration of the mundane and magisterial be the conscious choice of Shade, who happily describes his inspiration while shaving, or indeed, paring his nails, and therefore seems to agree with his maker that “genuine art mixes categories”?

On 15/12/2005, at 2:47 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:

It is fascinating to read the discussion about Pale
Fire.

I have a question - is it correct to judge Pale Fire
poem as it is without context of the whole book?
I feel that the main artistic issue of the book - its
construction and how all the elements work together.
How "non artistic realities" as, say, Preface and
Intdex can be transformed into aesthetic phenomena.
All the parts are so well balanced.
The poem itself works perfect in the novel. I am sure
Nabokov would have come up with better rhyming pattern
(and Brian Boyed showed those "weak ones") , but it is
quite possible that it was not Nabokov's purpose.
The poem is written by John Shade and not Nabokov. The
novel Pale Fire is written by Nabokov.

Best, Vladimir Mylnikov

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