“The Nature of Electricity” was send by John Shade to a New York magazine some time in 1958 which is before Pale Fire was written and before Kinbote rented Goldsworth’s house. It was published after Shade’s death. Its third stanza refers to number 999 as an old friend:

 

Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe

Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine

(So brightly beaming through a tree

So green) is an old friend of mine.

 

Does it mean that nine-hundred-ninety-nine is the number of a streetlamp opposite Shade’s house? Based on last stanza of PF poem the tree is shagbark tree in the front lawn garden, viewed from the veranda. Kinbote called that place the Nest for a reason. That is where Shade spent much of his time and wrote most of his poems. Could it be then that the poem has 999 lines by design since that number is an author’s old friend? Then search of 1000^th line becomes obsolete. Also is there a link between lights of “gentle dead” in “The Nature of Electricity” and the title of “Pale Fire” which comes from Hamlet’s fire bugs (I don’t have exact quote)? I think that is in line with final Boyd’s theory of Pale Fire.

 

I did not find reference to “The Nature of Electricity” in Nabokov-L archive but may be somebody else wrote about its use of the magic number.

 

- George Shimanovich