In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his childhood and, at the end of the Canto, mentions his fainting fits:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.
I had a brain, five senses (one unique);
But otherwise I was a cloutish freak.
In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps
But really envied nothing - save perhaps
The miracle of a lemniscate left