In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962), Shade’s birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday. While the poet Shade was born in 1898, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and his murderer Gradus were born in 1915. Shade is thus seventeen years Kinbote's and Gradus' senior. In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski's seventeenth birthday), to his brother Fyodor Dostoevski twice repeats the word gradus (degree in Russian). On the other hand, at the beginning of Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958) Dr Hasselbacher asks his friend James Wormold (the novel's protagonist) if his daughter Milly is seventeen on the seventeenth:
‘That nigger going down the street,’ said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, ‘he reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.’ It was typical of Dr Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the prefix Mr – friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. On Wormold’s deathbed, when Dr Hasselbacher came to feel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim.
The Negro was blind in one eye and one leg was shorter than the other; he wore an ancient felt hat and his ribs showed through his torn shirt like a ship’s under demolition. He walked at the edge of the pavement, beyond the yellow and pink pillars of a colonnade, in the hot January sun, and he counted every step as he went. As he passed the Wonder Bar, going up Virdudes, he had reached ‘1,369’. He had to move slowly to give time for so long a numeral. ‘One thousand three hundred and seventy.’ He was a familiar figure near the National Square, where he would sometimes linger and stop his counting long enough to sell a packet of pornographic photographs to a tourist. Then he would take up his count where he had left it. At the end of the day, like an energetic passenger on a trans-Atlantic liner, he must have known to a yard how far he had walked.
‘Joe?’ Wormold asked. ‘I don’t see any resemblance. Except the limp, of course,’ but instinctively he took a quick look at himself in the mirror marked Cerveza Tropical, as though he might really have been so broken down and darkened during his walk from the store in the old town. But the face which looked back at him was only a little discoloured by the dust from the harbour-works; it was still the same, anxious and crisscrossed and fortyish: much younger than Dr Hasselbacher’s, yet a stranger might have felt certain it would be extinguished sooner the shadow was there already, the anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquillizer. The Negro limped out of sight, round the corner of the Paseo. The day was full of bootblacks. ‘I didn’t mean the limp. You don’t see the likeness?’
‘No.’
‘He’s got two ideas in his head,’ Dr Hasselbacher explained, ‘to do his job and to keep count. And, of course, he’s British.’
‘I still don’t see…’ Wormold cooled his mouth with his morning daiquiri. Seven minutes to get to the Wonder Bar: seven minutes back to the store: six minutes for companionship. He looked at his watch. He remembered that it was one minute slow.
‘He’s reliable, you can depend on him, that’s all I meant,’ said Dr Hasselbacher with impatience. ‘How’s Milly?’
‘Wonderful,’ Wormold said. It was his invariable answer, but he meant it.
‘Seventeen on the seventeenth, eh?’
‘That’s right.’ He looked quickly over his shoulder as though somebody were hunting him and then at his watch again. ‘You’ll be coming to split a bottle with us?’
‘I’ve never failed yet, Mr Wormold. Who else will be there?’
‘Well, I thought just the three of us. You see, Cooper’s gone home, and poor Marlowe’s in hospital still, and Milly doesn’t seem to care for any of this new crowd at the Consulate. So I thought we’d keep it quiet, in the family.’ ‘I’m honoured to be one of the family, Mr Wormold.’
‘Perhaps a table at the Nacional or would you say that wasn’t quite well, suitable?’
‘This isn’t England or Germany, Mr Wormold. Girls grow up quickly in the tropics.’ (Part One, chapter 1)
The mirror marked Cerveza Tropical (Tropical Beer) brings to mind Sudarg of Bokay (Jakob Gradus in reverse), the mirror maker of genius mentioned by Kinbote in his commentary and index to Shade's poem. The Spanish word for beer, cerveza begins like cerveau, brain in French (depending on the context, cerveau can also mean mind, intellect, or a mastermind). In Canto One of his poem Shade (who likes his name: "Shade, ombre, almost man in Spanish") describes his childhood and says that he had a brain, five senses (one unique); but otherwise he was a cloutish freak:
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
Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft
Bicycle tires. (ll. 131-139)
In Canto Two of his poem Shade describes Aunt Maud's dementia and mentions monsters in her brain:
Maud Shade was eighty when a sudden hush
Fell on her life. We saw the angry flush
And torsion of paralysis assail
Her noble cheek. We moved her to Pinedale,
Famed for its sanitarium. There she'd sit
In the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit
Upon her dress and then upon her wrist.
Her mind kept fading in the growing mist.
She still could speak. She paused, and groped, and found
What seemed at first a serviceable sound,
But from adjacent cells impostors took
The place of words she needed, and her look
Spelt imploration as she sought in vain
To reason with the monsters in her brain. (ll. 195-208)
At the beginning (and then again at the end) of Canto Four of his poem Shade mentions his brain:
Now I shall spy on beauty as none has
Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
None has cried out. Now I shall try what none
Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
And speaking of this wonderful machine:
I'm puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind
Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen.
In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill
Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on
Or walking briskly to the corner store
To buy the paper he has read before. (ll. 835-861)
Gently the day has passed in a sustained
Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life. I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line. (ll. 963-976)
Shade says that now he will spy on beauty as none has spied on it yet. In Graham Greene's novel, Wormold's daughter Milly is a beautiful girl:
He could distinguish the approach of Milly like that of a police-car from a long way off. Whistles instead of sirens warned him of her coming. She was accustomed to walk from the bus stop in the Avenida de Belgica, but today the wolves seemed to be operating from the direction of Compostella. They were not dangerous wolves, he had reluctantly to admit that. The salute which had begun about her thirteenth birthday was really one of respect, for even by the high Havana standard Milly was beautiful. She had hair the colour of pale honey, dark eyebrows, and her pony-trim was shaped by the best barber in town. She paid no open attention to the whistles, they only made her step the higher seeing her walk, you could almost believe in levitation. Silence would have seemed like an insult to her now. (Part One, chapter 2)
A vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold is recruited by Mr. Hawthorne (the MI6 operative) into the British Secret Service and becomes a spy. One of the two methods of composing described by Shade, method A brings to mind a scarlet "A" (representing adultery) that the beautiful heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's historical novel The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1850) is bound to wear on her forehead. In a conversation at the Faculty Club Shade tells Pink (as Kinbote calls a professor of physics at Wordsmith University) that the king walked out of the Onhava Palace, and crossed the mountains, and left Zembla dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool:
A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): "Your regrets are groundless" [said he]. "That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph."
Shade: "True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool." (note to Line 894)
The name of the beautiful capital of Kinbote's Zembla, Onhava is a near-anagram of Havana, the capital of Cuba where Graham Greene's novel is set. In Greene's novel, Wormold invents a fake spy network and submits elaborate technical "drawings of a new military installation"—which are actually just the magnified, re-labeled internal parts of his Phastkleaners vacuum cleaner. British intelligence fatally misinterprets these vacuum components as secret plans for a massive hidden rocket launching system. Wormold's Phastkleaners bring to mind Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman mentioned by Kinbote when he describes his rented house:
In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line 691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world spaciousness and graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda. Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth's boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. What rather surprised me was that he, my learned landlord, and not his "missus," directed the household. Not only had he left me a detailed inventory of all such articles as cluster around a new tenant like a mob of menacing natives, but he had taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations, explanations, injunctions and supplementary lists. Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom, and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonné of its meager contents which included an assortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife (described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth's father from the Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that came with the house:
Mon, Wed, Fri: Liver
Tue, Thu, Sat: Fish
Sun: Ground meat
(All it got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves and I farmed it out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman.)
But perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun from getting at the upholstery. A description of the position of the sun, daily and seasonal, was given for the several windows, and if I had heeded all this I would have been kept as busy as a participant in a regatta. A footnote, however, generously suggested that instead of manning the curtains, I might prefer to shift and reshift out of sun range the more precious pieces of furniture (two embroidered armchairs and a heavy "royal console") but should do it carefully lest I scratch the wall moldings. I cannot, alas, reproduce the meticulous schedule of these transposals but seem to recall that I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning. My dear Shade roared with laughter when I led him on a tour of inspection and had him find some of those bunny eggs for himself. Thank God, his robust hilarity dissipated the atmosphere of damnum infectum in which I was supposed to dwell. On his part, he regaled me with a number of anecdotes concerning the judge's dry wit and courtroom mannerisms; most of these anecdotes were doubtless folklore exaggerations, a few were evident inventions, and all were harmless. He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous stories about the terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth's gown threw across the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of raghdirst (thirst for revenge) - crass banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless - by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. Let us turn to our poet's windows. I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel. (note to Lines 47-48)