At the beginning of Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) engaged him for one term to speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm," wrote President McAber):
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato.
I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it--big if!--engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber).
You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state. (ll. 500-509)
"To lecture on the Worm" brings to mind James Wormold, the protagonist (a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service) of Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958). Describing Izumrudov's visit to Gradus (Shade's murderer) in Paris, Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) calls Gradus "our man:"
On the morning of July 16 (while Shade was working on the 698-746 section of his poem) dull Gradus, dreading another day of enforced inactivity in sardonically, sparkling, stimulatingly noisy Nice, decided that until hunger drove him out he would not budge from a leathern armchair in the simulacrum of a lobby among the brown smells of his dingy hotel. Unhurriedly he went through a heap of old magazines on a nearby table. There he sat, a little monument of taciturnity, sighing, puffing out his cheeks, licking his thumb before turning a page, gaping at the pictures, and moving his lips as he climbed down the columns of printed matter. Having replaced everything in a neat pile, he sank back in his chair closing and opening his gabled hands in various constructions of tedium - when a man who had occupied a seat next to him got up and walked into the outer glare leaving his paper behind. Gradus pulled it into his lap, spread it out - and froze over a strange piece of local news that caught his eye: burglars had broken into Villa Disa and ransacked a bureau, taking from a jewel box a number of valuable old medals.
Here was something to brood upon. Had this vaguely unpleasant incident some bearing on his quest? Should he do something about it? Cable headquarters? Hard to word succinctly a simple fact without having it look like a cryptogram. Airmail a clipping? He was in his room working on the newspaper with a safety razor blade when there was a bright rap-rap at the door. Gradus admitted an unexpected visitor - one of the greater Shadows, whom he had thought to be onhava-onhava ("far, far away"), in wild, misty, almost legendary Zembla! What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!
He was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow, in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him, but he certainly had a keen mind. His name, Izumrudov, sounded rather Russian but actually meant “of the Umruds,” an Eskimo tribe sometimes seen paddling their umyaks (hide-lined boats) on the emerald waters of our northern shores. Grinning, he said friend Gradus must get together his travel documents, including a health certificate, and take the earliest available jet to New York. Bowing, he congratulated him on having indicated with such phenomenal acumen the right place and the right way. Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up giving his address which was of all places -- Our man, who interrupted the herald of success to say he had never -- was bidden not to display so much modesty. A slip of paper was now produced on which Izumudrov, shaking with laughter (death is hilarious), wrote out for Gradus their client's alias, the name of the university where he taught, and that of the town where it was situated. No, the slip was not for keeps. He could keep it only while memorizing it. This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious. The gay green vision withdrew - to resume his whoring no doubt. How one hates such men! (note to Line 741)
The beautiful capital of Kinbote's Zembla (a distant northern land), Onhava is a near-anagram of Havana, the capital of Cuba where Graham Greene's novel (a dark comedy) is set. Greene wrote the first version of the story in 1946, as an outline for a film script, with the story set in Estonia in 1938. A Russian poet who loathed detective novels (and who in his sonnet Conan Doyle calls the author of Sherlock Holmes "a fruit with the dung smell of greenhouse"), Igor Severyanin ("Mr. Northerner," 1889-1941) lived in Estonia after the 1917 Revolution. At the end of his his sonnet Kipling (1926) Severyanin mentions zveropodobnye lyudi (the beast-like people) and, in the last line, calls Rudyard Kipling (an Indian-born English writer and poet, 1865-1936, whose most famous poem is If—) "Priyavshiy dushu zverya chelovek (the man who adopted the soul of an animal):"
Звериное… Зуб острый. Быстрый взгляд.
Решительность. Отчаянность. Отвага.
Борьба за жизнь — девиз кровавый флага.
Ползут. Грызутся. Скачут. И палят.
Идиллии он вовсе невпопад:
Уж слишком в нем кричат инстинкты мага.
Пестрит пантера в зарослях оврага.
Ревет медведь, озлясь на водопад.
Рисует он художников ли, юнг ли,
Зовет с собой в пустыни или джунгли,
Везде и всюду — дым, биенье, бег.
Забыть ли нам (о нет, мы не забудем!),
Чем родственен звероподобным людям
Приявший душу зверя человек…
Describing IPH, Shade mentions the fate of beasts pondered by the Institute:
We heard cremationists guffaw and snort
At Grabermann's denouncing the Retort
As detrimental to the birth of wraiths.
We all avoided criticizing faiths.
The great Starover Blue reviewed the role
Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.
The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese
Discanted on the etiquette at teas
With ancestors, and how far up to go.
I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,
And dealt with childhood memories of strange
Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range. (ll. 623-634)
In his humorous poem The Betrothed (1886) Kipling mentions a Cuba stout, Havanas and other cigars:
«You must choose between me and your cigar».
—BREACH OF PROMISE CASE, CIRCA 1885.
Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,
For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.
We quarrelled about Havanas – - we fought o'er a good cheroot,
And I know she is exacting, and she says I am a brute
Open the old cigar-box - - let me consider a space;
In the soft blue veil of the vapour musing on Maggie`s face.
Maggie is pretty to look at - - Maggie's a loving lass,
But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the tuest of loves must pass.
There's peace in a Laranada, there's calm in a Henry Clay,
But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away - -
Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown - -
But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o' the talk o' the town!
Maggie, my wife at fifty - - gray and dour and olde - -
With never another Maggie to purchase for love or gold!
And the light of Days that have Been the dark of the Days that Are,
And Love's torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar - -
The butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep in your pocket - -
With never a new one to light tho' it's charred and black to the socket.
Open the old cigar-box - - let me consider awhile - -
Here is a mild Manilla - - there is a wifely smile.
Which is the better portion - - bondage bought with a ring,
Or a harem of dusky beauties fifty tied in a string?
Counsellors cunning and silent - - comforters true and tried,
And never a one of the fifty to sneer at a rival bride.
Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes,
Peace in the hush of the twilight, balm ere my eyelids close.
This will the fifty give me, asking naught in return,
With only a Suttee's passion - - to do their duty and burn.
This will the fifty give me. When they are spent and dead,
Five times other fifties shall be my servants instead.
The furrows of far-off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main,
When they hear my harem is empty, will send me my brides again.
I will take no heed to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal,
So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall.
I will scent 'em with best vanilla, with tea will I temper their hides,
And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides.
For Maggie has written a letter that gives me my choice between
The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick o' Teen.
And I have been servant of Love for barely a twelve-month clear,
But I have been Priest of Partagas a matter of seven year;
And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cheery light
Of stumps that I burned to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight.
And I turn my eyes to the future that Maggie and I must prove,
But the only light on the marshes is the Will-o'-the Wisp of Love.
Will it see me safe through my journey or leave me bogged in the mire?
Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I follow the fitful fire?
Open the old cigar box - - let me consider anew - -
Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?
A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke.
Light me another Cuba - - I hold to my first-shown vows,
If Maggie will have no rival, I'll have no Maggie for spouse!
A mild Manilla brings to mind the manila envelope mentioned by Kinbote in his foreword to Shade's poem:
This batch of eighty cards was held by a rubber band which I now religiously put back after examining for the last time their precious contents. Another, much thinner, set of a dozen cards, clipped together and enclosed in the same manila envelope as the main batch, bears some additional couplets running their brief and sometimes smudgy course among a chaos of first drafts. As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé. But he saved those twelve cards because of the unused felicities shining among the dross of used draftings. Perhaps, he vaguely expected to replace certain passages in the Fair Copy with some of the lovely rejections in his files, or, more probably, a sneaking fondness for this or that vignette, suppressed out of architectonic considerations, or because it had annoyed Mrs. S., urged him to put off its disposal till the time when the marble finality of an immaculate typescript would have confirmed it or made the most delightful variant seem cumbersome and impure. And perhaps, let me add in all modesty, he intended to ask my advice after reading his poem to me as I know he planned to do.
The isles of the Spanish Main (also known as the Spanish West Indies) in the last couplet of Kipling's poem The Betrothed make one think of 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. 679-82)
By a year of Tempests Shade means 1958, the year when VN's novel Lolita (1955) was published in the USA. Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana also came out in 1958 (it was published in UK on October 24, 1958). John Shade's heart attack occured on October 17, 1958:
John Shade's heart attack (Oct. 17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. It had all been perfectly timed, and he was still wrestling with the unfamiliar French contraption when the Rolls-Royce from Sylvia O'Donnell's manor turned toward his green silks from a road and approached along the mowntrop, its fat wheels bouncing disapprovingly and its black shining body slowly gliding along. Fain would I elucidate this business of parachuting but (it being a matter of mere sentimental tradition rather than a useful manner of transportation) this is not strictly necessary in these notes to Pale Fire. While Kingsley, the British chauffeur, an old and absolutely faithful retainer, was doing his best to cram the bulky and ill-folded parachute into the boot, I relaxed on a shooting stick he had supplied me with, sipping a delightful Scotch and water from the car bar and glancing (amid an ovation of crickets and that vortex of yellow and maroon butterflies that so pleased Chateaubriand on his arrival in America) at an article in The New York Times in which Sylvia had vigorously and messily marked out in red pencil a communication from New Wye which told of the poet's hospitalization. I had been looking forward to meeting my favorite American poet who, as I felt sure at the moment, would die long before the Spring Term, but the disappointment was little more than a mental shrug of accepted regret, and discarding the newspaper, I looked around me with enchantment and physical wellbeing despite the congestion in my nose. Beyond the field the great green steps of turf ascended to the multicolored coppices; one could see above them the white brow of the manor; clouds melted into the blue. Suddenly I sneezed, and sneezed again. Kingsley offered me another drink but I declined it, and democratically joined him in the front seat. My hostess was in bed, suffering from the aftereffects of a special injection that she had been given in anticipation of a journey to a special place in Africa. In answer to my "Well, how are you?" she murmured that the Andes had been simply marvelous, and then in a slightly less indolent tone of voice inquired about a notorious actress with whom her son was said to be living in sin. Odon, I said, had promised me he would not marry her. She inquired if I had had a good hop and dingled a bronze bell. Good old Sylvia! She had in common with Fleur de Fyler a vagueness of manner, a languor of demean - or which was partly natural and partly cultivated as a convenient alibi for when she was drunk, and in some wonderful way she managed to combine that indolence with volubility reminding one of a slow-speaking ventriloquist who is interrupted by his garrulous doll. Changeless Sylvia! During three decades I had seen from time to time, from palace to palace, that same flat nut-colored bobbed hair, those childish pale-blue eyes, the vacant smile, the stylish long legs, the willowy hesitating movements. (note to Line 691)
The characters in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana include Hawthorne, the MI6 operative who recruits James Wormold into the British secret service. An American novelist and short story writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is the author of The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1850). 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 Palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country 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)
In “Equality of Sacrifice,” the first of his Epitaphs of the War (a collection of short, epigrammatic poems inspired by World War I and modeled after classical Greek inscriptions) Kipling says:
A. “I was a Have.” B. “I was a ‘have-not.’”
(Together). “What hast thou given which I gave not?”
Kipling's Epitaphs of the War appeared in 1919, as a part of his poetry collection The Years Between. According to Kinbote, John Shade and Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote, the author of a book on surnames, calls the poet's wife, born Sybil Irondell) were married in 1919. A million surplus Maggies who are willing to bear the yoke in Kipling's poem The Betrothed brings to mind a million photographers mentioned by Kinbote at the end of his commentary to Shade's poem:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
Shade's murderer, Jakob Gradus is a namesake of Yakov Yurovsky (1878-1938), commander of the guard at Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg during the murder of the Romanov family on the night of 17 July 1918. He is known as the chief executioner Emperor Nicholas II, his family, and four of their servants. Among the people who were executed with the last Russian tsar's family was Dr. Eugene Botkin (1865-1918). The poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s "real" name). Nadezhda means in Russian "hope." There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc.), will be full again.
Btw., President McAber brings to mind Wilkins Micawber, a character in Charles Dickens's novel David Copperfield (1850). He is traditionally identified with the optimistic belief that "something will turn up." Dickens is the author of Great Expectations (1861). Describing IPH, Shade says that the Institute assumed it might be wise not to expect too much of paradise:
Instead
The Institute assumed it might be wise
Not to expect too much of paradise:
What if there's nobody to say hullo
To the newcomer, no reception, no
Indoctrination? What if you are tossed
Into a boundless void, your bearings lost,
Your spirit stripped and utterly alone,
Your task unfinished, your despair unknown,
Your body just beginning to putresce,
A non-undresssable in morning dress,
Your widow lying prone on a dim bed,
Herself a blur in your dissolving head! (ll. 535-548)
The epigraph to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana is a line by the 17th-century poet George Herbert: "And the sad man is cock of all his jests." In Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act V, Scene 1) Prince Hamlet holds the skull of Yorick and calls him "a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."