In his foreword to Shade's poem, Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) says that he is the most impractical fellow in the world and mentions an old fox in the book publishing business:
Imagine a soft, clumsy giant; imagine a historical personage whose knowledge of money is limited to the abstract billions of a national debt; imagine an exiled prince who is unaware of the Golconda in his cuff links! This is to say - oh, hyperbolically - that I am the most impractical fellow in the world. Between such a person and an old fox in the book publishing business, relations are at first touchingly carefree and chummy, with expansive banterings and all sorts of amiable tokens. I have no reason to suppose that anything will ever happen to prevent this initial relationship with good old Frank, my present publisher, from remaining a permanent fixture.
In a discarded variant (cited by Kinbote in his commentary to the poem), Shade says that he likes his name, "Shade, Ombre, almost 'man' / In Spanish." Man in Spanish is hombre. The Spanish word for fox is zorro. Zorro is a fictional character created in 1919 by American pulp writer Johnston McCulley (1883-1958), appearing in works (that were filmed many times) set in the Pueblo de los Ángeles in Alta California. A dashing vigilante who defends commoners and indigenous peoples against corrupt and tyrannical officials, Zorro wears a black domino mask that covers the upper half of his face. According to Kinbote, Shade's whole being constituted a mask:
Oh, there were many such incidents. In a skit performed by a group of drama students I was pictured as a pompous woman hater with a German accent, constantly quoting Housman and nibbling raw carrots; and a week before Shade's death, a certain ferocious lady at whose club I had refused to speak on the subject of "The Hally Valley" (as she put it, confusing Odin's Hall with the title of a Finnish epic), said to me in the middle of a grocery store, "You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you," and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: "What's more, you are insane." But let me not pursue the tabulation of nonsense. Whatever was thought, whatever was said, I had my full reward in John's friendship. This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were not alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart. His whole being constituted a mask. John Shade's physical appearance was so little in keeping with the harmonies hiving in the man, that one felt inclined to dismiss it as a coarse disguise or passing fashion; for if the fashions of the Romantic Age subtilized a poet's manliness by baring his attractive neck, pruning his profile and reflecting a mountain lake in his oval gaze, present-day bards, owing perhaps to better opportunities of aging, look like gorillas or vultures. My sublime neighbor's face had something about it that might have appealed to the eye, had it been only leonine or only Iroquoian; but unfortunately, by combining the two it merely reminded one of a fleshy Hogarthian tippler of indeterminate sex. His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purifed and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation.
Zorro brings to mind Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest active monotheistic religions, founded in ancient Persia by the prophet Zarathushtra (known in Greek as Zoroaster). Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None) is a philosophical novel by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), published in four parts between 1883 and 1885. A German philosopher, Nietzsche is the author of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872). At the end of his poem Shade says that the day (the last day of Shade's life) has passed in a sustained low hum of harmony:
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)
In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830), Mozart twice mentions harmony:
М о ц а р т
За твоё
Здоровье, друг, за искренний союз,
Связующий Моцарта и Сальери,
Двух сыновей гармонии.
(Пьёт.)
Mozart
Here is a health
To you, my friend, and to the candid union
That ties together Mozart and Salieri,
Two sons of harmony.
(Drinks.) (Scene II)
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother about the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art. (Scene II)
A phrase used by Mozart, nikto b (none would) is Botkin in reverse. Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). In his autobiographical work Ecce Homo: Wie man wird, was man ist (Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is) written in 1888, first published in 1908, eight years after the author's death, Nietzsche explicitly describes himself as a Doppelgänger, where he writes: "I am a Doppelgänger, I have a 'second' face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third." In January 1889, in Turin, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse that left him incapacitated for the rest of his life. In one of his variants Shade mentions people whose mind died before arriving in Strange Other World:
A beautiful variant, with one curious gap, branches off at this point in the draft (dated July 6):
Strange Other World where all our still-born dwell,
And pets, revived, and invalids, grown well,
And minds that died before arriving there:
Poor old man Swift, poor —, poor Baudelaire
What might that dash stand for? Unless Shade gave prosodic value to the mute e in “Baudelaire,” which I am quite certain he would never have done in English verse (cf. “Rabelais,” line 501), the name required here must scan as a trochee. Among the names of celebrated poets, painters, philosophers, etc., known to have become insane or to have sunk into senile imbecility, we find many suitable ones. Was Shade confronted by too much variety with nothing to help logic choose and so left a blank, relying upon the mysterious organic force that rescues poets to fill it in at its own convenience? Or was there something else—some obscure intuition, some prophetic scruple that prevented him from spelling out the name of an eminent man who happened to be an intimate friend of his? Was he perhaps playing safe because a reader in his household might have objected to that particular name being mentioned? And if it comes to that, why mention it at all in this tragical context? Dark, disturbing thoughts. (note to Line 231)
Kinbote is afraid that this dash (that might stand for Nietzsche, for instance) stands for his name. Actually, it stands for Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name). An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer 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 Oct. 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.
As explained by Gogol in his 1842 fragment Rim (Rome), coda means in Italian "tail." There is a well-known folklore belief and observation about foxes: they use their long, bushy tails (called a "brush") to sweep the snow or dirt behind them, helping to obscure their tracks from predators or hunters. In Canto One of his poem Shade wonders whose spurred feet left footprints on the snow and mentions the fellow whose tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
20th Century Fox (now officially named 20th Century Studios) is a major American film production studio. One also remembers the Guy Fawkes mask (often misspelled "the Guy Fox mask"), a stylized face with red cheeks, an upturned mustache, and a pointed beard that represents anti-establishment resistance and digital anonymity. It is based on the 17th-century English member of the Gunpowder Plot who tried to blow up the House of Lords on November 5, 1605.
The characters in VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) include Mr. Goodman, Sebastian's literary secretary. Describing his visit to Mr. Goodman's office, the narrator (Sebastian’s half-brother V.) mentions a black mask that covers Mr. Goodman’s face and compares Mr. Goodman's face to a cow udder:
'Pray be seated,' he said, courteously waving me into a leather armchair near his desk. He was remarkably well-dressed though decidedly with a city flavour. A black mask covered his face. 'What can I do for you?' He went on looking at me through the eyeholes and still holding my card.
I suddenly realized that my name conveyed nothing to him. Sebastian had made his mother's name his own completely.
'I am,' I answered, 'Sebastian Knight's half-brother.' There was a short silence.
'Let me see,' said Mr Goodman, 'am I to understand, that you are referring to the late Sebastian Knight, the well-known author?'
'Exactly,' said I.
Mr Goodman with finger and thumb stroked his face…. I mean the face under his mask… stroked it down, down, reflectively.'
'I beg your pardon,' he said, 'but are you quite sure that there is not some mistake?'
'None whatever,' I replied, and in as few words as possible I explained my relationship to Sebastian.
'Oh, is that so?' said Mr Goodman, growing more and more pensive. 'Really, really, it never entered my head. I was certainly quite aware that Knight was born and brought up in Russia. But I somehow missed the point about his name. Yes, now I see… Yes, it ought to be a Russian one…. His mother….'
Mr Goodman drummed the blotting-pad for a minute with his fine white fingers and then faintly sighed.
'Well, what's done is done,' he remarked. 'Too late now to add a… I mean,' he hurriedly continued, 'that I'm sorry not to have gone into the matter before. So you are his half-brother? Well, I am delighted to meet you.'
'First of all,' I said, 'I should like to settle the business question. Mr Knight's papers, at least those that refer to his literary occupations, are not in very great order and I don't quite know exactly how things stand. I haven't yet seen his publishers, but I gather that at least one of them – the firm that brought out The Funny Mountain – no longer exists. Before going further into the matter I thought I'd better have a talk with you.'
'Quite so,' said Mr Goodman. 'As a matter of fact you may not be cognizant of my having interest in two Knight books, The Funny Mountain and Lost Property. Under the circumstances the best thing would be for me to give you some details which I can send you by letter tomorrow morning as well as a copy of my contract with Mr Knight. Or should I call him Mr…' and smiling under his mask Mr Goodman tried to pronounce our simple Russian name.
'Then there is another matter,' I continued. 'I have decided to write a book on his life and work, and I sorely need certain information. Could you perhaps….'
It seemed to me that Mr Goodman stiffened Then he coughed once or twice and even went as far as to select a blackcurrant lozenge from a small box on his distinguished-looking desk.
'My dear Sir,' he said, suddenly veering together with his seat and whirling his eyeglass on his ribbon. 'Let us be perfectly outspoken. I have certainly known poor Knight better than anyone else, but… look here, have your started writing that book?'
'No,' I said.
'Then don't. You must excuse my being so very blunt. An old habit – a bad habit, perhaps. You don't mind, do you? Well, what I mean is… how should I put it?… You see, Sebastian Knight was not what you might call a great writer…. Oh, yes, I know – a fine artist and all that – but with no appeal to the general public. I don't wish to say that a book could not be written about him. It could. But then it ought to be written from a special point of view which would make the subject fascinating. Otherwise it is bound to fall flat, because, you see, I really don't think that Sebastian Knight's fame is strong enough to sustain anything like the work you are contemplating.'
I was so taken aback by this outburst that I kept silent. And Mr Goodman went on:
'I trust my bluntness does not offend you. Your half-brother and I were such good pals that you quite understand how I feel about it. Better not, my dear sir, better not. Leave it to some professional fellow, to one who knows the book-market – and he will tell you that anybody trying to complete an exhaustive study of Knight's life and work, as you put it, would be wasting his and the reader's time. Why, even So-and-So's book about the late… [a famous name was mentioned] with all those photographs and facsimiles did not sell.'
I thanked Mr Goodman for his advice and reached for my hat. I felt he had proved a failure and that I had followed a false scent. Somehow or other I did not care to ask him to enlarge upon those days when he and Sebastian had been 'such pals'. I wonder now what his answer would have been had I begged him to tell me the story of his secretaryship. After shaking hands with me most cordially, he returned the black mask which I pocketed, as I supposed it might come in usefully on some other occasion. He saw me to the nearest glass door and there we parted. As I was about to go down the stairs, a vigorous-looking girl whom I had noticed steadily typing in one of the rooms ran after me and stopped me (queer – that Sebastian's Cambridge friend had also called me back).
'My name,' she said, 'is Helen Pratt. I have overheard as much of your conversation as I could stand and there is a little thing I want to ask you. Clare Bishop is a great friend of mine. There's something she wants to find out. Could I talk to you one of these days?'
I said yes, most certainly, and we fixed the time.
'I knew Mr Knight quite well,' she added, looking at me with bright round eyes.
'Oh, really,' said I, not quite knowing what else to say.
'Yes,' she went on, 'he was an amazing personality, and I don't mind telling you that I loathed Goodman's book about him.'
'What do you mean?' I asked. 'What book?'
'Oh, the one he has just written. I was going over the proofs with him this last week. Well, I must be running. Thank you so much.'
She darted away and very slowly I descended the steps. Mr Goodman's large soft pinkish face was, and is, remarkably like a cow's udder. (Chapter Six)
In his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881), Oscar Wilde (an English poet, novelist and playwright, 1854-1900) compares John Keats (an English poet, 1795-1821) to Saint Sebastian (an early Christian saint and martyr):
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
Wilde calls Keats "poet-painter of our English Land." In Canto One of his poem Shade speaks of his childhood and says that he was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud, a poet and a painter with a taste for realistic objects interlaced with grotesque growths and images of doom:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
A curio in Aunt Maud's collection, Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4 On Chapman's Homer, hints at Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816). Shade's aunt Maud is a namesake of Maud Allan (1873-1956), a Canadian dancer, chiefly noted for her Dance of the Seven Veils. Though not perceived as an accomplished dancer, she performed in Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salome (based on a 1891 French play by Oscar Wilde), dancing the title role topless, which garnered great attention. Lou Andreas-Salomé (born either Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé or Lioulia von Salomé, 1861-1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist from a French Huguenot-German family. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
A fire temple is a place of worship for Zoroastrians. In Zoroastrian doctrine, atar and aban (fire and water) are agents of ritual purity. Describing the death of Queen Blenda (the mother of Charles the Beloved), Kinbote mentions Otar, the Prince's platonic pal, a pleasant and cultured adeling with a tremendous nose and sparse hair:
Her [Queen Blenda] he remembered - more or less: a horsewoman, tall, broad, stout, ruddy-faced. She had been assured by a royal cousin that her son would be safe and happy under the tutelage of admirable Mr. Campbell who had taught several dutiful little princesses to spread butterflies and enjoy Lord Ronald's Coronach. He had immolated his life, so to speak, at the portable altars of a vast number of hobbies, from the study of book mites to bear hunting, and could reel off Macbeth from beginning to end during hikes; but he did not give a damn for his charges' morals, preferred ladies to laddies, and did not meddle in the complexities of Zemblan ingledom. He left, for some exotic court, after a ten-year stay, in 1932 when our Prince, aged seventeen, had begun dividing his time between the University and his regiment. It was the nicest period in his life. He never could decide what he enjoyed more: the study of poetry - especially English poetry - or attending parades, or dancing in masquerades with boy-girls and girl-boys. His mother died suddenly on July 21, 1936, from an obscure blood ailment that had also afflicted her mother and grandmother. She had been much better on the day before - and Charles Xavier had gone to an all-night ball in the so-called Ducal Dome in Grindelwood: for the nonce, a formal heterosexual affair, rather refreshing after some previous sport. At about four in the morning, with the sun enflaming the tree crests and Mt. Falk, a pink cone, the King stopped his powerful car at one of the gates of the palace. The air was so delicate, the light so lyrical, that he and the three friends he had with him decided to walk through the linden bosquet the rest of the distance to the Pavonian Pavilion where guests were lodged. He and Otar, a platonic pal, wore tails but they had lost their top hats to the highway winds. A strange something struck all four of them as they stood under the young limes in the prim landscape of scarp and counterscarp fortified by shadow and countershadow. Otar, a pleasant and cultured adeling with a tremendous nose and sparse hair, had his two mistresses with him, eighteen-year-old Fifalda (whom he later married) and seventeen-year-old Fleur (whom we shall meet in two other notes), daughters of Countess de Fyler, the Queen's favorite lady in waiting. One involuntarily lingers over that picture, as one does when standing at a vantage point of time and knowing in retrospect that in a moment one's life would undergo a complete change. So here was Otar, looking with a puzzled expression at the distant window's of the Queen's quarters, and there were the two girls, side by side, thin-legged, in shimmering wraps, their kitten noses pink, their eyes green and sleepy, their earrings catching and loosing the fire of the sun. There were a few people around, as there always were, no matter the hour, at this gate, along which a road, connecting with the eastern highway, ran. A peasant woman with a small cake she had baked, doubtlessly the mother of the sentinel who had not yet come to relieve the unshaven dark young nattdett (child of night) in his dreary sentry box, sat on a spur stone watching in feminine fascination the luciola-like tapers that moved from window to window; two workmen, holding their bicycles, stood staring too at those strange lights; and a drunk with a walrus mustache kept staggering around and patting the trunks of the lindens. One picks up minor items at such slowdowns of life. The King noticed that some reddish mud flecked the frames of the two bicycles and that their front wheels were both turned in the same direction, parallel to one another. Suddenly, down a steep path among the lilac bushes - a short cut from the Queen's quarters - the Countess came running and tripping over the hem of her quilted robe, and at the same moment, from another side of the palace, all seven councilors, dressed in their formal splendor and carrying like plum cakes replicas of various regalia, came striding down the stairs of stone, in dignified haste, but she beat them by one alin and spat out the news. The drunk started to sing a ribald ballad about "Karlie-Garlie" and fell into the demilune ditch. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle, and so, in my awareness of this problem, I prepared for John Shade, some time in June, when narrating to him the events briefly noticed in some of my comments (see note to line 130, for example), a rather handsomely drawn plan of the chambers, terraces, bastions and pleasure grounds of the Onhava Palace. Unless it has been destroyed or stolen, this careful picture in colored inks on a large (thirty by twenty inches) piece of cardboard might still be where I last saw it in mid-July, on the top of the big black trunk, opposite the old mangle, in a niche of the little corridor leading to the so-called fruit room. If it is not there, it might be looked for in his upper-floor study. I have written about this to Mrs. Shade but she does not reply to my letters. In case it still exists, I wish to beg her, without raising my voice, and very humbly, as humbly as the lowliest of the King's subjects might plead for an immediate restitution of his rights (the plan is mine and is clearly signed with a black chess-king crown after "Kinbote"), to send it, well packed, marked not to be bent on the wrapper, and by registered mail, to my publisher for reproduction in later editions of this work. Whatever energy I possessed has quite ebbed away lately, and these excruciating headaches now make impossible the mnemonic effort and eye strain that the drawing of another such plan would demand. The black trunk stands on another brown or brownish even larger one, and there is I think a stuffed fox or coyote next to them in their dark corner. (note to Line 71)