At the end of his commentary 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) tells about his feeling of disappointment after reading Shade's poem and mentions the unique atmosphere of his kingdom:
We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana - but I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described to him, the characters I had made alive for him and all the unique atmosphere of my kingdom. I even suggested to him a good title - the title of the book in me whose pages he was to cut: Solus Rex, instead of which I saw Pale Fire, which meant to me nothing. I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where were the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvelous tale? (note to Line 1000)
A seaside country, Kinbote's Zembla brings to mind a kingdom by the sea in E. A. Poe's last poem Annabel Lee (published posthumously in 1850 and alluded to by Humbert Humbert at the beginning of VN's novel Lolita, 1955):
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the side of the sea.
In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) H. P. Lovecraft (an American writer, 1890-1937) devotes a whole chapter to E. A. Poe (an American poet and writer, 1809-1849). In his essay H. P. Lovecraft says that atmosphere is the all-important thing:
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfil every condition of true supernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author’s intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited, such a “high spot” must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere, the better it is as a work of art in the given medium. (I. Introduction)
Describing his rented house, Kinbote mentions the atmosphere of damnum infectum in which he was supposed to dwell:
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)
Damnum infectum is a Latin legal term meaning "damage not yet suffered but threatened or apprehended." The black cat that came with the house and that Kinbote farmed out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman, brings to mind The Black Cat (1845), a psychological horror short story by E. A. Poe. In Canto Three of his poem John Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions the fantasies of Poe that he tore apart:
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)
Later in the Canto Shade describes his heart attack and mentions 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)
In his note to Line 680 Kinbote writes:
Major hurricanes are given feminine names in America. The feminine gender is suggested not so much by the sex of furies and harridans as by a general professional application. Thus any machine is a she to its fond user, and any fire (even a "pale" one!) is she to the fireman, as water is she to the passionate plumber. Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name (sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear.
The Parrot is a poem by Alfred Noyes (an English poet and critic, 1880-1958, the author of The Opalescent Parrot, a 1929 collection of essays) quoted by Robert Ervin Howard (an American writer of pulp fiction, 1906-1936) in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft:
In a 1934 letter to H. P. Lovecraft, Howard discussed his use of a seemingly prescient parrot in the Conan story "Iron Shadows on the Moon." His recollections, and the reconstruction, appear as follows:
I'm afraid I can't claim originality in regard to the parrot and his repetition of the god's invocation [in “Iron Shadows on the Moon”]. I got the idea from a poem of Noyes', entitled, I believe, 'The Parrot". As I remember, it goes something like this:
When the king and his folk lay dead,
And the murderous horde was gone,
He gnawed through his cage and fled
To the sheltering woods alone.
But after an endless age,
He was taken by man once more;
And swung in a sturdier cage
By a white-washed ale-house door.
Through the long hot afternoon,
From his place by the blistered wall,
He whistled a dark old tune,
And called as a ghost might call:
"Farlo, merillo, geray!"
And the wondering people heard
The voice of the dead that day
Talking again in a bird.
The poem ends on what seems to me a powerful and shuddersome note
And once, oh dreadful and wild,
In the blaze of the noonday sun,
It shrieked like a frightened child
That into the dark has gone.
Here's the Alfred Noyes original:
THE PARROT
When the king and his folk lay dead,
And the murderous hordes had gone,
He gnawed through his cage and fled
To the swallowing woods alone;
But, after an endless age,
He was taken by a man once more;
And swung in a sturdier cage
By a sun-bleached wine-house door.
And there, on a hot white noon,
From his place on the blistered wall,
He whistled a dark old tune
And called, as a ghost may call,
Farlo — Merillo — Rozace,
With a chuckle of impish glee,
The words of the vanished race,
That none knew now but he.
Farlo – Merillo – Geray!
And the spell struck listeners heard
The tongue of the dead that day
Talking again in a bird;
And his eyes were like blood-red stones,
For round him the wise men drew,
And coaxed him with terrapin bones
To tell the words he knew.
Sleek as a peach was his breast
His long wings green as palms;
And, whiles, like a prince he’d jest,
Then, beggar-like, whine for alms;
And, whiles, like a girl in flight
He’d titter, then mimic a kiss,
And chuckle again with delight
In that wicked old way of his.
He’d courtesy low, and he’d dance
On his perch, and mockingly leer,
And stiffen himself and prance
For the grey-beards listening there;
And once – O, dreadful and wild,
In the blaze of that noonday sun;
He shrieked, like a frightened child,
That into the dark had gone.
—Alfred Noyes
Dick Turpin's Ride and Other Poems 1927
A story by R. E. Howard starring the fictional sword and sorcery hero Conan the Cimmerian, Shadows in the Moonlight (initially entitled Iron Shadows in the Moon) brings to mind the Shadows, a regicidal organization which has commissioned Gradus (Shade's murderer) to assassinate the self-banished king of Zembla. A word of a dead language (noone knows what it means) repeated by the parrot in Alfred Noyes's poem, Farlo reminds one of the Farlow couple, John and Jean, in VN's Lolita. Geray (another word spoken by the parrot) makes one think of John Ray, Jr., the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript (and Humbert's "real" name as it appears) and of Gray (one of Gradus's aliases). Btw., geroy is the Russian word for "hero."