Dear List,
 
In Kinbote's Foreword we find several details about Pale Fire's eighty medium-sized index cards: 
The short (166 lines) Canto One[ ...]occupies thirteen cards. Canto Two and Canto Three, are identical in length (334 lines) and cover twenty-seven cards each. Canto Four reverts to One in length and occupies again thirteen cards, of which the last four used on the day of his death give a Corrected Draft instead of a Fair Copy.
Kinbote informs us that Shade is very methodical and that "Canto Four:the last third of its text (lines 949-999) is supplied by a Corrected Draft [...] that "does not follow the lines of the card as rigidly as the Fair Copy does. Actually, it turns out to be beautifully accurate when you once make the plunge and compel yourself to open your eyes in the limpid depths under its confused surface. It contains not one gappy line, not one doubtful reading."
We also learn from him that Shade saved a total of twelve cards from incineration "because of the unused felicities shining among the dross of used draftings [...]

Kinbote had  "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 [...].In my notes to the poem the reader will find these canceled readings. Their places are indicated, or at least suggested, by the draftings of established lines in their immediate neighborhood. In a sense, many of them are more valuable artistically and historically than some of the best passages in the final text.

 

I would like to confront Kinbote's appraisals of Shade's poem (mainly his sentence " It contains not one gappy line, not one doubtful reading")  and the variants  drafts he brought up in his very critical commentary, one that often seems to contradict his original assessment of Canto Four. 

 

Of course there were no variants treasured or written for Canto Four's last fifty lines. There are only the early ones related to its lines 895-899:
The more I weigh... or this dewlap...Instead of these facile and revolting lines, the draft gives:
 895 I have a certain liking, I admit,

    For Parody, that last resort of wit:

    "In nature’s strife when fortitude prevails

    The victim falters and the victor fails."

899 Yes, reader, Pope

. 

 

 

 

..................................................................................................................................................................................


Drafts
(line 12) ... in the disjointed, half-obliterated draft which I am not at all sure I have deciphered properly: 

Ah, I must not forget to say something

That my friend told me of a certain king.

(lines 39-40) ... These lines are represented in the drafts by a variant reading: 

39 .............and home would haste my thieves,

40 The sun with stolen ice, the moon with leaves

 

If we discount, as I think we should, three casual allusions to royalty (605, 822, and 894) and the Popian "Zembla" in line 937, we may conclude that the final text of Pale Fire has been deliberately and drastically drained of every trace of the material I contributed[...] he has given the royal fugitive a refuge in the vaults of the variants he has preserved; for in his draft as many as thirteen verses, superb singing verses (given by me in note to lines 70, 79, and 130, all in Canto One, which he obviously worked at with a greater degree of creative freedom than he enjoyed afterwards) bear the specific imprint of my theme

 

(line 57) Shade crossed out lightly the following lines in the draft:

The light is good; the reading lamps, long-necked;

All doors have keys. Your modern architect

Is in collusion with psychanalysts:

When planning parents’ bedrooms, he insists

On lockless doors so that, when looking back,

The future patient of the future quack

May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene. 

 

(line 61) ... there happens to be quoted a manuscript poem (received from Sybil Shade) which is said to have been "composed by our poet apparently at the end of June, thus less than a month before our poet’s death, thus being the last short piece that our poet wrote." ( The Swing) ...I leave my poet’s reader to decide whether it is likely he would have written this only a few days before he repeated its miniature themes in this part of the poem. 

 

(line 70) After this, in the draft (dated July 3), come a few unnumbered lines that may have been intended for some later parts of the poem. They are not actually deleted but are accompanied by a question mark in the margin and encircled with a wavy line encroaching upon some of the letters: 

There are events, strange happenings, that strike

The mind as emblematic. They are like

Lost similes adrift without a string,

Attached to nothing. Thus that northern king,

Whose desperate escape from prison was

Brought off successfully only because

Some forty of his followers that night

Impersonated him and aped his flight —

 

(line 79) Written against this in the margin of the draft are two lines of which only the first can be deciphered. It reads:  

The evening is the time to praise the day 

 

(lines 90-93) In the draft, instead of the final text: 

.....................her room

We’ve kept intact. Her trivia for us

Retrace her style: the leaf sarcophagus

(A Luna’s dead and shriveled-up cocoon)

 The reference is to what my dictionary defines as "a large, tailed, pale green moth, the caterpillar of which feeds on the hickory." I suspect Shade altered this passage because his moth’s name clashed with "Moon" in the next line.

 

(line 130) Line 130 is followed in the draft by four verses which Shade discarded in favor of the Fair Copy continuation (line 131 etc.). This false start goes:

 As children playing in a castle find/ In some old closet full of toys, behind / The animals and masks, a sliding door/ [four words heavily crossed out] a secret corridor —

 

(line 231)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 (cp. "Rabelais," line 501), the name required here must scan as a trochee [...] 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?
After line 274 there is a false start in the draft: I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man" / In Spanish... 

 

(lines 376-377) This is replaced in the draft by the more significant — and more tuneful — variant:

 the Head of our Department deemed 

 

(line 413)  a nymph came pirouetting...In the draft there is the lighter and more musical:

413 A nymphet pirouetted

 

(lines 417-421: I went upstairs, etc. The draft yields an interesting variant:

417 I fled upstairs at the first quawk of jazz

     And read a galley proof: "Such verses as

     ‘See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,

     The sot a hero, lunatic a king’

     Smack of their heartless age." Then came your call

This is, of course, from Pope’s Essay on Man. One knows not what to wonder at more: Pope’s not finding a monosyllable to replace "hero" (for example, "man") so as to accommodate the definite article before the next word, or Shade’s replacing an admirable passage by the much flabbier final text.

 

(line 596) We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft — and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant:

Should the dead murderer try to embrace

His outraged victim whom he now must face?

Do objects have a soul? Or perish must

Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?

 The last syllable of "Tanagra" and the first three letters of "dust" form the name of the murderer whose shargar (puny ghost) the radiant spirit of our poet was soon to face. "Simple chance!" the pedestrian reader may cry. [...] This variant is so prodigious that only scholarly discipline and a scrupulous regard for the truth prevented me from inserting it here, and deleting four lines elsewhere (for example, the weak lines 627-630) so as to preserve the length of the poem.

 

(lines 609-614)  Nor can one help, etc.   This passage is different in the draft:

 609 Nor can one help the exile caught by death

    In a chance inn exposed to the hot breath

    Of this America, this humid night:

    Through slatted blinds the stripes of colored light

    Grope for his bed — magicians from the past

    With philtered gems — and life is ebbing fast.

 

(line 822) Fervently would I wish to report that the reading in the draft was:  killing a Zemblan king  

— but alas, it is not so: the card with the draft has not been preserved by Shade.

 

 

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