Stan has mentioned my name a couple of times in recent days, and it’s true that he and I are allies more often than not, and especially so on the question of the merits of Shade’s poem. I set out my basic views on Pale Fire, including my thoughts on the poem, in an essay-length message dated 12/18/06. But anyone deeply interested in the question should go back to the debate as it unfolded a year before that, with contributions by Brian Boyd, Michael Glynn, Walter Miale, and others whose names don’t come so quickly to mind.

Rather than replay my own arguments or discuss those that Stan has put forth, my purpose here is to show that our shared view, though it may now seem the minority opinion, has a long history. Besides a few members of the List who seem largely to have fallen silent, Stan and I are joined by a number of well-known and well-respected critics, including George Cloyne, F.W. Dupee, Alvin B. Kernan, Richard Rorty, Michael Wood, Robert M. Adams, Elizabeth Hardwick, and William Monroe. 

Dupee, who was a great admirer of Nabokov the novelist and wrote the introduction to the Anchor Books excerpt that first brought Lolita to a wide audience in the United States, referred (in another essay, of course) to Shade’s “quasi-poem” and went to to say that

John Shade is a kindly, even affectionate, portrait of the American poet-in-residence. Like Robert Frost, he maintains a stoic patience and well-ordered life in the face of domestic disaster. As with lesser specimens of the type his muse is so thoroughly “in residence,” so domesticated, that he is impelled, on one hand into academic verse, on the other into drink. Indeed, he could do with some of Kinbote’s madness and passion . . .

Adams, another admirer who has published two of the liveliest accounts of Nabokov’s time at Cornell that it’s been my pleasure to read, wrote of Pale Fire that “Shade the poet seems to me as much a joke as Kinbote the critic.” 

Hardwick’s judgment was short and brutal: “The brilliant Pale Fire is entirely the deranged annotation of a dreadful poem.”

But it’s mainly to William Monroe’s essay “Lords and Owners: Nabokov’s Sequestered Imagination” that I wish to call your attention. Not only is it a detailed consideration of the poem, it is also readily available at the Zembla website. In the section of his paper titled “Shade’s Earnest Effort,” Monroe writes as follows:

It seems unlikely that Nabokov would ask such a shopworn poetic form to serve his aesthetic and subversive purposes. In my view, Shade is still too utilitarian about art's contribution to life, and his gross employment of poetry is not yet aesthetic, alienistic, or Nabokovian.

A little farther on, Monroe says that Nabokov

knows well that the most formal poetic devices lend themselves to subversive satire as well as solemnity: Pope used the same heroic couplet form for his great mock-epic The Rape of the Lock, and Byron achieved a sudden "balloon prick" deflation in Don Juan, usually by a polysyllabic rhyme at the end of a stanza. By having Shade work in heroic couplets on an elegiac theme, Nabokov sets him up for a series of bathetic falls.

There follows then a sometimes fairly technical critique of the poem, ending with this:

To remain sequestered and uncorrupted, one's imagination must not be Lynched or Krapped. Art must not be slavishly put in the service of extra-literary enterprises--not by Kinbote, not by Shade, both of whom, in the end, are befooled by the author's jester bells.

Monroe’s larger point, with which Stan and I seem to be in full agreement, is that it’s not Shade’s poem that is great (or even very good), but rather the book as a whole. 

I hope that these quotations will send people running to read Monroe’s essay in its entirety--along with (and in opposition to, as it were), John Morris’s fine essay. For that matter, I hope that everyone with more than a passing interest in the subject of this List will read all the other first-rate essays available at the Zembla site.

In my 12/18/06 message, referred to above, I quoted with approval from R.W. Flynt’s 1957 review of Lolita in which he spoke of Nabokov’s “really fiendish, lyric delight in the bottom absurdity of things.” Flynt also praised VN’s Gogol book as “the best treatise on comedy that I know of.” The thing I miss in so much Nabokov scholarship is an appreciation of how funny my version of Pale Fire is in comparison to that of most of his recent critics, especially the otherworlders. In my view what is deepest in Nabokov just is his particular kind of humor--deeper by far than Shade’s trite musings on The Meaning of It All. Considering the time in which the book is set, one of the best (and therefore also the saddest) jokes in the book is that a florid homosexual like Kinbote, whose “secret” is already known to everybody, would turn to a straight man (in more ways than one) to bring him out of the closet on the glorious wings of song. This aspect of the book--pre-Stonewall homosexuality as a motivating, crazy-making force--is also played down and often ignored by critics, at least the straight ones. 

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So then, to come to the question behind all of this, what will it mean to us Shade-doubters if we're forced to accept that Nabokov didn't intend the poem to be funny? I can't speak for Stan or the others, but all it will mean for me is that Nabokov, by being less of a poet than he thought himself to be, wrote a far better novel than even he might have imagined.

Jim Twiggs