“The reader will find in the present work scattered references to my novels… The two-mover described in the last chapter has been republished in Chess Problems by Lipton, Matthews & Rice (Faber, London 1963, p. 252). My most amusing invention, however, is a “White-retracts-move” problem which I dedicated to E. A. Znosko-Borovski, who published it, in the nineteen-thirties (1934?), in the emigre daily Poslednie Novosti, Paris. I do not recall the position lucidly enough to notate it here, but perhaps some lover of “fairy chess” (to which type of problem it belongs) will look it up some day in one of those blessed libraries where old newspapers are microfilmed, as all our memories should be.” [  ]
Vladimir Nabokov. Foreword to “Speak,Memory”

Jansy Mello: I wish some of the Nabokovian chess experts would express their ideas about the link between “Pale Fire” and “Fairy Chess.”  I’m following Berndt-Peter Lange’s hypothesis when he writes (quoting the passage again): “Life is here seen in terms of a game of chess between unknown players indulging in another one of its special forms, fairy chess, whose rules allow imaginary pieces to make irregular moves: “... but there they were, aloof and mute,/ Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns/ To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns…” (II. 818-829)”

It occurred to me that Charles Kinbote’s variants (fairy chess is a “variant” of chess,)* related to John Shade’s verses might be explored as being representative of a literary kind of “fairy move” ** in the context and structure of JS-poem/CK-commentary.

One of these is particularly interesting:

Line 316: The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May – “Frankly, I am not certain what this means. My dictionary defines ‘toothwort’ as ‘a kind of cress’ and the noun ‘white’ as "any pure white breed of farm animal or a certain genus of lepidoptera." Little help is provided by the variant written in the margin: “In woods Virginia Whites occurred in May”/ Folklore characters, perhaps? Fairies? Or cabbage butterflies?

Or when CK offers indications about them, such as the “…Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongsskugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century.” His partial confession about the role Shade’s variants played in keeping alive his Zemblan dream, indicates a few of them, “all in Canto One”… Which, among them, offers us clues about PF’s author(s); which are to be “discarded” when we follow this perspective? 

“ despite the control exercised upon my poet by a domestic censor and God knows whom else, 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, a minute but genuine star ghost of my discourse on Zembla and her unfortunate king. [  ]What was that dim distant music, those vestiges of color in the air? Here and there I discovered in it and especially, especially in the invaluable variants, echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewake of my glory.[  ] I do not doubt that many of the statements made in this work will be brushed aside by the guilty parties when it is out. Mrs. Shade will not remember having been shown by her husband who "showed her everything" one or two of the precious variants.” [  ] “I… took the manuscript out again, and for several days wore it, as it were, having distributed the ninety-two index cards about my person, twenty in the right-hand pocket of my coat, as many in the left-hand one, a batch of forty against my right nipple and the twelve precious ones with variants in my innermost left-breast pocket. I blessed my royal stars for having taught myself wife work, for I now sewed up all four pockets. Thus with cautious steps, among deceived enemies, I circulated, plated with poetry, armored with rhymes, stout with another man’s song, stiff with cardboard, bullet-proof at long last.”

Here are other excerpts related to this special entry in the INDEX:

Variants: the thieving sun and moon, 39-40; planning the Primal Scene, 57; the Zemblan King’s escape (K’s contribution, 8 lines), 70; the Edda (K’s contribution, 1 line), 79; Luna’s dead cocoon, 90-93; children finding a secret passage (K’s contribution, 4 lines), 130; poor old man Swift, poor — (possible allusion to K), 231; Shade, Ombre, 275; Virginia Whites, 316; The Head of Our Department, 377; a nymphet, 413; additional line from Pope (possible allusion to K), 417; Tanagra dust (a remarkable case of foreknowledge), 596; of this America, 609-614; first two feet changed, 629; parody of Pope, 895-899; a sorry age, and Social Novels, 922.

Following their lead, I extracted specific lines from the indicated notes, but will add them to the notes at the end of the posting. ***

By coincidence, or not, there are a few lines usually quoted in association to “Pale Fire” that come from the chapter on “Exile” (?) in “Speak, Memory,” the same chapter in which he describes his putative “fairy tactics” **** Perhaps the “ultrasophisticated” evaluation of fairy chess and PF’s variants is simply one such wild goose chase, deliberately inserted in the novel for the enjoyment of a special group of readers (unfortunately my ignorance of chess is an obstacle to fulfil my hunter’s instincts). I need Nabokovian help to enjoy this virtual (and misplaced) novel variant reading of PF’s story…


……………………………………………………………………….

* - “In the context of chess problems, chess variants are called fantasy chess, heterodox chess or fairy chess. Some chess variants are used only in problem composition and not in actual play. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_variant’’ 


**  -  In speaking about his love for composing "fairy chess" moves, which he describes as a poethico-mathematical endeavor, Nabokov makes the following description of this cerebral pastime: “Deceit, to the point of diabolism, and originality, verging upon the grotesque, were my notions of strategy; and although in matters of construction I tried to conform, whenever possible, to classical rules, such as economy of force, unity, weeding out of loose ends, I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small furious devil.” This seems to me as good a description as any, not of his strategy in composing chess moves, but of his strategy in composing novels. Review by Juan  (March,2013)  http://www..goodreads.com/book/show/30594.Speak_Memory

*** - Lines 39-40: Was close my eyes, etc. - These lines are represented in the drafts by a variant reading:  

                  “and home would haste my thieves,
                                                      the sun with stolen ice,
                                                      the moon with leaves”
One cannot help recalling a passage in Timon of Athens (Act IV, Scene 3)…I am compelled for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this passage into English prose from a Zemblan poetical version of Timon…
                                                              “The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
                                                               and robs it. The moon is a thief:
                                                               he steals his silvery light from the sun.
                                                              The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.”

Line 57: The phantom of my little daughter’s swing - After this 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 70: The new TV -  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: a preterist - 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”
I feel pretty sure that my friend was trying to incorporate here something he and Mrs. Shade had heard me quote in my lighter-hearted moments, namely a charming quatrain from our Zemblan counterpart of the Elder Edda, in an anonymous English translation (Kirby’s?): “The wise at nightfall praise the day,
                                              The wife when she has passed away,
                                              The ice when it is crossed, the bride
                                               When tumbled, and the horse when tried.”

Lines 90-93: Her room, etc. - 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…”

Line 130: I never bounced a ball or swung a bat  - Frankly I too never excelled in soccer and cricket…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 —“
The comparison has remained suspended. Presumably our poet intended to attach it to the account of his stumbling upon some mysterious truth in the fainting fits of his boyhood. I cannot say how sorry I am that he rejected these lines. I regret it not only because of their intrinsic beauty, which is great, but also because the image they contain was suggested by something Shade had from me. I have already alluded in the course of these notes to the adventures of Charles Xavier, last King of Zembla, and to the keen interest my friend took in the many stories I told him about that king. The index card on which the variant has been preserved is dated July 4 and is a direct echo of our sunset rambles in the fragrant lanes of New Wye and Dulwich

Line 231: How ludicrous, etc. - 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,"…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…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? …Dark, disturbing thoughts.

Line 275: After line 274 there is a false start in the draft: -
                                  I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
                                  In Spanish...
One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme — and spare his reader the embarrassing intimacies that follow.

Lines 376-377: was said in English Litt to be - 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: “A nymphet pirouetted”

Lines 417-421: I went upstairs, etc. - The draft yields an interesting variant:
      “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… In pondering the near past I have never been able to ascertain retrospectively if he really had "guessed my secret," as he once observed (see note to line 991).

Line 596: Points at the puddle in his basement room - 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. But let him try to see, as I have tried to see, how many such combinations are possible and plausible. "Leningrad used to be Petrograd?" "A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us?" / 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:
      ^“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 629: The fate of beasts -  Above this the poet wrote and struck out: “The madman’s fate” //The ultimate destiny of madmen’s souls has been probed by many Zemblan theologians who generally hold the view that even the most demented mind still contains within its diseased mass a sane basic particle that survives death and suddenly expands…

Lines 895-899: The more I weigh... or this dewlap - Instead of these facile and revolting lines, the draft gives:   ^“ 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.’/  Yes, reader, Pope”

Line 922: held up by Our Cream - This is not quite exact. In the advertisement to which it refers, the whiskers are held up by a bubbly foam, not by a creamy substance.
         After this line, instead of lines 923-930, we find the following, lightly deleted, variant:
“All artists have been born in what they call
A sorry age; mine is the worst of all:
An age that thinks spacebombs and spaceships take
A genius with a foreign name to make,
When any jackass can rig up the stuff;
An age in which a pack of rogues can bluff
The selenographer; a comic age
That sees in Dr. Schweitzer a great sage.”
         Having struck this out, the poet tried another theme, but these lines he also canceled: “England where poets flew the highest, now

Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough;

Now the prosemongers of the Grubby Group,

The Message Man, the owlish Nincompoop

And all the Social Novels of our age

Leave but a pinch of coal dust on the page.”

**** -  “ [I remember one particular problem I had been trying to compose for months. There came a night when I managed at last to express that particular theme. It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, “thetic” solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (exposing White’s King to checks), which the composer had taken the greatest pains to “plant” (with only one obscure little move by an inconspicuous pawn to upset it). Having passed through this
“antithetic” inferno the by now ultrasophisticated solver would reach the simple key move (bishop to c2) as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores.] The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight.”