According to 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), the King saw Disa for the first time at a masked ball in his uncle’s palace:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups; worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flower-girls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisers, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434). (note to Line 275)
The King's uncle Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) is the Duke of Aros:
Conmal, Duke of Aros, 1855-1955, K.'s uncle, the eldest half-brother of Queen Blenda (q. v.); noble paraphrast, 12; his version of Timon of Athens, 39, 130; his life and work, 962. (Index)
Aros, a fine town in E. Zembla, capital of Conmal's dukedom; once the mayorship of the worthy Ferz ("chessqueen") Bretwit, a cousin of the granduncle of Oswin Bretwit (q. v.), 149, 286. (Index)
In R. L. Stevenson's story The Merry Men (1882) Charles Darnaway, a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh, travels to the remote island of Aros off the northwest coast of Scotland:
It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for the last time for Aros. A boat had put me ashore the night before at Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea, struck right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.
I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had remained in his possession. It brought him in nothing but the means of life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny. Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought neither help nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support it. I was a student of Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, and taught me to count Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in that part of the country, so far from all society and comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July day. (Chapter I "Ailean Aros")
Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. On the other hand, Duchess of Payn brings to mind James Payn (1830-98), an English novelist and editor who was accused of stealing R. L. Stevenson's stories. In a letter of October 16, 1882, to the Editor of the 'New York Tribune' R. L. Stevenson writes:
More than half in pleasantry - and I now think the pleasantry ill-judged - I complained in a note to my NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS that some one, who shall remain nameless for me, had borrowed the idea of a story from one of mine. As if I had not borrowed the ideas of the half of my own! As if any one who had written a story ill had a right to complain of any other who should have written it better! I am indeed thoroughly ashamed of the note, and of the principle which it implies.
But it is no mere abstract penitence which leads me to beg a corner of your paper - it is the desire to defend the honour of a man of letters equally known in America and England, of a man who could afford to lend to me and yet be none the poorer; and who, if he would so far condescend, has my free permission to borrow from me all that he can find worth borrowing.
Indeed, sir, I am doubly surprised at your correspondent's error. That James Payn should have borrowed from me is already a strange conception. The author of LOST SIR MASSINGBERD and BY PROXY may be trusted to invent his own stories. The author of A GRAPE FROM A THORN knows enough, in his own right, of the humorous and pathetic sides of human nature.
But what is far more monstrous - what argues total ignorance of the man in question - is the idea that James Payn could ever have transgressed the limits of professional propriety. I may tell his thousands of readers on your side of the Atlantic that there breathes no man of letters more inspired by kindness and generosity to his brethren of the profession, and, to put an end to any possibility of error, I may be allowed to add that I often have recourse, and that I had recourse once more but a few weeks ago, to the valuable practical help which he makes it his pleasure to extend to younger men.
The title of R. L. Stevenson's collection of short stories, New Arabian Nights (1882), is an allusion to the collection of tales known as A Thousand and One Nights. 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”).
R. L. Stevenson (1850-94) was a Scottish writer. In his Commentary and Index to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions the King's Scotch tutor, Walter Campbell:
Campbell, Walter, b. 1890, in Glasgow; K.'s tutor, 1922-1931, an amiable gentleman with a mellow and rich mind; dead shot and champion skater; now in Iran; 130. (Index)
Mr. Campbell's first name seems to hint at Walter Scott (the most famous Scottish author). The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) is a work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell (1904-87), in which the author discusses his theory of the mythological structure of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world myths. The world's true hero, VN had a thousand and one faces.
Shade's murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). My Shadow is a poem by R. L. Stevenson:
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all.
He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he's a coward you can see;
I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!
One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.
In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and says that she had "strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force of character." In a discarded variant (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) Shade mentions "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." In a conversation at the Faculty Club the German visitor twice repeats the word "strange:"
"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone. (note to Line 894)
R. L. Stevenson is the author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). R. L. Stevenson's last words (quoted by VN in his Cornell lecture) were "What's that? Do I look strange?"
My Last Duchess (1842) is a poem by Robert Browning. In his poem Prospice (1864) Robert Browning several times uses the phrase "of pain:"
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
According to Kinbote, the King saw Disa for the first time at a masked ball in his uncle’s palace. Masked Ball at the Opera House (1873) is a painting by Edouard Manet.