Describing the disguised king's arrival in America, 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) mentions Gide the Lucid and the mascana fruit that Sylvia O'Donnell got especially for him (Kinbote is a confirmed vegetarian):
John Shade's heart attack (Oct. 17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. It had all been perfectly timed, and he was still wrestling with the unfamiliar French contraption when the Rolls-Royce from Sylvia O'Donnell's manor turned toward his green silks from a road and approached along the mowntrop, its fat wheels bouncing disapprovingly and its black shining body slowly gliding along. Fain would I elucidate this business of parachuting but (it being a matter of mere sentimental tradition rather than a useful manner of transportation) this is not strictly necessary in these notes to Pale Fire. While Kingsley, the British chauffeur, an old and absolutely faithful retainer, was doing his best to cram the bulky and ill-folded parachute into the boot, I relaxed on a shooting stick he had supplied me with, sipping a delightful Scotch and water from the car bar and glancing (amid an ovation of crickets and that vortex of yellow and maroon butterflies that so pleased Chateaubriand on his arrival in America) at an article in The New York Times in which Sylvia had vigorously and messily marked out in red pencil a communication from New Wye which told of the poet's hospitalization. I had been looking forward to meeting my favorite American poet who, as I felt sure at the moment, would die long before the Spring Term, but the disappointment was little more than a mental shrug of accepted regret, and discarding the newspaper, I looked around me with enchantment and physical wellbeing despite the congestion in my nose. Beyond the field the great green steps of turf ascended to the multicolored coppices; one could see above them the white brow of the manor; clouds melted into the blue. Suddenly I sneezed, and sneezed again. Kingsley offered me another drink but I declined it, and democratically joined him in the front seat. My hostess was in bed, suffering from the aftereffects of a special injection that she had been given in anticipation of a journey to a special place in Africa. In answer to my "Well, how are you?" she murmured that the Andes had been simply marvelous, and then in a slightly less indolent tone of voice inquired about a notorious actress with whom her son was said to be living in sin. Odon, I said, had promised me he would not marry her. She inquired if I had had a good hop and dingled a bronze bell. Good old Sylvia! She had in common with Fleur de Fyler a vagueness of manner, a languor of demeanor which was partly natural and partly cultivated as a convenient alibi for when she was drunk, and in some wonderful way she managed to combine that indolence with volubility reminding one of a slow-speaking ventriloquist who is interrupted by his garrulous doll. Changeless Sylvia! During three decades I had seen from time to time, from palace to palace, that same flat nut-colored bobbed hair, those childish pale-blue eyes, the vacant smile, the stylish long legs, the willowy hesitating movements.
A tray with fruit and drinks was brought in by a jeune beauté, as dear Marcel would have put it, nor could one help recalling another author, Gide the Lucid, who praises in his African notes so warmly the satiny skin of black imps.
"You nearly lost the opportunity to meet our brightest star," said Sylvia who was Wordsmith University's main trustee (and, in point of fact, had been solely responsible for arranging my amusing lectureship there). "I have just called up the college - yes, take that footstool - and he is much better. Try this mascana fruit, I got it especially for you, but the boy is strictly hetero, and, generally speaking, Your Majesty will have to be quite careful from now on. I'm sure you'll like it up there though I wish I could figure out why anybody should be so keen on teaching Zemblan. I think Disa ought to come too. I have rented for you what they say is their best house, and it is near the Shades." (note to Line 691)
André Gide (1869-1951) is the author of Les nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth), a prose-poem published in France in 1897. A second part, Nouvelles nourritures ("Later Fruits"), was added in 1935. In his memoir essay In Memoriam Oscar Wilde (1905) André Gide quotes Wilde's words about his poem:
The carriage that is to drive me off is ready. Wilde gets in with me to accompany me a little distance. He speaks of my book, praises it cautiously. The carriage stops. Wilde gets out and says goodbye; then abruptly: "Look here, mon cher, you must promise me something. The Nourritures Terrestres is good. . . very good. But, mon cher, promise me never again to write 'I' again. In art there is no first person."
In Shade's poem 'I' is the first word of the first line: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain." In his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881) Oscar Wilde calls John Keats "the youngest of the martyrs, fair as Sebastian, and as early slain:"
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
Describing their first meeting after Wilde's release from prison, André Gide mentions Wilde's new assumed name, Sebastian Melmoth:
From prison Wilde came to France. In B---, a remote little village near Dieppe, there settled a Sebastian Melmoth; that was he. Of his French friends I had been the last to see him; I wished to be the first to see him again. I arrived about midday, without having announced myself in advance. Melmoth, whom friendship with T brought often to Dieppe, was not expected back that evening. He did not arrive until midnight.
On the previous occasion Gide met Wilde in Biskra, Algeria, in January 1895:
Wilde spoke of returning to London; the Marquis of Q was abusing him, and accusing him of flight.
"But," I asked, "if you go to London, do you know what you are risking?"
"That is something one should never know. My friends are funny; they advise caution. Caution! How can I have that? That would mean my immediate return. I must go as far away as possible. And now I can go no farther. Something must happen —something different."
The next morning Wilde was on his way to London. The rest is well known. That 'something different' was hard labor in prison.
Like Dr. Oscar Nattochdag (a distinguished Zemblan scholar, head of the Department to which Kinbote is attached), Sylvia O'Donnell urges the king to be more careful. Oscar Nattochdag's nickname, Netochka hints at Dostoevski's novel Netochka Nezvanov (1849). It remained unfinished, because the author was arrested, imprisoned in the St. Petersburg Peter-and-Paul Fortress (whose commander, General Ivan Nabokov, lent books to Dostoevski) and served four years of exile with hard labour at a prison camp in Omsk, followed by a term of compulsory military service. After Wilde's release from prison André Gide asked him if he has read Dostoevski's Zapiski iz myortvogo doma ("The House of the Dead," 1860-62):
I wished to induce Wilde to talk more seriously. I sit down again, and ask him, somewhat timidly, if he has read the "The House of the Dead."
He does not reply directly. "These Russian writers are extraordinary; what makes their books so great is the pity they put into them. Formerly I adored 'Madame Bovarie'; but Flaubert would have no pity in his books, and the air in them is close; pity is the open door through which a book can shine eternally. . . Do you know, it was pity that kept me from suicide. For the first six months I was so dreadfully unhappy that I longed to kill myself— but I saw the others. I saw their unhappiness; it was my pity for them that saved me. Oh, the wonder of pity! And once I did not know pity." He said this quite softly and without any exaltation. "Do you know how wonderful pity is?"
According to Kinbote, in a theological dispute with him Shade said that the password was Pity:
We happened to start speaking of the general present-day nebulation of the notion of "sin," of its confusion with the much more carnally colored ideal of "crime," and I alluded briefly to my childhood contacts with certain rituals of our church. Confession with us is auricular and is conducted in a richly ornamented recess, the confessionist holding a lighted taper and standing with it beside the priest's high-backed seat which is shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king. Little polite boy that I was, I always feared to stain his purple-black sleeve with the scalding tears of wax that kept dripping onto my knuckles, forming there tight little crusts, and I was fascinated by the illumined concavity of his ear resembling a seashell or a glossy orchid, a convoluted receptacle that seemed much too large for the disposal of my peccadilloes.
SHADE: All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
KINBOTE: Is it fair to base objections upon obsolete terminology?
SHADE: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology.
KINBOTE: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete.
SHADE: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L'homme est né bon.
KINBOTE: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin.
SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do you also deny that there are sins?
SHADE: I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain.
KINBOTE: Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner?
SHADE: He could torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He could denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto.
KINBOTE: And so the password is – ?
SHADE: Pity.
KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?
SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
SHADE: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.
KINBOTE: I had in mind diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to understand them. That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance. Even if we temper Chance with Necessity and allow godless determinism, the mechanism of cause and effect, to provide our souls after death with the dubious solace of metastatistics, we still have to reckon with the individual mishap, the thousand and second highway accident of those scheduled for independence Day in Hades. No-no, if we want to be serious about the hereafter let us not begin by degrading it to the level of a science-fiction yarn or a spiritualistic case history. The ideal of one's soul plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her –
SHADE: There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there?
KINBOTE: Not around that corner, John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is - even from a proud infidel's point of view! - to accept God's Presence - a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said –
SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?
KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said, "One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is." I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority. (note to Line 549)
Poeza sostradaniya ("The Poem of Pity," 1921) is a poem by Igor Severyanin:
Жалейте каждого больного
Всем сердцем, всей своей душой,
И не считайте за чужого,
Какой бы ни был он чужой.
Пусть к вам потянется калека,
Как к доброй матери — дитя;
Пусть в человеке человека
Увидит, сердцем к вам летя.
И, обнадежив безнадежность,
Все возлюбя и все простив,
Такую проявите нежность,
Чтоб умирающий стал жив!
И будет радостна вам снова
Вся эта грустная земля…
Жалейте каждого больного,
Ему сочувственно внемля.
The non-existing mascana fruit (plod maskany in Vera Nabokov’s Russian translation of Pale Fire) seems to hint at Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945), an Italian operatic composer, the author of Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry, 1890). In his poem “The Tour of Vaaliara. Mascagni’s Iris” Igor Severyanin, the author of Ananasy v shampanskom (“Pineapples in Champagne,” 1915), describes a performance of Mascagni’s opera Iris (1898) at the Stockholm Royal Theater. Mascagni’s seldom performed opera brings to mind Iris Acht, the celebrated Zemblan actress, favorite of Thurgus the Third (grandfather of Charles the Beloved):
Acht, Iris, celebrated actress, d. 1888, a passionate and powerful woman, favorite of Thurgus the Third (q. v.), 130. She died officially by her own hand; unofficially, strangled in her dressing room by a fellow actor, a jealous young Gothlander, now, at ninety, the oldest, and least important, member of the Shadows (q. v.) group. (Index)
Shadows, the, a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus (q. v.) to assassinate the self-banished king; its leader's terrible name cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar; his maternal grandfather, a well-known and very courageous master builder, was hired by Thurgus the Turgid, around 1885, to make certain repairs in his quarters, and soon after that perished, poisoned in the royal kitchens, under mysterious circumstances, together with his three young apprentices whose first names Yan, Yonny, and Angeling, are preserved in a ballad still to be heard in some of our wilder valleys. (ibid.)
Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid. K 's grandfather, d .1900 at seventy-five, after a long dull reign; sponge-bag-capped, and with only one medal on his Jaegar jacket, he liked to bicycle in the park; stout and bald, his nose like a congested plum, his martial mustache bristing with obsolete passion, garbed in a dressing gown of green silk, and carrying a flambeau in his raised hand, he used to meet, every night, during a short period in the middle-Eighties, his hooded mistress, Iris Acht (q. v.) midway between palace and theater in the secret passage later to be rediscovered by his grandson, 130. (ibid.)
Yonny brings to mind Yonville-l'Abbaye, the imaginary Normandy town in which Flaubert's Madame Bovary is set. Angeling seems to blend Friedrich Engels with Eleanor Marx-Aveling (Karl Marx's daughter), the first English translator of Madame Bovary, and with Angelina Blok (Alexander Blok's younger half-sister).
In the first line of his asso-sonnet Oscar Wilde (1911) Igor Severyanin calls Wilde's soul zaplyovannyi Graal' (bespattered Grail):
Его душа – заплеванный Грааль,
Его уста – орозенная язва...
Так: ядосмех сменяла скорби спазма,
Без слез рыдал иронящий Уайльд.
У знатных дам, смакуя Ривезальт,
Он ощущал, как едкая миазма
Щекочет мозг, – щемящего сарказма
Змея ползла в сигарную вуаль...
Вселенец, заключенный в смокинг дэнди,
Он тропик перенес на вечный ледник, –
И солнечна была его тоска!
Палач-эстет и фанатичный патер,
По лабиринту шхер к морям фарватер,
За красоту покаранный Оскар!
At the end of the first three stanzas of his poem Ya otkinul dokuchnuyu masku ("I discarded the bothersome mask," 1906) Gumilyov mentions chasha Graal' (the bowl Grail):
Я откинул докучную маску,
Мне чего-то забытого жаль…
Я припомнил старинную сказку
Про священную чашу Грааль.
Я хотел побродить по селеньям,
Уходить в неизвестную даль,
Приближаясь к далёким владеньям
Зачарованной чаши Грааль.
Но таить мы не будем рыданья,
О, моя золотая печаль!
Только чистым даны созерцанья
Вечно радостной чаши Грааль.
Разорвал я лучистые нити,
Обручавшие мне красоту; —
Братья, сёстры, скажите, скажите,
Где мне вновь обрести чистоту?
In August 1921 Gumilyov was executed by the Bolsheviks. Na smert' Gumilyova ("On the Death of Gumilyov," 1921) is a poem by Graal Arelski (the penname of Stefan Petrov, 1888-1937):
Нет, ничем, ничем не смыть позора,
Даже счастьем будущих веков!
Был убит Шенье 8-го термидора,
23-го августа — Гумилёв.
И хотя меж ними стало столетье
Высокой стеною звонких дней,
Но вспыхнули дни — и в русском поэте
Затрепетало сердце Шенье.
Встретил смерть и он улыбкой смелой,
Как награду от родной земли.
Грянул залп — и на рубашке белой
Восемь роз нежданно расцвели.
И, взглянув на небосклон туманный,
Он упал, чуть слышно простонав,
И сбылись его стихи, — и раны
Обагрили зелень пыльных трав.
Все проходит — дни, года и люди —
Точно ветром уносимый дым.
Только мы, поэты, не забудем,
Только мы, поэты, не простим.
In his poem Graal Arelski says that André Chénier was executed on the 8th Thermidor and Gumilyov died on August 23. The 8th Thermidor and eight roses that suddenly burst into blossom on Gumilyov's white shirt bring to mind Iris Acht (acht is German for 'eight').
The Holy Grail is a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the author of In Memoriam whom Kinbote in his Commentary pairs with A. E. Housman, the author of The Shropshire Lad:
Alfred Housman (1859-1936), whose collection The Shropshire Lad vies with the In Memoriam of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) in representing, perhaps (no, delete this craven "perhaps"), the highest achievement of English poetry in a hundred years, says somewhere (in a foreword?) exactly the opposite: The bristling of thrilled little hairs obstructed his barbering, but since both Alfreds certainly used an Ordinary Razor, and John Shade an ancient Gillette, the discrepancy may have been due to the use of different instruments. (note to Line 920)
Wilde's letter De Profundis is addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945). Describing shaving in Canto Four of his poem, Shade compares himself to Jean-Paul Marat (a French revolutionary leader, 1743-93, who was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday):
Since my biographer may be too staid
Or know too little to affirm that Shade
Shaved in his bath, here goes: "He'd fixed a sort
Of hinge-and-screw affair, a steel support
Running across the tub to hold in place
The shaving mirror right before his face
And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he'd
Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed." (ll. 887-894)