In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) describes his visit to a Mrs. Z. who, like Shade, saw a tall white fountain during her heart attack. But “fountain” in Jim Coates’ article about Mrs. Z.’s heart attack turns out to be a misprint of “mountain:”
I also called on Coates.
He was afraid he had mislaid her notes.
He took his article from a steel file:
"It's accurate. I have not changed her style.
There's one misprint - not that it matters much:
Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch."
Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But a topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found. (ll. 797-815)
Life Everlasting brings to mind The Everlasting Man (1925), a Christian apologetics book by G. K. Chesterton. In his essay Two Kinds of Paradox (1911) G. K. Chesterton speaks of misprints:
There is nothing that needs more fastidious care than our choice of nonsense. Sense is like daylight or daily air, and may come from any quarter or in any quantity. But nonsense is an art. Like an art, it is rarely successful, and yet entirely simple when it is successful. Like an art, it depends on the smallest word, and a misprint can spoil it. And like an art, when it is not in the service of heaven it is almost always in the service of hell. Numberless imitators of Lewis Carroll or of Edward Lear have tried to write nonsense and failed; falling back (one may hope) upon writing sense. But certainly, as the great Gilbert said, wherever there has been nonsense it has been precious nonsense. Les Précieuses Ridicules might be translated, perhaps, in two ways. No one doubts that serious artists are absurd; but it might also be maintained that absurdity is always a serious art.
I have suffered as much as any man from the public insult of the misprint. I have seen my love of books described as a love of boots. I have seen the word “cosmic” invariably printed as “comic”; and have merely reflected that the two are much the same. As to Nationalists and Rationalists, I have come to the conclusion that no human handwriting or typewriting can clearly distinguish them; and I now placidly permit them to be interchanged, though the first represents everything I love and the second everything I loathe. But there is one kind of misprint I should still find it hard to forgive. I could not pardon a blunder in the printing of “Jabberwock.” I insist on absolute literalism in that really fine poem of Lear, - “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.” To spoil these new nonsense words would be like shooting a great musician improvising on the piano. The sounds could never be recovered again. “And as in uffish thought he stood.” If the printer had printed it “affish” I doubt if the first edition would have sold. “Over the Great Gromboolian Plain.” Suppose I had seen it printed “Gromhoolian.” Perhaps I should never have known, as I know now, that Edward Lear was a yet greater man than Lewis Carroll.
Nonsense and sense mentioned by G. K. Chesterton make one think of Shade's line "Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense." "A topsy-turvical coincidence" in the preceding line brings to mind "there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss" in G. K. Chesterton's story (the first one in the collection The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911) The Blue Cross:
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. I have seen both these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.
In Irish Impressions (1919) G. K. Chesterton calls coincidences "spiritual puns:"
All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences; which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable; because it is possible to render the meaning, but not the double meaning.
In his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) speaks of misprints and mentions the artistic correlation between the English crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series:
Translators of Shade's poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of "mountain" into "fountain:" it cannot be rendered in French or German, or Russian, or Zemblan; so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue's galleries of words. However! There exists to my knowledge one absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant case, where not only two, but three words are involved. The story itself is trivial enough (and probably apocryphal). A newspaper account of a Russian tsar's coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this apologetically "corrected," it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet. I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation. (note to Line 803)
Shade's murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). Russia in the Shadows (1921) is a series of articles by H. G. Wells written after the author's trip to Soviet Russia and meeting with Lenin (whom Wells calls "the Kremlin dreamer"). G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man is, to some extent, a deliberate rebuttal of H. G. Wells' The Outline of History (1920), disputing Wells' portrayals of human life and civilisation as a seamless development from animal life and of Jesus Christ as merely another charismatic figure.