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), after line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:
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).
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. (note to Line 275)
The Spanish word for man, hombre seems to be related to ember, human being in Hungarian. The characters in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) include Krug's friend Ember (the Shakespeare scholar and translator). According to VN, the term 'bend sinister' means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). One of the greatest Russian lyric poets, Afanasiy Fet (1820-92) was the illegitimate son of Charlotte Foeth (née Becker; in Russia Sharlotta Karlovna Becker became Elizaveta Petrovna Shenshin) and the Russian nobleman Afanasiy Neofitovich Shenshin. The first husband of Fet's mother (an assessor at the City Court of Darmstadt), Karl Foeth was the son of Johann Foeth and Sybille Milens (both of whom lived in Cologne). Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls Sybil Shade, the poet's wife) brings to mind Fet's poem Lastochki ("The Swallows," 1884):
Природы праздный соглядатай,
Люблю, забывши всё кругом,
Следить за ласточкой стрельчатой
Над вечереющим прудом.
Вот понеслась и зачертила —
И страшно, чтобы гладь стекла
Стихией чуждой не схватила
Молниевидного крыла.
И снова то же дерзновенье
И та же тёмная струя, —
Не таково ли вдохновенье
И человеческого я?
Не так ли я, сосуд скудельный,
Дерзаю на запретный путь,
Стихии чуждой, запредельной,
Стремясь хоть каплю зачерпнуть?
On nature ever idly spying,
Forgetting all around, I'm fond
Of watching arrowy swallows flying,
When evening comes, above the pond.
See there a swallow darting, scratching
The glassy surface, till I fear
The alien element will be catching
The wings that swift as lightning veer.
Again that confident elation,
Again dark water flowing by...
Is it not such, my inspiration?
And, among human beings, I?
Seek I not thus a way forbidden,
I, vessel made of earthen clay.
Who search for something strange and hidden
And yearn to scoop a drop away?
The poem's first line, Prirody prazdnyi soglyadatay (On nuture an idle spy), brings to mind VN's short novel Soglyadatay ("The Eye," 1930). Its characters include Vikentiy Lvovich Weinstock, the spiritualist:
Викентий Львович Вайншток, у которого Смуров служил в приказчиках (сменив негодного старика), знал о нем меньше чем кто-либо. В характере у Вайнштока была доля приятной азартности. Этим, вероятно, объясняется, что он дал у себя место малознакомому человеку. Его подозрительность требовала постоянной пищи. Как у иных нормальных и совершенно почтенных людей вдруг оказывается страсть к собиранию стрекоз или гравюр, так и Вайншток, внук старьевщика, сын антиквара, солидный, уравновешенный Вайншток, всю свою жизнь занимавшийся книжным делом, устроил себе некий отдельный маленький мир. Там, в полутьме, происходили таинственные события.
Индия вызывала в нем мистическое уважение; он был одним из тех, кто при упоминании Бомбея представляет себе не английского чиновника, багрового от жары, а непременно факира. Он верил в чох и в жох, в чет и в черта, верил в символы, в силу начертаний и в бронзовые, голопузые изображения. По вечерам он клал руки, как застывший пианист на легонький столик о трех ножках: столик начинал нежно трещать, цыкать кузнечиком и затем, набравшись сил, медленно поднимался одним краем и неуклюже, но сильно ударял ножкой об пол. Вайншток вслух читал азбуку. Столик внимательно следил и на нужной букве стучал. Являлся Цезарь, Магомет, Пушкин и двоюродный брат Вайнштока. Иногда столик начинал шалить, поднимался и повисал в воздухе, а не то предпринимал атаку на Вайнштока, бодал его в живот, и Вайншток добродушно успокаивал духа, словно укротитель, нарочно поддающийся игривости зверя, отступал по всей комнате, продолжая держать пальцы на столике, шедшем вперевалку. Употреблял он для разговоров также и блюдечко с сеткой и еще какое-то сложное приспособленьице с торчавшим вниз карандашом. Разговоры записывались в особые тетрадки. Это были диалоги такого рода:
В а й н ш т о к
Нашел ли ты успокоение?
Л е н и н
Нет. Я страдаю.
В а й н ш т о к
Желаешь ли ты мне рассказать о загробной жизни?
Л е н и н (после паузы)
Нет...
В а й н ш т о к
Почему?
Л е н и н
Там ночь.
Тетрадок было множество, и Вайншток говорил, что когда-нибудь опубликует наиболее значительные разговоры. И очень был забавен некий дух Абум, неизвестного происхождения, глуповатый и безвкусный, который играл роль посредника, устраивая Вайнштоку свидания в разными знаменитыми покойниками. К самому Вайнштоку он относился с некоторым амикошонством:
В а й н ш т о к
Дух, кто ты?
О т в е т
Иван Сергеевич.
В а й н ш т о к
Какой Иван Сергеевич?
О т в е т
Тургенев.
В а й н ш т о к
Продолжаешь ли ты творить?
О т в е т
Дурак.
В а й н ш т о к
За что ты меня ругаешь?
О т в е т (столик буйствует)
Надул. Я - Абум.
Иногда от Абума, начавшего озорничать, нельзя было отделаться во весь сеанс. "Прямо какая-то обезьяна", - жаловался Вайншток.
Vikentiy Lvovich Weinstock, for whom Smurov worked as salesman (having replaced the helpless old man), knew less about him than anyone. There was in Weinstock’s nature an attractive streak of recklessness. This is probably why he hired someone he did not know well. His suspiciousness required regular nourishment. Just as there are normal and perfectly decent people who unexpectedly turn out to have a passion for collecting dragonflies or engravings, so Weinstock, a junk dealer’s grandson and an antiquarian’s son, staid, well-balanced Weinstock who had been in the book business all his life, had constructed a separate little world for himself. There, in the penumbra, mysterious events took place.
India aroused a mystical respect in him: he was one of those people who, at the mention of Bombay, inevitably imagine not a British civil servant, crimson from the heat, but a fakir. He believed in the jinx and the hex, in magic numbers and the Devil, in the evil eye, in the secret power of symbols and signs, and in bare-bellied bronze idols. In the evenings, he would place his hands, like a petrified pianist, upon a small, light, three-legged table. It would start to creak softly, emitting cricketlike chirps, and, having gathered strength, would rise up on one side and then awkwardly but forcefully tap a leg against the floor. Weinstock would recite the alphabet. The little table would follow attentively and tap at the proper letters. Messages came from Caesar, Mohammed, Pushkin, and a dead cousin of Weinstock’s. Sometimes the table would be naughty: it would rise and remain suspended in mid-air, or else attack Weinstock and butt him in the stomach. Weinstock would good-naturedly pacify the spirit, like an animal tamer playing along with a frisky beast; he would back across the whole room, all the while keeping his fingertips on the table waddling after him. For his talks with the dead, he also employed a kind of marked saucer and some other strange contraption with a pencil protruding underneath. The conversations were recorded in special notebooks. A dialog might go thus:
WEINSTOCK: Have you found rest?
LENIN: This is not Baden-Baden.
WEINSTOCK: Do you wish to tell me of life beyond the grave?
LENIN (after a pause): I prefer not to.
WEINSTOCK: Why?
LENIN: Must wait till there is a plenum.
A lot of these notebooks had accumulated, and Weinstock used to say that someday he would have the more significant conversations published. Very entertaining was a ghost called Abum, of unknown origin, silly and tasteless, who acted as intermediary, arranging interviews between Weinstock and various dead celebrities. He treated Weinstock with vulgar familiarity.
WEINSTOCK: Who art thou, O Spirit?
REPLY: Ivan Sergeyevich.
WEINSTOCK: Which Ivan Sergeyevich?
REPLY: Turgenev.
WEINSTOCK: Do you continue to create masterpieces?
REPLY: Idiot.
WEINSTOCK: Why do you abuse me?
REPLY (table convulsed): Fooled you! This is Abum. (Chapter 3)
Weinstock means in German “grapevine.” Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus (who contended that his name comes from the Russian word for "grape," vinograd, to which a Latin suffix has adhered) “Vinogradus” and “Leningradus:”
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
Gradus' wife, a beader in Radugavitra, eloped with her Gipsy lover:
At his hotel the beaming proprietress handed him a telegram. It chided him in Danish for leaving Geneva and told him to undertake nothing until further notice. It also advised him to forget his work and amuse himself. But what (save dreams of blood) could be his amusements? He was not interested in sightseeing or seasiding. He had long stopped drinking. He did not go to concerts. He did not gamble. Sexual impulses had greatly bothered him at one time but that was over. After his wife, a beader in Radugovitra, had left him (with a gypsy lover), he had lived in sin with his mother-in-law until she was removed, blind and dropsical, to an asylum for decayed widows. Since then he had tried several times to castrate himself, had been laid up at the Glassman Hospital with a severe infection, and now, at forty-four, was quite cured of the lust that Nature, the grand cheat, puts into us to inveigle us into propagation. No wonder the advice to amuse himself infuriated him. I think I shall break this note here. (note to Line 697)
Tsyganskaya vengerka ("The Gipsy Hungarian Song," 1857) is a famous poem by Fet's friend Apollon Grigoriev (1822-64). In his autobiographical story (written in epistolary form) Drugoy iz mnogikh ("Other of the Many," 1847) Grigoriev portrayed Fet as rotmistr (captain) Zarnitsyn. The surname Zarnitsyn brings to mind Kak posle yarkoy osenney zarnitsy (As after a bright autumnal sheet lightning), the second line of the second stanza of Fet's poem Izmuchen zhizn’yu, kovarstvom nadezhdy (“By Life Tormented and by Cunning Hope,” 1864):
Die Gleichmässigkeit des Laufes der Zeit in allen Kopfen beweist mehr, als irgend etwas, dass wir
Alle in denselben Traum versenkt sind, ja dass es Ein Wesen ist, welches ihn träumt. ("That regularity of the passage of time in all our heads indicates, more than anything else, that we are all sunk in the same dream, and that it is a single Being that is dreaming it." Schopenhauer, Parerga II, § 29.)
1
Измучен жизнью, коварством надежды,
Когда им в битве душой уступаю,
И днём и ночью смежаю я вежды
И как-то странно порой прозреваю.
Ещё темнее мрак жизни вседневной,
Как после яркой осенней зарницы,
И только в небе, как зов задушевный,
Сверкают звёзд золотые ресницы.
И так прозрачна огней бесконечность,
И так доступна вся бездна эфира,
Что прямо смотрю я из времени в вечность
И пламя твоё узнаю, солнце мира.
И неподвижно на огненных розах
Живой алтарь мирозданья курится,
В его дыму, как в творческих грёзах,
Вся сила дрожит и вся вечность снится.
И всё, что мчится по безднам эфира,
И каждый луч, плотской и бесплотный, —
Твой только отблеск, о солнце мира,
И только сон, только сон мимолётный.
И этих грёз в мировом дуновеньи
Как дым несусь я и таю невольно,
И в этом прозреньи, и в этом забвеньи
Легко мне жить и дышать мне не больно.
2
В тиши и мраке таинственной ночи
Я вижу блеск приветный и милой,
И в звёздном хоре знакомые очи
Горят в степи над забытой могилой.
Трава поблекла, пустыня угрюма,
И сон сиротлив одинокой гробницы,
И только в небе, как вечная дума,
Сверкают звёзд золотые ресницы.
И снится мне, что ты встала из гроба,
Такой же, какой ты с земли отлетела,
И снится, снится: мы молоды оба,
И ты взглянула, как прежде глядела.
1
By life tormented, and by cunning hope,
When my soul surrenders in its battle with them,
Day and night I press my eyelids closed
And sometimes I'm vouchsafed peculiar visions.
The gloom of quotidian existence deepens,
As after a bright flash of autumn lightning,
And only in the sky, like a call from the heart,
The stars' golden eyelashes sparkle.
And the flames of infinity are so transparent,
And the entire abyss of ether is so close,
That I gaze direct from time into eternity
And recognize your flame, universal sun.
Motionless, encircled by fiery roses,
The living altar of the cosmos smolders
And in its smoke, as in creative slumber,
All forces quiver, eternity's a dream.
And all that rushes through the abyss of ether,
And every ray, embodied or ethereal,-
Is but your reflection, O universal sun,
It is but a dream, but a fleeting dream.
Through the worldly breath of these reveries
I fly like smoke, involuntarily disperse,
And in this vision, in this delirium,
I can live with ease and breathe without pain.
2
In the darkness and still of a mysterious night
I see a fond and welcoming spark,
From the chorus of spheres, familiar eyes
Shine upon a grave forgotten in the steppe.
The grass has faded, the desert is grim,
A lonely tomb dreams an orphan's dream,
And only in the sky, like an eternal idea,
The stars' golden eyelashes sparkle.
And I dream you've risen from the dead,
Unchanged since you departed the earth,
And I dream a dream: we both are young,
And you've looked at me as you did back then.
In August 1857 Fet married Maria Botkin. The "real" name of Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death in March 1957 her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent) went mad and became the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus. Nadezhda means 'hope.' There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
The title of Shade’s poem is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. A book that the King takes with him into exile as a talisman turns out to be a tiny vest pocket edition of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens in Zemblan (translated into Zemblan by the King's uncle Conmal). In Moi vospominaniya (“My Reminiscences,” 1890) Afanasiy Fet speaks of the three Tolstoy brothers and mentions Timon of Athens:
...я убеждён, что основной тип всех трёх братьев Толстых тождествен, как тождествен тип кленовых листьев, невзирая на всё разнообразие их очертаний. И если бы я задался развить эту мысль, то показал бы, в какой степени у всех трёх братьев присуще то страстное увлечение, без которого в одном из них не мог бы проявиться поэт Л. Толстой. Разница их отношений к жизни состоит в том, с чем каждый из них уходил от неудавшейся мечты. Николай охлаждал свои порывы скептической насмешкой, Лев отходил от несбывшейся мечты с безмолвным укором, а Сергей - с болезненной мизантропией. Чем больше у подобных характеров первоначальной любви, тем сильнее хотя на время сходство с Тимоном Афинским.
According to Fet, the basic type of all three brothers Tolstoy is identical, just as the type of maple leaves, despite all variety of their outlines, is identical.
The name Conmal hints at "Que tu me connois mal, ô ma chere Ophélie!", Hamlet's words to Ophelia in Jean-François Ducis’s French version (1772) of Shakespeare’s play. Ofeliya ("Ophelia," 1846) is an autobiographical story by Apollon Grigoriev. K Ofelii ("To Ophelia," 1842-47) is a cycle of ten poems by Fet. One of them is the following Sonnet (1842):
С тех пор, как бог в тебе осуществил
Передо мной создание поэта,
Не знаю сам, за что я полюбил
Игривое созвучие сонета.
Не знаю сам, зачем он сердцу мил:
Быть может, звук знакомого привета
Он тех же рифм чредой изобразил —
И ложною мечтой душа согрета.
А может быть, он схож с тобою в том,
Что изо всех стихов его стихом,
Как и тобой, владеть всего труднее,
Иль, наконец, причудливый, как ты,
Смиряясь, он для чувства красоты,
Чем затруднял, становится милее.
In his commentary Kinbote quotes the beginning of a sonnet that Conmal composed directly in English:
Line 962: Help me, Will. Pale Fire.
Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is "pale fire." But in which of the Bard's works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens - in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of "pale fire" (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster).
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end.
It is easy to sneer at Conmal's faults. They are the naive failings of a great pioneer. He lived too much in his library, too little among boys and youths. Writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory - which was also John Shade's mistake, in a way.
We should not forget that when Conmal began his stupendous task no English author was available in Zemblan except Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose works, strangely enough, are unknown in England, and some fragments of Byron translated from French versions.
A large, sluggish man with no passions save poetry, he seldom moved from his warm castle and its fifty thousand crested books, and had been known to spend two years in bed reading and writing after which, much refreshed, he went for the first and only time to London, but the weather was foggy, and he could not understand the language, and so went back to bed for another year.
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)
The main character in Bend Sinister, the philosopher Adam Krug had always wished to know more about the Aurignacian Age and those portraits of singular beings (perhaps Neanderthal half-men—direct ancestors of Paduk and his likes—used by Aurignacians as slaves) that a Spanish nobleman and his little daughter had discovered in the painted cave of Altamira:
THINKING of that farcical interview, he wondered how long it would be till the next attempt. He still believed that so long as he kept lying low nothing harmful could happen. Oddly enough, at the end of the month his usual cheque arrived although for the time being the University had ceased to exist, at least on the outside. Behind the scenes there was an endless sequence of sessions, a turmoil of administrative activity, a regrouping of forces, but he declined either to attend these meetings or to receive the various delegations and special messengers that Azureus and Alexander kept sending to his house. He argued that, when the Council of Elders had exhausted its power of seduction, he would be left alone since the Government, while not daring to arrest him and being reluctant to grant him the luxury of exile, would still keep hoping with forlorn obstinacy that finally he might relent. The drab colour the future took matched well the grey world of his widowhood, and had there been no friends to worry about and no child to hold against his cheek and heart, he might have devoted the twilight to some quiet research: for example he had always wished to know more about the Aurignacian Age and those portraits of singular beings (perhaps Neanderthal half-men—direct ancestors of Paduk and his likes—used by Aurignacians as slaves) that a Spanish nobleman and his little daughter had discovered in the painted cave of Altamira. Or he might take up some dim problem of Victorian telepathy (the cases reported by clergymen, nervous ladies, retired colonels who had seen service in India) such as the remarkable dream a Mrs. Storie had of her brother’s death. And in our turn we shall follow the brother as he walks along the railway line on a very dark night: having gone sixteen miles, he felt a little tired (as who would not); he sat down to take off his boots and dozed off to the chirp of the crickets, and then a train lumbered by. Seventy-six sheep trucks (in a curious “count-sheep-sleep” parody) passed without touching him, but then some projection came in contact with the back of his head killing him instantly. And we might also probe the “illusions hypnagogiques” (only illusion?) of dear Miss Bidder who once had a nightmare from which a most distinct demon survived after she woke so that she sat up to inspect its hand which was clutching the bedrail but it faded into the ornaments over the mantelpiece. Silly, but I can’t help it, he thought as he got out of his armchair and crossed the room to rearrange the leering folds of his brown dressing gown which, as it sprawled across the divan, showed at one end a very distinct medieval face. (Chapter 12)
Krug's friend Ember also brings to mind Semblerland, the Zemblan name of Zembla:
Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch. I would counter with something on the lines of "all Chinese look alike" and change the subject. One day, however, in the lounge of the Faculty Club where I lolled surrounded by a number of my colleagues, I had to put up with a particularly embarrassing onset. A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was "absolutely unheard of," and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblans resembled one another - and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers" - my tormentor said: "Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face! I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava which I visited with my wife, who is Swedish, in 1956. We have a photograph of him at home, and her sister knew very well the mother of one of his pages, an interesting woman. Don't you see [almost tugging at Shade's lapel] the astounding similarity of features - of the upper part of the face, and the eyes, yes, the eyes, and the nose bridge?" (note to Line 894)
He [Gradus] began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov (whom they spelled "Khrushchev") had abruptly put off a visit to Scandinavia and was to visit Zembla instead (here I tune in: "Vï nazïvaete sebya zemblerami, you call yourselves Zemblans, a ya vas nazïvayu zemlyakami, and I call you fellow countrymen!" Laughter and applause.) The United States was about to launch its first atom-driven merchant ship (just to annoy the Ruskers, of course. J. G.). Last night in Newark, an apartment house at 555 South Street was hit by a thunderbolt that smashed a TV set and injured two people watching an actress lost in a violent studio storm (those tormented spirits are terrible! C. X. K. teste J. S.). The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised in agate type for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry (oh, Degré had!). The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: "$11, 000, 000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979," and Gradus, grown young again, reread this this twice, with the background gray thought, perhaps, that he would be sixty-four four days after that (no comment). On another bench he found a Monday issue of the same newspaper. During a visit to a museum in Whitehorse (Gradus kicked at a pigeon that came too near), the Queen of England walked to a corner of the White Animals Room, removed her right glove and, with her back turned to several evidently observant people, rubbed her forehead and one of her eyes. A pro-Red revolt had erupted in Iraq. Asked about the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum, Carl Sandburg, a poet, replied, and I quote: "They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels." A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers. And at a picnic for international children a Zemblan moppet cried to her Japanese friend: Ufgut, ufgut, velkum ut Semblerland! (Adieu, adieu, till we meet in Zembla!) I confess it has been a wonderful game - this looking up in the WUL of various ephemerides over the shadow of a padded shoulder. (note to Line 949)