In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions Sherlock Holmes:
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 13-28)
In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
Line 27: Sherlock Holmes
A hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective, the main character in various stories by Conan Doyle. I have no means to ascertain at the present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints.
Winter's code mentioned by Shade brings to mind the coded messages in Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Dancing Men (1903). After cracking the code by frequency analysis Sherlock Holmes says: “What one man can invent another can discover.” At the beginning of the story Watson compares Holmes to a strange, lank bird:
Holmes had been seated for some hours in silence with his long, thin back curved over a chemical vessel in which he was brewing a particularly malodorous product. His head was sunk upon his breast, and he looked from my point of view like a strange, lank bird, with dull grey plumage and a black top-knot.
Shade's poem is divided into four cantos. In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter). In The Adventure of the Dancing Men the last coded message (deciphered by Holmes) reads: ELSIE, PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD. A leitmotif in Canto Three of Shade's poem are the opening lines of Goethe's poem Erlkönig (1782): Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? / Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind (Who rides, so late, through night and wind? / It is the father with his child). At the end of Conan Doyle's novel The Sign of the Four (1890) Sherlock Holmes quotes Goethe (Xenien, XX):
“Strange,” said I, “how terms of what in another man I should call laziness alternate with your fits of splendid energy and vigour.”
“Yes,” he answered, “there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer and also of a pretty spry sort of fellow. I often think of those lines of old Goethe,—
Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus Dir schuf,
Denn zum würdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff."
[Pity that Nature made of you only one person,
because there was material enough for a worthy man and a rogue.]
(Chapter XII "The The Strange Story of Jonathan Small")
In Goethe's Faust (1808) Mephistopheles famously says: "Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum." ("Grey is, dear friend, all theory, And green of life the golden tree"). According to Shade, when he was a child, all colors made him happy, even gray:
All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt -
An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide -
Was printed on my eyelids' nether side
Where it would tarry for an hour or two,
And while this lasted all I had to do
Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves. (ll. 29-40)
Shade lives in the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green:
I cannot understand why from the lake
I could make out our front porch when I'd take
Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree
Has intervened, I look but fail to see
Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space
Has caused a fold or furrow to displace
The fragile vista, the frame house between
Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green. (ll. 41-48)
Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote's landlord) has a wife and four daughters (Alphina, Betty, Candida and Dee). Judge Goldsworth's youngest daughter, Alphina brings to mind the Alpha Inn, in Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892) the place where geese are purchased. Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of Black Peter (1904) makes one think of Colonel Peter Gusev (the surname comes from gus', goose), King Alfin's 'aerial adjutant' who is "still spry" (Kinbote's Index). In The Sign of the Four Holmes tells Watson that there are in him the makings of a very fine loafer and also of a pretty spry sort of fellow.
Shade's murderer, Gradus brings to mind ein Mann von vielen Graden (a man of manifold degrees), as in Goethe’s tragedy Mephistopheles calls Faust:
Mephistopheles:
Genug, genug, o treffliche Sibylle!
Gib deinen Trank herbei, und fülle
Die Schale rasch bis an den Rand hinan;
Denn meinem Freund wird dieser Trunk nicht schaden:
Er ist ein Mann von vielen Graden,
Der manchen guten Schluck getan.
Mephistopheles:
O Sibyl excellent, enough of adjuration!
But hither bring us thy potation,
And quickly fill the beaker to the brim!
This drink will bring my friend no injuries:
He is a man of manifold degrees,
And many draughts are known to him. (Faust, Part One, “Witches’ Kitchen”)
Treffliche Sibylle (excellent Sibyl), as Mephistopheles calls a witch, brings to mind Sybil Shade (the poet's wife).