comments on Pale Fire

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962. Borrowed on June 16, 2009.

1.) There is a girl’s shadow over Nabokov’s name. Before a reader can approach his books, one must turn Lolita to Lolita. She is a part of his work, not the whole. I think the most effective way to put her in perspective is to actually read Lolita.

2.) Still, one is intermittently haunted by her image, especially on crowded trains wherein the author of one’s reading material is apparent to fellow travelers. Never mind them, Reader—or carry a highlighter and pretend you’re taking a course on Expatriate Literature.

3.) Nabokov was quite attractive as a young man, if one favors the lean, pensive type. And one does. (See Pale Fire cover image, Everyman’s Library/Random House, 1992.)

4.) Pale Fire is: a) a long poem entitled “Pale Fire”, by college professor John Shade, written in a competent rhyming trot. b) a Commentary on this poem, composed by Charles Kinbote, a native of the country of Zembla. c) a Forward and an Index, also by Kinbote. d) “Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem. Note for further use.” (From “Pale Fire”.)

5.) The Commentary reveals (though one is wary of believing anything Nabokov says, more on this later) that Kinbote tried to shape the poem as Shade was writing it, in order to make this poem into an account of Kinbote’s mysterious past. “…I felt sure at last that he would recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla burning in my brain. I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard’s wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse.” One sees in Kinbote all the passionate drive of an author who has seized an idea in his teeth. Kinbote refers to himself as the “only begetter” of the poem, and Shade as the “innocent author.” The author is Kinbote. The author is Shade. The author is Nabokov.

6.) “I am also in the habit of lowering a student’s mark catastrophically” [said Shade], “if he uses ‘simple’ and ‘sincere’ in a commendatory sense; examples: ‘Shelley’s style is always very simple and good’; or ‘Yeats is always sincere.’ This is widespread, and when I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool.” After a statement like this, the reader is not sure what to believe. Certainly one can’t believe the author. The text sinks and shifts like sand underfoot.

7.) Kinbote has a great secret, but maybe not the one he thinks. Shade knows it: “Ah,” said Shade, “I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago.”

8.) Shade likes to take walks with a local farmer, because this farmer knows the names of plants and wildlife. In Shade’s poem, Shade remembers when an incorrect word (“fountain” for “mountain”) led him on a wild-goose chase: in his search for the nature of life after death, all he got was an awkward, “idiotic social call” with an elderly fan of his poetry. Even the fruitcake he was served didn’t make up for his disappointment. Though Kinbote claims he is not a poet himself, he has a poet’s concern for finding the correct words for things. Kinbote is astonished at the ill fit of certain words to their objects: “…what can be more resounding, more resplendent, more suggestive of choral and sculptured beauty, than the word coramen? In reality, however, it merely denotes the rude strap with which a Zemblan herdsman attaches his humble provisions and ragged blanket to the meekest of his cows…” And again: “How hard I found to fit the name ‘robin’ to the suburban impostor, the gross fowl, with its untidy dull-red livery and the revolting gusto it showed when consuming long, sad, passive worms!”

9.) In a 1967 interview with the Paris Review, Nabokov was asked if his characters ever escaped his control and ran off with the plot, as E. M. Forster has said about his own creations. Nabokov replied:

“My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.”

10.) Time crisscrosses and overlaps throughout the book, in “topsy-turvical coincidence.” Kinbote shows us the uncanny overlap between significant activities of Shade, King Charles of Zembla, and Gradus, a would-be regicide. Kinbote’s commentary weaves the lives of these characters together, so that their individual actions seem to form a larger pattern. This theme also appears in Shade’s poem: “Yes! It sufficed in life that I could find / Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game.”

11.) The poem itself: its quality is dubious. Though there are a few lovely passages (describing a tree: “The setting sun / Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone / Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell”), the poem’s principal emotional impact is accessible only after one has read the Commentary. Read without its Commentary, the poem “Pale Fire” is only vaguely interesting, and sometimes irritating—for instance, one dislikes the poet’s fascination with clipping his own fingernails. Kinbote’s assertion is correct: “Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide.” In particular, the Commentary makes Shade’s description of his wife appear especially tender and affecting, since Shade’s love for her differs so dramatically from Kinbote’s jealousy and anger toward her. The poem and its Commentary present very different views of not only Mrs. Shade, but of John Shade and their life together, and of Kinbote himself (who is, significantly, not mentioned in the poem). Though Kinbote’s Commentary is quite readable without its accompanying poem—and it might be an interesting exercise to write a Commentary on a nonexistent poem—one does appreciate how the poem and its Commentary are intertwined thematically.

12.) Kinbote, it must be said, is not at all too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work.

13.) From a televised interview, 1965:

Interviewer: There is occasionally confusion about the pronunciation of your last name. How does one pronounce it correctly?

Nabokov: Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now.