Foreword
The poem Pale Fire, written in heroic couplets—nine hundred and ninety-nine lines divided into four Cantos—was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his own home in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A. The manuscript, for the most part a fair copy from which the present text has been exactly reproduced, consists of eighty medium-sized library index cards, on each of which Shade used a pink line for the heading (Canto number, date) and wrote the text of the poem on the remaining fourteen blue lines in a thin, neat, amazingly clear hand, skipping one line to denote a double space, and always beginning a new card with the first line of every Canto.
The short (166 lines) Canto One, with all its quaint birds and parhelia, occupies thirteen cards. Your favorite Canto Two, and Canto Three, that astonishing tour de force, are of the same length (334 lines) and take up twenty-seven cards each. Canto Four matches Canto One in length and also occupies thirteen cards, the last four of which, used on the day of his death, belong not to the fair copy but to the corrected draft.
A methodical man, John Shade used to copy out by midnight the day’s batch of completed lines, but even if he now and then recopied them later, as I suspect, he dated the card (or cards) not with the day of final revision but with the date of the revised draft or first fair copy. I mean that he preserved the factual date of composition in preference to variants of revision. Right across the road from my present dwelling is a very noisy amusement park.
The result is that we have a complete calendar of his work. Canto One was begun in the post-midnight hours of July 2 and finished on July 4. The next Canto he commenced on his birthday and finished on July 11. Another week was dedicated to Canto Three. Canto Four was begun on July 19, and, as already noted, the last third of its text (lines 949–999) has reached us only in the form of a corrected draft. This passage, though exceedingly messy in appearance, bristling with devastating erasures and insertions of a cataclysmic nature, does not follow the lines of the cards with the same pedantic neatness as the fair copy. In reality, as soon as you plunge into it and force yourself to open your eyes in the transparent depths beneath its agitated surface, it turns out to be astoundingly accurate. There is not one incomplete line, not one doubtful reading. This fact is sufficient to show that the accusations brought forth (on July 24, 1959) in a newspaper interview by one of our self-styled Shadists—who asserted, without ever having seen the manuscript of the poem, that it “consisted of disconnected jottings, none of which represented the exact text”—is a malicious invention of those who wish not so much to lament the state in which a great poet’s work was interrupted by death as to calumniate the competence and perhaps the honesty of the present editor and commentator.
Another statement, publicly made by Professor Hurley and his clique, relates to structural considerations. I quote from the same interview: “No one can say how long John Shade meant his poem to be, but it is not at all unlikely that what he left is but a small portion of a work dimly conceived, as through a glass.” Nonsense again! Besides the blazing core of internal evidence ringing throughout Canto Four, there is the testimony of Sybil Shade (in a document dated July 25, 1959) that her husband “never intended to go beyond four parts.” For him Canto Three was the penultimate Canto, and I personally heard him say so during a sunset stroll, when, as if thinking aloud, he reviewed the labors of the day and gestured in pardonable self-approval, while his reserved companion unsuccessfully tried to adjust the rhythm of his long-legged, sweeping stride to the spasmodic, hobbling gait of the tousled old poet. Moreover, I shall even dare to assert (while our shadows continue the walk without us) that he had only one more line to write (namely, verse [1000]), which would have been identical with the first line and completed the structural symmetry, with the two central parts of equal length, substantial and spacious, forming a pair of wings of five hundred lines each with the shorter flanks, and damn that music. Knowing the combinational bent of Shade’s mind and his subtle sense of harmonic equilibrium, I cannot imagine that he intended to mutilate the facets of his crystal by impeding its predictable growth. And if that were not enough—and it is completely, entirely enough—I had the incomparable opportunity to hear from my poor friend’s own lips on the evening of July 21 that his work was finished—or almost finished (see my note to line [991]).
This packet of eighty cards was secured by a rubber band, which I now reverently replace, having examined their precious contents for the last time. Another, much thinner stack, consisting of twelve cards that were clipped together and placed in the same brown envelope as the main packet, contains several additional couplets tracing their brief and somewhat blurred way through the chaos of initial drafts. Shade made it a rule to destroy drafts as soon as he no longer needed them; I vividly recall seeing him on one radiant morning from my porch, burning a whole deck of them in the pale fire of the incinerator, before which he stood, head bowed, like an official mourner at a funeral, amid the wind-borne black butterflies of this backyard autodafé. He did retain these twelve cards for the sake of unused felicities shining beneath the dross of exhausted drafts. Possibly he vaguely intended to replace certain passages of the fair copy with other lovely variants from his reserve, or, more likely, a stealthily nurtured preference for a particular draft, excluded for architectonic reasons or because it annoyed S., induced him to postpone the spare variants until the marble finality of the flawless typescript would either confirm them or make even the most elegant variation seem clumsy and impure. Or perhaps—and allow me to add this with all modesty—he intended to ask my advice upon reading the poem to me—which, I know, was part of his plan.
These rejected readings the reader will find in my commentaries on the poem. Their place in the text is indicated or at least hinted at by the drafts of the final lines in their immediate vicinity. In a sense, many of them possess greater artistic and historical value than some of the best passages in the final text. Here I should explain how it came about that I became the editor of Pale Fire.
Immediately after the death of my dear friend, I convinced the grief-stricken widow to anticipate and categorically repel the commercial passions and academic intrigues that were bound to gather around her husband’s manuscript (which I had already transferred to a safe place before his body was laid to rest), by signing an agreement that he had handed the manuscript over to me; that I would immediately publish it with my commentary through any publisher of my choice; that all income, minus the publisher’s share, would go to her; and that on the day of publication the manuscript would be transferred to the Library of Congress for perpetual preservation. I challenge any serious critic to find any injustice in such a contract. Nevertheless, it was called (by Shade’s former lawyer) “a fantastic mess of evil,” while another person (his former literary agent) scoffingly wondered why Mrs. Shade’s trembling signature was written in “some strange red ink.” Such hearts and such minds are incapable of understanding that a man’s attachment to a masterpiece can be utterly overwhelming, especially when the back of the fabric delights the beholder and sole initiator, whose past is interwoven in it with the fate of the artless author.
As seems to be mentioned in my last note to the poem, the depth bomb of Shade’s death churned up such secrets and brought so many dead fish to the surface that I had to leave New Wye soon after my last conversation with the imprisoned murderer. The composition of the commentary had to be postponed until I could find a new incognito in a quieter environment, but the practical questions relating to the poem required immediate resolution. I flew to New York, made a photocopy of the manuscript, agreed on terms with one of Shade’s publishers, and was on the verge of closing the deal when, as if in passing, amidst a vast sunset (we were sitting in a walnut-and-glass cubicle fifty floors above a procession of scarabs), my interlocutor remarked: “You’ll be happy to know, Doctor Kinbote, that Professor So-and-So (a member of the Shade Committee) has agreed to collaborate with us as a consultant on this material.”
“Happiness,” you know, is something extremely subjective. One of our foolish Zemblan proverbs says: The lost glove rejoices. I immediately snapped shut my briefcase and headed to another publisher.
Imagine a soft-hearted, clumsy giant, imagine a historical figure for whom the concept of money is limited to the abstract billions of the national debt; imagine a monarch in exile unaware of the Golconda hidden in his cufflinks! All this to say—oh, with exaggeration—that I am the most impractical man in the world. Relations between such a man and an old fox of the printing trade are at first touchingly carefree and familiar, full of friendly teasing and signs of mutual affection. I have no reason to believe that any accident will prevent such initial relations with good old Frank, my current publisher, from remaining so.
Frank confirmed the safe return of the proofs he had sent me here and asked me to mention in my foreword—and I willingly do so—that the responsibility for all errors in the commentary lies exclusively with me. The professional proofreader carefully checked the printed text of the poem against the photocopy of the manuscript and found a few trivial misprints that I had missed; this was the only outside assistance I had to resort to. It is needless to say how much I relied on receiving a mass of biographical data from Sybil Shade, but she, unfortunately, left New Wye even before I did and is currently living with relatives in Quebec. We could, of course, have conducted the most fruitful correspondence, but one cannot simply shake off the Shadists. They swarmed into Canada and descended upon the poor woman as soon as I lost contact with her and her changeable moods. Instead of answering my letter of a month ago from my Cedarn cave, which listed some of the most important questions, including the real name of Jim Coates, etc., she suddenly stunned me with a telegram requesting me to accept Professor X (!) and Professor K (!!) as co-editors of her husband’s poem. How deeply this struck and wounded me! Naturally, this precluded any possibility of cooperation with my friend’s misguided widow.
And he was truly my friend! According to the calendar, we had known each other for only a few months, but there is a kind of friendship with its own inner duration, with its own zones of transparent time, independent of the turning, malevolent music. I shall never forget the excitement that seized me upon learning, as mentioned in one of the notes which the reader will reach, that the suburban house (rented for me from Judge Goldsworth, who was on sabbatical leave in England) into which I moved on February 5, 1959, was located next door to the home of the famous American poet whose verse I had tried to translate into Zemblan two decades ago! Aside from this glorious proximity, the Goldsworth chateau, as I soon realized, did not boast special merits. The heating system was a farce, as it depended on floor vents from which the lukewarm effluvium of a groaning and moaning furnace was delivered to the rooms with the weakness of a dying man’s last breath. Plugging the vents upstairs, I tried to direct more energy into the living room, but its climate proved incurably undermined, as nothing separated it from the Arctic regions except a thin front door, without any sign of a vestibule—either because the house was built in the heat of summer by a naive settler who had no idea what kind of winter New Wye had in store for him, or by virtue of some old-fashioned primness that required a casual guest to be able to ascertain through the open door that nothing untoward was happening in the living room. In Zembla, February and March (the last two of the four “White-Nosed Months,” as we call them) were also quite severe, but even a peasant’s hut always had a uniform mass of heat, not a network of murderous drafts. True, as usually happens with newcomers, I was told that I had chosen the worst winter in many years—and this at the latitude of Palermo! One of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to drive to the college in my recently acquired powerful red automobile, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, whom I had not yet met socially (I later learned they believed I preferred to be left alone), were fussing around their old Packard on the slippery garage exit, where it was emitting a distressed howl but could not extract its tormented rear wheel from the icy hell of a pothole. John Shade was awkwardly busy with a bucket from which he was scattering handfuls of brown sand over the blue glaze with the gestures of a sower. He was wearing boots, his vicuña collar was turned up, and in the sun, his abundant gray hair seemed covered with frost. I knew he had been ill a few months earlier, and I hastened towards them, intending to drive my neighbors to campus in my powerful car. My rented castle was separated from my neighbors’ driveway by an alley that skirted the slight elevation on which it stood, and I was about to cross it when I suddenly lost my balance and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. My fall acted like a chemical reagent on the Shades’ sedan—it immediately started moving and almost ran over me, while John grimaced vigorously at the wheel, and Sybil was fiercely trying to explain something to him. I am not sure that either of them noticed me.
However, a few days later, specifically on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at breakfast in the Faculty Club. “Finally presented my credentials,” as recorded with slight irony in my working diary. Along with four or five other distinguished professors, I was invited to his usual table under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College, stunned and peeling, as it was depicted on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. I was amused by his laconic offer to “try the pork.” I am a strict vegetarian and prefer to cook my own food. As I explained to my rosy-cheeked table companions, consuming anything that has passed through the hands of another living being is as repulsive to me as eating such a creature, including—here I lowered my voice—the plump, pony-tailed student who served us, wetting her pencil. Besides, I had already finished the fruit I brought in my briefcase, I said, and would therefore content myself with a bottle of good college ale. My free and easy manner lightened the atmosphere. The usual questions poured forth—whether egg and milk drinks were acceptable for a person of my convictions. Shade said his case was rather the opposite: to eat vegetables, he had to make an effort. Approaching a salad was for him like entering seawater on a cold day, and to attack the fortress of an apple he had to seriously collect himself. By that time, I had not yet familiarized myself with the rather tedious buffoonery and teasing customary in the intimate American academic environment, and so I refrained from expressing my deep admiration for his work to John Shade in the presence of these grinning old men, lest a serious literary conversation degenerate into ordinary tomfoolery. Instead, I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course—a reserved, subtle, quite charming boy; but the old poet shook his decisively grey mop in response and said he had long ago ceased to remember students’ names and faces, and of the entire poetry seminar, he could visually only recall an auditing lady on crutches. “Oh, come on,” said Professor Hurley. “Surely, John, you don’t forget this stunning blonde in black tights from Literary Course 202?” Shade, beaming with all his wrinkles, good-naturedly patted Hurley’s wrist to make him stop. Another inquisitor asked if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. “Is that a crime?” I asked. No, he replied, but why two? “Is that a crime?” I parried, and everyone laughed.
Despite a weak heart (see line [736]), a slight limp, and a certain curious irregularity in his method of locomotion, Shade inordinately loved long walks, but the snow hindered him, and in winter he preferred his wife to pick him up after lectures. A few days later, leaving Parthenocissus Hall—or Main Hall (now, alas, Shade Hall), I saw him waiting outside for Mrs. Shade to arrive. I stood beside him for a minute on the steps of the entrance portico, pulling on my gloves finger by finger and looking sideways, as if preparing to review a parade. “You’re taking your conscience seriously,” the poet remarked. He looked at his watch. A snowflake fell on it. “Crystal on crystal,” said Shade. I offered to drive him home in my powerful “Cramler.” “Wives are forgetful, Mr. Shade.” He raised his shaggy head and looked at the library clock. Across the wide, desolate expanse of the snow-covered lawn, two blushing youths in brightly colored winter clothes were walking, laughing and sliding. Shade looked at his watch again and, shrugging, accepted my offer.
I asked if he would mind if we took the scenic route, through the center of the university village, where I wanted to buy chocolate cookies and some caviar. He said he did not mind. From inside the supermarket, through the solid glass window, I saw my little old man slip into the liquor store. When I returned with my purchases, he was back in the car, reading a tabloid newspaper, which, in my opinion, no poet would condescend to touch. By the cozy burp, I understood that a flask of spirits was hidden on his warmly wrapped figure. As we drove into the garage alley, Sybil was just pulling up to the house. I got out of the car with polite animation. “Since my husband does not deem it necessary to introduce people to each other,” she said, “let’s do it ourselves. You are Doctor Kinbote, aren’t you? And my name is Sybil Shade.” She then turned to her husband, saying he could have waited for her an extra minute in his study: she had honked, and yelled, and even gone upstairs, etc. I turned to leave, not wanting to witness a family scene, but she called out to me: “Have a drink with us,” she said, “that is, rather, with me, because John is forbidden to touch alcohol.” I explained that I could not stay long, as I had a kind of small seminar at home and a round of table tennis with a pair of lovely twins and another other boy, another boy.
From that time on, I saw my famous neighbor more and more often. The view from one of my windows provided me with constant first-class entertainment, especially when I was expecting a late guest. As long as the branches of the deciduous trees separating us remained bare, from the second floor of my house I could clearly see the Shades’ living room window, and almost every evening I could observe the quiet swinging of the poet’s slippered foot. From this, one could conclude that he was sitting with a book in a low armchair, but nothing but this foot and its shadow, moving up and down the wall in the secret rhythm of concentrated thought, in the dense lamplight, could be discerned. Always at the same time, the brown morocco slipper would fall off the wool-socked foot, which continued to swing, albeit at a slightly reduced tempo. It was clear that bedtime, with all its terrors, was approaching, that in a few minutes the toe would begin to feel for and nudge the slipper, and then disappear with it from the golden field of my vision, crossed by the black sash of a branch. And sometimes Sybil Shade would quickly cross it, rushing and waving her arms as if in a fit of irritation, and a little later would return at a much slower pace, as if she had forgiven her husband for his friendship with the eccentric neighbor. But the puzzle of her behavior was completely resolved one evening when, dialing their number and simultaneously watching the window, I magically caused her to perform the entire cycle of these hurried and quite innocent movements that had so puzzled me. Alas, my peace of mind was soon to be disturbed. As soon as it became clear in the academic community that John Shade valued my company above all others, splashes of thick poison of envy flew at me. Your quiet giggling did not escape our notice, dearest Mrs. K., when after a tedious party at your house, I helped the tired old poet find his galoshes. Once I happened to go into the English Department faculty lounge in search of a journal with a photograph of the royal palace in Onhava, which I wanted to show my friend, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket—out of mercy, I shall call him Gerald Emerald—casually respond to a secretary’s question: “I think Mr. Shade has already left with the Great Beaver.” It is true, I am tall, and my brown beard is thick and deep in shade; the foolish nickname clearly referred to me, but it did not deserve attention, and, calmly taking the journal from the table strewn with brochures, I contented myself with deftly undoing Gerald Emerald’s bow tie with a flick of my fingers as I passed him on the way out. And there was the morning when Dr. Nattochdag, the head of the department I belonged to, asked me in an official tone to sit down, closed the door, and, frowningly settling into his swivel chair, suggested that I “be more careful.” More careful in what sense? A certain young man had complained to the counselor. Good heavens, what did he complain about? That I had criticized the literature course he was taking (“the most idiotic survey of the most idiotic works taught by the most idiotic mediocrity”). Laughing in complete relief, I embraced the dearest Nattochdag and promised not to misbehave again. I take this opportunity to send him my greetings. He always treated me with such exquisite courtesy that I sometimes wondered if he suspected the same thing as Shade, which only three people knew for sure—two trustees and the college president.
Oh, there were many such incidents. In a skit performed by a group of theater students, I was represented as a pompous misogynist with a German accent, constantly quoting Housman and chewing raw carrots. And a week before Shade’s death, a certain frantic lady, in whose club I had refused to give a lecture on “Halli-Walli” (as she put it, confusing Odin’s hall with the title of the Finnish epic), said to me in the middle of a grocery store: “You are an amazingly unpleasant man. I can’t understand how John and Sybil tolerate you”—and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: “Besides, you are insane.”
But allow me to cease this list of foolishness. Whatever they thought, whatever they said, John’s friendship was full compensation for me. This friendship was even more precious to me because of the deliberately concealed tenderness, especially when we were not alone, because of the gruffness stemming from what could be defined as the dignity of the soul. His entire being was a masquerade costume. John Shade’s outward appearance so little matched the harmonies swarming within him that one felt inclined to dismiss it as a crude mask or a fleeting fashion; for if the fashion of the romantic era refined the poet’s masculinity by exposing his attractive neck, refining his profile, and reflecting a mountain lake in his oval gaze, the bards of the present day, thanks obviously to greater possibilities of longevity, look like gorillas or vultures. My sublime neighbor’s face contained something that could even please the eye if it were only leonine or only Iroquois; unfortunately, combining both, it resembled only the face of a fleshy, Hogarthian drunkard of indeterminate gender. His shapeless body, the abundant grey mane of thick hair, the yellow nails of his plump fingers, the bags under his dull eyes—all this became understandable only if considered as debris, eliminated from his true being by the same forces of perfection that purified and minted his verses. He extinguished himself.
I have one photograph of him that is particularly dear to me. In this color amateur snapshot, taken on a bright spring day by my former acquaintance, Shade is shown leaning on a sturdy cane that once belonged to his Aunt Maud (see line [86]). I am wearing a white waterproof jacket bought at a local sporting goods store and a pair of purple trousers originally from Cannes. My left hand is half-raised—not to pat Shade on the shoulder, as it may seem, but to take off my dark glasses, which, however, it never reached in that life, the life of the photograph; the library book clamped under my right arm is a treatise on a Zemblan form of gymnastics, in which I intended to interest my young lodger who took this photograph. A week later, he abused my trust, basely taking advantage of my absence during a trip to Washington, returning from which I found that he had been entertaining a fire-haired Exton hussy who had left her hairpins and stench in all three bathrooms. Of course, we parted immediately, and through a gap in the window curtains, I could see the scoundrel Bob standing rather touchingly with his crew cut, his peeling suitcase, and the skis I had given him, waiting for a club mate to drive away with him forever. I can forgive everything except betrayal.
John Shade and I never discussed my personal troubles. Our close friendship was on that highest, exclusively intellectual level where a man rests from emotional sorrows, not shares them. My admiration for him served as a kind of alpine therapy. Looking at him, I always experienced a sublime sense of wonder, especially in the presence of other people, people of a lower sort. This astonishment was compounded by the awareness that they did not feel what I felt, did not see what I saw; that they took Shade for granted instead of saturating, if I may put it so, every nerve with the romance of his presence. There he is, I told myself, there is his head, containing a brain of a different kind than the synthetic jelly packed in the skulls surrounding him. He looks from the terrace (at Professor K.’s house that March evening) at the distant lake. I look at him. I am present at a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceives and transforms the world, absorbing it and decomposing it into its constituent elements, displacing them and at the same time storing them up, to produce one unforeseen day an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a poetic line. And I experienced the same kind of excitement as in early childhood, in my uncle’s castle, where I watched across the table a conjurer who had just given a fantastic performance and was now calmly eating vanilla ice cream. I looked at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole, where he had repeatedly changed color and was now frozen as a white carnation, and especially at his wonderful, seemingly fluid fingers, which could, at will, dissolve a spoon into a sunbeam with a simple twist or turn a plate into a dove by tossing it into the air.
It is precisely such a sudden wave of magic that Shade’s poem is: my grey-haired friend, my beloved old conjurer, slipped a deck of cards into his hat—and shook a poem out of it.
Let us now turn to the poem. I hope that my foreword has not proved too meager. The rest of the notes, arranged as a line-by-line commentary, will probably satisfy the most demanding reader. Although these notes, according to custom, are placed at the end of the poem, the reader is advised to look through them first, and then, with their help, study the poem, rereading them, of course, as the text is consumed, and having finished the poem, perhaps glancing through them a third time for completeness. In such cases, I find it reasonable to avoid the hassle of constant turning by either cutting out the pages and pinning them to the corresponding places in the text, or, even simpler, acquiring two copies of the book so as to place them side by side on a comfortable table—not on a rickety structure like mine, on which my typewriter is precariously placed, in this miserable motel, with a carousel inside and outside my head, many miles from New Wye. Allow me to say that without my commentaries, Shade’s text is simply devoid of all human reality, for the human reality of a poem like this, too whimsical and reserved for autobiography, with many meaningful lines thoughtlessly rejected by him, depends entirely on the reality of the author and his environment, attachments, etc.—a reality that only my notes can provide. My dear poet would probably not subscribe to such a statement, but for better or for worse, the last word rests with the commentator.
CHARLES KINBOTE October 19, 1959 Cedarn, Utana
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