Nabokov's Blueprint
Pale Fire. By Vladimir Nabokov. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 21s.)
IN the American University of Wordsmith lives an eminent and ageing poet, John Shade, who has a bossing wife called Sybil and is at work on a poem which is to consist of 500 heroic couplets and to be entitled 'Pale Fire.' His neigh- bour, who has rented the house of a hanging but at present sabbatical judge (Goldsworth), is a refugee scholar called Charles Kinbote; he comes from the northern country of Zembla, is a dedicated pederast, and has obtained an ap- pointment to the university by means which are far from clear. Shunned by his colleagues, Kin- bote is befriended by Shade and has convinced himself that his stories, which he pours out to the poet, of his beloved Zembla and its last king (now also in exile) are providing the substance and the inspiration of Shade's poem.
This was the basic situation when, in July of 1959, Shade started work on 'Pale Fire.' Now jump a few months to October. The poem has been finished (in late July); Shade has been mur- dered, a few hours after finishing the poem and apparently by someone who thought he was Kin- bote; Kinbote has possessed himself of the MS and, with the permission of Shade's wife (who hates him), has retired to a place called Cedarn in order to edit it. The novel, Pale Fire, is the edition which Kinbote compiles: it contains Kin- bote's Foreword, in which he explains the cir- cumstances; the 1,000-line poem, 'Pale Fire,' which is a kind of autobiographical excursus (and as pretty a piece of pastiche as you could ask for); voluminous notes, in which Kinbote elaborates the Zembla legend, deplores the fact that Shade has not, after all, used it in the poem, and snatches desperately at the few phrases which could refer to it; and a helpful index of the characters and places mentioned.
The Foreword recommends us to read the Notes before the poem, and it is in the former that the novel properly consists. From them we learn, first, that Kinbote himself is the exiled King Charles of Zembla, with whose adven- tures, though without identifying himself, he has sought to fascinate John Shade; secondly, that Shade's murderer, called variously Gradus, Degree, de Grey, d'Argus (etc. etc.), was in fact a Zemblan assassin ordered by the Ex- tremist Party to find and kill the King, alias Kinbote, in his place of refuge; and thirdly, as time goes on and the penny drops, that Kinbote is barking mad, his tales of Zembla and its fanatics only the product of a gifted but diseased mind. Shade is real, the poem is real, Dr. Kin- bote is real (but as scholar and not as King); the murderer, too, is real, but so far from being an Extremist assassin he is simply an escaped lunatic (yes, another lunatic) who thinks he is shooting at Judge Goldsworth, from whom he once received acheavy sentence of imprisonment.
Now, what is one to make of this? One can praise, with all sincerity, the ingenious construc- tion, the biting humour, the fluent versification of the poem itself, the dazzling expertise with which, for example, Nabokov instructs us, through Kinbote's own mouth, that Kinbote is mad. But what is- the aim behind so eccentric an expenditure of so much labour and talent? (Not to mention erudition: the whole book is stuffed with linguistic jokes and curious infor- mation.) The scholarly Mary McCarthy, delight- ing to disentangle puns and allusions, sees the book as a kind of three-dimensional chess match and also as 'one of the very great works of art of this century.' Dwight Macdonald finds it `unreadable.' Philip Toynbee, never one to com- plain of complex or unfamiliar method, never- theless 'found this [the material] as boring as Mr. Macdonald did. . . . It can't be too often insisted that books which try to operate on more than one level must operate satisfactorily on the most obvious level of all.' As for Cyril Con- nolly, he describes this book as 'an outstandingly original fantasy composed for the intellectually adult.' And as for myself, having quoted four such authoritative opinions, I should like to shut my trap and call it a day, for this novel might have been written solely in order to make fools of reviewers. But it is too late to withdraw, an Opinion must be hazarded: so let me say, for a start, that having found the whole affair en- thralling I totally disagree with both Mr. Toyn- bee and Mr. Macdonald; that I think Miss McCarthy has become somewhat over-excited; and that while Mr. Connolly is right about the high quality of the fantasy, I find him wrong
in supposing, as he appears to, that the fantasy is all.
For Pale Fire, I would submit, is a study in the processes and powers of artistic creation. One starts, as one always must, from a given and plausible reality : in this case, a pleasant and distinguished but rather self-satisfied poet, who has an eccentric friend and is mistakenly murdered by an escaped lunatic. All very pos- sible, not uninteresting, but meaningless, waste- ful. The thing must be given form, significance. it must be turned into art. So somewhere in the
land regions let us postulate a fantasy
'and called Zembla (the passages about which have an elegiac fascination, a kind of yearning, unlike anything I have read for some time); it is a land in which the King is learned and teaches (incognito) in colleges; in which the talk ios,,t of art and pleasure; in which there is plenty W. scope for sexual activity, particularly gamey peasant girls in the mountains. (Mr. lOYnbee crossly calls it `Zenda,' but for myself Id go,there tomorrow if I could.) But, of course, it cannot last. The police State over the border becomes envious, a revolution IS stirred up which nobody wants, Zembla is contaminated; and out of this spoiled paradise comes the Avenger of Mediocrity, the Mean, Modern Man with the Hatchet, who can't bear the thought that the delicate spirit of old Zembla still lives on peacefully in an American pro- vince. This assassin is the representative of a world gone mad; and as such he merges with the figure of the real murderer, who, like him, derives his strength from mindlessness and hate. Who kills the poet? The imaginary renegade conjured up by Kinbote from his ruined Arcadia, or the homicidal maniac from the local bin? The answer is both; the spirit of the former act- ing in the body of the latter. And so now we see our theme: a squalid killing, hitherto without motive or meaning, is now transformed: a poet, who creates beauty, has been blindly destroyed by a power itself derived from diseased beauty— the diseased beauty of Zembla or of Kinbote's mind. Kinbote always wanted to thrust Zembla on to Shade, and now he has: in the form of a fanatical killer, the warped offshoot of a once splendid creation which has got out of control and become monstrous. The trouble, as I see it, is that Mr. Nabokov has funked the respon- sibility of being true to his own creation; for although he, the artist, is really responsible for Zembla and the Zemblan killer, he has chosen, in his uncertainty, to credit them to a lunatic, so that if the whole thing goes wrong he, Nabo- kov, cannot be blamed. He has given us a nervous, preliminary study of what might be done in this line; he has given us, not a novel, but a blueprint.
SIMON RAVEN
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