Nabokov's Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is more fun to read than just about any book I know. By “fun” I mean that it’s a lot more than funny, but, being a poem, plus a critical appraisal of a book (with copious footnotes), and a novel, all combined, it engages the reader — as one flips back and forth through its pages — in the same way a really great puzzle or a game does.

Pale Fire begins with a 999 line poem in four cantos written by John Shade, a famous American poet. It’s one of the most beautiful long poems in our language and begins with an unforgettable image:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff–and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land.

The striking description here of the tricks of perception a mirroring window can inflict on the eye and the mind will mirror many of the literary deceptions contained in the novel.

The poem is autobiographical and centers on the apparent suicide of Shade’s daughter Hazel, and includes discussions of death and the afterlife, glimpses of his family and writing life, and culminates with a rumination on the power of poetry to help us comprehend life and the miracle of our universe.

This beautiful, touching, and somewhat serious poem is followed by a supposed “Foreward” and “Commentary” written by Charles Kinbote, the poet’s neighbor and, Kinbote would have us believe, Shade’s closest confidant and literary executor. The Commentary is in the form of notes to lines in the poem, though each note will take us absurdly beyond the poem itself into the funhouse of Kinbote’s mind. Here’s the entry on the unexceptional word “often” in line 62:

Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life. Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress. There was naturally my famous neighbor just across the lane, and at one time I took in a dissipated young roomer (who generally came home after midnight). Yet I wish to stress that cold hard core of loneliness which is not good for a displaced soul . . . . I kept moving from window to window, my silk nightcap drenched with sweat, my bared breast a thawing pond, and sometimes, armed with the judge’s shotgun, I dared beard the terrors of the terrace.

What the hell, the reader will ask, does any of that have to do with John Shade’s poem?

Is Kinbote mad? He may well have been Shade’s friend, but that’s drawn into question with his implicit confession that he is also Charles Xavier Vseslav, or Charles II, the deposed King of Zembla (think “semblance”), a “distant northern land”, and the target of Soviet-styled revolutionaries who may have mistakenly murdered Shade in an assassination attempt on Kinbote.

Kinbote would also have us believe that most of the credit due for Shade’s poem should go to Kinbote himself, for the inspiration he provided during long walks the two took at the time of its composition. The evidence he points to in the poem however is slim, even tortured.

Ultimately, Kinbote suggests that the poem is really entirely about himself. His note to lines 939 and 940 — ”Man’s life is a commentary to abstruse/ unfinished poem. Note for further use.” — reads, “If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” In reality, according to Kinbote, it’s not Shade’s poem, but Kinbote’s commentary, that is important. This is Pale Fire in a nutshell, and one of Nabokov’s biggest winks in the book.

Among other things, Pale Fire is a riotous satirical commentary on literary criticism, particularly the kind that focuses overmuch on the author’s life and not sufficiently on the work — the text — itself. The book also includes extensive footnotes at the end, which provide their own funhouse moments as you follow the breadcrumb trail they leave throughout the book.

Pale Fire may not be as scintillating or sexy as Lolita or Ada: or Ardor, nor as outright funny as some of Nabokov’s earlier novels written in Russian and set in Germany, but, if you’re willing to have your assumptions about what is entertaining, funny, and beautifully written turned upside down, and to enjoy a novel unlike anything else you’ve ever read, you’ll fall in love with Pale Fire.

Other recommended works: Ada: or Ardor, The Defense, Lolita (of course), Despair, Laughter in the Dark, and The Collected Short Stories.

On Mansfield Park

I first read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park on the recommendation of Vladimir Nabokov, who, in his Lectures on Literature said, “Mansfield Park is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child.”

He also wrote:

At first Jane Austen’s manner and matter may seem to be old-fashioned, stilted, unreal. But this is a delusion to which the bad reader succumbs. The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book. An original author always invents an original world, then we experience the pleasurable shock of artistic truth, no matter how unlikely the person or thing may seem if transferred into what book reviewers, poor hacks, call “real life”.

To put it in another way, a great novel is one that creates a wholly convincing world, one in which all of the parts are completely integrated and are, preferably, not all that similar to the world in which we live. Sometimes that world is totally the writer’s creation, as with the Oz books. Sometimes, as with Austen, that world is at least not unlike one that was once real and commonplace, but is no more.

In Austen’s world of the early 19th century British gentry (she wrote all of her major works between 1810 and her death in 1817), the day is spent visiting the neighbors, making charitable visits to the poor, horseback riding, or preparing for the Ball. Women should draw, dance, sing, and play the piano, and men, or, rather, gentlemen, should be able to tell the difference between talent and mere effort in these matters.

Money is something that’s been around in such abundance for so long that no one thinks about it much unless marriage is involved. Then, eligible bachelors are “worth five thousand a year” or “alas, only five hundred a year.” Sex is for marriage exclusively. Single men who indulge in it are naughty; single women who indulge in it are ruined forever. In such a world, morality is not only a matter of crime and punishment. One can cross over into the reprehensible simply by putting on a theatrical performance in the absence of parental approval.

And that is what much of Mansfield Park is about. The central character is Fanny Price, born poor and being raised by her aunt and uncle in a mansion along with her four cousins, all of them treating her as an inferior with the exception of Edmund who becomes her protector almost from her arrival. Here (pardon the length of this charming passage), we learn that Edmund will take pains for his young cousin’s health by providing her with a horse for her daily exercise.

Though Edmund was much more displeased with his aunt than with his mother, as evincing least regard for her niece, he . . . at length determined on a method of proceeding which would obviate the risk of his father’s thinking he had done too much, and at the same time procure for Fanny the immediate means of exercise, which he could not bear she should be without. He had three horses of his own, but not one that would carry a woman. Two of them were hunters; the third, a useful road-horse: this third he resolved to exchange for one that his cousin might ride; he knew where such a one was to be met with; and having once made up his mind, the whole business was soon completed. The new mare proved a treasure; with a very little trouble she became exactly calculated for the purpose, and Fanny was then put in almost full possession of her. She had not supposed before that anything could ever suit her like the old grey pony (of which she had been deprived); but her delight in Edmund’s mare was far beyond any former pleasure of the sort; and the addition it was ever receiving in the consideration of that kindness from which her pleasure sprung, was beyond all her words to express. She regarded her cousin as an example of everything good and great, as possessing worth which no one but herself could ever appreciate, and as entitled to such gratitude from her as no feelings could be strong enough to pay. Her sentiments towards him were compounded of all that was respectful, grateful, confiding, and tender.

We can imagine where this might lead in Austen’s world of perpetual romantic entanglements.

Later, when the children are young adults, Harry Crawford and his sister Mary arrive in the neighborhood, at a time when the stern and principled uncle is away managing business interests. While concerned about the depth of Mary’s principles, the somewhat priggish Edmund cannot completely ignore her charms. Harry will toy with Fanny’s cousins’ affections (and later with her own).

All this leads up to a plan to put on a play called Lovers’ Vows, in spite of Edmund and Fanny’s concern that the family patriarch will disapprove. Eventually Edmund is drawn into the fun, leaving Fanny to appear the scold. Of course, the father returns and is mightily displeased.

Eventually, there will be further romantic interactions and, of course, a happy ending, none of which will be revealed here. I should simply list some of the novel’s many charms: Fanny may be a bit of a stick, but she’s so carefully and lovingly drawn that her principles become her most winning feature; the book makes us actually believe that once upon a time putting on a theatrical in one’s parents’ living room was a sin worth censure; and, its depiction of a sheltered, privileged life presents a convincing demonstration that with privilege comes moral responsibility, and that meeting that responsibility — particularly in one’s interactions with the opposite sex — is the only thing that justifies that privilege.

To conclude with Nabokov: “The charm of Mansfield Park can be fully enjoyed only when we adopt its conventions, its rules, its enchanting make-believe. Mansfield Park never existed, and its people never lived.” Except, I would add, in the minds of those who read it.

Other recommended works: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persusion, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility. They’re all great.