Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

After the success of Lolita (1955, but not published in the U.S. until 1958), Nabokov retired from his teaching jobs in Russian Language and Literature at Wellesley (1941-1948) and Cornell (1948-1959) and retired from the United States entirely. He moved to Switzerland where he produced this novel, his masterpiece, published in 1962. Although, hmm, Lolita was already his masterpiece so what superlative is available to describe this even more masterful work of art? And while I’m on the subject, Pale Fire is not only one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, it’s one of the best works of art of any kind, of the twentieth century. I firmly hold my opinion.

How a work of such intricate genius can also be so darn enjoyable is one of this tricky novel’s greatest tricks. It’s comic, and we don’t usually allow humorous works of art to attain the category of great, but as a corrective, I submit Exhibit 1, Pale Fire. There’s a chuckle on nearly every page. It’s erudite but not opaque. It’s a puzzle, but solvable, and the solution, satisfying.

Pale Fire presents itself as a 999-line poem by the celebrated poet John Shade, edited by Charles Kinbote a colleague of the poet at the same East-erly college: Wordsmith (sometimes College, sometimes University). Kinbote surrounds Shade’s poem with an epigraph from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, a Foreword, extensive commentary, and an Index. But something is clearly, funnily, amiss.

Not to overlook anything, let’s start with the epigraph which speaks of both a “ludicrous account” and of random shootings, both of which will figure in the story to follow. A few pages into the Foreward, we realize that Kinbote has pressed his friend’s poem into the service of his own tale (pressed, twisted, forced, perverted). The poem, Pale Fire by John Shade, is about John Shade, divided into four “Cantos”: the first about his childhood, including a fainting episode that he imbues with spiritual meaning; the second about his marriage to his wife, Sybil and their daughter, Hazel, who died as a (probable) suicide in her early twenties; the third is Shade’s attempts to solve the mystery of death (Hazel’s, his, ours) through spiritual investigation, the last describes Shade’s ability, a la Proust, to achieve resolution, meaning, and consolation in life by turning life into art.

Kinbote’s commentary on Shade’s poem, though, is his own wild tale about the last king of Zembla, a fictional eastern/northern European country that in 1958 suffered a revolution that transformed the kingdom into a Soviet satellite. The deposed king, Charles Xavier, or Charles the Beloved, or Charles Kinbote we instantly realize, escapes captivity and makes his way out of Zembla, out of Europe and into the United States, to the fictional city and state of New Wye, Appalachia, and a visiting lectureship at Wordsmith. The escape involves a secret passage from the castle to a theater and a climb over a mountain (The Sound of Music opened on Broadway on November 16, 1959. Mountain escapes were in the air.) In New Wye, Kinbote rents a house, across a little lane but neighbor to the poet John Shade, whom Kinbote admires and attaches himself to. Kinbote, through his commentary, narrates not only the story of Charles Xavier, including the monarch’s boyhood and life leading up to the revolution and the escape, but also his life incognito as Charles Kinbote in New Wye post-revolution from February through July 1959 as he tells his story to John Shade and attempts to inspire the great poet to turn the story to verse.

At first Kinbote thinks he has succeeded, as Shade does embark, in early July, on a long poem. But on July 21, as Shade finishes the poem, the poet is shot to death as he and Kinbote come up the lawn leading to Kinbote’s rented house. Kinbote, who throughout the novel has been tracking the progress of the murderer closing in across Europe tells us the shooter is a Zemblan assassin named Gradus aiming for him. Kinbote, unharmed, secures the poem and the contractual right to publish it from Shade’s grieving widow. Then, when he discovers Shade’s poem is not about the last King of Zembla, he concocts a specious commentary that allows him to tell his preferred story anyway.

This satire of academic writing is in itself amusing. It isn’t only King Charles the Self-Serving who when presenting the work of another inveigles to turn the analyst of the subject into the subject of analysis. But this is only the beginning of Nabokov’s playful purpose.

While Shade’s poem tells one story and Kinbote’s commentary tells a second, Nabokov’s novel tells a third story that only gradually reveals itself. It’s clear that Kinbote is an eccentric character. It’s clear he’s capable of manipulation and deception. I think Nabokov means us to take seriously the red flag raised while still in the Foreward when a woman who has hired Kinbote to give a lecture at her club announces to Kinbote’s face and the reader’s attention, “You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you,” and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: “What’s more, you are insane.” (p. 25).

Pale Fire shares much in common with Lolita. Besides Nabokov’s own consistent art and humor, both are narrated by quirky Europeans displaced from the old world to the new. Both men are on, or go on, the lam. Both stories end with gun violence. The New England college milieu of Pale Fire is much the same as Nabokov’s other novel of this time Pnin (1957), in fact, Pnin himself shows up (pp. 155, 268, 283). Lolita is also named in both Shade’s poem (line 680, p. 58) and Kinbote’s commentary (p. 243). And both Humbert Humbert of Lolita and Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire are biased narrators telling their own stories for their own purpose who are not to be trusted! Like breadcrumbs, Nabokov leaves a trail of clues throughout the novel pointing to what’s really going on. The trail begins with that epigraph from Boswell, and the club woman’s pronouncement of Kinbote’s dangerous mental state. The trail ends in the novel’s final paragraph with Kinbote giving the game away. He imagines a possible future for himself. First he considers and rejects suicide. Then, musing on what he might do, he writes, “I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king; another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments” (p. 301).

Shade is the “distinguished old poet.” Kinbote is now confirmed to be what we may have already guessed: a lunatic imagining himself a king. And the other lunatic, the man Kinbote calls Gradus and imagines to be a Zemblan assassin is actually a man named Jack Gray, an escapee from the Institute for the Criminal Insane (p. 295). Gray arrives in New Wye bent on revenge, his target is Judge Goldsmith, the owner of the house Kinbote is renting, the judge who consigned Gray to that mental Institute, the judge who is now out of the country on sabbatical. Unfortunately, Shade happens to look like the judge. In a conversation at the university Kinbote records in his commentary, Shade says he looks like “two local characters, one being the disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria.” We learn the identity of the other local look-a-like when another professor remarks that “she [the disheveled hag] looks like Judge Goldsworth” (p. 267). Gray confuses the professor for the judge and kills the wrong man.

Amazed, we remember, or flip back to find again the passage where Kinbote first confuses Jack Gray and Gradus. “Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, of James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d’Argus” (p. 77). Kinbote gives Gradus even a further alias in another of Nabokov’s breadcrumbs when Kinbote comes across a scrapbook kept in the judge’s library “in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler’s quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d’Argus)….” The sentence continues its list of killers: “a bright little parricide aged seven (“Now, sonny, we want you to tell us–“), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer” (p. 83). The sad pudgy old pederast surely must be our friend Humbert Humbert.

So motive for murder and identity of one lunatic revealed, what is the true identity of our other lunatic, Charles Kinbote? This is a little harder to confirm certainly. And we must remember that the whole tale is a mix of fiction and non-fiction, real places like Washington D.C., New York, Copenhagen, and Paris, appearing beside New Wye, Appalachia, and Zembla (note the apt pun on both resemble and disemble). Kinbote is not a king, and he may not be a “Kinbote” either, but whatever he is he is firstly the fictional creation of Vladimir Nabokov, so looking for “reality” is like looking though “a glass, darkly” a phrase from Paul quoted by Nabokov/Kinbote/and a character named Prof. Hurley in the Foreward (p. 14), or the opening line of Shade’s poem, “I was the shadow…” Mirrors, glasses, reflections, hallucinations occur throughout the novel.

Nabokov doesn’t leave enough crumbs to reconstitute a solid loaf, but Kinbote appears to be “really” a Professor named Botkin. The noticeable name first slides into view on p. 100, “other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others.” We glimpse the name again, now applied to a person at Wordsmith college, on p. 155, along with our friend Pnin: “Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque “perfectionist”)…” It’s likely here that Kinbote is speaking of himself and mistakingly neglected to use the pseudonym he is otherwise known by to his colleagues. In a discussion of suicide, Kinbote mentions the famous line from Hamlet’s speech “a bare botkin (note the correct spelling)” (p. 220). And lastly, in the same section where Shade admits he resembles Judge Goldsworth, another professor tells Kinbote, “I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?” Kinbote: “You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla” (p. 267). One more clue: speaking of his Department Head, Kinbote writes in the Foreward, “He always behaved with such exquisite courtesy toward me that I sometimes wondered if he did not suspect what Shade suspected, and what only three people (two trustees and the president of the college) definitely knew” (p. 25). It can’t be that the president and the trustees have secret knowledge that Kinbote is the Zemblan king, because there is no Zemblan king, so it may be that they know that Kinbote is Prof. Botkin and for some reason the administration agreed to allow his use of the pseudonym. It helps that Kinbote/Botkin’s friend Sylvia O’Donnell “was Wordsmith University’s main trustee (and, in point of fact, had been solely responsible for arranging my amusing lectureship there)” (p. 248).

I would not be surprised or ashamed if there is more to the puzzle than I’ve puzzled out, or if I’ve gotten something wrong. Like a magic show, it’s fun being fooled. If you’ve read the novel, I hope you find my investigation helpful. If you haven’t read the novel, please do, and fear not, nothing I’ve given away here will reduce your pleasure.

I must make one more comment of a more personal interest. The narrator and the king he pretends to be are profligately and joyfully homosexual. Charles Kinbote entertains numerous boys from the college in his rented home. He lures them over by the use of a pair of ping pong tables he has set up in his basement. There’s also a brief mention of a spoiled affair with a man named Bob who betrays Charles with a woman while Charles is out of town (pp. 26-27 and elsewhere). The king, starting from a young age sports with boys his own age, and thereafter a variety of pages, and friends, and guards, and so on. The most amusing episode comes when the king is encouraged to take a wife for progeny purposes and is unable to fulfill his genetic duty (pp. 207-209). It’s all in good fun, for the king and for the reader. Unlike Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Kinbote’s sexuality is entirely irrelevant to the story. Perhaps Nabokov made him gay just to make him that much more eccentric. He’s also a vegetarian who refuses to eat food prepared by hands other than his own, for instance. Granted, Kinbote actually is a lunatic, but it’s not his sexuality that makes him so. I bring it up because it was so unusual to find such a positive portrayal of homosexuality in a book of that time and discovering it was exciting for me when I first read the novel forty years ago.

My aged paperback has a brilliant orange cover except for a quarter-inch strip the length of the far left side near the spine where, unprotected from the sun by an unfortunately just slightly smaller companion book snuggled beside it on the bookshelf the orange has faded to pale, to pale orange, pale fire.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.