Writing on the Wall (2 page)

What is modern and bourgeois in Macbeth’s character is his wholly
social
outlook. He has no feeling for others, and yet until the end he is a vicarious creature, existing in his own eyes through what others may say of him, through what they tell him or promise him. This paradox is typical of the social being—at once a wolf out for himself and a sheep. Macbeth, moreover, is an expert buck-passer; he sees how others can be used. It is he, not Lady Macbeth, who thinks of smearing the drunken chamberlains with blood (though it is she, in the end, who carries it out), so that they shall be caught “red-handed” the next morning when Duncan’s murder is discovered. At this idea he brightens; suddenly, he sees his way clear. It is the moment when at last he decides. The eternal executive, ready to fix responsibility on a subordinate, has seen the deed finally take a
recognizable
form. Now he can do it. And the crackerjack thought of killing the grooms afterward (dead men tell no tales—old adage) is again purely his own on-the-spot inspiration; no credit to Lady Macbeth.

It is the sort of thought that would have come to Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius, another trepidant executive. Indeed, Macbeth is more like Claudius than like any other character in Shakespeare. Both are doting husbands; both rose to power by betraying their superior’s trust; both are easily frightened and have difficulty saying their prayers. Macbeth’s “Amen” sticks in his throat, he complains, and Claudius, on his knees, sighs that he cannot make what priests call a “good act of contrition.” The desire to say his prayers like any pew-holder, quite regardless of his horrible crime, is merely a longing for respectability. Macbeth “repents” killing the grooms, but this is for public consumption. “O, yet I do repent me of my fury, That I did kill them.” In fact, it is the one deed he does
not
repent
(i.e.,
doubt the wisdom of) either before or after. This hypocritical self-accusation, which is his sidelong way of announcing the embarrassing fact that he has just done away with the grooms, and his simulated grief at Duncan’s murder (“All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn,” etc.) are his basest moments in the play, as well as his boldest; here is nearly a magnificent monster.

The dramatic effect too is one of great boldness on Shakespeare’s part. Macbeth is speaking pure Shakespearean poetry, but in his mouth, since we know he is lying, it turns into facile verse, Shakespearean poetry buskined. The same with “Here lay Duncan, His silver skin lac’d with his golden blood...” If the image were given to Macduff, it would be uncontaminated poetry; from Macbeth it is “proper stuff”—fustian. This opens the perilous question of sincerity in the arts: is a line of verse altered for us by the sincerity of the one who speaks it? In short, is poetry relative to the circumstances or absolute? Or, more particularly, are Macbeth’s soliloquies poetry, which they sound like, or something else? Did Shakespeare intend to make Macbeth a poet, like Hamlet, Lear, and Othello? In that case, how can Macbeth be an unimaginative mediocrity? My opinion is that Macbeth’s soliloquies are not poetry but rhetoric. They are tirades. That is, they do not trace any pensive motion of the soul or heart but are a volley of words discharged. Macbeth is neither thinking nor feeling aloud; he is declaiming. Like so many unfeeling men, he has a facile emotionalism, which he turns on and off. Not that his fear is insincere, but his loss of control provides him with an excuse for histrionics.

These gibberings exasperate Lady Macbeth. “What do you mean?” she says coldly after she has listened to a short harangue on “Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!’” It is an allowable question—what
does
he mean? And his funeral oration on
her,
if she could have heard it, would have brought her back to life to protest. “She should have died hereafter”—fine, that was the real Macbeth. But then, as if conscious of the proprieties, he at once begins on a series of bromides (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow...”) that he seems to have had ready to hand for the occasion like a black mourning suit. All Macbeth’s soliloquies have that ready-to-hand, if not hand-me-down, air, which is perhaps why they are given to school children to memorize, often with the result of making them hate Shakespeare. What children resent in these soliloquies is precisely their sententiousness—the sound they have of being already memorized from a copybook.

Macbeth’s speeches often recall the Player’s speech in
Hamlet
—Shakespeare’s example of how-not-to-do-it. He tears a passion to tatters. He has a rather Senecan rhetoric, the fustian of the time; in the dagger speech, for example, he works in Hecate, Tarquin, and the wolf—recherché embellishment for a man who is about to commit a real murder. His taste for hyperbole goes with a habit of euphuism, as when he calls the sea “the green one.” And what of the remarkable line just preceding, “The multitudinous seas incarnadine,” with its onomatopoeia of the crested waves rising in the t’s and d’s of “multitudinous” and subsiding in the long swell of the verb? This is sometimes cited as an example of pure poetry, which it would be in an anthology of isolated lines, but in the context, dramatically, it is splendid bombast, a kind of stuffing or padding.

The play between poetry and rhetoric, the
conversion
of poetry to declamation, is subtle and horrible in
Macbeth.
The sincere pent-up poet in Macbeth flashes out not in the soliloquies but when he howls at a servant. “The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! Where got’st thou that goose look?” Elsewhere, the general’s tropes are the gold braid of his dress uniform or the chasing of his armor. If an explanation is needed, you might say he learned to
use
words through long practice in haranguing his troops, whipping them and himself into battle frenzy. Up to recent times a fighting general, like a football coach, was an orator.

But it must be noted that it is not only Macbeth who rants. Nor is it only Macbeth who talks about the weather. The play is stormy with atmosphere—the screaming and shrieking of owls, the howling of winds. Nature herself is ranting, like the witches, and Night, black Hecate, is queen of the scene. Bats are flitting about; ravens and crows are hoarse; the house-martins’ nests on the battlements of Macbeth’s castle give a misleading promise of peace and gentle domesticity. “It will be rain tonight,” says Banquo simply, looking at the sky (note the difference between this and Macbeth’s pompous generality), and the First Murderer growls at him, striking, “Let it come down.” The disorder of Nature, as so often in Shakespeare, presages and reflects the disorder of the body politic. Guilty Macbeth cannot sleep, but the night of Duncan’s murder, the whole house, as if guilty too, is restless; Malcolm and Donalbain talk and laugh in their sleep; the drunken porter, roused, plays that he is gatekeeper of hell.

Indeed, the whole action takes place in a kind of hell and is pitched to the demons’ shriek of hyperbole. This would appear to be a peculiar setting for a study of the commonplace. But only at first sight. The fact that an ordinary philistine like Macbeth goes on the rampage and commits a series of murders is a sign that human nature, like Nature, is capable of any mischief if left to its “natural” self. The witches, unnatural beings, are Nature spirits, stirring their snake-filet and owl’s wing, newt’s eye and frog toe in a camp stew: earthy ingredients boil down to an unearthly broth. It is the same with the man Macbeth. Ordinary ambition, fear, and a kind of stupidity make a deadly combination. Macbeth, a self-made king, is not kingly, but just another Adam or Fall guy, with Eve at his elbow.

There is no play of Shakespeare’s (I think) that contains the words “Nature” and “natural” so many times, and the “Nature” within the same speech can mean first something good and then something evil, as though it were a pun. Nature is two-sided, double-talking, like the witches. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” they cry, and Macbeth enters the play unconsciously echoing them, for he is never original but chock-full of the “milk of human kindness,” which does not mean kindness in the modern sense but simply human “nature,” human kind. The play is about Nature, and its blind echo, human nature.

Macbeth,
in short, shows life in the cave. Without religion, animism rules the outer world, and without faith, the human soul is beset by hobgoblins. This at any rate was Shakespeare’s opinion, to which modern history, with the return of the irrational in the Fascist nightmare and its fear of new specters in the form of Communism, Socialism, etc., lends support. It is a troubling thought that bloodstained Macbeth, of all Shakespeare’s characters, should seem the most “modern,” the only one you could transpose into contemporary battle dress or a sport shirt and slacks.

The contemporary Macbeth, a churchgoer, is indifferent to religion, to the categorical imperative or any group of principles that may be held to stand above and govern human behavior. Like the old Macbeth, he’d gladly hazard the future life, not only for himself but for the rest of humanity: “Though palaces and pyramids do slope Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure Of Nature’s germens tumble all together...” He listens to soothsayers and prophets and has been out on the heath and in the desert, putting questions to Nature on a grand scale, lest his rivals for power get ahead of him and Banquo’s stock, instead of his, inherit the earth. Unloosing the potential destructiveness that was always there in Nature, as Shakespeare understood, the contemporary Macbeth, like the old one, is not even a monster, though he may yet breed monsters, thanks to his activities on the heath; he is timorous, unimaginative, and the prayer he would like to say most fervently is simply “Amen.”

June, 1962

A Bolt from the Blue

P
ALE FIRE
IS A
jack-in-the-box, a Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself kit. This new work by Vladimir Nabokov consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor’s preface, notes, index, and proof corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer’s directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and cross-references, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed, and these “levels” are not the customary “levels of meaning” of modernist criticism but planes in a fictive space, rather like those houses of memory in medieval mnemonic science, where words, facts, and numbers were stored till wanted in various rooms and attics, or like the Houses of astrology into which the heavens are divided.

The poem has been written by a sixty-one-year-old American poet of the homely, deceptively homely, Robert Frost type who teaches at Wordsmith College in New Wye, Appalachia; his name is John Shade, his wife is called Sybil, nee Irondell or Swallow; his parents were ornithologists; he and his wife had a fat, plain daughter, Hazel, who killed herself young by drowning in a lake near the campus. Shade’s academic “field” is Pope, and his poem,
Pale Fire,
is in Pope’s heroic measure; in content, it is closer to Wordsworthian pastures—rambling, autobiographical, full of childhood memories, gleanings from Nature, interrogations of the universe: a kind of American
Prelude.
The commentator is Shade’s colleague, a refugee professor from Zembla, a mythical country north of Russia. His name is Charles Kinbote; he lives next door to Shade in a house he has rented from Judge Goldsworth, of the law faculty, absent on sabbatical leave. (If, as the commentator points out, you recombine the syllables of “Wordsmith” and “Goldsworth,” you get Goldsmith and Wordsworth, two masters of the heroic couplet.) At the moment of writing, Kinbote has fled Appalachia and is living in a log cabin in a motor court at Cedarn in the Southwest; Shade has been murdered, fortuitously, by a killer calling himself Jack Grey, and Kinbote, with the widow’s permission, has taken his manuscript to edit in hiding, far from the machinations of two rival Shadians on the faculty. Kinbote, known on the campus as the Great Beaver, is a bearded vegetarian pederast, who has had bad luck with his youthful “ping-pong partners”; a lonely philologue and long-standing admirer of the poet (he has translated him into Zemblan), he has the unfortunate habit of “dropping in” on the Shades, spying on them (they don’t draw theirs) with binoculars from a post at a window or in the shrubbery; jealous of Mrs. Shade, he is always available for a game of chess or a “good ramble” with the tolerant poet, whom he tirelessly entertains with his Zemblan reminiscences. “I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you,” a faculty wife hisses at him in the grocery store. “What’s more, you are insane.”

That is the plot’s ground floor. Then comes the
piano nobile.
Kinbote believes that he has inspired his friend with his tales of his native Zembla, of its exiled king, Charles the Beloved, and the Revolution that started in the Glass Works; indeed, he has convinced himself that the poem is
his
poem—the occupational mania of commentators—and cannot be properly understood without his gloss, which narrates Zemblan events paralleling the poet’s composition. What at once irresistibly peeps out from Kinbote’s notes is that he himself is none other than Charles the Beloved, disguised in a beaver as an academic; he escaped from Zembla in a motorboat and flew to America after a short stay on the Cote d’Azur; an American sympathizer, a trustee of Wordsmith, Mrs. Sylvia O’Donnell, has found him a post on the language faculty. His colleagues (read “mortal enemies”) include—besides burly Professor Hurley, head of the department and an adherent of
“engazhay”
literature—Professor C, a literary Freudian and owner of an ultra-modern villa, a certain Professor Pnin, and an instructor, Mr. Gerald Emerald, a young man in a bow tie and green velvet jacket. Meanwhile the Shadows, the Secret Police of Zembla, have hired a gunman, Jakob Gradus, alias Jacques d’Argus, alias Jacques Degré, alias Jack Grey, to do away with the royal exile. Gradus’ slow descent on Wordsmith synchronizes, move by move, with Shade’s composition of
Pale Fire;
the thug, wearing a brown suit, a trilby, and carrying a Browning, alights on the campus the day the poem is finished. In the library he converges with Mr. Gerald Emerald, who obligingly gives him a lift to Professor Kinbote’s house. There, firing at the king, he kills the poet; when the police take him, he masks his real purpose and identity by claiming to be a lunatic escaped from a local asylum.