Writing on the Wall (3 page)

This second story, the
piano nobile,
is the “real” story as it appears to Kinbote of the events leading to the poet’s death. But the real, real story, the story underneath, has been transpiring gradually, by degrees, to the reader. Kinbote is mad. He is a harmless refugee pedant named Botkin who teaches in the Russian department and who fancies himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. This delusion, which he supposes to be his secret, is known to the poet, who pities him, and to the campus at large, which does not—the insensate woman in the grocery store was expressing the general opinion. The killer is just what he claims to be—Jack Grey, an escaped criminal lunatic, who has been sent to the State Asylum for the Insane by, precisely, Judge Goldsworth, Botkin’s landlord. It is Judge Goldsworth that the madman intended to murder, not Botkin, alias Kinbote, alias Charles the Beloved; the slain poet was the victim of a case of double mistaken identity (his poem, too, is murdered by its editor, who mistakes it for something else). The clue to Gradus-Grey, moreover, was in Botkin’s hands when, early in the narrative, he leafed through a sentimental album kept by the judge containing photographs of the killers he had sent to prison or condemned to death: “...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), a bright little parricide aged seven...” He got, as it were, a preview of the coming film—a frequent occurrence in this kind of case. Projected onto Zembla, in fact, are the daily events of the campus. Gradus’ boss, Uzumrudov, one of the higher Shadows, met on the Riviera in a green velvet jacket is slowly recognized to be “little Mr. Anon.,” alias Gerald Emerald, alias Reginald Emerald, a teacher of freshman English, who has made advances to (read in reverse “had advances made to him by”) Professor Botkin, and who is also the author of a rude anonymous note suggesting that Professor Botkin has halitosis. The paranoid political structure called Zembla in Botkin’s exiled fantasy—with its Extremist government and secret agents—is a transliteration of a pederast’s persecution complex, complicated by the “normal” conspiracy-mania of a faculty common room.

But there is in fact a “Zembla,” behind the Iron Curtain. The real, real story, the plane of ordinary sanity and common sense, the reader’s presumed plane, cannot be accepted as final. The explanation that Botkin is mad will totally satisfy only Professors H. and C. and their consorts, who can put aside
Pale Fire
as a detective story, with the reader racing the author to the solution.
Pale Fire
is not a detective story, though it includes one. Each plane or level in its shadow box proves to be a false bottom; there is an infinite perspective regression, for the book is a book of mirrors.

Shade’s poem begins with a very beautiful image, of a bird that has flown against a window and smashed itself, mistaking the reflected sky in the glass for the true azure. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane.” This image is followed by another, still more beautiful and poignant, a picture of that trick of optics whereby a room at night, when the shades have not been drawn, is reflected in the dark landscape outside.

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!

“That crystal land,” notes the commentator, loony Professor Botkin. “Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country.” On the plane of everyday sanity, he errs. But on the plane of poetry and magic, he is speaking the simple truth, for Zembla is Semblance, Appearance, the mirror-realm, the Looking-Glass of Alice. This is the first clue in the treasure hunt, pointing the reader to the dual or punning nature of the whole work’s composition.
Pale Fire,
a reflective poem, is also a prism of reflections. Zembla, the land of seeming, now governed by the Extremists, is the antipodes of Appalachia, in real homespun democratic America, but it is also the
semblable,
the twin, as seen in a distorting glass. Semblance becomes resemblance. John Shade and Gradus have the same birthday—July 5.

The word “Zembla” can be found in Pope’s
Essay on Man
(Epistle 2, v); there it signifies the fabulous extreme north, the land of the polar star.

But where the Extreme of Vice was ne’er agreed.

Ask where’s the North? At York, ’tis on the Tweed;

In Scotland, at the Oroades, and there,

At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where;

No creature owns it in the first degree,

But thinks his neighbor farther gone than he.

Pope is saying that vice, when you start to look for it, is always somewhere else—a will-o’-the-wisp. This somewhere else is Zembla, but it is also next door, at your neighbor’s. Now Botkin is Shade’s neighbor and vice versa; moreover, people who live in glass houses...Shade has a vice, the bottle, the festive glass, and Botkin’s vice is that he is an
invert, i.e.,
turned upside down, as the antipodes are, relative to each other. Further, the reader will notice that the word “Extreme,” with a capital (Zemblan Extremists), and the word “degree” (Gradus is degree in Russian) both occur in these verses of Pope, in the neighborhood of Zembla, pre-mirroring
Pale Fire,
as though by second sight. Reading on, you find (lines 267-268), the following couplet quoted by John Shade in a discarded variant of his own manuscript:

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,

The sot a hero, lunatic a king...

The second line is
Pale Fire
in a nutshell. Pope continues (lines 269-270):

The starving chemist in his golden views

Supremely blest, the poet in his muse.

Supremely Blest
is the title of John Shade’s book on Pope. In this section of the poem, Pope is playing on the light-and-shade antithesis and on what an editor calls the “pattern of paradoxical attitudes” to which man’s dual nature is subject. The lunatic Botkin incidentally, playing king,
inverts
his name.

To leave Pope momentarily and return to Zembla, there is an actual Nova Zembla, a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean, north of Archangel. The name is derived from the Russian
Novaya Zemlya,
which means “new land.” Or
Terre Neuve,
Newfoundland, the New World. Therefore Appalachia = Zembla. But since for Pope Zembla was roughly equal to Greenland, then Zembla must be a green land, an Arcadia. Arcady is a name often bestowed by Professor Botkin on New Wye, Appalachia, which also gets the epithet “green,” and he quotes
“Et in Arcadia ego,”
for Death has come to Arcady in the shape of Gradus, ex-glazier and killer, the emissary of Zembla on the other side of the world. Green-jacketed Gerald Emerald gives Death a lift in his car.

The complementary color to green is red. Zembla has turned red after the Revolution that began in the Glass Factory. Green and red flash on and off in the narrative like traffic signals and sometimes reverse their message. Green appears to be the color of death, and red the color of life; red is the king’s color and green the color of his enemies. Green is pre-eminently the color of seeming (the theatrical greenroom), the color, too, of camouflage, for Nature, being green at least in summer, can hide a green-clad figure in her verdure. But red is a color that is dangerous to a wearer who is trying to melt into the surroundings. The king escapes from his royal prison wearing a red wool cap and sweater (donned in the dark) and he is only saved by the fact that forty loyal Karlists, his supporters, put on red wool caps and sweaters, too (red wool yarn—“yarn” comes from Latin “soothsayer”—is protective Russian folk magic) and confuse the Shadows with a multitude of false kings. Yet when the king arrives in America he floats down with a green silk parachute (because he is in disguise?), and his gardener at New Wye, a Negro whom he calls Balthasar (the black king of the three Magi), has a green thumb, a red sweater, and is seen on a green ladder; it is the gardener who saves the king’s life when Gradus, alias Grey, appears.

Now when Alice went through the looking-glass she entered a chess game as a white pawn. There is surely a chess game or chess problem in
Pale Fire,
played on a board of green and red squares. The poet describes his residence as “the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green”; the Rose Court in the royal palace in Onhava (Far Away), the Zemblan capital, is a sectile mosaic with rose petals cut out of red stone and large thorns cut out of green marble. There is much stress, in place descriptions, on framing, and reference is made to chess problems of “the solus rex type.” The royal fugitive may be likened to a lone king running away on the board. But in problems of the solus rex type, the king, though outnumbered, is, curiously enough, not always at a disadvantage; for example, a king and two knights cannot checkmate a lone king—the game is stalemated or drawn. All the chess games played by characters in the story are draws. The plot of the novel ends in a kind of draw, if not a stalemate. The king’s escape from the castle is doubtless castling.

Chess is the perfect mirror-game, with the pieces drawn up confronting each other as in a looking-glass; moreover, castles, knights, and bishops have their twins as well as their opposite numbers. The piece, by the way, called the bishop in English in French is
“le fou”
or madman. In the book there are two opposed lunatics at large: Gradus and Kinbote. The moves made by Gradus from the Zemblan capital to Wordsmith in New Wye parallel spatially the moves made in time by the poet toward the completion of his poem; at the zero hour, there is a convergence of space and time. What is shadowed forth here may be a game of three-dimensional chess—three simultaneous games played by a pair of chess wizards on three transparent boards arranged vertically. A framed crystal land, the depth-echo of the bedroom projected onto the snow.

The moves of Gradus also hint some astrological progression. Botkin reached Judge Goldsworth’s “chateau” on February 5, 1959; on Monday, February 16, he was introduced to the poet at lunch at the Faculty Club; on March 14, he dined at the Shades’, etc. The magnum opus of old John Shade is begun July 1; under the sign of Cancer, he walks sideways, like a crab. The poem is completed (except for the last line) the day of Gradus’ arrival, July 21, on the cusp between Cancer and Leo. As the poet walks to his death, the sound of horseshoes is heard from a neighboring yard (horseshoe crabs?). The fateful conjunction of three planets seems to be indicated, and the old astrological notion of events on earth mirroring the movements of the stars in the sky.

The twinning and doubling proliferate; the multiplication of levels casts a prismatic, opaline light on Faculty Row. Zembla is not just land but earth—“Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp,” as John Shade names the globe; a Zemblan feuilletonist had fancifully dubbed its capital Uranograd—“Sky City.” The fate of Charles the Beloved is a rippling reflection of the fate of Charles II of England on his travels, of Bonnie Prince Charlie and of the deposed Shakespearean rulers for whom streets are named in Onhava—Coriolanus Lane, Timon Alley. Prospero of
The Tempest
pops in and out of the commentary, like a Fata Morgana, to mislead the reader into looking for “pale fire” in Shakespeare’s swan song. It is not there, but
The Tempest
is in
Pale Fire:
Prospero’s emerald isle, called the Ile of Divels, in the New World, Iris, and Juno’s peacock, sea caves, the chess game of Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero’s enchantments, his lost kingdom, and Caliban, whom he taught language, that supreme miracle of mirroring.

Nature’s imitations of Nature are also evoked—echo, the mocking-bird perched on a television aerial (“TV’s huge paperclip”), the iridescent eyes of the peacock’s fan, the cicada’s emerald case, a poplar tree’s rabbit-foot—all the “natural shams” of protective mimicry by which, as Shade says in his poem, “The reed becomes a bird, the knobby twig An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big Wickedly folded moth.” These disguises are not different from the exiled king’s red cap and sweater (like the markings of a bird) or the impersonation of an actor. Not only Nature’s shams but Nature’s freaks dance in and out of the lines: rings around the moon, rainbows and sun dogs (bright spots of light, often colored, sometimes seen on the ring of the solar halo), the heliotrope or sun-turner, which, by a trick of language, is also the bloodstone, Muscovy glass (mica), phosphorescence (named for Venus, the Morning Star), mirages, the roundlet of pale light called the
ignis fatuus,
fireflies, everything speckled, freckled, curiously patterned, dappled, quaint (as in Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty”). The arrowy tracks of the pheasant, the red heraldic barrings of the Vanessa butterfly, snow crystals. And the imitation of natural effects in manufactures: stained glass, paperweights containing snowstorms and mountain views, glass eyes. Not to mention curios like the bull’s-eye lantern, glass giraffes, Cartesian devils. Botkin, the bearded urning, is himself a prime “freak of Nature,” like Humbert Humbert. And freakish puns of language (“Red Sox Beat Yanks 5/4 on Chapman’s Homer”), “Muscat” (a cat-and-mouse game), anagrams, mirror-writing, such words as “versipel.” The author loves the ampersand and dainty diminutives ending in “let” or “et” (nymphet). Rugged John Shade is addicted to “word-golf,” which he induces Botkin to play with him. Botkin’s best scores are hate-love in three (late-lave-love), lass-male in four (last-mast-malt-male), live-dead in five. If you play word-golf with the title words, you can get pale-hate in two and fire-love in three. Or pale-love in three and fire-hate in three.