Shade and Shape in Pale Fire
by Brian Boyd
page six of nine
Let us return to Shade's last hours. He breaks off his poem, saying to Kinbote: "I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God." (C.991, 288) To judge by the symmetry of the cantos, he has been planning a thousand-line poem, and in the course of this last day's work, he has found both a title and an ending. Noting in the course of a backward glance over his career that he has passed beyond titles filched from other writers, he now pretends to lapse back into old ways from sheer haste when he steals the phrase "pale fire" from Shakespeare. In fact by filching from Timon's denunciation of universal thievery he wittily mocks the whole practice of purloining titles and at the same time through the imagery of reflection in Timon's speech he reflects in turn the lingering after-image of his own opening lines.17 At the end of the poem Shade wants to answer the highly-wrought image of the poem's opening with a quiet fade-out into the mundane harmonies around him. At the same time, by virtue of the Vanessa, with its crimson-barred wings, he can close off the poem with a visual echo of the opening, the red streak on a waxwing's wings. The harmonies gently gather, as "the flowing shade and ebbing light" (P.996, 69) again draws on the tide-and-shine imagery from the Timon passage, while not interrupting the relaxed, "sustained / Low hum of harmony" (P.963-64, 68) of his close. No wonder Shade is pleased with the way the end of his poem is working out.
And yet it doesn't seem quite to have ended. The poem is in heroic couplets throughout, and the 999th line has no matching rhyme. Shade declares in the penultimate verse paragraph:
After equating the design of his verse and his universe like this, Shade would utterly undermine his serene confidence in the deep harmony of things--which he plainly seeks as his poem's final note--were he to leave the last rhyme unfinished. He must surely plan one more line to round the poem off.I feel I understand
980
But as he accepts Kinbote's invitation for a drink and walks across the lane to the Goldsworth house, he is shot and killed by an intruder. He has asserted that if his private universe scans right, so does the verse of galaxies divine, but suddenly the rhyme is broken off forever, his confidence cruelly mocked, and the meaningless breach of a grotesque death substituted for the promise of continuity and harmony.
Yet if from beyond Shade can help Kinbote to incorporate the killing as a note to line 1000, identified as a repetition of the first line, and to equate the approach of unexpected death with the composition of the poem, he will complete "Pale Fire" in a way richer than he could have ever imagined. He ends the antepenultimate paragraph:
Presumably he would like to have ended the whole poem with a consonne d'appui; if the next line after line 999 reads "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" it will indeed have that consonne d'appui (the "l" of "slain" rhyming with not just the vowel, but also with the preceding consonant, of "slane"), and it seems to disclose indeed a "fantastically planned, / Richly rhymed life." All his life, his poem tells us, he has been trying to project himself imaginatively beyond death, as in that image of the waxwing. Now he seems to have projected his imagination into that of Kinbote, whose first note records a waxwing-like bird in the armorial bearings of Charles II of Zembla. Now Shade seems to see that the poem has been designed by a force beyond him so that if he finds the best solution--if he inspires Kinbote with the idea that Jack Grey is Jakob Gradus, a glassmaker and a Shadow in pursuit of Charles II--then he can simultaneously satisfy Kinbote's frustration at the lack of connection between Zembla and "Pale Fire," complete his own poem in an unimaginably rich and complex way, and fill out the generous patterns of a solicitous fate.
970
Instead of the cold blast of sceptical irony that Shade's murder at first seems to release, a flood of radiant positives courses through the poem. Shade had written of his hunch that he could find the solution in "the contrapuntal theme; / Just this: not text, but texture," and in "Playing a game of worlds" (P.807-19, 62-63). Although he had built his own counterpoint of sound and sense into the poem, and played a game of worlds in the counterpoint he devised for Hazel's last night, he can now help create a far richer counterpoint, in the Gradus theme, a far richer texture, in the interplay of commentary and poem, a far ampler "game of worlds," as he juxtaposes himself and Gradus approaching through "spacetime" (C.209, 163).18
Kinbote would like in his first note "to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus," with the date Shade began the poem, but in the fantasy that by the time he writes has become fixed in his mind, Gradus "actually . . . left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5" (C.1-4, 74). But Shade can synchronize even better: he has Kinbote imagine that Gradus is assigned his orders to kill Charles II in the Glass Works, as the Shadows gulp down vodka out of test tubes, "at 0:05, July 2, 1959--which happens to be also the date upon which"--and even the very minute that--"an innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem" (C.171, 151). Shade had said he was "ready to become a floweret / Or a fat fly, but never, to forget"; now he has in a sense entered into the "pansy" or the "botfly" Kinbote, and helps him record not only all that Kinbote thinks he remembers, but more of his own wife and daughter and himself than he had room for in his poem. He had imagined himself in the "reflected sky" of the poem's opening lines, and now he finds himself in Zembla, "land of reflections," finds himself in the mirror-world of death, trying on Kinbote, as it were, trying out the switch from right-handed to left-handed, from heterosexual to homosexual, from the control and fulfilment of his own life to the turmoil and desperation of Kinbote's.
Line after line in the poem takes on a new significance: "All colors made me happy: even gray," Shade muses, and Kinbote comments in a way that is cracked in him but flawless coming from Shade: "By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later" (C.17 and 29, 77). Shade writes of himself as he shaves and composes: "Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows" (P.937); Gradus or de Grey shaves only every second day.
Near the start of the poem Shade switches from the waxwing in summer to bird tracks in snow:
20No, he was not, but Holmes in "The Final Problem" appears to have died, his footsteps leading to the edge of the abyss into the Reichenbach Falls into which he seems to have toppled in a desperate fight with Moriarty. In the next story, "The Adventure of the Empty House," written years later, he seems as it were to come back from the dead to tell Watson that he has not died, that after Moriarty had tumbled alone to his death, he could have reversed his boots as he had done on previous occasions, but instead had tried to evade later pursuit by Moriarty's henchmen by climbing up the cliff from the track to leave no trail. Within "The Adventure of the Empty House," he and Watson watch through a window as a killer seeking revenge shoots at a wax image of himself that Holmes has left in his Baker Street window.19
In Pale Fire Shade, still surviving beyond death, can direct Kinbote to add a note equating line 1000 with line 1, so that after the poem's final word, "lane," there is now as it were a dot and an arrow pointing back to the beginning, where we find the after-image of another bird that has passed on, and another wax image in a window: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain." And in the note to this new line 1000, Kinbote records that Shade, after he crosses the lane in line 999, is shot, as if in synchrony with the waxwing's death in the window, by someone seeking revenge.
Even the title explodes with new meaning. No longer largely a wry self-deprecatory pseudo-stop-gap, it swells with new ironies as the theme of mutual theft in Timon's speech now applies not only to Shade's lifting a phrase from Shakespeare but also to Kinbote's stealing the manuscript of Shade's poem. Behind Timon's jaundiced vision of universal thievery, we can see an expansive circulation of energies between sun and moon and sea, like the interchange we can now see between Shade's New Wye, Kinbote's Zembla, and the beyond.
From the relationship between the waxwing of line 1 (a cedar waxwing) and Cedarn, the "ghost town" (C. 609-14, 235) where Kinbote sits as he writes his commentary under Shade's influence, to the wheelbarrow in line 999 that precedes by a moment Shade's death and so recalls the toy wheelbarrow preceding the childhood fits in which Shade was "tugged at by playful death" (P.140),20 the poem now explodes with "richly rhymed life" to a degree the mortal Shade could never have imagined.
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17. The "moondrop" in Shade's "But this transparent thingum does require / Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire" (P.961-62, 68) also evokes Timon's interlocked images. A moondrop is "a liquid of magical potency, supposed to be shed by the moon" (Webster's Second).
18. Gradus is associated with "space and time" again at C.171, 152; C.741, 255; C.949/2, 277.
19. "The Final Problem" (1891), "The Adventure of the Empty House" (1894), in Doyle.
20. The link between the two wheelbarrows was first pointed out by Carol T. Williams, 36.
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