Whack fol the dah

ELTE Papers in English Studies

Sorozatszerkesztő
Friedrich Judit
series editor
 Whack fol the dah

Írások Takács Ferenc 65. születésnapjára

Writings for Ferenc Takács on his 65th birthday

Szerkesztette
Farkas Ákos, Simonkay Zsuzsanna,
Vesztergom Janina
editors

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Bölcsészettudományi Kar
Angol–Amerikai Intézet
Anglisztika Tanszék
Department of English Studies
School of English and American Studies
Faculty of Humanities, Loránd Eötvös University

Budapest • 2013
A kiadvány megjelenését az OTKA 79197. számú projektje tette lehetővé
The publication was supported by OTKA Grant No 79197

Copyright © Szerzők / The Authors, 2013

Copyright of The Seven-Day Camel © Donald E. Morse, 2012
All rights reserved
Editing copyright © Farkas Ákos, Simonkay Zsuzsanna,
Vesztergom Janina, 2013

Kiadta az ELTE BTK Angol–Amerikai Intézet Anglisztika Tanszék

Minden jog fenntartva
Published by the Department of English Studies, ELTE University
All rights reserved

A borítót tervezte / Cover design by Szalay Miklós (www.szalamiki.hu)

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ISSN 2061-5655
ISBN 978-963-284-305-6
Márta Pellérdi
Nabokov, Wilson, and the Dead Poets
Literary Friendship as Sub-text in Pale Fire1

And he was a very dear friend indeed!

– Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

When Nabokov moved to the US in 1940, it was Edmund Wilson who

helped advance his career as an American writer. Wilson, by then, had
already established his reputation as a distinguished literary critic and
novelist. As Associate Editor of The New Republic, and later as a regu-
lar reviewer and contributor to The New Yorker, he helped Nabokov
publish his stories and introduced him to other literary and academic
contacts. The lengthy correspondence between the two friends, first
published in 1979, was characterized by a frequent and lively intellec-
tual exchange of ideas in the forties and early fifties. The letters, how-
ever, became fewer in number, shorter in length and more formal in
tone, with a conspicuous gap marking the period between 1964 and
1971.2 Wilson and Nabokov discussed and argued over mainly literary
subjects in their letters, never exactly seeing eye-to-eye in judging the
reputation of some great writers and the quality of their works. The
friendship was very valuable for Nabokov, although the two men had
different political and literary convictions: Wilson’s views on literary
criticism and social issues were influenced by Freudian and Marxist
theories, which Nabokov always criticized in a friendly manner, point-
ing out to his friend why he considered them to be misleading. They
also argued about Russian prosody: Wilson had a fair command of
Russian, but Nabokov was a native speaker and a poet at the same time,
having a deeper knowledge about Russian literature and its cultural
and political context than Wilson. It seems that when Lolita was pub-
lished in 1955 and Nabokov became famous overnight, the friendship
between the two men became somewhat strained. Wilson had to real-
ize that the émigré he had helped back in 1940 was now more famous
as a novelist than he could ever hope to be. When Nabokov was writing
1.  This essay is an abridged and modified version of Chapter Five in M.
Pellérdi, Nabokov’s Palace: The American Novels (Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 79–111.
2.  Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, The Nabokov-Wilson Letters:
Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson 1940–1971,
ed. Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).

377
Pale Fire in the late fifties and early sixties, the friendship was already
on the decline. When the English version of Eugene Onegin, translated
by Nabokov, was published in four volumes two years after Pale Fire in
1964, this long and warm friendship came to an end. Wilson publicly
attacked Nabokov’s literal translation of Pushkin’s great poem on the
columns of The New York Review of Books, and Nabokov fought back in
the Encounter, trying to defend his translation and commentary, a work
of scholarship which he had been engaged in for more than a decade.
Pale Fire, Nabokov’s fifth English novel, was written while the author
was still working on Eugene Onegin. My argument in this essay is that
one of Pale Fire’s themes, besides other themes – the most commonly
recognized one being literary criticism – is literary friendship, inspired
by Nabokov’s friendship with Wilson.3 This theme is reinforced by the
intertextual patterns that offer a literary historical overview of the
English literary discourse on melancholy and madness. The literary
historical sub-text underlines Nabokov’s intention to become a part of
the English and American literary tradition; by deciding to become an
American writer, he takes care to ground his text within this tradition.
In the commentary to Eugene Onegin Nabokov referred to the dis-
course on melancholy and madness in English literature as the “moon-
tomb-ghost theme that was, in a sense, the logical result of Death’s
presence in Arcadia.”4 This theme remains surprisingly constant
throughout centuries of English poetry beginning with Shakespeare
and running through the writings of English poets from the seven-
teenth until the twentieth century. When Nabokov mentions death’s
presence in Arcadia, he is not only referring to the prevalence of such
a theme in literature ever since the Renaissance, but also to a famous
picture by Nicolas Poussin – known under the title of “Et in Arcadia
ego” or “The Arcadian Shepherds” – and a highly appraised interpreta-
tion of the painting by the art critic Erwin Panofsky, which he discussed
with Wilson in the letters.5 The shepherds on the painting are absorbed
by the inscription on a tombstone, but instead of being surprised at
3.  The Onegin-Lenski friendship in Eugene Onegin might also have been
inspirational.
4.  Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr
Pushkin, trans. Vladimir Nabokov, vol. 3 (New York: Bollingen Series 72,
Pantheon Books, 1964), p. 152.
5.  Nabokov and Wilson, pp. 318–20. See more on the significance of
Poussin’s painting in relation to Pale Fire in Emmy Waldman, “Who’s Speaking
in Arcady? The Voices of Death, Dementia and Art in Pale Fire,” in NOJ / НОЖ:
Nabokov Online Journal 4 (2010), accessed 11 December 2012 <http://etc.
dal.ca/noj/articles/volume4/7_Waldman_Final.pdf>; and Gerard de Vries
and D. B. Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2006), p. 77.

378
discovering that Death is present, they seem to be “immersed in mel-
low meditation on a beautiful past.”6 According to Panofsky, it is Death
itself speaking in the Latin phrase and reminding the shepherds that
“Even in Arcadia, I, Death, hold sway.”7 Panofsky also draws attention
to other interpretations of the phrase, such as “I, too, lived in delightful
Arcady.”8 Thus, the phrase is a reminder that the dead also inhabited
Arcady once, and that one of the functions of art, besides reminding us
of this melancholic fact, is to remember, especially those poets (now
in Elysium) who were once in Arcady, and those who lived in the past
just as we are now living in the present. Pale Fire, this essay also ar-
gues, is full of direct or indirect references to English poets who once
lived in Arcady, especially ones for whom friendship with another poet
became artistically inspirational and who were in some way affected
by or subjected to what was in those days referred to or diagnosed as
melancholy.
Charles Kinbote, a member of the faculty at Wordsmith University
in Nabokov’s fictional Arcadia of New Wye, Appalachia, is the insane
and completely unreliable narrator, who is editing and annotating
John Shade’s autobiographical and incomplete 999-line narrative
poem after the latter’s death. Throughout his rambling commentary,
Kinbote is posing as a former close friend of the deceased Shade. After
gradually realizing that Kinbote, the alleged ex-King of Zembla, “suf-
fers from classical paranoia” and “delusions of grandeur,” as Brian
Boyd described his ailment, readers should also be careful in accepting
what he has to say about his former friendship with Shade.9 Kinbote
tries to interest Shade in his personal “misfortunes” and fantasies
(27). The poet kindly listens, but does not encourage his next-door
neighbor’s efforts to create a solid bond of friendship between them.
Kinbote finds an explanation for Shade’s apparent indifference: “Our
close friendship was on that higher, exclusively intellectual level where
one can rest from emotional troubles, not share them” (27).10 Again
and again, he emphasizes the depth of their relationship:

And he was a very dear friend indeed! The calendar says I had
known him only for a few months but there exist friendships
6.  Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Anchor
Books, 1955), p. 313.
7.  Panofsky, p. 310.
8.  Panofsky, p. 317.
9.  Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 60.
10.  All parenthetical page references refer to the following edition:
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962).

379
 which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of
transparent time … (18–19)
Shade kindly listens to the remarkable story of the King’s de-
thronement and escape from Extremist Zembla, but the final version
of his poem lacks almost any mention of the “distant northern land,”
its king and the friendship with Shade (315). As Kinbote remarks in
his disappointment, “Vainly does one look in Pale Fire (oh, pale, in-
deed!) for the warmth of my hand gripping yours, poor Shade!” (177).
In order to prove that he is the best person for the job of editing the
manuscript, Kinbote cannot refrain from making literary analogies
and finding literary role models from the history of English literature
to support his argument:
Surely, it would not be easy to discover in the history of poetry
a similar case – that of two men, different in origin, upbringing,
thought associations, spiritual intonation and mental mode,
one a cosmopolitan scholar, the other a fireside poet, entering
into a secret compact of this kind. (80)
Kinbote ends up, however, depressed, full of despair, isolated and
lonely, disappointed in friendship, just as Shakespeare’s mad hero,
Timon of Athens, the eponym of the play from which Shade borrows
the title for his poem. The references to Timon of Athens in Pale Fire,
it seems, serve not only the purpose of stressing the theme of literary
thievery and highlighting the ontological “'shadow' and 'substance'”
quandary,11 but to introduce the theme of literary friendship and
the discourse on melancholy and madness in English poetry on the
first pages of the commentary, which will prove to be an undercur-
rent, or “contrapuntal” theme (line 807) throughout the rest of the
sub-text.12 It is possible that suicide – hors-texte – will follow in the
wake of Kinbote’s disillusionment. Kinbote provides an apology of sui-
cide in the Commentary, and the foreword is dated October 19, 1959.
Nabokov in an interview admitted that the day marks the anniversary
of Jonathan Swift’s death and added that Kinbote “certainly did” com-
mit suicide after he finished his commentary, most probably on that
11.  See Ferenc Takács, “‘Shadow’ and ‘Substance’: Pale Fire and Timon of
Athens,” in Míves semmiségek / Elaborate Trifles: Tanulmányok Ruttkay Kálmán
80. születésnapjára / Studies for Kálmán G. Ruttkay on His 80th Birthday, ed.
Gábor Ittzés and András Kiséry (Piliscsaba: Pázmány Péter Catholic University,
2002), 97–106, pp. 99–104.
12.  That the theme of melancholy was very much present in the literary
discourse of the seventeenth century is also illustrated by Robert Burton’s The
Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621.

380
very same day.13 If this is so, Kinbote had chosen the day of Swift’s
death for his suicide for a particular reason. He had seen himself in the
role of Swift, and Shade as a modern reincarnation of Alexander Pope.
Pope happens to be Shade’s favorite poet and his poem is writ-
ten in Popeian heroic couplets. Being misanthropic and melancholic,
Kinbote feels closer to Swift. Shade had even written a book on Pope,
which is “concerned mainly with Pope’s techniques but also contains
pithy observations on ‘the stylized morals of his age’” (195).14 Swift
and Pope had similar literary tastes and were joined in their denun-
ciation of untalented, “dull” poets and pedantic critics. But Kinbote’s
fancies of Zembla also find their source in Pope’s poem. Zembla is a
garbled form of the Russian word “zemlya” and it is also Pope’s dream-
land from his Essay on Man.15 But other poems, such as “The Temple of
Fame” and The Dunciad, dedicated to the subject of criticism, are also
scattered with references to Zembla.16
There also existed a Zembla for Swift. In The Battle of the Books
the seat of allegorical Criticism is situated in Zembla.”17 Kinbote, the
critic, also comes from the same distant land of fancy, or so he would
have his readers believe. He is, however, interested mainly in similari-
ties between Swift’s personality and his own, as when he describes his
own misanthropic inclinations:
I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes. I too am a desponder
in my nature, an uneasy, peevish, and suspicious man, although I
have my moments of volatility and fou rire. (173)

Swift characterizes his life in Ireland as “a stranger in a strange

land” and some of the letters written toward the end of his life might
even “suggest that Swift is profoundly depressed, on the brink of a

13.  Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p.

74.
14.  Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin, in a similar manner, makes “pithy observa-
tions on the stylized morals of the age,” (195) and offers a broad perspective
on the origins of motifs and literary thievery.
15.  The Popeian analogies were first discussed by Mary McCarthy in “A
Bolt from the Blue,” in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays
(New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1970), 15–34.
16.  G. M. Hyde, Vladimir Nabokov: America’s Russian Novelist (London:
Marion Boyars, 1973), p. 172.
17.  Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub with other Early Works (1696–1707),
ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), p. 103. Boyd notes the link
between Swift’s and Kinbote’s suicide in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, pp. 171, 280–1,
27n.

381
nervous breakdown or suicide.”18 If Swift’s melancholy at the end of his
life, his preference for prose over poetry, is taken into consideration,
then it can be safely said that Kinbote seems to be following in Swift’s
footsteps, even choosing the day of his death to match Swift’s.
The epigraph of Pale Fire, however, is taken from James Boswell’s
The Life of Samuel Johnson.19 John Shade even resembles Dr. Johnson
(267). Some aspects of the “friendship”between Shade and Kinbote
are similar to the relationship between Johnson and Boswell.20
Biographers constantly emphasize Boswell’s leech-like attachment to
his older friend. Shade is very polite to Kinbote, however, and would
never venture as far as Dr. Johnson did to break out in the following
manner: “You have but two topics, sir; … yourself and me, and I am sick
of both.”21 Dr. Johnson may have been annoyed by Boswell occasionally,
but he finally rewarded his young friend by advocating his member-
ship in the distinguished Literary Club. In a similar vein, Shade also
supports Kinbote’s literary ambitions by inspiring him after his death
as a ghost to write the commentary (if we accept Boyd’ interpretation),
which will prove to be the warp to the weft of Shade’s text.22
Johnson was not just a poet, but a biographer, like Boswell, and
a scholar, who wrote about other English poets – Collins, Cowley,
Swift, Pope, Dryden, Milton and Gray – in Lives of the Poets. He spent
several years writing the Dictionary of the English Language (just as
Nabokov with translating Eugene Onegin), and is known also for his
critical edition of Shakespeare. Boswell, on the other hand, just as
Kinbote, also had rivals. Mrs. Piozzi’s and Sir John Hawkins’s versions
of Dr. Johnson’s life, however, cannot match Boswell’s in liveliness,
18.  Ann Cline Kelly, Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media and
the Man (New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) p. 103.
19.  Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967),
p. 299.
20.  See an earlier article on the subject of the Shade-Kinbote, Dr. Johnson-
Boswell analogy: M. Pellérdi, “The Role of Biography and Literary Allusions in
Pale Fire,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 2.1 (1996) 103–
116. Helen Deutsch discusses the relevance of Boswell’s epigraph, the Pope-
Swift and Boswell-Johnson friendship in the context of the Kinbote and Shade
relationship in Loving Dr. Johnson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2005), pp. 209–25. Jeffrey Meyers also comments on this analogy in
“Shade’s Shadow (Reconsiderations): Samuel Johnson in Vladimir Nabokov’s
Works,” New Criterion 1 May 2006, accessed 11 December 2012 <http://
www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-15390203_ITM>.
21.  Washington Irving, Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography, ed. H. E. Coblenz
(Boston: D. Heath and Co. Publishers, 1904), p. 235, in Internet Ar-
chive, accessed 11 December 2012 <http://www.archive.org/stream/
olivergoldsmith01irvigoog#page/n10/mode/2up>.
22.  Boyd, Nabokov’s, p. 211.

382
exactitude and documentation. Similarly, “Prof. H.(!) and Prof. C.(!!),”
whom Sybil Shade is urging Kinbote to accept as “co-editors” of John
Shade’s last poem, would be rival commentators to Kinbote (18). It is
highly unlikely, however, that they would be capable of and willing to
provide a fanciful rather than a factual commentary to Shade’s poem.
It is also interesting that Johnson and Boswell both suffered from
melancholy and the fear of madness, and both wrote about their ail-
ment.
Despite accumulated honors, despite a circle of loyal, devoted
friends, many of them distinguished, during most of his adult
life Johnson was subject to episodes of depression, usually
characterized by self-reproach for indolence, feelings of guilt,
and almost constant fear of insanity.23
Boswell wrote about his malady in his Journal and in the columns
of The London Magazine. Nabokov even quotes from Boswell’s The
Hypochondriack in the Commentary to Eugene Onegin, to explain the
origin of Onegin’s spleen and demonstrate with an example the preva-
lence of the melancholy and madness theme in early nineteenth-cen-
tury English literature:
I flatter myself that The Hypochondriack may be agreeably re-
ceived as a periodical essayist in England, where the malady
known by the denomination of melancholy, hypochondria,
spleen, or vapours, has been long supposed almost universal.24
The names of Wordsmith University, where Shade and Kinbote
both teach, and Judge Goldsworth – whose house the ex-King rents and
whom, besides Dr. Johnson, Shade resembles – are the corrupted ver-
sions of the surnames of English poets. The “witty exchange of sylla-
bles invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet” refers to William
Wordsworth and Oliver Goldsmith (99). Wordsworth and Goldsmith
are just two examples in a long list of “great English poets” and Shade
seems to follow in their footsteps.25
23.  William B. Ober, “Johnson and Boswell: ‘Vile Melancholy’ and ‘The
Hypochondriack,’” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 7 (1985)
657–678, p. 659, accessed 11 December, 2012 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.
gov/pmc/articles/PMC1911859/pdf/bullnyacadmed00063-0051.pdfOber>.
Helen Deutsch mentions that “‘Be not solitary’ was Johnson’s motto from The
Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘be not idle’” (p. 213).
24.  Eugene Onegin, vol.2, p.153.
25.  Wordsworth’s early poems, such as “An Evening Walk” and “Descriptive
Sketches,” were written in heroic measure just as Goldsmith’s “The Deserted
Village.”

383
 Shade has a penchant for natural science. For Shade, natural de-
tails are important, and Pale Fire commemorates several English
poets who, like Shade, knew “the names of things.” Goldsmith, besides
being a poet, was also a naturalist, a friend of Johnson’s, a member
of Johnson’s Literary Club. But perhaps to Johnson, one of the great-
est merits of Goldsmith was his writing. “The Traveller” and “The
Deserted Village” continued the elegiac line in English poetry which
had been begun by Thomas Gray and the other Graveyard poets. Many
of the poets to whom Kinbote alludes – to show his erudition in English
poetry – share between them not only the theme of melancholy and
death in their poetry, but also an interest in the “ghost” theme, that
is finding out the truth behind supernatural occurrences. Goldsmith,
Johnson, Southey, Browning, Hardy, Tennyson, Kipling, the poets al-
luded to by Kinbote, seemingly at random, were interested in psychic
and supernatural phenomena and wrote about them, often dismissing
irrational explanations and favoring reason over the supernatural.
Through Kinbote’s references to Southey and Wordsworth, per-
haps the greatest literary friendship in the history of English poetry is
resurrected in the sub-text. The legendary close friendship between
Wordsworth and Coleridge, which finally turned into estrangement
between the two English Romantic poets after more than a decade,
is well-known and has been extensively documented by biographers.
After a time Wordsworth seems to have treated Coleridge with “great
unkindness,” which “afflicted” Coleridge and made him feel “quite
wretched.”26 It was also Coleridge who urged Wordsworth to write
The Recluse, feeding him the necessary information for the philosophi-
cal part of the poem (like Kinbote feeding his story to Shade), which
the latter was never able to complete. Only the Introduction (“Home
at Grasmere”) and “The Excursion” (which was to be the second part
of the poem) were written. Kinbote’s melancholy is similar to that
of Coleridge, who even wrote an ode on the subject (“Dejection: an
Ode”) to which Wordsworth replied with the poem “Resolution and
Independence.”
In Shade’s poem the “moon” of melancholy appears more explicitly
in his memories of his Aunt Maud. The maiden aunt’s name, if we con-
tinue the melancholy-madness-friendship train of thought, however,
evokes Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud.” The original title of the poem was
26.  Henry Crabb Robinson, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc.:
Being Selctions from the Remains, ed. Edith Morley (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1922), p. 146, in Internet Archive, accessed 11 December,
2012 <http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924079621060#page/n181/
mode/2up>.

384
“Maud or the Madness.”27 Tennyson was interested in this subject be-
cause, according to his biographer Christopher Ricks, he “was to spend
many hours and many verses in brooding on whether madness and
melancholia were hereditary.”28 Kinbote appreciates Tennyson’s po-
etry, especially “In Memoriam,” to the same extent as Housman’s “The
Shropshire Lad”: commenting on line 920 of Shade’s poem on poetic
inspiration, he considers both poems to be “the highest achievement
of English poetry in a hundred years” (269).
“In Memoriam” and “The Shropshire Lad” are both characterized
by melancholic sorrow, a certain heretic streak of blasphemy, and
were both written in honor of lost friends. Arthur Hallam encour-
aged Tennyson to write and helped him publish his first poems, and
became a profound influence on his life. He found in Hallam the same
fears he had to face, “‘his fears of going mad and of turning atheist.’”29
But Tennyson lost his friend early and unexpectedly. The most famous
passage in “In Memoriam” describes a supernatural experience the
speaker (Tennyson) had, a “communion” with his dead friend, which
happened when he was reading Hallam’s letters on the lawn at dusk
many years after Hallam’s death. The power of words in resurrecting
the dead emerges forcefully in these lines: “So word by word, and line
by line, / The dead man touch’d me from the past, / And all at once it
seem’d at last / The living soul was flash’d on mine, / And mine in this
was wound, and whirl’d …(“In Memoriam,” 95.33–8).30
Alfred Housman’s friendship with Moses Jackson was somewhat
different. Housman was a homosexual scholar-poet, whose friend
did not reciprocate his feelings. Nevertheless, he regarded Jackson as
“the man who had more influence on [his] life than anybody else.”31
Throughout the commentary, Kinbote describes himself to be con-
stantly quoting Housman. Kinbote’s homosexuality and bungling
scholarship is a poor and pathetic copy of the man he is always quot-
ing, the “pale fire” of a scholar who published editions of Manlius from
1903 to 1930. Kinbote cannot really follow in his footsteps, nor can
he live up to Swift and Boswell through his simultaneous imitations.
Housman heavily criticized imprecision and multiple interpretations

27.  Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1989), pp. 233, 235.
28.  Ricks, Tennyson, p. 52.
29.  Ricks, Tennyson, p. 36.
30.  Alfred Tennyson, The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Alfred Lord
Tennyson (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1899), p. 246.
31.  Richard Perceval Graves, A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 190.

385
in scholarly works, a tendency which he considered to be generally
widespread. To Kinbote also, there is more than one version of Shade’s
poem, and instead of commenting on the original manuscript, he sees
his own story somewhere deep in the structure of Pale Fire, especially in
the variants. Kinbote as a critic-commentator-editor destroys Shade’s
poem with his notes, committing an act which can only be termed as
blasphemy. As Christopher Ricks remarked, Pale Fire continues a long
line of literary tradition “that relates editing to blasphemy.”32 Another
form of blasphemy is suicide, which Kinbote is trying to defend with
his arguments, and which he seriously considers committing.
Shade and Kinbote both make several references to Robert Frost.
With the allusions to the American poet, the shade of another man
of letters, his Welsh friend, Edward Thomas, also appears. Frost and
Thomas took long rambling walks together in the Welsh countryside
just before the First World War, both of them knowing “the names”
of the flora and fauna around them and both being familiar with,
as Thomas put it, “the ‘grief without a pang,’” which is described in
Coleridge’s Dejection.”33 Frost also lost his friend; Thomas enlisted in
the British army for patriotic reasons when he was past the recruit-
ing age, and died in World War I.34 It was Frost who first persuaded
Thomas to write poetry. It is probable that Nabokov was also familiar
with Thomas’s poems since Thomas edited the book entitled British
Butterflies and Insects (adding a motto on allusions to butterflies or in-
sects from the poems of English poets at the beginning of each chapter
in the volume).35
Kinbote describes Frost as
the author of one of the greatest short poems in the English lan-
guage, a poem that every American boy knows by heart, about
the wintry woods, and the dreary dusk, and the little horsebells
of gentle remonstration in the dull darkening air, and that prodi-
gious and poignant end – two closing lines identical in every syl-
lable, but one personal and physical, and the other metaphysical
and universal. I dare not quote from memory lest I displace one
precious word. (203–4)
32.  Christopher Ricks, "Introduction," in A. E. Housman, Collected Poems
and Selected Prose by A. E. Housman, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Allen
Lane, 1988), p. 13.
33.  Matthew Spencer, ed., Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas
to One Another (New York: Handsel Books, 2003), p. 21.
34.  Spencer, p. 26.
35.  Edward Thomas, ed., British Butterflies and Insects (London: Hodder
and Stoughton, 1908).

386
 He is referring to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which
can also be interpreted as a death-wish poem. Shade’s lines on his
daughter’s suicide are reminiscent of Frost’s short poem. Hazel is de-
termined to commit suicide, and she is riding on a bus to get to the
lake in the snowy woods on a late evening in March to drown herself.
Kinbote feels sympathy for Hazel and especially likes Frost’s poem on
the attraction of suicide because it expresses his own emotions. Thus,
the theme of melancholy and madness ending in suicide (Hazel’s and
possibly Kinbote’s) runs its full course, after some of the most notable
literary friendships of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth cen-
turies have been resurrected partly by Shade, and mainly by Kinbote
through his allusions in the Commentary to the major, mainly English
poets.
In writing Pale Fire, while Nabokov had these friendships in mind,
he might also have been thinking of his own friendship with Edmund
Wilson. Before the attacks on Eugene Onegin, which took Nabokov by
surprise, Wilson had already showed signs of displeasure at the suc-
cess of Lolita. Boyd in his biography of Nabokov tries to find the rea-
sons for Wilson’s unreasonable behavior toward his former friend:
The eroticism of Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County had ensured
only that the book was banned from sale and forgotten. When
Lolita, on the other hand, brought Nabokov fortune, fame, and
ringing acclaim, it sharply intensified Wilson’s irritation that he
could not quite compete and that Nabokov knew it. In the year
of Lolita’s American appearance, Wilson failed to reply to one of
Nabokov’s letters, and when Nabokov wrote again, suspecting
the cause of Wilson’s silence, he took care not to mention Lolita
by name. But he still tried to keep the friendship alive: “You have
quite forgotten me,” he wrote late in 1960, after Wilson failed to
reply to another letter. After seeing Wilson in 1962, their clos-
est common friend, Roman Grynberg, wrote to Nabokov asking
what had made Wilson so angry with him. “Envy? But you are so
different!”36
The melancholy of lost friendship, the wall built by one former
friend preventing communication with the other, runs through
Nabokov’s Pale Fire. And yet the novel is not pessimistic. There is a
conversation going on; the verses of the poets alluded to in the text of
Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s Commentary provide a constant backdrop
36.  Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 495–6.

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of a steady but changing stream of conversation on melancholy, mad-
ness, suicide, the hereafter, blasphemy and criticism, thereby enrich-
ing the “moon-tomb-ghost” theme of Arcady in New Wye with fresh
imagery and thought. Kinbote draws attention to the “miracle” of po-
etry “being readable”:

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs

being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought,
new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We
take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of
brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of ages, the his-
tory of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and con-
struction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to
Keats. (289)
Kinbote and Shade, however, do not take poetry for granted. Just
as Tennyson’s speaker in “In Memoriam,” they are both “hold[ing] / An
hour’s communion with the dead,”37 and so are we by reading Shade’s
poem and Kinbote’s Commentary and discovering the presence of
other poets in the underlying themes. Christopher Ricks expresses this
idea appropriately in Allusion to the Poets:
We have powers of speech as a community, here in the present,
only because we form a community with the past. All language
holds communion with the dead, those dead who have no me-
morial except the language which they maintained, and those
other dead who left the memorials of literature.38
Pale Fire does not just record the conversations of Shade and
Kinbote, but expands to embrace the conversations of other English
poets, becoming a “Dead Poets’ Society” or Literary Club, which we
readers can also join. Thus, we find ourselves in the “otherworldly”
company of poets with whom we can converse and argue as we read,
write and talk about their works. And in this illustrious company we
can also find the author of Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov, and his former
friend, Edmund Wilson.

37.  Quoted in Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2002), p. 189.
38.  Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, p. 189.

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