C.1-4
pg 73
"a bird knocking itself out": Kinbote assumes the bird has not died, although this is not stated explicitly in the poem.

"We can visualize John Shade in his early boyhood": Kinbote assumes that Shade is a boy when the event with the bird takes place, although -- again -- this is not explicit.

"a young New Wye gardener": see Foreword, PF 998, etc

C.12
pg 74
"a domestic anti-Karlist": K links Sybil to the Zemblan revolutionaries who have dethroned him and are determined to kill him. "anti-Karlist" = anti-Charles, so anti-Kinbote in particular to anything else. Does Sybil's animosity cause Kinbote to invent the anti-Karlists as part of the germination for the Zemblan story? Or is he just figuratively comparing her to those others he considers his enemies? (One compelling reading of the early New Wye sections of Kinbote's Commentary notes the elements that might have been used as generative sources for the Zemblan fantasy.)

pg 75
"his impregnable fortress and my humble home": elsewhere the humbled home is a chateau and a castle (pg 19, 20). Kinbote transforms the Goldstein house into whatever best suits his narrative intent.

pg 75
"Parachuting had become a popular sport": parachuting == escaping? What's the deal with Zemblans and parachuting? It's a pretty odd national pastime. A person travels with limited volition from a moving origin to an uncertain destination. One can steer to an extent but one cannot return. Death is a distinct possibility.

pg 75
"/Sosed/ (Zembla's gigantic neighbor)": USSR

pg 75
"Conchologists": conchology: "The branch of zoology that deals with shells and shellfish" (OED). Kinbote's example of "special research" and "personal culture" on the part of kings -- listening to internal echoes?

pg 76
"Southey's Lingo-Grande ('Dear Stumparumper,' etc)": I have no idea other than Lingo-Grande == Great (or large) Language (or lick)? "Dear Stumparumper" sounds German, der Stümper (blunderer) and der Rumpf (body, torso) maybe?

pg 76
"Hodinski": my (old) notes indicate that Hodinski is connected to "The Song of Igor's Campaign" but I can't fathom why at the moment (anyone?). Anyway and just in case:

VN translated the Old Russian epic The Song of Igor's Campaign (~1187) in 1953, and maintains in his notes that early Russian material was linked by the Vikings to early Scottish / Celtic literature.

Another translation
And another

"The Kongs-skugg-sio": Kinbote is correct, it means "The Royal Mirror," but "Skugg" alone means "shade, shadow." It is a 13th century Old Icelandic history that ends with a conflict between Archbishop Eystein and his king, and with Eystein's exit to England. See pg 130 for Eystein.

Icelandic Sagas

pg 76
"Coriolanus Lane" (where Charles Xavier lives while slumming at the lectern of Zembla U):

Plutarch's Coriolanus (75 CE): Life of Coriolanus

Shakespeare's Tragedy of Coriolanus (1608), a play about political unrest and class warfare (probably S's most political work) in which Caius Martius wins the name Coriolanus as reward for his great deeds in battle. In order to secure consul status, Coriolanus must go out and win the consent of the Roman citizens (who are angry over a grain shortage), which doesn't go well and results his in his exile from Rome. He then teams up with the Volscians, masses an army, and lays siege to his old hometown, making him a Volscian hero, but is later assassinated by Aufidius, a jealous rival.

C.17
pg 78
"distant dim Zembla": Zembla is still dim at this point in the narrative -- it hasn't been fully created yet.

pg 80
"a Zemblan poetical version of Timon":

Immediately noteworthy re the Timon quote is that compared to the original all the genders are reversed (this theme returns, for instance "with sexes reversed" on p.83 and "boy-girls and girl-boys" on p.104). Conmal also replaces the key phrase "pale fire" with "silvery light" -- interesting that Kinbote should have chosen these particular four lines.

C.42
pg 80
"I could make out the outlines of some of my images in the shape his genius might give them; by mid-June I felt sure at last that he would recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla burning in my brain." ...

Kinbote has this expectation of what he'll find in Shade's poem, as if the ideas that dominate his mind should also dominate the poet's. VN comments in _Strong Opinions_ regarding the "middlebrow or the upper Philistine" who "likes to recognize his own thoughts and throws in those of the author" (41), and Kinbote's expectations may imply those of some critics who gave negative reviews of VN because of a lack of "ideas" (see p 275 for "A hack reviewer of new books" which may refer to Orville Prescott who panned _Lolita_ in the NY Times in 1958).

Also interesting is the notion that Kinbote is constructing an artificial pattern of references for Shade (and also for the reader), in contrast to the natural patterns that Shade seeks in his poem.

pg 81
"pale and diaphanous final phase": another echo of the title which K admits "cannot be regarded as a direct echo of my narrative".

pg 81
"have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent light from my poet's fiery orb, and unconsciously aping the prose style of his own critical essays.": this passage is often offered up in the Shade-wrote-it arguments in response to the question over whether Shade's prose style could be as good as Kinbote's (in which case why didn't he write prose?).

pg 81
"control exercised upon my poet by a domestic censor and God knows whom else": K again implies that Sybil has coerced her husband into removing Zembla references from his poem. The "God knows whom else" is interesting, though -- what might K be thinking of?

C.47-48
pg 82
"the 'frame house on its square of green' was five miles west of the Wordsmith campus but only fifty yards or so distant from my east windows"

A clearer picture of the setting is evolved in this Note -- the Goldsworth residence is west of Shade's, and a chess pattern is superimposed (see "rented castle" on pg. 20 and "white-and-black" on pg. 82). Kinbote as the black pieces and Shade as the white, this idea will return.

pg 82
"charming, charmingly vague lady": Sylvia O'Donnell (246-), and see also "Alfin the Vague" on pg 101, K/C's father.

pg 82
"[The Goldsworth house] was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country":

The Old English "wod" means "wood" (as in a stand of trees somewhere between a grove and a forest in size), also something (usually a ship) made from wood (as well as "to go, advance, move onward" ("[He] wod þa ðurh ðone wælrec" --Beowulf)), so presumably wodnaggen could mean "wood cabin"; but also the Anglo-Saxon "wod" [wʊd] meaning "mad" or "raving like a maniac."

"Naggen" is a woodland village in Sweden where guests "reside in comfort at Bäverhyddan (The Beaver Lodge)" and may "take part in a thrilling beaver hunt in a 17,000 hectare hunting ground".

Also apparently means "to abide" in Hebrew (?), but also the Low German "(g)naggen" means "to irritate, provoke" (evolves into "nag"), so "wodnaggen" might be "irritate to madness." Alternatively, let "naggen" == noggin and you have "crazy in the head". Also "wod" leads to "Wodin", Wotan, Odin, the Norse boss god, so wodnaggen could be "to provoke the god". Also, the Indo-European "wod" is a variant of "wed" for the modern English "wet".
Reference 1
Reference 2

In Bede's _Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (as translated into Anglo Saxon by King Alfred the Great, who will become more significant later), the word "wod" is applied to Eadbald, son of St. Aethelbert (540-616 CE), King of Kent. Eadbald, according to Bede, "not only refused to embrace the faith of Christ, but was also defiled with such a sort of fornication, as the apostle testifies, was not heard of, even among the Gentiles; for he kept his father's wife." Bede continues: "Nor did the perfidious king escape without Divine punishment and correction; for he was troubled with frequent fits of madness, and possessed by an evil spirit." (Bede, Book II, Chapter 5).
See also
See also

pg 83
"Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14)":

Here the invention of Zembla may (or may not) evolve (or begin), as Kinbote translates the objects in the Goldsworth house into his fantasy. Boyd writes:

"'Alphina' and 'Betty' all but embody the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, and the reversed order of daughters and letters implies a deliberate countdown, a comically confident case of family planning. But the girls' names also oddly prefigure the names of the four principals of the Zemblan royal family, in descending order of age, King Alfin, Queen Blenda, their son Charles and his queen Disa. The unique 'Alphina' especially seems to have inspired the equally unprecedented 'Alfin,' to serve as a starting point, as her name implies, for the whole Zemblan saga, and the first character Kinbote introduces in his first long Zemblan note is indeed Alfin the Vague" (Magic of Artistic Discovery, 97).

See also pg 295 where K hides the manuscript in the Goldsworth closet, and exits "as if it had been the end of a secret passage that had taken me all the way out of my enchanted castle and right from Zembla to /this/ Arcady." Boyd writes, "has the Goldsworth closet somehow expanded in Kinbote's mind to become the Zemblan closet leading to the secret passage that makes possible the King's escape?" (ibid, 98).

The "reversed order" also makes me think of the "reversed footprints" (pg 34, 78).

pg 83
"Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov": Georgi Malenkov (1902–1988), premier of the Soviet Union after Stalin (1953-1955) and perhaps the most progressive Soviet leader before Gorbachev. Forced to resign by Khrushchev.

(Mrs. G must have been a handsome woman!)

Malenkov may be something of a Coriolanus figure as he was a soldier betrayed by comrades, and was forced to resign his office due to the failure of his government's agricultural policy.

pg. 83
"her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen":

"[...] suggests Kathleen Winsor's _Forever Amber_ (1944), a steamy-for-the-time historical blockbuster [...] of romantic intrigues centering on the court of England's Charles II" (ibid, 98), noted by VN in a 1964 letter to his French translator, Maurice-Edgar Coindreau. "Zen" may suggest J.D. Salinger and his "then-recent stories about the Glass family, which chime in curious harmony with Zembla, that 'crystal land' (C.12, 74) whose revolution 'flickered first' in its Glass Factory (C.130, 120)" (Boyd, 98).

Boyd finishes this section by arguing, "In the solitude of the Goldsworth castle, doubly dislocated from the Russia of his birth and the Scandinavia where he had felt sexually free, still harrowed by a sense of persecution but exhilarated to have a great American poet for neighbor and occasional companion, the dangerously egomaniacal Kinbote rapidly develops a fantasy that sublimates his past and will carry him forever into the future, if only he can persuade Shade to turn his vision into verse. [...] the alphabetic hints of the Goldsworth chateau consolidate in his mind until they form the almost entirely self-enclosed delusions that in the Index guide us methodically through Zembla from A to Z" (ibid, 98).

pg 83
"a morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: [...] the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus)":

Jacques d'Argus, of course, is a pseudonym for Jakob Gradus, helping to set up the strong theory that Jack Grey was aiming for Judge Goldsworth when he shot John Shade (who resembles Judge Goldsworth). See also pg 85: "this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of /raghdirst/ (thirst for revenge) [...]"

pg 84
"the diet of the black cat": see epigraph.

pg 85
"damnum infectum": In Roman law, "damage (damnum) not done, but apprehended," "damage which [a person] has reason to fear."

pg 86
"Let us turn to our poet's windows." A subject of great preoccupation for Kinbote, and the main theme of the rest of the note.

pg 86
"I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous /apparatus criticus/ into the monstrous semblance of a novel."

apparatus criticus: "A collection of material, as variant readings and other palaeographical and critical matter, for the textual study of a document." (OED)

VN seems to be commenting on his current project itself through the irony of Kinbote's assertion.

pg 86
"the coming of summer presented a problem in optics: the encroaching foliage did not always see eye to eye with me: it confused a green monocle with an opaque occludent, and the idea of protection with that obstruction."

As I believe I mentioned before, Kinbote's frustration with the natural world's hindrance to his spying on Shade may imply the *unnaturalness* of his behavior (I think of Huysmans' _À Rebours_ (1884) when imagining Kinbote in that house all alone), that the patterns of the natural world that help Shade toward his goal do the opposite for artificial Kinbote, perhaps even *protect* Shade from Kinbote's aggression.

Also I like the parallelism of "eye to eye": Kinbote's eye meeting nature's eye: the word "eye" as a hole in something: "An object resembling the eye in appearance, shape, function, or relative position" (OED) and "an object resembling an eye on a plant; esp. (a) an axillary bud or leaf bud; (b) the centre of a flower; (c) the remains of the calyx on a fruit" (OED). "Eye" can also mean "the opening through which the water of a fountain or spring wells up" (OED), recalling Shade's fountain of (false) salvation and Poe's fountain of creative inspiration.

"Monocle: A single eyeglass" (OED) as in the thing Col. Klink wears.
"Occludent: noun & adjective (rare) (a thing) that occludes" (OED).

Kinbote wants to see *through* nature to whatever interests him beyond it, so in this sense he may parallel Shade. Where Shade's interests lie in the otherworldly, however, Kinbote's lie in the here-and-now.

See also on pg 86: "Sybil whom a shrub had screened from my falcon eye" (87), "he never pulled down the shades (*she* did)" (87), and "interference by framework or leaves" (89).

pg 86
"on July 3 according to my agenda": Agenda as both a memorandum book and a plan for matters to be attended to.

pg 87
"People who live in glass houses should not write poems"

Perhaps another allusion to Salinger? Glass here also as the windows between Shade at work and Kinbote's eye, so a lens as if on a microscope -- Kinbote treats Shade in this note as an insect or an animal that a scientist wishes to observe and document.

pg 87
"led me to indulge in an orgy of spying which no considerations of pride could stop"

Admits to spying and casts it into negative terms; Kinbote apparently knows his behavior is wrong but is unable to stop.

pg 87
"Hero of Our Time", "Time Lost": indicating the novels of Lermontov and Proust respectively. Lermontov's novel concerns a corrupted anti-hero who goes to great lengths to combat the boredom of his aristocratic society. Much the same might be said of Proust's Marcel.

pg 87
"I found, at the end of the veranda, an ivied corner from which I could view rather amply the front of the poet's house." etc -- this large passage has Kinbote orienting himself based on the location of Shade's house and scouting out positions from which he can spy on three of its sides (and if you're playing along as a good Nabokovian reader, by the end of this section you should have a decent map of Kinbote and Shade's adjacent properties). Kinbote's geography has Shade in something of a bear-hug, enveloping him, as the pieces on a chess board might seek to envelop an opponent (Kinbote has bishops controlling the oblique lines and Rooks attacking the open files to Shade's front porch -- we have a position out of a chess-problem).

pg 87
"my bodyguard of black junipers" -- the junipers in Kinbote's rented garden, suggesting perhaps the "Black Rose Paladins" (did they act as Charles' bodyguards in Zembla?). Also suggests chess again: black pawns.

pg 87
"patch of pale light under the lone streetlamp": again flirting with the title. The streetlamp is mentioned several times -- I wonder if it has a function beyond supporting the image of loneliness and melancholy?

pg 87-88
"[I] rather enjoyed following in the dark a weedy and rocky easterly projection of my grounds ending in a locust grove on a slightly higher level than the north side of the poet's house."

Kinbote may be confusing locusts with the cicadas Shade writes about in his poem. We also learn that the Goldsworth property has a higher elevation than Shade's, putting Kinbote geologically above the other.

pg 88
"Once, three decades ago [...]"

This passage may recount Kinbote's first sexual experience with "a tall, pale, long-nosed, dark-haired young minister." Using very Romantic images, he writes, "Into these roses and thorns there walked a black shadow" (88), "Guilty disgust contorted his thin lips" (88), "His clenched hands seemed to be gripping invisible prison bars. But there is no bound to the measure of grace which man may be able to receive. All at once his look changed to one of rapture and reverence. I had never seen such a blaze of bliss before" (88). All this sexual innuendo seems a parallel for Shade's Aunt Maud passages, although for Kinbote it's all mixed up with religious imagery. It culminates in a linkage between the minister and John Shade.

pg 88-89
"My binoculars would seek him out and focus upon him from afar in his various places of labor"

Kinbote using a technological device to help satisfy his sexual urge toward Shade. Hey, that sounds Pynchonesque!

pg 89
This passage expands on the theme of spying on Shade, giving various conditions and the manner in which Kinbote sees him: at night as a reflection from a mirror, "in the forenoon, lurking in the ruptured shadows", "on a hot day, among the vines of a small arborlike portico" culminating in "[Shade's] plump cherubic fist propping and crimpling his temple." One gets the sense this is Kinbote's religious triptych of John Shade -- he can "distinguish the expression of passionate interest, rapture and reverence" on the poet (echoing the description of the Zemblan minister), and is certain that "at *that* moment Our Lord was with him."

pg 90
On a "hot, black, blustery night," Kinbote invades the rear of Shade's house and "experiences a queer sense of relief" (keep your jokes to yourself) when he finds it dark there -- again implying that he knows the wrongness of his behavior. Then he spots "a faint square of light under the window", the word square implying chess again, and that the position of the board has changed with this foray: Kinbote's "black, blustery [k]night" attacking the white king and queen on their side of the board. Positioned in a "box hedge" (box = square, hedge as in "hedge knight"), Kinbote knocks over a garbage can lid, prompting Sybil to close the window (the white queen moves between the black knight and the white king). Kinbote retreats back to his "cheerless domicile with a heavy heart and a puzzled mind" (90) (he's seen Shade reading Canto Two to Sybil but doesn't realize it). If this is a chess-problem (a puzzle), one gets the sense of Kinbote as the player trying to devise a strategy for his black pieces to mate the white king (literally!).

He's seen the solution but doesn't recognize it until: "the puzzle was solved a few days later"; Kinbote returns to the rear of the house (at dusk) and this time finds the door ajar. It's interesting that Kinbote's intrusion to the rear of the Shades' house seems easier this time, almost casual, as if he's getting used to it.

K demonstrates his misogyny by describing Sybil's response to the poem as having "so rapt a look on her face that one might have supposed she had just thought up a new recipe." Shade cannot restrain a rare expression of annoyance with Kinbote, uttering "an unprintable oath" (90).

pg 90
"Sybil hated the wind"
Just an odd interesting detail -- I don't really know what to make of it.

pg 90
"St. Swithin's Day"
July 15th. St. Swithin was the Bishop of Winchester (died 862), a counselor to Egbert, King of the West Saxons (d. 839), and tutor of Egbert's son Ethelwulf. By his request he was buried outside the north wall of his cathedral so that passers-by could walk over his grave and rain could fall on it. A century later, his body was moved inside the cathedral and, legend has it, a great storm ensued, signaling the saint's displeasure and linking him to the weather. A superstition grew around his day:

St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.

pg 90
"promnad vespert mid J.S." Zemblan for "evening walk with J.S." (I took it in High School).

pg 92
"the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero"

A fictitious fraternity? See pg 27 for K's recollection of the photograph of Shade and Kinbote at Prof C's house looking out over this lake and on into eternity. Omega summons the biblical passage concerning Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end -- God and transcendence of the infinite, and time. "Ozero" is Russian for lake, so we have a volume of time and of space bordering a lake: omega, the end, and zero, the nothing; thus suggesting the obvious Hazel connections.

"Indian names garbled"
Native American folklore describes the creation of New York's Finger Lakes as the handprint of a god on the land. There are 11 Finger Lakes (borders, bookends again): Conesus Lake, Hemlock Lake, Canadice Lake, Honeoye Lake, Canandaigua Lake, Keuka Lake, Seneca Lake, Cayuga Lake, Oswasco Lake, Skaneateles Lake, and Otisco Lake.

pg 92-93
The final passage in this note is probably my favorite from the book. Kinbote describes the setting as if gliding through it, reaching into hyperbole: "Here are the great mansions of madness, the impeccably planned dormitories", "the magnificent palace of Administration", "the prisonlike edifice containing our classrooms and offices"; he passes through the university along the avenue of Shakespeare trees -- then an odd disorienting intrusion: "a distant droning sound" -- then on through "a hint of a haze, the turquoise dome of the Observatory" which pushes him upward through "wisps and pale plumes of cirrus," then back down to the sports facilities, "the poplar-curtained Roman-tiered football field, deserted on summer days [like this one] except for a dreamy-eyed youngster flying" -- then another hyphenated intrusion: "on a long control line, in a droning circle" -- to an unexpected final phrase: "a motor-powered model plane" and the note's last paragraph: "Dear Jesus, do something."

How to explain Kinbote's final reaction to this passage? His father -- or at least Charles' father -- King Alfin dies in a plane crash (pg 104), but I'm inclined to think that detail is inspired by this scene (and indeed on pg 126 there's a Zembla version of this passage). It seems more likely that Kinbote has interiorized the sensation of that tethered model plane trapped in that endless vicious circle. The prose prior to its mention has much the feel of an airplane looping about and above the university, around the buildings, along the tree lines, up toward the sky and back toward the ground, almost as if searching for something unknown or unknowable, its early allusion ("a distant droning sound") a premonition of what it will find and a vague self-awareness (Kinbote aware of his deviant behavior but unable to stop it), finally discovering only itself "on a long control line in a droning circle" -- realizing then and too late that the search was an illusion of volition, and that the real goal should have been escape. "Dear Jesus, do something": somebody save me.



The gardener has linguistic links to Gradus. See Note to 17 (p. 77) "he contended the real origin of the name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, /vinograd/, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus."

There's very much an East->West movement to the etymology of this word that becomes "vineyard", stapled by Kinbote to a Russian origin. The word "yard" is believed to derive from the Proto-Indo-European "gharto-", the Proto-Germanic "garda", and the Old English "geard" (enclosure, garden, court, house, yard), while "vine" is from the Latin "vinea" through the Old French "vigne". "Vineyard" is from the Old English "wingeard".

It is also found in the Scandinavian/Icelandic garđr (that's a crossed d, or "eth", equivalent to an English "th") meaning a fenced or walled enclosure, a house, or a castle; together with "vin", a vin-garđr is a grape enclosure. The plural is "garđar" meaning "Russia" due to numerous Viking strongholds there, linking Russia to the Vikings.

In his _Eugene Onegin_ translation, VN connects "gorod" to "garđ": "Novgorod, ancient Holmgard, was founded by the Vikings at the grey dawn of our era." Sailors from the city of Novgorod (New Town), north of St. Petersburg, found Novaya Zemlya in the 11th or 12th century, and Kinbote says in his note to line 681 that Charles derives from two "Novgorod princesses."

The Anglo-Saxon "građa" means "a step" or "degree", evolving into gradual -- Gradus again.

The East->West movement is made by both Gradus and Kinbote (as well as Nabokov). The Icelandic stop between Russia/Zembla and America/Vineland hints at the journey of the Vikings to Vineland. Gradus arrives in Vineland and is knocked unconscious by a garđr: he flies right into a mirror.

I'm not sure what all to make of the Gray->Black (or Black->Gray) impact between the "Negro gardener" and Gradus, other than black is associated in PF with death and endings, one end of two poles that turn up a lot in the novel, and so it's fitting that the poem ends with the gardener. Or almost ends there -- note that the last line has him going past, "Trundling an empty barrow up the lane", therefore going on *beyond* that ending (into the sunset as it were), and the Commentary too *almost* ends with a scene involving the gardener.

Reference 1
Reference 2



"Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey": degree (Anglo Saxon "građa"):

Jack-in-the-Green: the Green Man, a woodland spirit often rendered in a frame of leaves who is ceremonially put to death during the Pagan Beltane festival (May 1) to celebrate the coming of Spring. His execution is said to release the spirit of summer. Now also: "A chimney sweep enclosed in a framework of boughs, carried in Mayday processions" (Webster's).

An intersection between Pagan and Christian (a border zone, as with the color grey): of the Green Men decorating Gloucester Cathedral: "Perhaps he reminds us of our interconnectedness with nature and the greening power of trees and plants. [...] The Green Man probably arrived in the Christian Church as a part of a general sense of Spirit in Nature, an inheritance from the Pagan past, an inheritance which was doubtless more subconscious than deliberate."

See also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Middle English edited by J.R.R. Tolkein, Modern translation by Paul Deane

Implies the (abundant) Celtic and Anglo Jack legends and tales (Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk), concerned mainly with a trickster protagonist who beats someone stronger through cunning (but who may not always live happily ever after). There's even one branch (Jack and Molly, Jack Tales) localized to Appalachia.

Jack is also a name associated with various villains, including Jack-the-Lad, "the nickname of Jack Sheppard, an 18th-century thief [...] (a) a young troublemaker; (b) a working-class hero; (c) a wanted criminal." (OED); and Jack-the-Ripper. Also a general villain of nature: Jack Frost. (We'll see Gradus assume the role of several historical and fictional villains before finally becoming Jack Grey.)

Jack: "A thing which saves human labour; a device, a tool." (OED)

Jack-of-the-Clock: A figure of a man which strikes the bell on the outside of a clock. (OED)

Jack-at-a-pinch. (a) One called upon to take the place of another in an emergency. (b) An itinerant parson who conducts an occasional service for a fee. (Webster's Revised)

Everyman-Jack: colloq. each and every person. (OED)

Jack-of-all-trades: one who can turn his hand to any kind of work. (Webster's Revised)

Jack-in-a-box: A child's toy, consisting of a box, out of which, when the lid is raised, a figure springs. (Webster's)

Jack-in-office: an insolent fellow in authority. --Wolcott. (Webster's)

Jack-o'-Lantern comes from an old Irish legend about a man who won a pact with the devil which kept him from going to hell, but who was too wicked to get into heaven, so was doomed to wander the marshes for eternity, swinging a ghostly lantern.

"gradient" has some good polyvalence too:

"1. The degree of slope of a road, railway, etc.; amount of inclination to the horizontal. b. An inclined part of a road etc.; a slope.

2. An increase or decrease in the magnitude of a property, e.g. temperature, pressure, concentration, etc., observed in passing from one point to another; the rate of such a change." (OED)

Shade is shot while he and Kinbote climb a gradient toward the garden.

Also we learn somewhere that "grados" is Zemblan for tree. I wonder how that plays back on the gardener, whom K meets tending the Shakespeare trees at Wordsmith and who ultimately stops Gradus in the garden?

Oh that too: the garden and the ravus rattlesnake for anyone looking toward the biblical or Miltonic.

I should have noted the parallel grey/gray too: Jacques de Grey and James de Gray.

And something else strange on pg 77: Gradus is raised by a "totally unrelated" Alsatian merchant also named Gradus. What to make of this, given we've been warned against coincidence in favor of a "web of sense"?



"Ravus": suggests Poe's "The Raven", which bird of ill-omen may be read as a manifestation of the poet's madness generated by his despair over the loss of his lover. Gradus might be read as a manifestation of Botkin's madness generated by his despair over the loss of his homeland.

Cheirogaleus ravus, a species of lemur: the "large iron-grey Dwarf Lemur." Does this link Gradus to Sybil in the form of a tree-dwelling prosimian primate? Yeah, I guess not.

Also Sistrurus ravus, a species of rattlesnake (the "pigmy" rattlesnake).

"Ravenstone": A village in Buckinghamshire County, UK, a region that once formed a border area between the Anglo Saxon and Viking kingdoms (again, the Vikings forming the geographical and historical glue for many of the novel's references) and site of a castle built to fight off the invading Danes in the 10th century; birthplace of William Penn (who founded Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Bucks County PA) and G. K. Chesterton; also the location of "Milton's Cottage", where Milton composed _Paradise Lost_, and the village of Ivinghoe, from which Sir Walter Scott drew inspiration for his novel _Ivanhoe_.

"The name Ravenstone derives from the persons name of 'Hræfn' or 'Hrafn' (Old Scandinavian name or possibly Old English) + the old English 'tun', and means 'Hræfn's, or Hrafn's, farm'.

Suggests E.G. Ravenstein (1834-1913), an explorer, geographer, naturalist, and historian. Author of the Laws of Migration (1885), which Laws include:

Long distance migrations favor big cities [like Copenhagen, Geneva, Nice] Most migrants are adults 20-45 years [like Gradus, Kinbote] Most migration proceeds step-by-step [like Zembla -> Copenhagen -> Geneva] Each migration flow produces counterflow [...] Large towns grow more by migration [especially college towns?]

"d'Argus": suggests "the arc" as well as "dark", but also Argus was the name of Odysseus' dog, the only one to recognize him on his return to Ithaca. Ithaca of course is the name of the town where Cornell University is located, and Gradus is the only one to explicitly recognize Kinbote's true identity there.

Also the Argus Butterfly of the family Nymphalidae (in French the Papillon d'Argus?).

Also there was apparently a camera called Argus Model D manufactured 1939-1940, which evolved into the Argus Model K. Probably grasping here, but an interesting coincidence anyway.



Gradus ad Parnassum (the first Gradus?), "A step to Parnassus; aid in writing Latin poetry; a work on Latin verse-making containing rules and examples."

"Steps to Parnassus"; in Greek mythology Parnassus was the mountain dwelling of the gods. A composer, having climbed Parnassus, would, according to the metaphor, have achieved a perfect compositional technique.

see also

From Webster's Revised:
"\Gra"dus\, n. [From L. gradus ad Parnassum a step to Parnassus.] A dictionary of prosody, designed as an aid in writing Greek or Latin poetry."

From OED:
"[Latin = step(s) in Gradus ad Parnassum 'Step(s) to Parnassus', the title of a manual of Latin prosody. Cf. VULGUS noun2.] Hist. A manual of classical prosody used in schools to help in writing Greek and Latin verse."

[Excuse me while I spiral out for a few minutes:] _Gradus ad Parnassum_ concerns advancement (in steps) to the Home of Poetry (and gods), to a final arrival in art. Gradus acts out this movement between two fixed points (as with 181 and 1881, the bordered or book-ended lemniscate or fixed Cassinian oval), between origin and destination, between waking and sleeping. The final long sentence to Note to Line 17 (p 78) has Gradus as part of the poetic texture of daily life, "riding past in a rhyme" and "moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter" and so on, "falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night." Gradus is generated into life through the poem, lives in its lines, and must sleep when the act of the poem's creation pauses. Gradus only lives when John Shade writes; there is a parallelism to Gradus moving and the poem expanding (for example on July 5, as Shade begins Canto 2, Gradus leaves Zembla for Western Europe), the time it takes Shade to fill the space of his index cards paralleled to the time Gradus consumes to travel geographically (Time and Space paralleled), and on July 21, as the poem is finished, Gradus has no where left to travel -- and so has finally arrived.

This business with sleeping and awaking might be worth pursuing. In sleep, Shade's spirit is free of the inexorable approach of death (qua Gradus), for time has stopped and spatial movement has paused. Line 101: "No free man needs a God; but was I free?" The numeral 101 is linked to being trapped in time and the need for escape due to awareness of death in life. Wakefulness / consciousness is a prison from which sleep grants a brief release, as described in the stanza at 873-886: Shade is divided into a waking half and a sleeping half -- forming either a somnambulant whole or a split dream consciousness -- until the two halves recognize one another and the complete original being is returned to wakefulness. The dream half of Shade is his "free" "spirit" (876), which moves around outside in the "reflected sky" zone of Shade's lawn (line 4 -- note that 4 is half of 8, half infinity, a decidedly angular numeral). Line 880-881 has: "And then I realized that *this* half too / Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke"; in connection with the 8s, 0s, and 1s (of course!), the spirit-half within the infinity of dreams has a realization (880: lemniscate activity of the spirit returning to consciousness, to the zero, unknown, death -- the realization), and wakes up (881: crashing into the wall, barrier, window, posited end of life).

"Mirages, miracles, midsummer morn" (886): if 8 is the lemniscate of infinity, then 6 is the arc that leads to it. Or the arc that leads to death? Or maybe I should have quit while I was ahead.



"_Finnigan's [sic] Wake_ as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's 'incoherent transactions'" (p 76) suggests James MacPherson (1736-1796), a Scottish poet and historian, who published fake verse translations of Ossian (_Fingal and Temora_ or _The Poems of Ossian_ or just _Ossian_), whom he claimed was a third century Gaelic bard.

"[...] he perhaps saw himself as reconstituting epics from fragmentary remains. Yet much of the poetry is his own, and his 'learned' commentaries are disingenuous."

While his counterfeit was finally determined by David Hume and Edward Gibbon, MacPherson's early detractors included Samuel Johnson, who wrote (according to Boswell):

"Mr. James Macpherson, ---

I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall not be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian.

What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the public, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable: and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard, not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.

SAM. JOHNSON"

Nonetheless, MacPherson had a great influence on Goethe and the German Romantics, as well as on Russian literature and theater:

"Russian readers of the poems of 'Bard Ossian', published in 'Moskovsky zhurnal' (Pt. 2. M., 1791) in the 1790s, were thrilled to discover a wonderful and distant northern land, so like their own country and yet so full of secret charm and mystery."

Macpherson is thus another literary bridge across Europe: Scotland and Russia linked (as with Boswell and Botkin).

Reference 1 Reference 2 Reference 3 From MacPherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry:

"Son of the noble Fingal, Oscian, Prince of men! what tears run down the cheeks of age? what shades thy mighty soul?

Memory, son of Alpin, memory wounds the aged. Of former times are my thoughts; my thoughts are of the noble Fingal. The race of the king return into my mind, and wound me with remembrance."

From MacPherson's On the Death of a Young Lady:

Lamented shade! thy fate demands a tear, An offering due to thy untimely bier;
Accept then, early tenant of the skies, The genuine drops that flow from friendship's eyes!
Those eyes which raptured hung on thee before, Those eyes which never shall behold thee more:
So early hast thou to the tomb retired,
And left us mourning what we once admired.

[...]
Peace, gentle shade, attend thy balmy rest,
And earth sit lightly on thy snowy breast;
Let guardian angels gently hover round,
And downy silence haunt the hallowed ground:
There let the Spring its sweetest offspring rear,
And sad Aurora shed her earliest tear.

***

See also Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Angus":

I went out to the hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I turned to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.


***

See also Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), pseudonym for Christopher Murray Grieve, a Scottish poet and political radical who often used a fake Scots dialect in his work. His poem "First hymn to Lenin" (1931) caused some English poets to sympathize with Communism, and his book-length poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), about Scotland from the point of view of a man drunk on whiskey, is usually considered his great work.

Also:
Charles IX of Sweden, who was known as Karl IX, as in "Teach, Karlik!"(76).

Charles XVI Gustav of Sweden, in whose name one can almost make out Charles XaVIer Vseslav, and who must have been a prince at the time of VN's writing PF.
pg.96
"sometimes, armed with the judge's shotgun, I dared beard the terrors on the terrace."

Kinbote replaces the more common "face" with "beard." He wears a beard of course, but it's not just a pun. OED says the verb form of "beard" can mean figuratively to "oppose openly, defy; attack audaciously," and as in such phrases as "beard the lion in his den," to "attack someone on his or her own ground or subject." Thus it's a somewhat stronger version of "face," which OED defines as to "confront, look at or towards."

Also, one US slang form of the word "beard" is: "A person who completes a bet or other transaction on behalf of another in order to conceal the identity of the principal; a front man." In a sense then Kinbote could be a kind of beard for Botkin. Another US slang form for "beard" is "A woman who accompanies a homosexual man as an escort to a social occasion, in order to help him conceal his homosexuality." Just saying is all.

pg 96
Kinbote describes his night terrors, lying "awake and breathless" in bed, "as if only now living consciously through those perilous nights in my country, where at any moment, a company of jittery revolutionists might enter and hustle me off to a moonlit wall."

The phrase "only now living consciously" stands out while looking for clues that Zembla is created in Kinbote's mind in these passages. He continues:

"The sound of a rapid car or a groaning truck would come as a strange mixture of friendly life's relief and death's fearful shadow; would that shadow pull up at my door? Were those phantom thugs coming for me?"

There's another link here between the Early New Wye and post-Shade's-death narrative piles. The two versions of Shade's shooting have either Jack Grey arriving at the Goldsworth chateau via truck, or Gerald Emerald dropping off Jakob Gradus by car (see p 284). Shade says to Kinbote before being shot, "'I'll have to write again to Bob Wells [the town mayor] about those damned Tuesday night trucks'" which implies he's heard one and that they are loud (p. 293). Emerald is described as having "whizzed off to some tryst in the valley," implying he's a fast driver (p. 284).

The word "shadow" also stands out, the shadows that might frighten Kinbote while lying awake in bed, and the personified Shadows in pursuit of the escaped Charles Xavier, so a link between New Wye and Zembla.

A note regarding resemblances and shadows and all the Alfred the Great references: among the works Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon was Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, in which version of that text Boethius talks about resemblances and "the shadows of the true happiness." He writes, "this present life is very like a shadow, and in that shadow no man can attain the true felicities. [...] If any very great man were driven from his country, or goeth on his lord's errand, and so cometh to a foreign people, where no man knows him, nor he any man, nor even knows the language, thinkest thou that his greatness can make him honourable in that land? But I know that it cannot" (Chapter XXVII).

pg 97
"Rodnaya Zembla": "Native land" ("rodnaya zemlya" is a common Russian phrase, "rodnaya" means "native" and "zemlya" means "land" -- also the name of a Russian newspaper).

pg 97
"At times I thought that only by self-destruction could I hope to cheat the relentlessly advancing assassins who were in me, in my eardrums, in my pulse, in my skull, rather than on that constant highway looping up over me and around my heart"

I could be wrong but I think this is K's first allusion to suicide. He says that the assassins were *in* him, in his skull -- he is to be his own assassin. Also the image of the highway is interesting, as it passes over him and around his heart but not through him, as the assassin's bullet passes Kinbote and enters through John Shade's heart.

pg. 97 "Bob's return to Candida's or Dee's former bed."

Bob fits into the house alphabetically, as does Balthasar, Prince of Loam. Do we ever get the gardener's real name?

pg 98
"Balthasar, Prince of Loam"

Again the theme of east moving west:

Balthasar is the Hellenized name of one of the three Magi in the Christian New Testament who arrive from the East following a star and seeking "the newborn king of the Jews" (Matthew 2:1). The others are Melchior and Gaspar (or possibly Caspar -- or Jaspar?). They weren't originally kings (depicted in early Christian stories as Persians -- probably due to geography), but were probably exalted by Europeans seeking to dramatize the coming of nations to honor the king of all kings. One was made African, one Asian or Arabian, one European. From what I gather (from the links below -- pretty fascinating reading actually), Balthasar is the Asian or Arabian one who brings frankincense.

As saints
As Zoroastrians
Rudolf Steiner going off on it

*** Also Belshazzar /bEl"Saz@/ : The King of Babylon who 'made a great feast..and drank wine before the thousand' (Daniel 5:1).

Here's a good commentary on Daniel 5:Reference

These guys have the following interesting pronunciation: Bale-shats-TSAR

***

A very large wine bottle, usually holding the quantity of sixteen regular bottles. (OED)

***

In Shakespeare:

Balthasar is the name of one of Romeo's servants in Romeo and Juliet. In 2.4, Romeo says, "I warrant thee, my man's as true as steel" probably in reference to Balthasar. In 5.1 Balthasar delivers the terrible news to Romeo: "Then she is well, and nothing can be ill: / Her body sleeps in Capel's monument, / And her immortal part with angels lives" (5.1.17-19). In 5.3, at Juliet's grave, Romeo wants to off himself, and sends Balthasar away with a sealed letter for his father (a suicide note more or less), but Balthasar says in aside, "For all this same, I'll hide me hereabout: / His looks I fear, and his intents I doubt" (5.3.43-44), believing Romeo is suicidal. Lurking around in the churchyard, Balthasar meets Friar Lawrence and tells him Romeo is at Juliet's grave. Lawrence wants Balthasar to accompany him into the vault, but Balthasar declines, saying he's afraid of Romeo after disobeying him. Lawrence will go inside alone, and Balthasar says, "As I did sleep under this yew-tree here, / I dreamt my master and another fought, / And that my master slew him." Yeah that's right, he says "yew-tree."

Also in Shakespeare, Balthazar is a merchant in the Comedy of Errors, Balthazar is a servant to Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and Balthasar is the musician in Much Ado About Nothing who sings the Hey nonny nonny song: "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more...":

Reference

***

In royal history and art:

The son of King Felipe IV of Spain and Isabella of France. Diego Velázquez has several paintings of Don Balthasar Carlos (Carlos a Spanish variant for Charles), as a youngster around six years old. Carlos (b. 1629) died at age 17, never becoming the king these images of him seem to promise.

A portrait of Carlos
Carlos as a hunter
Carlos hanging out with a dwarf

***

In gardening:

Loam
A. noun.
1. Clay, clayey earth, mud.

2. Clay moistened with water so as to form a paste that can be moulded into shape; spec. a mixture of moistened clay, sand, chopped straw, etc., used in making bricks, plastering walls, grafting, etc. ME.

3. Earth, soil. arch. ME.

4. (A) very fertile soil composed chiefly of clay, sand, and humus; Geology (a) friable mixture of sand, silt, clay, and usually humus. M17. red loam: see RED adjective.
(OED)

pg. 100
"Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn"

Reinforces the assumption of Cedarn's location, that it is at least west of Chicago.

pg. 100
"Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner [...], Botkin"

Botkin is (probably) aka Kinbote, and it is the only name in this list that is not English and has nothing to do with writing.

pg. 101
"the neatly stacked batches of [Pale Fire index cards] lie in the sun on my table as so many ingots of fabulous metal"

Prompts a question that I don't recall being asked: could Kinbote be in it for the money?

pg. 101
From Professor Hurley's "Appreciation of John Shade": "Just before our poet's untimely death he seems to have been working on an autobiographical poem."

What if this quote from Prof H. were the only reference to the poem that Kinbote had ever seen? What if he wrote his own poem and passed it off as Shade's, along with a commentary, in order to profit from the poet's death?

pg 105
"Grindelwod": Grindelwald is a beautiful little town in Switzerland.

Also Grindel (or Grendel) is the monster in Beowulf, so "Grindel's Wood."

pg. 105
"Fleur de Fyler": Flower defiler, de-virginizer. Makes me think of Joyce's "Sir Tristram, violer d'amores" (FW:3).

pg. 105
"Pavonian Pavilion": has the ring of Pavlov in it.

pg. 105
"along which a road, connecting with the Eastern highway, ran."

A parallel for Dulwich Rd. which "On the northern side of the hill [...] joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University" (pg. 92). Wordsmith is to the east of Dulwich Hill.

pg. 106
demilune

"Fortification. An outwork resembling a bastion, with a crescent-shaped gorge" (OED).

Part of Alfred the Great's appearance in this note:

pg 105
"A peasant woman with a small cake she had baked":

An allusion to King Alfred: According to legend he spent the night in a peasant woman's hut while a fugitive in the marshes of Athelney. The woman, ignorant of his identity, left Alfred to watch some cakes she had left cooking on the fire, and scolded him when he allowed them to burn.

Reference
Reference

pg 106
"a drunk with a walrus mustache kept staggering around and patting the trunks of the lindens"

A linden is a lime tree, but it's also the wood from such a tree. Linden wood was commonly used to create shields and boats, and it turns up in many Anglo-Saxon poems, for instance in Beowulf, or here from Tennyson's translation of "The Battle of Brunnanburh":

There by Brunnanburh,
Brake the shield-wall,
Hew'd the linden-wood,
Hack'd the battle-shield,
Sons of Edward with hammer'd brands.

Reference

Alfred (the King, not the Lord) was responsible for the creation of a fleet of ships and a series of fortifications, so in keeping with the kennings of that period's poetry, he might have "[patted] the trunks of the lindens" while ensuring the security of his kingdom. He also had a mustache. I'm not sure why he's drunk here, perhaps in celebration of his victory over the Danes?

pg 106
"the various approaches to a fortified castle": or to a fortified text.

pg 107
"a black chess-king crown": reinforcing the chess motif with Kinbote in control of the black pieces.

p 108
"Lilith"

p. 109
"He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom."

Charles becomes a Zemblan Hamlet (things tend to be reversed there).

It may be noteworthy that this particular message from beyond the grave is a manipulative hoax, helping to question the ontology of the later barn scene (sort of the lynchpin for Boyd's ghost theory, which depends entirely on the barn scene NOT being a hoax).

Also interesting is how the mirror of the two sides of Pale Fire has now begun to cast reflections back out. Prior to this, details in Zembla could be traced back to origins in New Wye (the ABCD names, Alfin's monoplane, etc), but this séance scene will be mirrored in New Wye. (Obviously this is debatable and depends on a linear reading -- the barn scene could have inspired this scene for Kinbote -- but should we be convinced that the "reality" of the New Wye narrative has primacy over the Zemblan "reality"?)

The séance stuff also reminds me of GR, characters seeking meaning through mysticism (and religion), manipulated by others through the same means, which process is its own sort of mirror.

p. 110
"viola d'amore" -- "A four-stringed musical instrument of the violin family, larger and of lower pitch than a violin; an alto or tenor violin." (OED)

This must be why Fleur de Fyler reminded me of Joyce -- "Sir Tristram, violer d'amores" (FW:3). Embedded in the Zemblan couplet on p. 108 is the word "tristan," and also -- expanding 3 letters -- "kin-tristan," casting Kinbote into the unlikely role of Tristan (but note again Balthasar the gardener -- if Charles can be a reversed Hamlet, then Kinbote can be a reversed Tristan/Romeo).

More references to Hamlet -- Fleur as Ophelia: "in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance [...] combing their hair in shallow water" (see Hamlet 4.5). "Sudarg of Bokay", in addition to being a mirror of Gradus, marks the origin of the mirror in flowers.

Like the Balthasar in Much Ado About Nothing, Ophelia sings a "hey nonny" song. I don't know whether to try to make anything of that.

The phrases "little peasant /garlien/" and "the wistful mermaid from an old tale" suggest the fairy tales that will pop up later. See also "The Merman" (p. 129) and "merman azure."

See also p. 183 for a mirror of this mirror and "an endless sequence of green-shorted Kinbotes."

Sudarg signs his name with a diamond while Kinbote signs his name with a King. Both playing card suits. Just saying is all.

The mirror here acts out in miniature a process that much of the novel's mirroring serves: transformations in time into art and eternity. Female linked to time, mortality, death, also reminds me of Joyce and Faulkner. What's that Joyce quote that has people linked by umbilical cords flying through eternity?

The infinite number of mirrors suggests also Harvard's rare book room.

p. 112
"Exposition of Glass Animals [...]"

"Gradus helping the fire brigade to clear a space in the square for the lynching of the non-union incendiaries, or at least of the persons (two baffled tourists from Denmark) who had been mistaken for them."

More Hamlet: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear, and not for the last time -- they wander in and out of Zembla the way they do in Shakespeare's play. p. 114
"A Luna" ... "a large, tailed, pale green moth, the caterpillar of which feeds on the hickory."

The Luna moth: "a light-green moth that has long, curving tails on its hindwings and distinctive eyespots on all four wings. This nocturnal insect is found in deciduous hardwood forests in North America."

Reference

We're not supposed to interpret colors as symbols (especially not green!), but we can trace connections between passages featuring them. "Pale" - Pale Fire etc, "green" - the green door and room in C.130 etc, "moth" - mirrors, Gradus ("batlike moth" on 123), butterflies (everywhere) etc, so this is an image that collects several motifs (a nexus of patterns?) nominally linked to the moon (which has served that same purpose for a multitude of artists).

p. 114
"Aunt Maud had been pasting clippings of an involuntarily ludicrous or grotesque nature"

Assuming I've read it correctly, the implication is that Aunt Maud's act of cutting and pasting the clippings has transformed them into the ludicrous or grotesque (Aunt Maud again as despoiler or corrupter?) -- although it is Kinbote who describes them this way. That her clippings should be "involuntarily ludicrous and grotesque" is an interesting judgment coming from Kinbote -- Aunt Maud has clipped these ads for a purpose other than what their publisher had foreseen, and so she's Kinboted Life Magazine (Kinboted Life?).

We are told the first and the last of these clippings "intercommunicate most pleasingly." Alpha and Omega joined again.

p. 114
"pudibundity":


An odd word that OED doesn't know. A search turns up some peculiar results -- see for yourself: Reference

The context here is of Aunt Maud's clippings from Life Magazine, "so justly famed for its pudibundity in regard to the mysteries of the male sex" (114). The two example clippings each contain images of females admiring males -- was she interested in the males, in the admiring females, or both? Was she operating from some sense of irony? Desire? Were these clippings pornographic for her?

Maud has also clipped out the "On Chapman's Homer" newspaper article (thumbtacked to the door, not pasted to the scrapbook), again stripping content from context.

p. 115
"a modern Eve worshipfully peeping from behind a potted tree of knowledge"

Much as American life is coerced into the frames of Life Magazine's pages, all of knowledge is potted for the modern Eve.

p. 115
"Nothing beats a fig leaf"


See p. 86 for Kinbote's other problems with optics and uncooperative vegetation.

p. 115
"the paperweight" -- see ln 61 for paperclip

Shade's poem "Mountain View" (presumably it's Shade's) continues this theme of abstracting ideas and images into reductive forms, this time the image and memory of a mountain view encapsulated into a paperweight. "The mountain is too weak to wait" is reminiscent of Shade's mountain/fountain concerns in Canto Three.

pg 116
"misprint": Kinbote has no knowledge of baseball, so he thinks "Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4 On Chapman's Homer" is a misprint, completely missing the joke. He says parenthetically that the Keats' poem is "often quoted in America." Was that the case in the 50s? (It sure isn't now.) See also 117 where Kinbote confuses "bounced a ball or swung a bat" for soccer and cricket. He seems eminently qualified to comment on the work of this American poet, no?

pg 116
"No free man needs a God"

See p 89 for Shade as "agnostic friend," p. 223 for Kinbote's Christian polemic and belief system.

p. 116
"iridule"


Kinbote believes Shade invented this term, yet the Zemblan language has a word for it?

p. 116
"peacock-herl", "alder"


The owner of Kinbote's motor court is right -- it's artificial bait for fly fishing (cost you $1.27 at iflyshop.com) that can form the body for an alder fly (among others). It's often used to tie "nymphs" (a kind of lure).

Reference
Reference

p. 116
"also called alder"


The alder is part of the reference set for Göethe's "Der Erlkönig." Commonly thought a mistranslation* from Johann Gottfried von Herder's version of the Danish "Erlkönigs Tochter" ("ellerkonge", "elverkonge" "king of the elves"), the Erlkönig may refer to an Elf King, or (as it does literally) to the Alder King (German "Erle" "alder" and "König" "king"). In Germanic folklore the Erlkönig is an evil spirit malicious especially toward children.

"Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?"
See also Kron glacier (99), Mt. Kron (132), Kronberg (143) See also elfinwood (142), alfear (143)

Reference
Reference

The Alder
Betulaceae (Birch family)


Alnus spp. (A. Glutinosa - "European or Black Alder", A. Maritima - "Seaside Alder", A. Rugosa - "Tag Alder", A serrulata - "Common or Hazel Alder")

A member of the sacred tree club in Pale Fire (along with Cedar, Hazel, Yew, Ash, Beech, Birch) (and remember the first rule of tree club!), the alder is the Celtic Tree of Life (when cut it seems to bleed red), associated with resurrection, the emergence of the solar year, and protection against water (it's leaves resist rain better than other deciduous trees, and it's timber resists decay when used for conduits, bridges, or boats).

Graves says, "But principally the alder is the tree of fire, the power of fire to free the earth from water; and the alder-branch by which Bran was recognised at the /Câd Goddeu/ is a token of resurrection -- its buds are set in a spiral. This spiral symbol is ante-diluvian: the earliest Sumerian shrines are 'ghost-houses', like those used in Uganda, and are flanked by spiral posts." (Robert Graves, _The White Goddess_, p. 172)

And of course the spiral is an important construct for VN.

Also known as the faerie's tree, it is the tree of witches, who can use its wood to fashion whistles to summon and control the four winds. It's wood is used for the construction of pipes, flutes, staves, and (historically) shields that were believed to inherit the protection of the tree's spirit. Also used to produce charcoal. Sometimes called Gummy or Gluey in European folklore.

Three dyes derive from the alder: red from its bark, green from its flowers, and brown from its twigs, so it contains the elements of fire, water, and earth, and is also associated with the colors crimson, green-brown, and royal purple.

In Celtic myth Bran the Blessed is a giant who bridges the charmed river Linon using alder wood, fights the Ash King on behalf of the Alder King, and his sister Branwen's son is burned in an alder bonfire. Bran is the god of regeneration, whose name means "raven." Later legend has it that after receiving a mortal wound in the foot with a poisoned spear, Bran's head was brought to the White Mound, where the Tower of London now stands, in order to face any enemy invasion (thus the legend that if the ravens leave the Tower of London, Britain will be invaded). King Arthur later dug it up in order to become Britain's sole protector.

Reference

In the Irish Ossianic "Song of the Forest Trees" it is the "the very battle-witch of all woods, tree that is hottest in the fight," and in Irish legend the first human male was created from the alder. In the legends of the Rollright stones in Oxfordshire, the King Stone, which stands alone, was reputedly once associated with a grove of alder trees. In ancient Greek mythology, the god Cronos was represented by an alder tree. In Norse legend March was known a the "lengthening month of the waking alder" (JM Paterson, _A Tree in Your Pocket_).

Reference
Reference
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Reference

* A recent essay by Burkhard Schröder disputes Göethe's supposed mistranslation, and shows Erlkönig to connect to the color white and some of the associations that surround it (he includes the Greek goddess Alphito, the Jewish Lilith, the German Alberich (the Erlking is sometimes thought to be the King of the dwarves; also the alder grows near water and is said to be under the protection of water fairies (Rhinemaidens for the Wagnerphiles out there)), to the Celtic Bran the Blessed, and even forward to Moby Dick).

Reference (in German)
Reference

pg 117
"Sutton", "recombination of letters taken from two names, one beginning in 'Sut,' the other ending in 'ton.'"

See p. 236 where K notes that "real-life characters, except members of the family, of course, are pseudonymized in the poem" (with the exception of Prof. Starover Blue). Presumably this is the case with Dr. Sutton, although I'm curious if there's enough evidence here to piece together the actual names of the "two distinguished medical men" represented as Sutton.

p 117
"In the Middle Ages and hour was equal to 480 ounces of fine sand or 22,560 atoms"

More merging of time and space in measurement. Has anyone been able to verify this assertion of 480 ounces and 22,560 atoms?

There are 480 grains in one troy ounce (based on the supposed weight of the barley grain), so 480 is an important number when it comes to measuring precious metals like gold -- one troy ounce of gold equals 480 grains (compute the value of gold grains by dividing its current market value by 480).

p. 117
"Gradus the Gunman was getting ready to leave Zembla for his steady blunderings through two hemispheres"

Trying to connect this with some famous villain. Anyone? This one's admittedly tenuous (but interesting for the obvious reasons):

John Francis (yes!) attempted to shoot Queen Victoria in 1842 while she rode in an open carriage. He failed (like Gradus he was a blunderer) but managed to escape. Victoria's police chief, Sir Robert Peel, convinced Victoria to travel along the same route at the same time in case Francis decided to try again. Francis did try again and this time was caught. Victoria wanted him hanged but Peel had him shipped off to Australia (sending the gunman across two hemispheres).

Reference

"Line 130: I never bounced a ball or swung a bat" (pp 117-135) Summary

The setting is the Royal Palace in Onhava where King Charles is kept confined by insurgent forces. It is a time of transition (another border zone), the early months of the rebellion, and the Royalists and Modems (Moderate Democrats) are losing control of the country thanks to "the tainted gold and robot troops that a powerful police state from its vantage ground a few sea miles away was pouring into the Zemblan Revolution" (p 119). Soon Zembla will become "a commonplace modern tyranny" (p 119).

After being accused of sending signals from his high tower with a hand mirror, Charles is moved to "a dismal lumber room" that contains a closet which connects to a secret passage, although Charles does not immediately remember it (it's been three decades since he discovered it). This had been the dressing room of his grandfather "Thurgus the Third" who had been carrying on an affair with an actress named Iris Acht, whose sun-faded portrait still hung on one wall "above a whitewashed closet door"; it is "a large photograph in a frame of black velvet" (121). Iris, who died in 1888 (the number of yards between Thurgus' closet and her dressing room it turns out -- see 127), is shown revealing her bare shoulders.

On p. 123 Kinbote's pacing accelerates as he warms up, at one moment yawning, then losing sight of the card players due to his "prism of tears", then casting a "bored glance". "A cricket cricked" (123). Then he sees the "gilt key in the lock of the closet door" (123) which causes a "spark of conflagration to spread in the prisoner's mind." It's the key to the secret passage he and Oleg discovered thirty years ago.

That was in May of 1928 when Charles was thirteen and had Oleg, Duke of Rahl, for a playmate ("sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts" (123) should convey the idea), "a regular faunlet" (123) with whom Charles had shared a bed for the first time a fortnight ago. Young Charles rummages through the lumber room closet in search of "an elaborate toy circus" (which will be the palace itself in the future -- see p. 208) and stumbles upon the secret passage. Charles gets flashlights and a pedometer as Oleg arrives. Oleg carries a tulip. Hahahahhahahahah. Ahem. Together they follow the secret passage as it winds about the palace grounds, "[adapting] itself to the various structures which it followed" (126) until the pedometer tocks off 1,888 yards at a green door which the closet key also fits. The boys are scared by the "two terrible voices" (127) of a man a woman [rehearsing for a play], and run back in panic to "lock themselves up" for "another sort of excitement" (127).

Charles, returning from his recollection, realizes he can use the secret passage to escape the castle. He judges he'll need ninety seconds to "enter the closet, lock it from the inside, remove the shelves, open the secret door, replace the shelves, slip into the yawning darkness, close the secret door and lock it" (128).

After convincing his guard (Hal) to let him play the piano in the music room, Charles is able to tell Odon (who keeps a "vigil over the shrouded harp") of the secret tunnel and his new plan. We learn of the ongoing quest by the "new administration" to locate the "crown jewels" (see Index) by hiring "a couple of foreign experts [...] to locate them" (129), two Russians (Andronnikov and Niagarin) who have been methodically dismantling the palace.

Odon goes off to act in /The Merman/ at the Royal Theater, "already bemisted, already receding into the remoteness of his Thespian world" (p. 131), after warning Charles to wait before using the tunnel. Charles is escorted back to his chamber by a "fat guard" and turned over to "handsome Hal", who informs his charge that he'll be locking the lumber-room door in order to "join his companions in the adjacent court" (132).

Charles, realizing his opportunity, changes into the clothes he finds in the closet ("skiing trousers and something that felt like an old sweater" (132) which turn out to be bright red), "[negotiates] the eighteen invisible steps" through the closet and into the secret passage. He lights up his "torch" and thinks of "Oleg's ghost, the phantom of freedom" (132) (Oleg has since died in a toboggan accident at the age of fifteen), recalling the image of "the luminous disk probing an endless tunnel" (128). He follows the secret passage (now grown more squalid) to the third door, and enters Iris Acht's dressing room in the Royal Theater. He meets Odon there. Together they don "cloaks from a heap of fantastic raiments" (134), pass through a group of people smoking on the landing (a reflection of present day New York no doubt), and are recognized by the Scenic Director, but before he can stammer out the king's identity, they make it to Odon's "racing car" for their getaway.

That's the surface of the note. Next I'll start digging.

p. 118
"[I am] a tricky wrestler"
Kinbote reminding his reader not to understand him too quickly. Anybody up for some Zemblan calisthenics?

p. 118
"As children playing in a castle find
In some old closet full of toys, behind
The animals and masks, a sliding door
[four words heavily crossed out] a secret corridor--"


Probably Kinbote's most glaringly fake "variant" to the poem, relating as it does directly to the Zembla story to follow. Was Kinbote just unable to think of anything for the fourth line, or is there some secret passage here that a reader might discover...?

p. 118
"The index card on which the variant has been preserved is dated July 4"

July 4 is the American Independence Day on which independence from England is celebrated.

p. 118
"'Tell me more,' [Shade] would say as he knocked his pipe empty against a beech trunk."

From Dryden's translation of Virgil's first Eclogue:

"Beneath the shade which beechen boughs diffuse
You, Tityrus, entertain your silvan muse.
Round the wide world in banishment we roam,
Forced from our pleasing fields and native home;
While, stretched at ease, you sing your happy loves,
And Amaryllis fills the shady groves."


The symbol for the written word in the Celtic ogham alphabet, the beech (Phagos to the Celts) is the tree from which the pages of the first books in Europe were made ("beech" in English from "boc" "book," in German "Buche" "Buch") and associated with various gods of wisdom and learning, as well as Odin/Wotan, who was given the gift of runes. Frazer describes it as the embodiment of Diana for the Romans. St. Leanard was said to have prayed away serpents and birds from the beech (as his hut was surrounded by beeches). The tree of ancient learning, it is also associated with Cronos, Greek god of time. It is also the national emblem of Denmark.

The beech commonly provides covering for witch hazel (common to the Appalachian Mountains).

The phrase "knock on wood" (an Americanization from the English "touch wood") purportedly derives from a Celtic superstition that knocking on a tree would invoke the spirit held within. In this case, to knock on a beech tree is to invoke a spirit of new experiences and new information ("The Battle of the Trees" begins with the beech) -- thus a fitting tree for the beginning of Kinbote's story. Another version of the superstition has it that knocking on a tree would make enough noise to prevent the spirit within from hearing what you were saying, in which case the opposite intent would be implied for Shade.

Reference
Reference

In any case, one gets the sense that either Shade is not really listening or Kinbote is just hearing what he wants to hear.

Reminiscent of the "drunk with a walrus mustache [who] kept staggering around and patting the trunks of the lindens" (p. 106).

p 118
"Mrs. Shade sat quietly enjoying a video drama."
Kinbote again tries to trivialize Sybil, this time just before relating the story of Charles' daring escape (part four of the glorious "adventures of Charles Xavier, last King of Zembla"). While Sybil goes in for drama, Kinbote is all about Romance.

p. 119
"Solus Rex"

Kinbote informs us that Charles is "the only black piece in what a composer of chess problems might term a king-in-the-corner waiter of the _solus rex_ type." (pp 118-119). A return of the chess-problem motif recalls the scene in C.47-80 where Kinbote works out the problem of attacking Shade's home. This time the black king must devise a means of escape from his castle (a chess position in which the king and a rook transpose -- the rook is Odon, who will soon move off to the Royal Theater). The "composer" of this problem is both Nabokov himself, who thought of chess problems as a means for working out plot, but also perhaps KinBotkin, who may think of them as a means for inventing it. Charles Xavier is the king alone in his empty corner of the board; another name for this kind of position is "mating scenario" -- he has only to be mated for the game to end. (see Fleur de Fyler.)

_Solus Rex_ was the title of the original prototype for _Pale Fire_ written 1939-40, the first chapter of which is called "Ultima Thule".

Reference
Reference

p. 119
"tainted gold"

Perhaps implies the money (reportedly 40 to 50 million gold marks) Lenin was supposed to have acquired from the German government in order to finance the Russian Revolution (supposedly deposited into Stockholm banks and moved through the Bank of Siberia in Petrograd), in return for which Lenin signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty taking Russia out of World War I and opening up the Spring Offensive of 1918.

[Other theories concerning the financing of the Bolsheviks do exist, but they reek of anti-Semitism]

p. 119
"robot troops that a powerful police state from its vantage ground a few sea miles away was pouring into the Zemblan Revolution"

Several anti-monarchical revolutions are evoked by the state of Onhava in this passage. The "powerful police state" reflects Soviet Russia, but the anti-Karlists also reflect the Spanish "Carlist" civil wars of the 1830s (also implied by the Basque tennis coach).

p. 119
"he was caged in his rose-stone palace"

Kinbote describes Charles Xavier -- himself in the reflection of memory, invention, and art -- as "caged", this time once again "in his rose-stone palace", and "with the help of field glasses" (paralleling his spying upon John Shade), "he could make out youths diving into the swimming pool of a fairy tale sport club." (p 119). References to stories and fairy tales begin showing up frequently, both explicitly and in camouflage.

"Rose" occurring elsewhere: "Rose Court" (88), "the queen's rosewood writing desk" (256)

May suggest the English War of the Roses (~1845-1885), an English civil war of succession between the House of Lancaster and the House of York (the former's badge a red rose, the latter's a white rose), a consequence of the overthrowing of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, in 1399 (Henry IV, succeeded by Henry V, Shakespeare's Prince Hal).

Reference

p. 119
"the English ambassador [...] playing tennis with the Basque coach"

Of Basques

The Romans met the Basques somewhere between 218 and 75 BCE around the region of Pamplona. After the Western Empire dissipated around 830 CE, the Navarre Kingdom come about, which covered all of modern Navarre, the three Vascongadas (Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia, Araba), parts of modern France, and parts of modern Spain, populated largely by the Basques. This territory gradually receded, and by 1515 Navarre was absorbed by Spain and France into roughly the current borders. The Spanish Basques retained privileges of self-governance called "feuros," and were only subject to the crown as a group, rather than individually, while they lived in the Vascongadas. It was these feuros that compelled the Basques to support Don Carlos in his bid for the Spanish crown during the Carlist Wars.

Of Carlists

The Basques were allied with the Carlists during Spain's civil wars ("The Carlist Wars"), the first of which (1834 - 1839) was spawned in part by the shockwave of the French Revolution and a dispute regarding the succession of King Ferdinand VII. The pretender to the Spanish throne, Charles V (byname Don Carlos), was the brother of Ferdinand. The king had left his throne to his daughter Isabelle, and Charles maintained that under Salic law female succession was forbidden. Promising regional autonomy under his rule in opposition to the liberal centralism of the new government, Charles garnered the support of the Basques, who hoped to retain their feuros -- their rights to self-governance -- and headed the revolt from the Basque provinces. Both Britain and France supported Isabelle, however, and facing superior numbers and support, the first Carlist rebellion was brought to an end by 1840, scattering many of the Basques as a consequence. Don Carlos retreated to exile and abdicated his pretensions in 1845, taking the title Count de Molina.

Perhaps of some interest for PF readers, the Basque national anthem, "Gernikako Arbola" by Jose Mari Iparraguirre, centers on a "sacred tree" in Gernika, the historic gathering site of the Basque self-governing councils. The first verse translated:

The tree of Gernika
is a blessed symbol
loved by all the Basque people
with deep love.
Give to all the world
your fruit;
we adore you
sacred tree.

Reference
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Note also that Henry IV married Joan of Navarre in 1403.

p. 119 etc

References to mirrors and doubled pairs occur with great frequency prior to Charles' escape in C.130: "the swimming pool" that Charles spies upon with his field glasses (119), the two men playing tennis (119), Iris Acht's "broad bare shoulders" (122), the chamber door "flanked by two banished engravings" (122), Charles stripped by his "former valet's valet" (122) and given "two morocco bed slippers" (122), the two tutors playing chess (126) mirrored by the two soldiers playing cards (122) near a lantern around which "a batlike moth blindly flapped" (123) (the moth another mirror object linked to Gradus transformed into a bat on p. 133).

What's the deal with all the twins and mirrors?

In much of VN's fiction, the mirror indicates a solipsistic condition from which the protagonist seeks escape. Mirrors serve to convey the borders of time, memory (a distorted mirror), and exile. Both Shade and Kinbote mirror themselves in their texts, as they mirror one another, and Kinbote in particular is surrounded by mirrors that reflect the condition of soul, his incapacity to see beyond himself into the lives of others.

In his Introduction to the 1970 Random House edition to _Lolita_, Alfred Appel Jr notes, "Nabokov's are emotional and spiritual exiles, turned back upon themselves, trapped by their obsessive memories and desires in a solipsistic 'prison of mirrors' where they cannot distinguish the glass from themselves."

While Charles is trapped in his fairy tale castle, Kinbote is trapped in his solipsistic prison of mirrors, each of them seeking some means of escape. For the Charles, it lies through the secret passage: his route to the Royal theater; for Kinbote, it lies through John Shade's poem: his route to Zembla. For both of them, the liberating destination is art. (And so also an explanation for all the literary characters and artistic allusions that pop up in Kinbote's fantasy.)

p. 119
"Somewhere in the mist of the city"

Another motif in this passage is the commingling of "mist" and "midst": obscured vision with crowded space: "in the mist of the city " (p 119), "in the mist of the bath house" (p. 123), "already bemisted" (131) -- part of the thematic merging of time and space that leads ultimately through the secret passage.

p. 119
"Stone-faced, square-shouldered /komizars/ enforced strict discipline among the troops"

In English: "commissar," "a: a Communist party official assigned to a military unit to teach party principles and policies and to ensure party loyalty; b: one that attempts to control public opinion or its expression" (MW11).

p. 119
"Puritan prudence had sealed up the wine cellars"

Suggests the English civil war (1642-1650) between the Puritans and Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell (also "Roundheads") and the Anglicans and Royalists on the side of King Charles I and his son Charles II (also "Cavaliers"). The "Puritans" of this period, largely Calvinist Protestants, wished to "purify" the Church of England of all Catholic influences (viewing the Bible as the sole authority for liturgy, ceremony, and practice). A rift had been growing between the Puritans and the Anglicans by the time Charles I (1600-1649) ascended to the throne in 1625, and Charles managed to anger the Puritans by first marrying Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic Princess, and then appointing William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633; and he didn't please the Parliamentarians by dissolving Parliament three times over the course of 1625-1629 and insisting upon the Divine Right of Kings. Open war began in 1642 and resulted in the beheading of both Archbishop Laud in 1645 and King Charles I in 1649.

Note that Gradus is described as puritanical.

Reference
Reference
Reference

p. 119
"those dreadful days in the polluted palace!"

We've learned that the soldiers are behaving with strict discipline, the wine cellars have been sealed up, the maids servants have been removed, and the ladies in waiting have all gone -- this is what Charles considers polluted?

p. 120
"Blawick"

The only Zemblan town with an English name, described in the Index as "a pleasant seaside resort on the Western Coast of Zembla, casino, golf course, sea food, boats for hire" -- see also Note to 149.

This is where Charles plans to make his departure from Zembla once he gets the opportunity, so it mirrors Brighton, England in at least two senses: its geographical features are similar, and it's the town from which Charles II escaped England for his exile in 1651 after his defeat at Worcester.

p. 121
Thurgus the Third

Turgeis, a Norwegian Viking, invaded Ireland in 839 CE, and established an outpost at the mouth of the River Liffey (which came to be known as Dublin). He crowned himself King of Erin. In 844 several unified Irish tribes were able to capture and kill him -- they drowned him in Lough Owel.

p. 122
"under an enclosed poplar two soldiers on a stone bench were playing lansquenet."
As Charles awaits execution he sees these two soldiers playing cards near a poplar. In some Christian lore, it's the poplar (or aspen, a species of poplar) that was used in the construction of Christ's crucifix. Some Roman soldiers later gambled for Christ's possessions (John 19:23–24).

Also, ancient Irish coffin makers used a rod made of aspen as a measuring device.

Oh and aspen is a good choice to carve your stake from if you're looking to kill vampires (working on my Kinbote as vampire theory).

The Poplar

The populus genus inludes cottonwoods, poplars, and aspens. Associated by the Celts with earthly and material aspects of life, the poplar is the shield maker's tree, thought to be able to protect from death and injury, also commonly used for writing. It is the tree of the Autumnal Equinox and of the commencement of old age.

Heracles/Hercules wore a crown of poplar leaves when he returned from Hades with Cerberus during his twelfth labor. The leaves are black on the outer side, signifying the Underworld (forecasting Charles' descent into his own), and the tree was thereafter sacred to Heracles, the symbol of his having labored in the lands of the dead. Sunlight damaged Cerberus' eyes when Heracles brought him out (Gradus again?).

Reference
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Reference

p. 122
"two soldiers on a stone bench were playing lansquenet."

"A gambling card-game of German origin" (OED), but also: "a member of a class of mercenary soldiers in the German and other Continental armies in the 16th and 17th cents" (OED), so these soldiers may also have been playing soldier.

p. 123
"specimens of Varangian boyhood"

"Any of the Scandinavian rovers who in the 9th and 10th cents. overran parts of Russia and reached Constantinople; a member of the Varangian Guard" (OED)

p. 123
Oleg

In 904-907 CE, the Kievan Prince Oleg brought 80,000 men (Varangians mainly) and 2,000 ships to Constantinople and attacked the Greeks. During the siege, Oleg commanded his troops to make wheels and attach them to their beached ships, and when the wind was right they sailed them over land towards the city. This scared the Greeks enough to agreed to pay a large tribute and sign a commercial treaty.

Reference

p. 123
"faunlet" - the masculine of "nymphet"

p. 123-124
"On that particular afternoon a copious shower lacquered the spring foliage of the palace garden, and oh, how the Persian lilacs in riotous bloom tumbled and tossed behind the green-streaming amethyst-blotched windopanes!"

From "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd" by Walt Whitman (1865):

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.


O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.


Reference

p. 123
"gilt key"

Guilt key -> guilty? When exactly did the terms "in the closet" and "out of the closet" come about?

Perhaps the proximity of the gilt (as in gilded) key to Charles' cage was intended -- gilt as in coated with gold, gilded as in "rich and superior in quality," a gilded cage, as where one might keep a bird. A gilded flicker is a bird found in the American Southwest, and also what a key might do when a bedside light casts a spark upon it.

p. 123 etc
The Magic Key

In a trompe l'oeil nutshell, Kinbote escapes into art.

The key Charles finds in the "lumber room" opens three doors: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The first door is the door to the closet, which holds old things, things from Kinbote's past, his memory. The closet is a kind of random mirror. It also holds "the tiny volume of /Timon Afinsken/" which will remain with Kinbote for the rest of his life "as a talisman" (p. 132), and the red clothes he'll require to affect his escape.

The second door is through the back of the closet to the secret passage behind it, the passage that wraps around the stuff of the present, beneath and through it all, spiraling outward from that dim origin in Kinbote's cage (see also the highway on pg. 97).

The last door is at the other end of the 1,888 yard tunnel, and leads to the theater dressing room, the green door entrance into art and eternity, the synthesis. The dressing room once belonged to Iris Acht (8, infinity upright). The number of yards from the closet to the green door is a concrete poem for a threshold or an origin followed by a series of infinities: 1888: signifying death. Iris Acht dies in 1888, as did Mathew Arnold (as noted on p. 294, "still clutching the inviolable shade," a quote from "The Scholar Gypsy," which suggests the immortality of art), as did Nikolai Przhevalski, a Russian naturalist and explorer for whom a city in eastern Kyrgyzstan is named (mentioned in VN's novel _The Gift_ I believe). My (old) notes also indicate that in 1888 V.P. Botkin's essay on the British theater appeared in the third volume of his work on Shakespeare, but I've been unable to verify this.

Reference

p. 124
"Mandevil Forest"

see Baron Mandevil (147)

Byron's "Manfred" (1817) is a Faustian dramatic poem obsessed with guilt and remorse and the frustrations of the Romantic spirit. Man is "half dust, half deity, alike unfit to sink or soar."

Reference

p. 125
"Oleg arrived. He carried a tulip."

Hahahahhahaa.... Sorry. The young Prince observes that Oleg's "soft blond locks [...] had been cut since his last visit to the palace," and thinks, like an anticipating lover, "I knew he would be different." Something in this reminds me of M. Swann courting Odette, but I've put off trying to find it.

p. 126
"Academy Boulevard, Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley"

One gets the sense that Kinbote has been pilfering names from Shakespeare, and Timon especially has importance. What are the odds that a work so obviously in the minds of Zemblans should have inspired John Shade's title? See p. 92 for the descriptions of Wordsmith's grounds and place names.

p. 126
"Monsieur Beauchamp had sat down for a game of chess at the bedside of Mr. Campbell"

Lord Beauchamp: English titles can be inscrutable at times, but this seems to be one of Henry Seymour's (1612—1686), a Royalist supporter and close personal attendant of Charles II during the Civil War and afterwards in exile. He bore the prince's last personal message to his father before the King was beheaded.

May also be Edward Seymore, Thomas Seymore, or William Seymore, but I'm too confused to investigate further.

Reference
Reference
Lady Anne Campbell was the daughter of the Marquis of Argyle, leader of the Scots at the time Charles II returned there in preparation to face Cromwell. Argyle proposed that Charles marry Anne, and Charles -- in need of Scottish support for the Royalist cause -- pretended to agree. (He actually had little intention of doing so, since on the one hand he a multitude of mistresses (and reputedly over 350 illegitimate children!), and on the other hand was too much the diplomat to use his marriage on Scotland -- ultimately he would wed Catherine of Braganza of Portugal). After the defeat by Cromwell and Charles' subsequent escape to France, the wedding was called off, purportedly leaving Lady Anne devastated.

Reference

p. 126
"glacis slope"

"A gently sloping bank; spec. in Fortification, a natural or artificial bank sloping down from the covered way of a fort so as to expose attackers to the defenders' missiles etc. L17." (OED)

also

"fig. A zone or area, esp. a small country, acting as a protective barrier or buffer between two (potentially) enemy countries. M20." (OED)

p. 126
"the avenue of birches"

Reminiscent of the avenue of Shakespeare's trees at WU (p. 99, etc). Birches are common to both New England and Russia.

Birch
Betulaceae

Betula sp.(most used: Yellow Birch - B. alleghaniensis or B. lutea; Sweet/Black Birch - B. lenta; Canoe Birch - B. papyritea; European White Birch - B. alba).

In the Celtic oghram alphabet the Birch is Beth - B, and the symbol of the Bardic school, called by the folk names Beithe, Bereza, Berke, Beth, Bouleau, Lady of the Woods, Birth, and constituting the month Dec 24th to Jan 20th according to Graves.

It is the tree of guidance and orientation, providing light in the darkness and direction in the unknown, "birch" meaning "bright" or "shining" in Indo-European and Sanskrit, possibly from the Anglo-Saxon "beorgan" meaning "to protect or shelter."

Considered feminine and associated with the planet Venus and the element water to the Celts; and with the god Thor to the Norse; it is the "Tree of Birth" and the "Pioneer Tree," the tree that one plants first in order to bring about the birth of the forest. It represents new starts, new journeys, its whiteness symbolizing cleanliness and determination in overcoming difficulties.

Superstitions include exorcism -- the use of bound birch twigs to strike people or animals possessed by evil spirits; in Britain it was used to strike criminals in order to purify them of their misdeeds and sins; and in Russia one would hang a stem of it tied with a red ribbon to rid themselves of the evil eye.

Birch is the wood favored by witches for the fashioning of brooms. May poles and Beltane fires in Britain used birch. Birch beer is brewed from the branches. Its charcoal was used in the formulation of gun powder.

One of the Roman "three pillars of wisdom" (with Oak and Yew)

Reference

p. 126-127
The Secret Passage

Like the "natural shams" that fascinate Shade (ln 712-715), the secret passage follows the pattern of its surroundings: "in its angular and cryptic course it adapted itself to the various structures which it followed" (126). It is also described in terms of writing, "here availing itself of a bulwark to fit in its side like a pencil in the pencil hold of a pocket diary," drawing the reader back out of the narrative to an image of its internal author scribbling away; then joining other dark passageways in the "cellars of a great mansion." Kinbote's style and vocabulary have taken on a Poe feel (as one wonders what bones have been bricked up in those dark cellars), and he speculates that "certain arcane connections had [possibly] been established between the abandoned passage and the outer world [or] by the blind pokings of time itself." He says, "for here and there magic apertures and penetrations, so narrow and deep as to drive one insane, could be deduced," recalling similar descriptions from Poe's _Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_ (1837) and the land where the rocks of chasms hint at arcane mysteries that can only be solved outside of the text (pointing ultimately back to their author) -- part of the journey into art where the artist must arrange, devise, and determine his course before discovering the white cataract of creative imagination at the journey's end.

At this point in Charles' life he is too interested in Oleg's "shapely buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton" for him to follow the secret passage all the way to its ultimate penetration into art, the mysteries of sex still fascinating him enough to ground him in this world, saying "[Oleg's] erect radiance [...] seemed to illume with leaps of light the low ceiling and crowding walls" (126-127), and by the time the passage reaches its end at 1,888 yards and the green door, he is too frightened by what he hears beyond it to step through: the "two terrible voices" rehearsing in the dressing room of Iris Acht. Curiously, what's "more eerie than anything that had come before" for Charles is the "man's murmuring some brief phrase of casual approval ('Perfect, my dear,' or 'Couldn't be better');" in other words it's not the art that frightens him so much as its critique and its commentator, Charles Kinbote's very own future occupation and the activity in which he is presently engaged.

p. 128
Handsome Hal

"a rather handsome but incredibly stupid Extremist", "Hal (if that was his name)" (128), "the solemn and corpulent guard" (129), "handsome Hal" (131), "The fat guard led the King back to his room and turned him over to handsome Hal" (131).

A Bizarro Prince Hal, Henry V of England, accompanied by his friend Sir John Falstaff from Shakespeare's Henry plays. Bizarro because Hal, while charismatic, was not a particularly handsome man (he was scarred in the face by an arrow at the Battle of Shrewsbury at the age of 16) (Kinbote must be thinking of Lawrence Olivier), and was anything but stupid; and Falstaff, while corpulent, is not even slightly solemn. (Zembla, land of reflections.) Hal must be disguised as a soldier here, as he does in Shakespeare's Henry V.

For more evidence, see p. 132 where Hal wants to go join his companions and Charles says, "Good night, bad boy" -- in Henry IV, Hal is a bit of a delinquent who spends too much time hanging out at the Boar's Head tavern to the displeasure of his father the king).

That Charles is Hal's prisoner is perhaps interesting given the number of prisoners Shakespeare's Henry V orders executed. Also perhaps interesting is the contrast between what we know about King Charles and the way Shakespeare presents King Henry V (a kind of model for a great king).

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p. 128-129
"[Odon] was a fox-browed, burly Irishman, with a pink head"

What's an Irish actor doing involved in the Zemblan revolution? Might suggest Lord Byron, an English poet who involved himself in both Italian and Greek revolutionary movements (1820, 1822), in the case of the latter spending lots of time with the Greek prince Mavrocordato, and lots of money financing a navy for him.

Reference

In later passages Odon will come more to resemble Lord Wilmot (later Lord Rochester), Charles II traveling companion and trusted aid during his escape from the English Commonwealth.

p. 129
"Bechstein"

Makers of fine pianos since 1853 and still considered among the finest in the world. The maker of the original Bechstein was named -- of course -- Carl.

Reference

p. 129
"/The Merman/"

Gender switch and centaurism, typical of Zembla.

p. 129
"a couple of foreign experts", "two Soviet professionals" (131), ("Their names (probably fictitious) were Andronnikov and Niagarin" -- 244)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now searching for the crown jewels.

p. 129
"the crown jewels"

Probably inspired by the story of the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and family. The legend goes that when the family was summoned to the basement in order to be shot by the Bolsheviks, the children had diamonds, sapphires, and other jewels sewn into their clothing, effectively serving as bullet proof vests that may have saved some of their lives. Since then there has been great speculation regarding the ultimate whereabouts of the Romanov fortune, whether it had been taken by the Bolsheviks, smuggled out of the country, or hidden someplace in or around Ekaterinburg.

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In reply to Alfred Appel Jr's question concerning the secret whereabouts of the crown jewels, VN said, "In the ruins, sir, of some old barracks near Kobaltana; but do not tell it to the Russians."

Kobaltana, the only Zemblan place found in the Index but not in the text, is listed as: "a once fashionable mountain resort near the ruins of some old barracks now a cold and desolate spot of difficult access and no importance but still remembered in military families and forest castles, not in the text" (p. 310).

Boyd notes that "Kobaltana" is pretty close in sound to "Cedarn Utana," a small resort near the Idoming border "again a ghost town" (C.609-614) in "these grim autumnal mountains" (C.71, 100), where Kinbote sits at his typewriter to annotate Shade's manuscript. (Boyd, _Magic_, 102). The crown jewels then are the cards of John Shade's poem "Pale Fire."

I would add to that evidence the scene where Kinbote's armors himself with the poem (p. 300), filling out his clothes in much the same way the Romanov children were said to have done with literal jewels. There's also some allusion that the crown jewels are actually hidden in Kinbote's pants ("broken bits of a nutshell" p. 131, "crown, necklace, scepter" p. 244), thus a pun on the Romanov story (or just a symptom of my low-brow sense of humor).

p. 130
"the huge oils of Eystein"

There's the obvious pun on eye and painting, but also Eystein is the name of several kings celebrated in Norse sagas.

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Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson was an architect who commissioned and designed the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway (inaugurated 1152/3), and a translator of the writings of St. Olaf (/Passio et Miracula beatu Olavi/), the manuscript for which was found at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, England, where Eystein had spent several years in exile (1180-1183).

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See also note to line 12.

Links also to steinmann and buchstein.

p. 130
"trompe l'oeil"

"Deception of the eye; (an) optical illusion; esp. a painting or object intended to give an illusion of reality" (OED).

The joke here of course is that the illusion of the walnut kernel hides nothing more than a walnut kernel, so the real illusion is the assumption that it signifies something more, similar to Shade's mountain. There's an inverse duality between the hunt for the crown jewels and Shade's search for something beyond life, the former digging inward and destroying, the latter peering outward and creating.

p. 131
"an iron curtain had gone up"

Implying the "iron curtain" of the Soviet Union, a phrase coined by Churchill on March 5, 1946, considered the inauguration of the Cold War.

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p. 131
"nenuphars"

"A water lily; esp. (a) the common white water lily, Nymphaea alba; (b) the yellow water lily, Nuphar luteum" (OED).

p. 131
"half past nine"

9:30 doubled becomes 18 - 80 (half mathematically, half visually -- using both halves of the brain here)

p. 132 (and elsewhere)
"Thuleans"

Thule (pronounced too-lee, Ultima Thule pronounced as "thoo-lee"): The Farthest Land; a geographical region believed to be six days' sail north of Britain, the most northern region of the world. Also the northwestern peninsula of Greenland pointing towards Canada, and a town there. Site of a WWII United States Navy base.

Photos of Thule
Map
See VN's "Ultima Thule"

p. 132
"Mt. Kron"

German for "crown." Also implies time, but maybe more significant is that Kronenberg Castle in Copenhagen was once known as Elsinore (the setting for some famous soliloquies).

Reference

See Kronberg in the Index (p. 310).

p. 132
"eighteen invisible steps"

Charles must descend "eighteen invisible steps" to transition from the lumber room to the tunnel, once more the same concrete pattern 18 (coming to indicate any important transition I'm starting to think).

p. 132
"The dim light he discharged at last was now his dearest companion, Oleg's ghost, the phantom of freedom"

By "discharged" Kinbote means "(Allow to) escape or flow out; pour forth, emit; (of a river) empty (itself), flow into" (OED), which also has some parallel sexual connotations given the vessel of the tunnel into which his light is discharged ("He experienced a blend of anguish and exultation, a kind of amorous joy" (p. 132)); but also "Send away; let go" (OED), an exorcism of Oleg's spirit into the tunnel through which it will guide the king toward freedom. But "the phantom of freedom" implies an illusion, a figment of the imagination, an unreality (OED), while also suggesting the will o' the wisp connected to Gradus in the form of Jack (-o’-lantern, /ignis fatuus/, the "false fire" that will lead one astray).

"Phantom" also recalls Shade's first reference to Hazel: "The phantom of my little daughter's swing" (ln 57), and the light recalls Hazel's description of "a roundlet of pale light" (p. 188) in the barn.

p. 133
"the pretty page"

Charles associates the memory of Oleg with the day of his coronation and the hair oil aroma of his "pretty page" (Baron Mandevil -- see p. 147). The page had bent over in order to "brush a rose petal off the footstool," and that rose petal has now become Charles himself, who discovers he is "hideously garbed in bright red" (p. 133).

p. 133
"The secret passage seemed to have grown more squalid"

It's run down now, the "intrusion of its surroundings was even more evident." The perfect fantasy of his youth, the discovery and mystery that this tunnel led him through with Oleg, and the new experience of sex no longer has the same power to enthrall him the way it once did: it's only a part of his past now, "a remembered spread of colored sand [that] bore the thirty-year-old patterned imprint of Oleg's shoe"; its relationship with the world is more obvious, its exterior connections more noticeable to his adult mind "at the spot where the passage went through the foundations of a museum" (133).

p. 133
"The pool of opalescent ditch water had grown in length; along its edge walked a sick bat like a cripple with a broken umbrella."

Gradus making a cameo in the tunnel. See Gradus' "urgent and blind flight" (p. 135), and his poor eyesight (p. 232). Right now he's in a holding pattern like that monoplane Kinbote sees flying in circles at WU, but soon his vicious circle, like Charles' own, will break loose and fly outward. That the pool has "grown in length" may imply Yeats' spiraling circle in "The Second Coming" -- this would be Charles' second coming through this tunnel.

Gradus must have landed here after being knocked down on p. 123: "Around the lantern that stood on the bench a batlike moth blindly flapped -- until the punter knocked it down with his cap" (122-123).

p. 133
"thirty-year-old patterned imprint of Oleg's shoe"

30 is visually half 80 -- Charles is at the halfway point in the tunnel and Oleg's ghost is still guiding him toward his destination at the Royal Theater.

p. 133
"there had somehow wandered down, to exile and disposal, a headless statue of Mercury, conductor of souls to the Lower World"

Believed to be derived from the Latin "merx" or "mercator" meaning "merchant," Mercury is also the god of trade, profit, and commerce, here cast into subterranean exile by the Zemblan revolution. Luckily for Charles, Mercury is also the protector of travelers, as well as the creator of all art. Associated with the Greek Hermes and the Celtic Lugus (Rome as the nexus of cultures once again -- Caesar noted of the Celts, "of all the gods they most worship Mercury").

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p. 133
"a cracked krater with two black figures shown dicing under a black palm"

A brief reprise of the mirrored cage dualism in the two black figures dicing, but the image is cracked now and historical, a remnant of the past (like all symbols?).

A krater is a Greek bowl with two handles and a foot, often decorated with scenes of people relaxing, and often used for mixing wine and water at symposia. May suggest Keat's urn, "foster-child of Silence and slow Time."

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p. 133
"contained an accumulation of loose boards"

The secret passage begins in the "lumber room" and ends with an "accumlation of loose boards," a clear origin and destination. The green room at the back of the theater is Charles' synthesis, his means of escape *into* theater (which will take the instance of _Henry IV_ with all those counterfeit kings running around -- see p. 143), into literature and imagination, into art -- into Iris Acht's dressing room.

p. 133
"a heavy black drapery"

Immediately beyond the green door is a "heavy black drapery," the wall of the unknown. While grappling to pass through it his flashlight ("torch") "rolled its hopeless eye and went out," and when Charles drops it "it fell into muffled nothingness" (133). Oleg's spirit in the form of the light cannot follow Charles beyond the tunnel -- there is nothing left for it to cast itself into, space has run out and only time remains; the king is released and Oleg must remain in the past. Is the "phantom of freedom" also dispelled?

p. 134
"the Sunday attire of Gutnish fishermen, and his fist still clenched the cardboard knife with which he had just dispatched his sweetheart."

A strange folding of time at the Royal Theater -- what are the odds that Odon and his troupe of actors should be performing the very same play that Charles and Oleg overheard in rehearsal thirty years ago?! (See p. 127.) As Odon says, in parallel to his predecessor: "Good God."

p. 134
"Plucking a couple of cloaks from a heap of fantastic raiments"

It is fitting that Charles should don a "fantastic cloak" for his journey into fairy tales about to commence.

p. 135
"a puddle reflected his scarlet silhouette"

A return of the mirror. Charles has escaped his physical cage but his spiritual captivity persists. p. 135, p. 136
"his urgent and blind flight", "loosely folded umbrella"

Gradus the bat (see p. 133)

p. 136
"the powerful iambic motor"

Poem as engine of creation again.

p. 136
"lemniscate" "a unicursal bicircular quartic" (according to K's WOD)

unicursal: "Having, traversing, or being on one course or path", "(Math.) designating a curve or surface which is closed and can be drawn or swept out in a single movement" (OED)

bicircular: Applied to a class of quartic curves each of which passes twice through each of the circular points at infinity, and thus resembles (analytically, and sometimes in form) a pair of circles.

quartic: "(Math.) A quantic or function of the fourth degree; a curve or surface of the fourth order."

The lemniscate in Shade's poem is left by "nonchalantly deft bicycle tires" on wet sand. So (distancing myself from assertions here):

1) Is the pattern created deliberately or by accident? How? By lying the bicycle down on its side? By riding it in a figure 8? Or through spinning the front wheel alone in two circles?

2) Sand implies a beach, which is another border zone, a cusp between natural elements of earth and water. (Like a bicircular intersection?)

3) Remembering some anagrams for Kinbote: I BE KNOT, BE KIN TO, BIKE NOT

My understanding of Shade's joy in it had been as a natural pattern from which a spiritual component can be derived, as in this quote from Max Heindel:

"Humanity as a whole is slowly progressing upon the path of evolution, thus very slowly, almost imperceptibly, attaining higher and higher states of consciousness. The path of evolution is a spiral when we regard it from the physical side only, but a lemniscate when viewed in both its physical and spiritual phases. [...]

"In the lemniscate, or figure 8, there are two circles which converge to a central point, which circles may be taken to symbolize the immortal spirit, the evolving ego. One of the circles signifies its life in the physical world from birth to death. [...]

"The objective work of physical existence over, the race run, and the day of action spent, the ego enters upon the subjective work of assimilation accomplished during its sojourn in the invisible worlds, which it traverses during the period from death to birth, symbolized by the other ring of the lemniscate."

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Incidentally, Heindel himself may offer some parallels:

Heindel (1865-1919), "the greatest western mystic of the twentieth century," was a pseudonym for Carl Louis Von Grasshoff, born to a royal family connected to the Court of Prince Bismark. He changed his name when he emigrated to America. [You see where I'm going with this.] When he was eight, Carl lived in Copenhagen where he had an accident while jumping over a ditch; his left foot was injured and he would limp for most of the rest of his life (see p. 133 "The pool of opalescent ditch water had grown in length; along its edge walked a sick bat like a cripple with a broken umbrella"; see also pp. 135-136 where this bat is linked to Gradus). In 1884 he moved to Glasgow and worked as a tobacconist on Argyle Street (see Lady Anne Campbell, the daughter of the Marquis of Argyle). Later he emigrated alone to America (leaving his wife and four children in Denmark).

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Almost certainly irrelevant is that Heindel's father, Francois Grasshoff, was a master baker who died in a boiler explosion in his own bakery, which is how the Great Fire of London started more than 200 years earlier under the reign of Charles II. Also irrelevant but interesting is that Heindel married the daughter of a boilermaker.

p. 136
"I suspect that Shade's phrase has no real meaning. As other poets before him, he seems to have fallen here under the spell of misleading euphony"

p. 136
"/coramen/"

"cor" Var. of Latin COM- before r. Cf. CO-, COL-, CON- (OED)

"Cor" Hist. A Hebrew measure of capacity of about 400 litres (100 gallons) (OED)

p. 137
"I saw [the clockwork toy] on a shelf, between a candlestick and a handless alarm clock"

Both symbols of death, here left with the toy on a dusty shelf in the basement, remnants of an older literature (in the catacombs). Shade's "brush[ing] the dust off his sleeves" furthers this image. These are also symbols of broken or lost time.

P. 137
"/memento mori/"

[Latin = remember that you have to die] a warning or reminder of death, esp. a skull or other symbolical object. (OED)

Paralleled the less common:

memento vivere /"vi;v@ri/ [Latin = remember that you have to live, after memento mori] a reminder of life; a reminder of the pleasure of living. (OED)

p. 137
"Sybil's voice calling from above"

Graves, in _The White Goddess_, describes Sybil as "conjur[ing] up the spirits of the dead." Here she summons Shade and Kinbote back from the underworld of the basement.

p. 137
"now the rusty clockwork shall work again, for I have the key."

Kinbote has stolen the key to the clockwork toy?! He has the key, the key to death? Or the key for winding the clock, the key to time? See p. 127 for "magic key."

p. 137
"The Bera Range"

Kinbote describes "a two-hundred-mile-long chain of rugged mountains," a Zemblan mirror of the Appalachian Mountains.

The word "bear" comes from the Old English "bera": "[Old English bera = Middle Dutch bere (Dutch beer), Old High German bero (German Bär), from West Germanic: rel. to Old Norse bjœrn.]" (OED)

Bera Mawr ("Big Bera", 2605 ft.) and Bera Bach ("Little Bera", 2648 ft.) are two mountains in the Carneddau range of northern Wales, part of Snowdonia, and near Afon Goch river and Aber Falls (two names that resonate slightly elsewhere in PF). Big Bera happens to be shorter than Little Bera; they were probably named this way because Big Bera is more impressive to look at.

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Try as I might I could not coax Charles II of England into crossing the Carneddau mountains; instead he stopped short of the Severn and returned east. Neither could I rearrange geography so that crossing them would lead into the Wye Valley -- they are in the Northwest part of Wales, while the Wye is in the Southeast. (I wonder if VN encountered similar frustrations in researching his book?)

So why the "Bera" mountains instead of, for example, the Black Mountains, which do border the Wye?

There's a Bera (Beara) Peninsula in Ireland, one of several peninsulas in the southwest that extend into the Atlantic like fingers pointing across the ocean, and which is divided down the spine by the Caha Mountains and cut off basally from the mainland by the Kenmare River. (And no, neither "Bera" nor "Beara" turns up in Joyce as far as I can tell.)

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I thought maybe Bera was intended to suggest Lavrenti Beria (1899-1953), Stalin's boss of the Soviet NKVD (Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs, a domestic secret police before the KGB), believed responsible for the deaths of millions of Russians in the purges, and later imprisoned and executed by Krushchev.

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"Bera" is also a language used in the Congo.

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(This site by the way is great -- it provides examples from 2000 different languages.)

Tasik Bera is the largest natural freshwater lake in Peninsula Malaysia.

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None of which is very compelling.

The geographical features described in this passage do seem to allude to the real Novaya Zemlya, with its chain of rugged mountains (an extension of the Urals) and its impassable canal (the Matochkin Strait that divides the two islands). To the west is the Barents Sea, so another formulation of Bera I suppose....

p. 138
"Aros and Grindelwod"

Both suggest towns in Switzerland: Arosa and Grindelwald (see Grindelwod again p. 105).

p. 138
"Bregberg" "Bregberg Pass" (139)

Could this imply the German "Burgberg" or Mountain Fortress (e.g. Harzburg or Colditz (from which a number of POWs escaped via tunnels))?

Colditz may be worth looking at given that it was originally a hunting lodge for the kings of Saxony, then later a wedding present for a Danish Princess, then a prison, then a mental hospital, then (infamously) a Prisoner of War camp during WWII for prisoners who had proven troublesome (or "Deutschfeindlich") by already escaping at least once in the past. The prison was made "Escape Proof" by experts in the various fields related to escaping: mechanical engineering, lock-picking, explosives manufacture, etc. Despite these efforts (and Goering's own stamp of approval), out of 300 attempts, 120 prisoners made it out of the castle, and 31 made it all the way home (more than from any other POW camp). See Kobaltana in the Index (p. 310).

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p. 138
"Odevalla, Yeslove and Embla"

Yeslove, see Bishop Yeslove (p. 173). Described in the Index as "a fine town, district and bishopric, north of Onhava" (315). Next to this my old margin notes have: "Moby Dick" but I cannot figure out why.

Embla suggests Zembla certainly, but also Elba. Odevalla suggests Valhalla and "The Hally Vally" (p. 25).

p. 138
"a 'scenic drive.'"

See Scenic Director p. 134.

p. 138, 149
"Gulf of Surprise"

Charles II escaped England into exile on board the Surprise (later renamed the Royal Escape). Also points back to Dim Gulf (ln 957); see Poe's "To One in Paradise":

A voice from out the Future cries,
"On! on!"–but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!


If Dim Gulf is the past (Shade's first book), then Gulf of Surprise is the future, so another time parallel.

p. 139
"Thunder was rumbling in the terrible brown sky."

This made me think of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" -- the dog, the farmhouse, the dosing off, the stranger sighted from a distance, and some of the mountain descriptions add to it. Also "the ripple-warped reflection" (p. 143), and "the Rippleson Caves" (p. 145).

p. 139
"after pushing through the black wall of the forest"

Reminiscent of the "heavy black drapery" (p. 133) at the entrance to the Royal Theater from the secret tunnel.

p. 139
"He would, he said, lead them a merry chase, assume sensational disguises, and get into touch with the rest of the gang."

So! Continuing this mad project of kinboting Kinbote, let's follow Charles II from Boscobel to Brighton!

After the lost Battle of Worcester, Charles II (the "Merry Monarch"), in the company of Lord Wilmot (later Lord Rochester), and their guide Charles Giffard (see Griff and Garh p. 140), made their way to White Ladies Priory outside of Boscobel (see "Boscobel") in Shropshire County (see notes for Housman). This was an Augustinian Priory (see "Rose Court" p. 88) dedicated to St. Leonard (see "beech trunk" p. 118), the name for which derived in opposition to a nearby Benedictine nunnery known as Black Ladies, and from the wearing of undyed habits on the part of its residents (see "alder" p. 116).

In White Ladies Priory Charles changed his clothes into "a pair of ordinary grey cloth breeches, a leather doublet and green jerkin" (1) (see "green jerkin" I forget where). Having sent Lord Wilmot to scout ahead in the direction of London, Charles was taken by Richard Penderel, a brother of one of the White Ladies servants, to hide in a nearby wood (see "wodnaggen" p. 82, "Grindelwod" p. 105) called Spring Coppice. That night, Charles and Penderel, intending to find a ferry across the Severn into Wales, traveled to a small cottage called Hubbal Grange where they rested, ate, and improved Charles' disguise.

Charles then adopted the name William Jones, and he and Penderel set out for Evelith Mill, near Shifnal, where the miller challenged them, forcing them to run and hide behind a hedge. Then they traveled to Madeley and a residence there called Upper House owned by Francis Woolfe, who agreed to shelter the king in his barn. They soon learned that all the crossings of the Severn were guarded by Cromwell's troops, so they decided to return to Boscobel House to meet up with Wilmot, but not before Charles' disguise was once again improved, this time by Mrs. Woolfe, who darkened his skin with walnut juice. They arrived back at Boscobel around three in the morning of Saturday, September 6. Charles returned to hiding in the wood while Penderel went to the house, finding one of Charles' officers there, Major William Careless.

Charles and Careless climbed into a great oak nearby and hid for the following day (thus the legend of Charles II and the oak tree). That night, Charles moved to a priest hole in the attic of the house. He left Boscobel on Sunday, September 7, 1651, four days after the Battle of Worcester, accompanied by the Penderel brothers. They traveled to Moseley Old Hall and met up again with Lord Wilmot, then to Bentley Hall where Charles changed his disguise into that of a serving man. Then accompanied by the daughter of the owner of Bentley Hall, one Jane Lane, they made their way finally to Brighton where they stayed until arranging passage on a boat (a coal brig) called "The Surprise" (see "Gulf of Surprise" in Note to 149) owned by Nicholas Tettersell. (The boat was later renamed The Royal Escape.) On October 5th, Charles sailed to France to remain in exile in Europe for most of a decade.

Now, on Royal Oak Day, commonly called Restoration Day, it is customary for a large bough of oak to adorn the front of the King's Head Inn in Brighton.

1: from Charles' own account dictated to Samuel Pepys in 1680, first published 1766.

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p. 139
"His mother was an American from New Wye in New England"

Sylvia O'Donnell, see p. 247

p. 140
Griff

Anglo-Indian abbreviation for Griffin (OED)

p. 143
"/steinmann/ (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent)" -- a cairn, also a stone-man.

This is the intersection of a word motif and progression:

"Rodstein" on p. 88: "the sectile mosaic of the court -- realistic rose petals cut out of rodstein and large almost palpable thorns cut out of green marble." (This is the scene with the minister who resembles St. Augustine and Charles' sexual reaction to watching him.) "Stone rod" -- "rod" a symbol of office, a magician's wand, and yes, it's also slang for penis. Oh rose, thou art sick!

"Bechstein" on p. 129: "The King sat down at the Bechstein" (a piano). This is in the music room of the palace.

"Eystein" on p. 130: "the huge oils of Eystein had fascinated several generations of Zemblan princes and princesses." (Linked to an Archbishop renowned for building things with stone.) This is in the gallery of the palace.

"Julius Steinmann" becomes the cairn personified on p. 153: "An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist), had eluded for several months the police who had been driven to the limits of exasperation by his mimicking to perfection the voice of Charles the Beloved in a series of underground radio speeches deriding the government."

"Buchmann" on p. 161: "In front of their garage, on the ground, I noticed a /buchmann/, a little pillar of library books which Sybil had obviously forgotten there." (Most of them are Faulkner.) Obviously: book-man.

All this comes together in the Note to 1000 where Gradus has "decided to play a new role" and ignores Kinbote as if he were "a stone king on a stone charger in the Tessera Square of Onhava" (295). I'll leave the notion of a "tesseract square" for later, but a stone king would be a "Steinkönig" (and a stone horse a "Steinpferd") connecting steinmann to Erlkönig. It is certainly no accident that the /steinmann/ on p. 143 is adjacent to /alfear/. The Erlkönig is the Alder King, so -> alderman, "A man of noble or high rank" (OED), and also: tree-man.

Therefore: tree-man, stone-man, book-man. A progression of man through time defined by the tools he uses. Or wood-man, cave-man, library-man; a progression of man defined by his dwelling. Also add: church-man, conservatory-man, gallery-man.

Where the steinmann is personified on p. 153, Kinbote depersonifies himself on p. 295; he turns to stone, becomes the steinmann, the stone-man. He is left behind in history. The world no longer needs kings.

See also the clockwork boy memento mori on p. 137

Rodstein, if transformed the same way as the alder, becomes rodmann: a "rodman," according to the OED, is both "an angler" (see p. 116) and "a gunman" (see Note to 1000 and elsewhere).

p. 143
"decide whether to scramble up the steep debris slope in front of him or to strike off to the right along a strip of grass, gay with gentians, that went winding between lichened rocks"

lichened || likened?

"He elected the second route"

Chooses the easier path.

p. 143
"Great fallen crags diversified the wayside."

See Wordsworth's "The Prelude": "Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side" (Bk 6 ln 631).

Reference

p. 144
"the most dangerous stretch lay ahead. Westward [...] Up to this moment the mountain had stood between him and the gulf"

Shade's (false) death border symbol

p. 144
"take off that red /fufa/"

Poe -- "Masque of the Red Death"?

End of Charles' masquerade -- or at least his participation in the Zemblan masquerade affecting his escape.

p.145
"'War?' queried her consort. 'That must have been the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951 -- not war.'"

Connects back to "Extremists from the famous Glass Factory where the revolution had flickered first" (p. 120) and "the 1950 Exposition of Glass Animals, when part of it was almost destroyed by fire" (p. 112).

Three years after his ascension to the throne in 1685, James II (brother of Charles II) was forced to repeat his brother's escape routine and flee to France after attempting to convert England to Roman Catholicism. (He was replaced in Whitehall by the Protestant William III of Orange and his wife Mary, James' daughter, in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688.) James II, his son James III, and his grandson Charles's long-term campaign to recapture the throne was supported by the so-called Jacobites, whose secret societies were banned by the monarchy, and who would engrave the bowls and glasses they used to toast their "King over the sea" with Jacobite symbols. The most common symbol engraved on this "Jacobite glass" is a rose.

Reference

I'm at a loss to find an analog for the fire (unless it's London's Great Fire of 1666, which happened during the Restoration and is unconnected to any revolution), but this at least supplies a nexus for the glass, Charles II, and rose patterns.

p. 146
"all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror"

The face seems a(nother) parody of _Pale Fire_ itself.

p. 146
"sat knitting", "on one side of her lay a pair of carpet slippers and on the other a ball of red wool"

Part of the engine of creation motif: the knitting woman the engine of the masquerade (see the opening stanzas of Canto 4).

p. 147
"I was looking for /shpiks/ [plainclothesmen]"

Why is this definition bracketed instead of parenthetical like the rest of them in this section? Compare to bore, grunter, alfear, steinmann, nippern, all defined in parentheses.

p. 147
"Let those Russians vanish"

Awaiting the disappearance of the Russians, who will be replaced by Soviets.

p. 147
"I trust the reader has enjoyed this note."

See index under Kinbote: "his trusting the reader enjoyed the note."