Line 819: Playing a game of worlds
My illustrious friend showed a childish predilection for all sorts of word games and especially for so-called word golf. He would interrupt the flow of a prismatic conversation to indulge in this particular pastime, and naturally it would have been boorish of me to refuse playing with him. Some of my records are: hate-love in three, lass-male in four, and live-dead in five (with «lend» in the middle).
Line 822: killing a Balkan king
Fervently would I wish to report that the reading in the draft was: killing a Zemblan king — but alas, it is not so: the card with the draft has not been preserved by Shade.
Line 830: Sybil, it is
This elaborate rhyme comes as an apotheosis crowning the entire canto and synthesizing the contrapuntal aspects of its «accidents and possibilities.»
Lines 835-838: Now I shall spy, etc.
The canto, begun on July 19th, on card sixty-eight, opens with a typical Shadism: the cunning working-in of several inter-echoing phrases into a jumble of enjambments. Actually, the promise made in these four lines will not be really kept except for the repetition of their incantatory rhythm in lines 915 and 923-924 (leading to the savage attack in 925-930). The poet like a fiery rooster seems to flap his wings in a preparatory burst of would-be inspiration, but the sun does not rise. Instead of the wild poetry promised here, we get a jest or two, a bit of satire, and at the end of the canto, a wonderful radiance of tenderness and repose.
Lines 841-872: two methods of composing
Really three if we count the all-important method of relying on the flash and flute of the subliminal world and its «mute command» (line 871).
Line 873: My best time
As my dear friend was beginning with this line his July 20 batch of cards (card seventy-one to card seventy-six, ending with line 948), Gradus, at the Orly airport, was walking aboard a jetliner, fastening his seat belt, reading a newspaper, rising, soaring, desecrating the sky.
Lines 887-888: Since my biographer may be too staid or know too little Too staid? Know too little? Had my poor friend precognized who that would be, he would have been spared those conjectures. As a matter of fact I had the pleasure and the honor of witnessing (one March morning) the performance he describes in the next lines. I was going to Washington and just before starting remembered he had said he wanted me to look up something in the Library of Congress. I hear so clearly in my mind’s ear Sybil’s cool voice saying. «But John cannot see you, he is in his bath»; and John’s raucous roar coming from the bathroom: «Let him in, Sybil, he won’t rape me!» But neither he nor I could recall what that something was.
Line 894: a king
Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch. I would counter with something on the lines of «all Chinese look alike» and change the subject. One day, however, in the lounge of the Faculty Club where I lolled surrounded by a number of my colleagues, I had to put up with a particularly embarrassing onset. A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was «absolutely unheard of,» and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblans resembled one another — and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of «resemblers» — my tormentor said: «Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face! I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava which I visited with my wife, who is Swedish, in 1956. We have a photograph of him at home, and her sister knew very well the mother of one of his pages, an interesting woman. Don’t you see [almost tugging at Shade’s lapel] the astounding similarity of features — of the upper part of the face, and the eyes, yes, the eyes, and the nose bridge?»
«Nay, sir» [said Shade, refolding a leg and slightly rolling in his armchair as wont to do when about to deliver a pronouncement] «there is no resemblance at all. I have seen the King in newsreels, and there is no resemblance. Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.»
Good Netochka, who had been looking singularly uncomfortable during this exchange, remarked in his gentle voice how sad it was to think that such a «sympathetic ruler» had probably perished in prison.
A professor of physics now joined in. He was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet achievements including Dr. Zhivago, and so forth): «Your regrets are groundless» [said he]. «That sorry ruler is known to have escaped disguised as a nun; but whatever happens, or has happened to him, cannot interest the Zemblan people. History has denounced him, and that is his epitaph.»
Shade: «True, sir. In due time history will have denounced everybody. The King may be dead, or he may be as much alive as you and Kinbote, but let us respect facts. I have it from him [pointing to me] that the widely circulated stuff about the nun is a vulgar pro-Extremist fabrication. The Extremists and their friends invented a lot of nonsense to conceal their discomfiture; but the truth is that the King walked out of the palace, and crossed the mountains, and left the country, not in the black garb of a pale spinster but dressed as an athlete in scarlet wool.»
«Strange, strange,» said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone.
Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: «Kings do not die — they only disappear, eh, Charles?»
«Who said that?» asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department.
«Take my own case,» continued my dear friend ignoring Mr. H. «I have been said to resemble at least four people: Samuel Johnson; the lovingly reconstructed ancestor of man in the Exton Museum; and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria.»
«The third in the witch row,» I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed.
«I would rather say,» remarked Mr. Pardon — American History — «that she looks like Judge Goldsworth» («One of us,» interposed Shade inclining his head), «especially when he is real mad at the whole world after a good dinner.»
«I hear,» hastily began Netochka, «that the Goldsworths are having a wonderful time -«
«What a pity I cannot prove my point,» muttered the tenacious German visitor. «If only there was a picture here. Couldn’t there be somewhere -«
«Sure,» said young Emerald and left his seat.
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: «I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?»
Kinbote: «You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla» [sarcastically stressing the «Nova'»].
«Didn’t you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?» asked my dear Shade.
«Yes, a king’s destroyer,» I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: «Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?»
«Oxford, 1956,» I replied.
«You do know Russian, though?» said Pardon. «I think I heard you, the other day, talking to — what’s his name — oh, my goodness» [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: «Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name» [laughing].
Professor Hurley: «Think of the French word for ‘tire’: punoo.»
Shade: «Why, Sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty» [laughing uproariously].
«Flatman,» quipped I. «Yes,» I went on, turning to Pardon, «I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more so than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least, and at its court. Today, of course, all this has changed. It is now the lower classes who are forcibly taught to speak Russian.»
«Aren’t we, too, trying to teach Russian in our schools?» said Pink.
In the meantime, at the other end of the room, young Emerald had been communing with the bookshelves. At this point he returned with the T-Z volume of
