In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions jazz and the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, among the things that he loathes:
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks. (ll. 923-930)
Richard Aldington's novel Death of a Hero was described by its author as both a jazz novel and a memorial to a generation. Aldington's first novel, Death of a Hero was completed in 1929, in Paris. In 1929, in South France (where he was hunting butterflies), VN wrote his third novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930). Showing to Luzhin various countries in a splendid atlas they found in one of the bookcases, Mrs. Luzhin says: "And here is Spain where they do horrible things to bulls:"
Большая поездка куда-нибудь за границу была отложена до весны, – единственная уступка, которую Лужина сделала родителям, желавшим хоть первые несколько месяцев быть поблизости. Сама Лужина немного боялась для мужа жизни в Берлине, опутанном шахматными воспоминаниями; впрочем, оказалось, что Лужина и в Берлине нетрудно развлекать.
Большая поездка куда-нибудь за границу, разговоры о ней, путевые замыслы. В кабинете, очень Лужину полюбившемся, нашелся в книжном шкапу великолепный атлас. Мир, сперва показываемый, как плотный шар, туго обтянутый сеткой долгот и широт, развертывался плоско, разрезался на две половины и затем подавался по частям. Когда он развертывался, какая-нибудь Гренландия, бывшая сначала небольшим придатком, простым аппендиксом, внезапно разбухала почти до размеров ближайшего материка. На полюсах были белые проплешины. Ровной лазурью простирались океаны. Даже на этой карте было бы достаточно воды, чтобы, скажем, вымыть руки,– что же это такое на самом деле,– сколько воды, глубина, ширина… Лужин показал жене все очертания, которые любил в детстве,– Балтийское море, похожее на коленопреклоненную женщину, ботфорту Италии, каплю Цейлона, упавшую с носа Индии. Он считал, что экватору не везет,– все больше идет по морю,– правда, перерезает два континента, но не поладил с Азией, подтянувшейся вверх: слишком нажал и раздавил то, что ему перепало,– кой-какие кончики, неаккуратные острова. Он знал самую высокую гору и самое маленькое государство и, глядя на взаимное расположение обеих Америк, находил в их позе что-то акробатическое. “Но в общем все это можно было бы устроить пикантнее,– говорил он, показывая на карту мира.– Нет тут идеи, нет пуанты”. И он даже немного сердился, что не может найти значения всех этих сложных очертаний, и долго искал возможность, как искал ее в детстве, пройти из Северного моря в Средиземное по лабиринтам рек или проследить какой-нибудь разумный узор в распределении горных цепей. “Куда же мы поедем?”–говорила жена и слегка причмокивала, как делают взрослые, когда, начиная игру с ребенком, изображают приятное предвкушение. И затем она громко называла романтические страны. “…Вот сперва на Ривьеру,– предлагала она.– Монте-Карло, Ницца. Или, скажем, Альпы”.– “А потом немножко сюда,– сказал Лужин.– В Крыму есть очень дешевый виноград”,– “Что вы, Лужин, Господь с вами, в Россию нам нельзя”.– “Почему? — спросил Лужин.– Меня туда звали”.– “Глупости, замолчите, пожалуйста”,– сказала она, рассердившись не столько на то, что Лужин говорит о невозможном, сколько на то, что косвенно вспомнил нечто, связанное с шахматами. “Смотрите сюда,– сказала она, и Лужин покорно перевел глаза на другое место карты.– Вот тут, например, Египет, пирамиды. А вот Испания, где делают ужасные вещи с бычками…”
The long trip abroad was postponed until spring - the sole concession Mrs. Luzhin made to hei parents, who wanted at least for the first lew months to be near at hand. Mrs. Luzhin herself somewhat feared Berlin life for her husband, entwined as it was with chess memories: it turned out, however, not to be difficult to amuse Luzhin even in Berlin.
A long trip abroad, conversations about it, travel projects. In the study, which Luzhin had become very fond of, they found a splendid atlas in one of the bookcases. The world was shown at first as a solid sphere, tightly bound in a net of longitudes and latitudes, then it was rolled out flat, cut into two halves and served up in sections. When it was rolled out, some place like (ireenland, which at first had been a small process, a mere appendix, suddenly swelled out almost to the dimensions of the nearest con- tinent. There were white bald patches on the poles. The oceans stretched out smcxithly azure. Even on this map there would be enough water to, say, wash your hands— what then was it, actually— so much water, depth, breadth.
Luzhin showed his wife all the shapes he had loved as a child— the Baltic Sea, like a kneeling woman, the jackboot of Italy, the drop of Ceylon falling from India’s nose. He thought the equator was unlucky— its path lay mostly across oceans; it cut across two continents, true, but it had no luck with Asia, which had pulled up out of the way. More- over it pressed down and squashed what it did manage to cross— the tips of one or two things and some untidy islands. Luzhin knew the highest mountain and the smallest state, and looking at the relative positions of the two Americas he found something acrobatic in their association. “But in general, all this could have been arranged more piquantly,” he said, pointing to the map of the world. “There’s no idea behind it, no point.” And he even grew a little angry that he was unable to find the meaning of all these complicated outlines, and he spent hours looking, as he had looked in childhood, for a way of going from the North Sea to the Mediterranean along a labyrinth of rivers, or of tracing some kind of rational pattern in the disposition of the mountain ranges.
“Now where shall we go?” said his wife and clucked slightly, the way adults do to indicate pleasant anticipation when they begin to play with children. And then she loudly named the romantic spots. “First down here, to the Riviera,” she suggested, “Monte Carlo, Nice. Or, say, the Alps.” “And then this way a bit,” said Luzhin, “They have very cheap grapes in the Crimea.” “What are you saying, Luzhin, the Lord have mercy on you, it’s impossible for us to go to Russia.” “Why?” asked Luzhin. “They invited me to go.” “Nonsense, stop it please,” she said, angered not so much by Luzhin’s talking of the impossible as by his referring obliquely to something connected with chess. “Look down here,' she said, and Luzhin obediently tranferred his gaze to another place on the map. “Here, for instance, is Egypt, the pyramids. And here is Spain where they do horrible things to bulls. . . (Chapter 12)
Setka dolgot i shirot (a net of longitudes and latitudes) brings to mind one harrassed schoolmarm who cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitude mentioned by Shade in one of his conversations with Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla):
In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, the inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith's famous avenue, a quotation from St. Augustine, and so on), a few samples of John Shade's conversation which I had collected in order to refer to them in the presence of people whom my friendship with the poet might interest or annoy. His and my reader will, I trust, excuse me for breaking the orderly course of these comments and letting my illustrious friend speak for himself.
Book reviewers being mentioned, he said: "I have never acknowledged printed praise though sometimes I longed to embrace the glowing image of this or that paragon of discernment; and I have never bothered to lean out of my window and empty my skoramis on some poor hack's pate. I regard both the demolishment and the rave with like detachment."
Kinbote: "I suppose you dismiss the first as the blabber of a blockhead and the second as a kind soul's friendly act?"
Shade: "Exactly."
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov."
Talking of the vulgarity of a certain burly acquaintance of ours: "The man is as corny as a cook-out chef apron."
Kinbote (laughing): "Wonderful!"
The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull."
Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?"
Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane."
The respective impacts and penetrations of Marxism and Freudism being talked of, I said: "The worst of two false doctrines is always that which is harder to eradicate."
Shade: "No, Charlie, there are simpler criteria: Marxism needs a dictator, and a dictator needs a secret police, and that is the end of the world; but the Freudian, no matter how stupid, can still cast his vote at the poll, even if he is pleased to call it [smiling] political pollination."
Of students' papers: "I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive."
Kinbote: "For instance?"
"Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot. Looking in it for symbols; example: 'The author uses the striking image green leaves because green is the symbol of happiness and frustration.' I am also in the habit of lowering a student's mark catastrophically if he uses 'simple' and 'sincere' in a commendatory sense; examples: 'Shelley's style is always very simple and good'; or 'Yeats is always sincere.' This is widespread, and when I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool."
Kinbote: "But I am told this manner of thinking is taught in high school?"
"That's where the broom should begin to sweep. A child should have thirty specialists to teach him thirty subjects, and not one harassed schoolmarm to show him a picture of a rice field and tell him this is China because she knows nothing about China, or anything else, and cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitude."
Kinbote: "Yes. I agree." (note to Line 172: books and people)
In Gogol's story Zapiski sumasshedshego ("The Notes of a Madman," 1835) Poprishchin (who imagines that he is King of Spain Ferdinand VIII) discovers that China and Spain are one and the same land (zemlya):
Я открыл, что Китай и Испания совершенно одна и та же земля, и только по невежеству считают их за разные государства. Я советую всем нарочно написать на бумаге Испания, то и выйдет Китай.
I discovered that China and Spain were essentially the same land and only through ignorance they are believed to be different countries. I recommend everybody to put down on paper Spain and it will come out China.
According to Kinbote, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers:"
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 heard," 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 the T-Z volume of an illustrated encyclopedia.
"Well," said he, "here he is, that king. But look, he is young and handsome" ("Oh, that won't do," wailed the German visitor.) "Young, handsome, and wearing a fancy uniform," continued Emerald. "Quite the fancy pansy, in fact."
"And you," I said quietly, "are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket."
"But what have I said?" the young instructor inquired of the company, spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper.
"Now, now," said Shade. "I'm sure, Charles, our young friend never intended to insult your sovereign and namesake."
"He could not, even if he had wished," I observed placidly, turning it all into a joke.
Gerald Emerald extended his hand--which at the moment of writing still remains in that position. (note to Line 894)
Some quirk of alderwood ancestry mentioned by Kinbote seems to hint at Goethe's Erlkönig (alder king), but it also makes one think of Richard Aldington (1892-1962). Kinbote compares Gerald Emerald (a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus, Shade's murderer, a lift to Kinbote's rented house in New Wye) to a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper. In Prologue to Death of a Hero the narrator of Aldington's novel mentions a colored reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper:
But, as the hall tiles hurt his knees, he went and knelt on a hassock at the prie-dieu in his bedroom. On the top of this was an open Breviary in very ecclesiastical binding with a florid ecclesiastical book-marker, all lying on an ecclesiastical bit of embroidery, the “gift of a Catholic sister in Christ.” Above, on a bracket, was a coloured B.V.M. from the Place St. Sulpice, holding a nauseating Infant Jesus dangling a bloody and sun-rayed Sacred Heart. Over this again was a large but rather cheap-looking imitation bronze Crucifix, with a reproduction (coloured) of Leonardo’s Last Supper to the right, and another reproduction (uncoloured) of Holman Hunt’s (heretical) Light of the World to the left. All of which gave Mr. Winterbourne the deepest spiritual comfort. (MORTE D’UN ERÖE, alegretto)