According to Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), the disguised king arrived in America descending by parachute:
John Shade's heart attack (Oct. 17, 1958) practically coincided with the disguised king's arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole. It had all been perfectly timed, and he was still wrestling with the unfamiliar French contraption when the Rolls-Royce from Sylvia O'Donnell's manor turned toward his green silks from a road and approached along the mowntrop, its fat wheels bouncing disapprovingly and its black shining body slowly gliding along. Fain would I elucidate this business of parachuting but (it being a matter of mere sentimental tradition rather than a useful manner of transportation) this is not strictly necessary in these notes to Pale Fire. While Kingsley, the British chauffeur, an old and absolutely faithful retainer, was doing his best to cram the bulky and ill-folded parachute into the boot, I relaxed on a shooting stick he had supplied me with, sipping a delightful Scotch and water from the car bar and glancing (amid an ovation of crickets and that vortex of yellow and maroon butterflies that so pleased Chateaubriand on his arrival in America) at an article in The New York Times in which Sylvia had vigorously and messily marked out in red pencil a communication from New Wye which told of the poet's hospitalization. I had been looking forward to meeting my favorite American poet who, as I felt sure at the moment, would die long before the Spring Term, but the disappointment was little more than a mental shrug of accepted regret, and discarding the newspaper, I looked around me with enchantment and physical wellbeing despite the congestion in my nose. Beyond the field the great green steps of turf ascended to the multicolored coppices; one could see above them the white brow of the manor; clouds melted into the blue. Suddenly I sneezed, and sneezed again. Kingsley offered me another drink but I declined it, and democratically joined him in the front seat. My hostess was in bed, suffering from the aftereffects of a special injection that she had been given in anticipation of a journey to a special place in Africa. In answer to my "Well, how are you?" she murmured that the Andes had been simply marvelous, and then in a slightly less indolent tone of voice inquired about a notorious actress with whom her son was said to be living in sin. Odon, I said, had promised me he would not marry her. She inquired if I had had a good hop and dingled a bronze bell. Good old Sylvia! She had in common with Fleur de Fyler a vagueness of manner, a languor of demeanor which was partly natural and partly cultivated as a convenient alibi for when she was drunk, and in some wonderful way she managed to combine that indolence with volubility reminding one of a slow-speaking ventriloquist who is interrupted by his garrulous doll. Changeless Sylvia! During three decades I had seen from time to time, from palace to palace, that same flat nut-colored bobbed hair, those childish pale-blue eyes, the vacant smile, the stylish long legs, the willowy hesitating movements.
A tray with fruit and drinks was brought in by a jeune beauté, as dear Marcel would have put it, nor could one help recalling another author, Gide the Lucid, who praises in his African notes so warmly the satiny skin of black imps.
"You nearly lost the opportunity to meet our brightest star," said Sylvia who was Wordsmith University's main trustee (and, in point of fact, had been solely responsible for arranging my amusing lectureship there). "I have just called up the college - yes, take that footstool - and he is much better. Try this mascana fruit, I got it especially for you, but the boy is strictly hetero, and, generally speaking, Your Majesty will have to be quite careful from now on. I'm sure you'll like it up there though I wish I could figure out why anybody should be so keen on teaching Zemblan. I think Disa ought to come too. I have rented for you what they say is their best house, and it is near the Shades."
She knew them very slightly but had heard many endearing stories about the poet from Billy Reading, "one of the very few American college presidents who know Latin." And let me add here how much I was honored a fortnight later to meet in Washington that limp-looking, absent-minded, shabbily dressed splendid American gentleman whose mind was a library and not a debating hall. Next Monday Sylvia flew away but I stayed on for a while, resting from my adventures, musing, reading, taking notes, and riding a lot in the lovely countryside with two charming ladies and their shy little groom. I have often felt when leaving a place that I had enjoyed, somewhat like a tight cork that is drawn out for the sweet dark wine to be drained, and then you are off to new vineyards and conquests. I spent a couple of pleasant months visiting the libraries of New York and Washington, flew to Florida for Christmas, and when ready to start for my new Arcady deemed it nice and dutiful to send the poet a polite note congratulating him on his restored health and jokingly "warning" him that beginning with February he would have a very ardent admirer of his for neighbor. I never received any answer, and my civility was never recalled later so I suppose it got lost among the many "fan" letters that literary celebrities receive, although one might have expected Sylvia or somebody to have told the Shades of my arrival.
The poet's recovery turned out indeed to be very speedy and would have to be called miraculous had there been anything organically wrong with his heart. There was not; a poet's nerves can play the queerest tricks but they also can quickly recapture the rhythm of health, and soon John Shade, in his chair at the head of an oval table, was again speaking of his favorite Pope to eight pious young men, a crippled extramural woman and three coeds, one of them a tutorial dream. He had been told not to curtail his customary exercise, such as walks, but I must admit I experienced myself palpitations and cold sweats at the sight of that precious old man wielding rude garden tools or squirming up the college hall stairs as a Japanese fish up a cataract. Incidentally: the reader should not take too seriously or too literally the passage about the alert doctor (an alert doctor, who as I well know once confused neuralgia with cerebral sclerosis). As I gathered from Shade himself, no emergency incision was performed; the heart was not compressed by hand; and if it stopped pumping at all, the pause must have been very brief and so to speak superficial. All this of course cannot detract from the great epic beauty of the passage. (Lines 691-697)
The mowntrop (meadow path in Zemblan) brings to mind "some moondrop title" that, according to Shade, his poem does require:
Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) (ll. 941-962)
Shade borrows the title of his poem from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (4.3): "the moon's an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun." In her poem Metamorphoses of the Moon (1953) Sylvia Plath (an American poet, 1932-63) compares the sky to a shrouded parachute:
Cold moons withdraw, refusing to come to terms
with the pilot who dares all heaven's harms
to raid the zone where fate begins,
flings silver gauntlet of his plane at space,
demanding satisfaction; no duel takes place:
the mute air merely thins and thins.
Sky won't be drawn closer: absolute,
it holds aloof, a shrouded parachute
always the same distance from
the falling man who never will abstain
from asking, but inventive, hopes; in vain
challenges the silent dome.
No violation but gives dividends
of slow disaster: the bitten apple ends
the eden of bucolic eve:
understanding breaks through the skull's shell
and like a cuckoo in the nest makes hell
for naïve larks who starve and grieve.
What prince has ever seized the shining grail
but that it turned into a milking pail?
It's likely that each secret sought
will prove to be some common parlor fake:
a craft with paint and powder that can make
cleopatra from a slut.
For most exquisite truths are artifice
framed in disciplines of fire and ice
which conceal incongruous
elements like dirty socks and scraps
of day-old bread and egg-stained plates; perhaps
such sophistry can placate us.
But yet the perverse imp within will probe
beneath the fringes of forbidden robe,
seduced by curiosity,
until in disenchantment our eyes glut
themselves on the clay toes and short clubfoot
which mar the idol's sanctity.
The choice between the mica mystery
of moonlight or the pockmarked face we see
through the scrupulous telescope
is always to be made: innocence
is a fairy-tale; intelligence
hangs itself on its own rope.
Either way we choose, the angry witch
will punish us for saying which is which;
in fatal equilibrium
we poise on perilous poles that freeze us in
a cross of contradiction, racked between
the fact of doubt, the faith of dream.
Slow disaster in the next (third) stanza of Sylvia Plath's poem brings to mind Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) who, as Sylvia thinks, ought to come too. The angry witch in the poem's last stanza makes one think of "an angry young virgin with coal-black hair and ice-blue eyes" (as Kinbote calls Disa):
Before leaving, the King asked his host, whose name was Griff, to accept an old gold piece he chanced to have in his pocket, the only money he possessed. Griff vigorously refused and, still remonstrating, started the laborious business of unlocking and unbolting two or three heavy doors. The King glanced at the old woman, received a wink of approval, and put the muted ducat on the mantelpiece, next to a violet seashell against which was propped a color print representing an elegant guardsman with his bare-shouldered wife - Karl the Beloved, as he was twenty odd years before, and his young queen, an angry young virgin with coal-black hair and ice-blue eyes. (note to Line 149)
Charles the Beloved married Disa in 1948. The Zemblan Revolution broke out on May 1, 1958. In August of that year, after three months of captivity, the king manages to escape from the Onhava Palace and leaves Zembla with Odon. "Twenty odd years before" Disa (who was born in 1928) was less than ten. Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. Colonel Montacute (the pilot of a chartered plane from which the disguised king descends by parachute) makes one think of Montague, Romeo’s family name in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In Shakespeare's Macbeth (3.5) Hecate (the goddess of witches) says:
Great business must be wrought ere noon.
Upon the corner of the moon
There hangs a vaporous drop, profound.
I'll catch it ere it come to ground.
And that, distilled by magic sleights,
Shall raise such artificial sprites,
As by the strength of their illusion,
Shall draw him [Macbeth] on to his confusion.
He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace, and fear.
And you all know security
Is mortals' chiefest enemy.
Kinbote mentions Odon and his mother in his index to Shade's poem:
Odon, pseudonym of Donald O'Donnell, b .1915, world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot; learns from K. about secret passage but has to leave for theater, 130; drives K. from theater to foot of Mt. Mandevil, 149; meets K. near sea cave and escapes with him in motorboat, ibid.; directs cinema picture in Paris, 171; stays with Lavender in Lex, 408; ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair, 691; see also O'Donnell, Sylvia.
O'Donnell, Sylvia, née O'Connell, born 1895? 1890?, the much-traveled, much-married mother of Odon (q. v.), 149, 691; after marrying and divorcing college president Leopold O'Donnell in 1915, father of Odon, she married Peter Gusev, first Duke of Rahl, and graced Zembla till about 1925 when she married an Oriental prince met in Chamonix; after a number of other more or less glamorous marriages, she was in the act of divorcing Lionel Lavender, cousin of Joseph, when last seen in this Index.