John Shade Shaving: Inspiration and Composition in a Selection from Pale Fire

Charles Kinbote's aesthetic frustrations with his beloved poet John Shade reach their apex at the start of Pale Fire's final canto, which features long descriptions of the poet shaving in the bathtub. Kinbote tries to elevate the passage with a desperate (and faulty) reference to a similar moment in the oeuvre of A. E. Housman. Kinbote unwittingly sends the reader on an allusive journey in which we find that that the act of shaving is the figure used by both Nabokov and Housman in describing the agony of poetic composition and the transient bliss of inspiration. What Kinbote originally reads as a mocking parody turns out to be a genuine, though playful, statement of artistic method.