POETRY IN REVIEW

1 8 9 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R O fortunate, O expedient Brian Boyd! The biographer of Vladimir Nabokov, also one of his most edifying commentators, has done what surely many of us who, in the egregious idiom, ‘‘have taught’’ Pale Fire, the master’s greatest, densest novel, have only imagined doing: he has disentangled the eponymous poem ‘‘Pale Fire’’ by the fictional character John Shade from the editorial tentacles of the fictional scholar Charles Kinbote and presented it as though it were a poem to be taken at face value – which it is and isn’t. You will recall the novel’s donnée: John Shade, a New England poet and scholar, who tells us sardonically that on a TV program he has just been ‘‘mentioned twice, as usual just behind / (one oozy footstep) Frost,’’ had all but completed an autobiographical long poem, in four cantos, 999 lines long, in heroic couplets. The concluding thousandth line is missing, so the received explanation goes, because Shade was shot and killed by a man named Jack Grey P a l e F i r e : A P o e m i n Fo u r C a n t o s b y J o h n S h a d e , by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd, illustrated by Jean Holabird, with essays by Brian Boyd and R. S. Gwynn (Gingko Press, 88 pages, $35 boxed edition) 1 9 0 Y E N S E R Y (or Jacob Gradus) before he could finish his magnum opus. The poem was spirited away from the crime scene by Shade’s neighbor, Kinbote, a Russian scholar and professor, who secured from Shade’s widow, Sybil, the right to edit and publish the work. At first blush the poem concerns Shade’s childhood (Canto One); his relationships with his maternal aunt Maude, his muse and wife, Sybil, and his daughter Hazel (Canto Two and passim), a budding genius adored by her parents who committed suicide as a teenager (an event delayed in the narrative for climactic purposes until Canto Four) because of her humiliating homeliness; and his and his wife’s experience with a New Age lay or transreligious community dedicated to exploration of the possibility of an afterlife. The community calls itself the Institute for Preparation for the Hereafter or I.P.H., an acronym pronounced ‘‘if’’ – or, when spoken in French with the article, ‘‘leaf.’’ ‘‘L’if,’’ Shade informs us, might as well allude to Rabelais’s alleged dying words, ‘‘Je m’en vais chercher le grand peut-être,’’ ‘‘I’m going o√ to look for the grand perhaps [or ‘if’].’’ The enigmas that are the raison d’être of the I.P.H. are especially relevant in view of Hazel’s death and Shade’s despair at the thought of never seeing her again. Kinbote has accomplished his editorial task, and Shade’s text is replete with an editor’s foreword, a commentary (which includes some especially ‘‘precious variants’’ and canceled passages), and an index. Matters complicate themselves as the reader increasingly understands , thanks to the importunate apparatus, that Kinbote, an émigré from Russia, takes the poem to be inspired at least in large part by his own biography, even though his appearance in the text is limited to a Hitchcockian cameo. Further embranglement ensues as the reader also surmises, on the basis of his cagy innuendoes , inadvertent slips, and flagrant inconsistencies, that Kinbote (aka V. Botkin) is a paranoid schizophrenic who lives an intense fantasy life as Charles the Beloved, the deposed King of Zembla, whose own autobiography, including accounts of his archenemies, appears in fits and starts in the endnotes. Boyd’s coup is to extract the poem and to reproduce it in a splendid boxed edition. The box houses facsimiles of Shade’s fair draft of ‘‘Pale Fire’’ and rough drafts of a few passages, handwritten on 3 — 5 lined index cards; a nicely printed booklet (also 3 — 5) of the finished work ‘‘Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos,’’ with a P...