Pale Fire and Sherlock Holmes

Paul R. Jackson

Studies in American Fiction, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 1982, pp. 101-105
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1982.0025

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/440639/summary

[ Access provided at 10 Feb 2021 09:13 GMT from University College London (UCL) ]
 PALE FIRE AND SHERLOCK HOLMES

Paul R. Jackson
Temple University

Most commentators on Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire have noted

the importance of the bird reference with which John Shade's poem
opens. With an image that presumably was to be repeated at the
poem's close, Shade refers to himself as "the shadow of the waxwing
slain/ By the false azure in the windowpane," a central mirror
metaphor introducing at once the theme of resemblances that domi-
nates the book.1 Shade becomes the punning but living shadow of the
dead bird; the poem moves quickly to the questions of art and reality,
life and death with which the book deals; and the poet can immedi-
ately point to continued life as he announces paradoxically: "And I/
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky" (p. 33). While critical opinion
may differ on the precise nature of Shade's life after death—he is
generally seen as either living on in the notes Kinbote supplies or as the
author of his own story and therefore of his own pretended and unreal
death—Pale Fire makes sense only in terms of the survival of the
imaginative moment Shade's poem introduces. Shade must, somehow,
live on.
Less commented upon than the waxwing, however, is a second
bird that soon enters the poem, a further example of what Kinbote
pointedly calls "all those amusing birds" (p. 13). As Shade in the poem
stands contemplating the falling snow on the other side of the win-
dowpane, he describes the landscape first "as night unites the viewer
and the view" and then as morning brings its "amazement" (p. 33).
The morning surprise is a track left by a second bird, a revelation that
leads to poetic questioning:
Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back. . . A pheasant's feetl
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (p. 33).
Reading a road as if it were a book is a literary game indeed, and ar-
rows pointing back, repetitions of reversed direction, pheasants as
sublimated grouse, and Chinas becoming Americas all suggest the
102Notes

resemblances that merge the opposites and provide the affirmation

solidly at the base of Pale Fire.2
Kinbote, as untrustworthy an editor here as elsewhere, correctly
identifies Holmes but is unsure of the story. Holmes is "a hawk-nosed,
lanky, rather likable detective, the main character in various stories by
Conan Doyle." But of the story itself, he pleads the same lack of
reference material that obscures the central quotation from Timon of
Athens that gives the novel its title and central image. Referring to the
Holmes stories, Kinbote says only: "I have no means to ascertain at the
present time which of these is referred to here but suspect that our poet
simply made up this Case of the Reversed Footprints" (p. 78). Kinbote
is partly right; there is no case in the Holmes canon solved by the detec-
tive reversing his shoes. But Holmes lurks here around the page's corner
nevertheless, and correct recollection points the way ultimately to
Shade's continued existence beyond the construct of the poem itself.
The tracks of Sherlock Holmes, a childhood enthusiasm, can be
followed throughout Nabokov's work.3 Chess player Luzhin of The
Defense retains memories of Holmes "endowing logic with the glamour
of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all
known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a talisman progressing
through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one radiant
conclusion," memories so intense twenty years later that reading
Holmes again was only to experience a "dryish paraphrase, an
abridged edition. . . ."* An "omnibus edition of Sherlock Holmes"
follows Pnin's narrator for years,5 while the narrator of The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight resorts to "an old Sherlock Holmes stratagem."6
Shirley Holmes of Lolita's Camp Q points to mystery,7 and Hermann
Hermann of Despair, a murderer who ought to know, criticizes Conan
Doyle for missed opportunities. In a suggestion echoing the dynamics
of Pale Fire's twin heroes, Hermann comments: "How marvelously you
could have crowned your creation when your two heroes began boring
youl . . . For you could have written one last tale concluding the
whole Sherlock Holmes epic; one last episode beautifully setting off the
rest: the murderer in that tale should have turned out to be not the one-
legged bookkeeper, not the Chinaman Ching and not the woman in
crimson, but the very chronicler of the crime stories, Dr. Watson
himself—Watson, who, so to speak, knew what was Whatson. A stag-
gering surprise for the reader."8 Such repetition argues familiarity, and
it is not fanciful to assume that Nabokov's memory, like that of Luzhin
and Hermann, was haunted with Holmesian detail.
 Studies in American Fiction103

The "Case of the Reversed Footprints," as Kinbote calls it, in-

volves Conan Doyle's attempt to kill off his famous detective, a need
surely echoed in Hermann Hermann's awareness that Holmes and
Watson had begun to bore their creator. Always oppressed by the
public's interest in his most famous character, an interest that pursued
him, hounded him, drew off his energies from literary endeavors he
felt more important, Doyle decided in 1893 to get rid of his irksome
creation. "I am in the last Holmes story," he wrote his mother, "after
which the gentleman vanishes, never to return. I am weary of his
name."9 And so in the appropriately named "The Final Problem," the
last story in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the detective is made to
die of authorial weariness. In a final encounter with arch-villain Pro-
fessor Moriarty, Holmes and Watson journey to Switzerland, where
they are tricked into visiting the falls of Reichenbach. Watson is fur-
ther induced to return to the inn, leaving Holmes alone to face the evil
Professor. When he returns, Watson finds only Holmes' Alpine-stock,
his cigarette case, and a final note. The story records a moment of
elegiac completeness. "The blackish soil is kept forever soft by the in-
cessant drift of spray, and a bird would leave its tread upon it. Two
lines of footmarks were clearly marked along the farther end of the
path, both leading away from me. There were none returning." Wat-
son concludes what he must conclude: the two men, locked in each
other's arms, must have toppled over the edge. The story ends with a
Watsonian salute to "the best and the wisest man whom I have ever
known."10
Doyle had acted, as he felt, out of necessity: "I had fully deter-
mined at the conclusion of The Memoirs to bring Holmes to an end, as I
felt that my literary energies should not be directed too much into one
channel," he was to write in the Preface to The Case Book of Sherlock
Holmes. "That pale, clear-cut face and loose-limbed figure were taking
up an undue share of my imagination." But public outcry and even-
tually the seduction of American cash caused Doyle to resurrect his
dead hero. As he rather stuffily put it in the Case Book Preface: "I did
the deed, but fortunately no coroner had pronounced upon the re-
mains, and so, after a long interval, it was not difficult for me to re-
spond to the flattering demand and to explain my rash act away."11
In "The Adventure of the Empty House," the first story of The
Return of Sherlock Holmes, the detective returns indeed. Moriarty had
been killed, Doyle reveals, but Holmes had escaped, thanks to his ex-
pertise in Japanese wrestling. He had freed himself from Moriarty's
grasp, had watched the professor fall to his death and had realised a
104Notes

special opportunity. By pretending to be dead, he could capture other

desperate criminals, who would take impossible chances without
Holmes' obstructing presence. Saved by this awkward manipulation,
Holmes, and Doyle, had to explain still the double row of footprints
leading to the fall without the return tracks that would have marked
Holmes' escape. Ultimately, to his surprised but patient companion,
Holmes explains that he had climbed to a ledge above the path, had
waited there while Watson and the others discovered his "death" and
finished their investigations, and then, after further difficulties with a
Moriarty associate, had left into his own hiatus. In his comments to
Watson, Holmes explains his problem. "I might, it is true, have re-
versed my boots, as I have done on similar occasions, but the sight of
three sets of tracks in one direction would certainly have suggested a
deception."12 The "similar occasions" belong in the realm of Holmes
stories never told; this allusion to reversed boots is the only mention of
the ploy in the entire canon.
For Nabokov's purposes in Pale Fire, this reference is nevertheless
exactly right. The question of reversing the boots arises at the crucial
point of Holmes' death and return. Not really dead, although readers
and author had thought him so, Holmes was to have a further career in
several other books. In fact he was never to die. As one Holmesian has
put it: "Henceforward Holmes could never die again; he could only
retire; he was forever condemned to life."13 And that is precisely the
usable point for Shade's poem. That blank page of the snow-covered
road does have its story. Like the waxwing that is killed but lives on in
Shade, the pheasant leaves tracks pointing backward. Death leads to
life, Shade's murder to resurrection in Kinbote, and Kinbote to the fur-
ther incarnations he promises at the end of the book. "I'm reasonably
sure that we survive," says Shade as he discovers the "combinational
delight" of existence (p. 69) . And survive he does, his return to fictional
life anticipated by Sherlock Holmes himself, Shade's poem pointing
backward to the extended life of a character who just could not stay
dead.

Notes

'Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962), p. 33. Further
references are given in the text.
2Although its content seems unusable for Pale Fire, Kenneth Fearing's "Sherlock
Spends a Day in the Country," The New Yorker (March 11, 1944), p. 32, links Holmes
and snow in a poem Nabokov called "lovely" in a letter to Edmund Wilson. See Simon
 Studies in American Fiction105

Karlinsky, ed., The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence Between Vladimir

Nabokov and Edmund Wihon 1940-1971 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 132.
'Nabokov was reading the Holmes stories again in the mid- 1940s, perhaps as a
response to Edmund Wilson's "Mr. Holmes, They Were the Footprints of a Gigantic
Hound" that appeared in The New Yorker on February 17, 1945. In letters to Wilson,
Nabokov in 1946 quotes from the stories and parodies Holmes. See Karlinsky, pp. 162,
167.
'Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1964), pp. 34, 33.
For this and the following references to Holmes in Nabokov, see the notes to Alfred Appel,
Jr., The Annotated Lolita (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), pp. 363-64, 427-28.
'Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1957),
p. 190.
"Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Norfolk: New Directions,
1959), p. 153.
'Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1955), p. 66.
»Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1966), pp. 131-32.
"Letter dated April 6, 1893. Quoted in John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 76.
'"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Doubleday &
Company, no date), pp. 479, 480.
"Doyle, p. 983.
,2Doyle, p. 487.
13Carr, p. 169.