NPPF Comm2: Often

[Don Corathers]

Line 62: often (p 95)

Kinbote converts an adverb to his own use, without so much as a
fare-the-well to the poem from which he plucked it. In this three-plus page
note we learn a good deal more about K's paranoia and instability, and his
imagined identity.

In the first half of the note he reminds us "how given to regicide Zemblans
are." The citizens of Zembla have killed nineteen members of the royal
family in a single century, an average of one assassination every five years
and three months. Although he is still trying to maintain the fiction of
referring to the deposed king in the third person, he offers this
information as a preface to a detailed discussion of how personally fearful
he is, "as if only now living consciously through those perilous nights in
my country, where at any moment a company of jittery revolutionists might
enter and hustle me off to a moonlit wall." Only in the last sentence of
this long paragraph does he remember to refer to himself as "the
chloroformed scholar," without explaining why Zemblan revolutionaries would
have any interest in Charles Kinbote.

In the middle of that paragraph is the remarkable admission that at night,
watching the Shade house, he wished John Shade would have another heart
attack, which would give him an opportunity to play a heroic and comforting
role.

We also learn more about Bob, the disappointingly heterosexual roommate
during Kinbote's first months in New Wye.

The note ends with two anecdotes that illuminate the dimensions of Kinbote's
paranoia and mental disarray. He may have some reason, believing himself to
be a deposed king, to be fearful of revolutionary assassins, but he is also
spooked by the Goldsworth cat wearing a "neck bow of white silk which it
could certainly never have put on all by itself," and he misinterprets a
note about his bad breath as a taunt about hallucinations.

Boyd (in *Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery*) shows
persuasively that it was probably the mysterious Gerald Emerald who tied the
silk bow on the cat-as a practical joke-and slipped the note about halitosis
into Kinbote's pocket.

Finally, we meet Balthasar, the gardener, Prince of Loam. Compare Marquis de
Sod.

Rodnaya Zembla (p 97) = Red Zembla?

Heliotropes (Heliotropium turgenevi) (p 98). MW10 says, with some
definitions abridged for the convenience of the typist:

heliotrope. n. [L. heliotropium, fr. Gk. heliotropion, helio [.]  +  tropos
turn; fr. its flowers turning toward the sun.] 1. any of a genus
(Heliotropium) of herbs or shrubs of the borage family-compare garden
heliotrope. 2. bloodstone. 3. A variable color averaging a moderate to
reddish purple.

garden heliotrope. A tall rhizomatous valerian widely cultivated for its
fragrant tiny flowers and for its roots which yield the drug valerian.

valerian. [2.] A drug consisting of the dried rootstock and roots of the
garden heliotrope formerly used as a carminative and sedative.

carminative. Expelling gas from the alimentary canal so as to relieve colic
or griping.

Long way to go for a fart joke, I'm thinking. Oh, and:

bloodstone. A green chalcedony sprinkled with red spots resembling
blood-called also heliotrope.

Shit:

chalcedony. A translucent quartz that is commonly pale blue or gray with
nearly waxlike luster.

Somewhere in there is a Turgenev connection, but damned if I can find it. I
do recall reading in Boyd that Turgenev was a friend of a Russian writer
named Botkin.

In any case the heliotrope, with its flowers that turn toward the sun, its
roots that will both relieve gas and calm you down, and its red and green
color scheme, is powerfully connected to memories of home for Kinbote. A
home that is, perhaps not incidentally, not a palace but a "house of painted
wood" with a garden bench.

D.C.