NPPF--commentary--691--the attack

[Paul Mackin]

The note coordinates events in the poem with events in the Zembla story.
Shade's heart attack (which as we might have gathered from the poem
wasn't much of a medical event) occurs at the same time as the escaping
king's arrival in America and his being taken in tow by Odon's mother
Sylvia O'Donnell who has set him up at Wordsmith University in a
teaching job and a house next door to his favorite American poet By now
we are as used to K/C's putting down all women as we are to his
unfailing interest in attractive young men. He repays his benefactress
by  unnecessarily calling attention to an alleged drinking problem. The
servant who brings him a drink however is a "jeune beaute, as Marcel
would have put it." (sounds more like something  Proust would have had
the Baron de Charlus say about Charlie Morel). Sylvia helpfully warns
that the servant is hetero and further that K/C had better exercise a
fair degree of caution with this sort of thing in New Wye.Sylvia departs
leaving K/C to sightsee and visit museums before eventually  preceding
on to Wordsmith. where he finds Shade fortunately recovered from the
illness but dismayingly uninformed as to his new neighbor's existence.