DWIGHT MACDONALD
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
But the torrent of virtuosity deafens one to whatever meaning the
poet may have been trying to communicate. "It's clever-but is it art?"
as an earlier and more brilliant verse technician asked.
The raison d'etre of the book is the commentary. This spins a
tale, which I found as interesting as the wedding guest did the ancient
mariner's, about the king of a contemporary country called Zembla
who, after many adventures, escapes his Extremist (Communist) as–
sasins and arrives at a provincial American university masquerading
as Dr. Kinbote. (The adventures, and the lengthy excursions into
Zemblan customs and court life, were tedioys because the author
has
not thought or felt his way into his imaginary country as, say, Swift
and More and Samuel Butler did into theirs, and this is because he uses
Zembla not to convey some meaning about life or politics but merely
as a large piece in the puzzle-picture which the book is.) Dr. Kinbote
becomes a close friend of his colleague, John Shade, and Shade writes
a poem which Kinbote assumes is about Zembla and its refugee king,
since he has thoroughly briefed the poet on these subjects. The poem
and the poet's life are ended by the bullets of an incompetent Ex–
tremist gunman, who has tracked the king to the university and who
aims at Kinbote but hits Shade. Kinbote, who has gotten possession
of Shade's manuscript
in
the minutes preceding the murder, pub–
lishes it with his forward, index and commentary. It becomes clear,
as one reads the commentary, that Kinbote is really a lunatic, that he
was not a friend of Shade, who has been tolerating him uneasily,
that the poem has nothing to do with Zembla or Charles the Beloved,
topics which were doubtless as boring to Shade as they are to the
reader, and that the assassin was in fact a lunatic who had mistaken
Shade for Judge Goldworthy, Shade's next-door neighbor and Kinbote's
absentee landlord, who had sent the assassin to prison. The skill with
which the author, speaking always through Kinbote, manages to let
these cats out of his capacious bag without ever damaging the struc–
ture of Kinbote's paranoiac fantasy, this must be admired. But, not
I think, applauded. For the technical exertions he expends on the
project are so obtrusive as to destroy any esthetic pleasure on the
reader's part. His chief device, for instance, is a parody of academic
method: Dr. Kinbote's line-by-line commentary, which is more than
five times as long as the poem, uses the most far-fetched interpreta-
