442
DWI6HT MACDONALD
or in Miss McCarthy's review the referents for her sweeping value
judgments: "creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, origin–
ality, and moral truth. . . . one of the very great works of art of
this
century." Her exegetical effort is a formidable one-though it is
dis–
turbing to find her attributing to Wordsworth the well-known tag from
Shelley's
Adonais:
"Life like a dome of many-colored glass/Stains
the white radiance of eternity,"-and also to find her, as a letter
in
The New R epublic
notes, changing "white" to "pale"-she has been
speculating on the book's title. Miss McCarthy couldn't find "pale fire"
in Shakespeare, though Shade's poem indicates it's there, nor could
I.
But Mr. Nabokov in an interview says it is from
Timon of Athens,
and
so it is; in Act IV, Scene 3: "The sun's a thief, and with
his
great
attraction/Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief/And her pale
fire she snatches from the sun." The reference to Kinbote's academic
rape of Shade's poem is, as we say, unmistakeatSle. (The exegetical itch
is catching.) But explaining a work of
art
is one thing and critically
evaluating it is another. I'm afraid that like the book, Miss McCarthy's
review seems to me an exercise in misplaced ingenuity. I finished it with
the uneasy feeling that she, like Mr. Nabokov, had fallen into the pit
that the pedantic Dr. Kinbote had digged.
Dwight Macdonald
