After finishing Brian Boyd’s study of Pale Fire, I stood at my balcony window and gazed down twelve storeys to where an acacia tree was wildly tossing its branches in the wind. I was still reflecting on Boyd’s thesis that the subliminal influence of Hazel’s ghost is the key to solving the novel when a sudden prickle ran across my scalp. Let me try to explain the reason for this. In my early twenties, I had an interest in automatism—a surrealist method of literary production I learned from Andre Breton. The idea was to write at random to eliminate conscious thought from the creative process, and while the result was unreadable gibberish, that is beside the point. What interests me here is that in South Korea, circa 2005, I had produced a booklet of automatistic prose and was trying to come up with a title for it. The text was so shapeless that almost any title could have been justified. Eventually, however, one floated up from the teeming mass of possibilities and solidified: I would call it Pale Fire. Where did “pale fire” came from? At the time you could have counted on two hands the books I had read and Nabokov was not mentioned in any of them. [1] It is possible, of course, that it was just a coincidence or maybe a case of cryptomnesia: I saw the words somewhere and then forgot that I had seen them. Whatever the explanation, I know my surprise and dismay were real when I searched the internet and discovered that the title—that my title—was already taken—and by some Russian named “Nabokov” whom I had never even heard of and who had wasted it on something as dull as a book of literary criticism. My online research, I might add, went no further than a disdainful glance at a website that confirmed the book’s existence. But it was because of this experience that, a few years later, an old paperback edition of Pale Fire caught my eye on the shelf of a secondhand bookstore in New Zealand. So began my formal acquaintance with Nabokov. As I stood at the balcony window, I recalled all this and gazed blindly at the tossing acacia branches and the brickwork of a restaurant behind them. And then I thought about my early reading more generally and, with a sad qualm, cast my thoughts still further back to the emotional and intellectual confusion of my teens and early twenties and to my terrible vanity, fragility and sadness. I saw from the vantage point of my late thirties how desperately I needed guidance at the time and that reading books was therefore the best thing I could do—but not the revolting phantasmagorias of William S. Burroughs or the histrionic manifestos of the modernist avant-garde. I needed the spiritual wisdom of Chesterton, Dostoyevsky, Aquinas. The trouble is that if someone had recommended Chesterton the Catholic or Dostoyevsky the fervent Christian mystic—and, a fortiori, Aquinas, the Church doctor—I would have dismissed all three out of a mindless iconoclasm. I know this because I recall dismissing T. S. Eliot to a college professor when I was 18 and had just learned of his conversion to the Church of England. Not that I dismissed Eliot for this in my heart. I was simply trying to impress the professor with my heterodoxy. The only books acceptable to my rebellious spirit were those that broke all moral and artistic rules. And even if I had tried to read, say, The Everlasting Man, I wouldn’t have understood it. I would have to work my way up to such books by gradual increases in my knowledge, literacy and imagination; and down to them, too, by gradual increases in suffering and humility. All the books I have read are, in this sense, like rungs on a ladder by means of which I climbed out of a pit. The pornographic gore of Naked Lunch is surely the bottom rung—but even that book provided me with a readerly outlet for my subversive impulses and so an incidental exposure to such rationality as belongs to a page of ordered words and whatever literary beauty is to be found in grey subway dawns and phosphorescent excrement. And by means of this rung, I inched my way up to the next: To Camus and Sartre who, while reaching a conclusion of atheism, correctly understood that the only really important question was the nature of Ultimate Reality; and from there to Borges whose wonderful intelligence and obscure erudition made room for the existence of God—or at least for the possibility of his existence—and so undermined my smug atheism. And from that rung to others: The ecstatic benediction to nature and sexuality in the soliloquy of Molly Bloom; the religious epiphany of Levin Konstantin at the end of Anna Karenina; the anguished spirituality of Dostoyevsky; and, of course, Nabokov’s own subtle “theology for skeptics” manifest in his preoccupying interest in the afterlife. In this way, page by page, I continued my assent until at last I was ready to leave the pit behind me and walk on two feet into the cathedral-like grandeur of Natural Theology. I have still not explained the strange thrill I experienced standing at the balcony window but I think I am now ready to do so. Let us imagine that, when I was in my late teens, God gazed down upon me where I was slumped in the darkness and smiled with infinite compassion. It may be that He knew that I could love Him but also knew what it would take: Before I could love, I needed to believe; and before I could believe, I needed to understand; and before I could understand, I needed to read voluminously and with the right complement of interest and humility. How simple everything would be if I could have picked up the Summa Theologiae and at once catapulted myself into the noonday brightness. But a powerful spell of vanity and egotism lay upon me and this would first need to be broken. And so God, in his mercy and patience, threw down a rope ladder by means of which I could slowly ascend, handgrip by handgrip, over a period of twelve years. Even my being misyoked and marooned in South Korea must have figured in His design. All this takes a long time to explain but ran through my mind very quickly as I stood at the window. And then my thoughts reached this conclusion. It is good that I came out of the dark place I was in. But it is also important that I should have some idea of God’s involvement so that I can pay him the proper tribute of gratitude. Plausibly, therefore, God might wish to conceal his signature in the pattern of circumstances leading to my salvation. And one way He could do this is by subliminally influencing me from the beyond to read a book whose solution involves a subliminal influence from the beyond. God would know that this strange coincidence was something I was bound to reflect upon. And in case there were any doubt, I would have the words of Vera Nabokov declaring the beyond--potustoronnost—her husband’s “main theme” and Boyd’s careful articulation of the thesis that Shade’s questions about the afterlife are answered affirmatively in a secret language of coincidences. Suddenly, I felt the conspiracy of coincidences between New Wye and Zembla spilling out of the fictional universe of Pale Fire and into my lived reality. Suddenly, I saw what this implied: That the “contrapuntal genius of human fate,” as Nabokov calls Him, had for some time now been exercising a loving influence on my life. This is the moment I feel the prickle go across my scalp.
[1] I didn't start reading seriously until my late twenties when I was unhappily married in South Korea and, for twelve long years, had nothing better to do. I read nothing as a child and during my entire term at college finished only six books: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Naked Lunch, On the Road, The Name of the Rose, Borges’ Labyrinths, and Gulliver’s Travels. By 2001, I was living in South Korea where English language novels were very hard to find but even Korean bookstores had a few pulpy Wordsworth Classics thanks to which I can add Wuthering Heights, Dracula and GreatExpectations to my list—for a pitiful total of 9 books by the age of 25. Around this time I discovered two things. One was that I did not enjoy my wife's company. The other was that I could order almost any book online. And so my reading finally began to take off.