Judgement Day Pale Fire Journal Judgement Day Pale Fire Journal | Page 54

necessary to say so, the poem may certainly be interpreted as reference
to death in general, and not specifically death by gunshot. I digress.
Speculations have also risen concerning my client’s abrupt acquisition of
the poem so close to the event of Shade’s death. As my client notes in the
Foreword of his book, “it has been called (by Shade’s former lawyer) a
“fantastic farrago of evil,” while another person (Shade’s former literary
agent) has wondered with a sneer if Mrs. Shade’s tremulous signature
might not have been penned “in some kind of peculiar red ink (p. 16-17).”
Yet in my client’s explanation his true intent is revealed, “Immediately after
my friend’s death I prevailed on his distraught widow to forelay and defeat
the commercial passions and academic intrigues that were bound to come
swirling around her husband’s manuscript (p.16).” Admittedly I am able to
understand how the condition in which the manuscript was “transferred by
(my client) to a safe spot even before (Shade’s) body had reached the
grave (p.16),” can seem suspicious, but I am confident in assuring the jury
that was this done in utmost haste by my client in order to protect the poet
he so revered.
Critics of the Foreword will also pick on my client’s saying on p.17 that “…
The depth charge of Shade’s death blasted such secrets and caused so
many dead fish to float up, that I was forced to leave New Wye soon after
my last interview with the jailed killer.” Contrary to their belief that this
statement supposes my client as the killer, he is in actuality referring to the
discovery of his being the exiled King of Zembla, causing him to flee in or-
der to stay hidden from those authorities who are in pursuit of him as we
speak, also why he had to find “a new incognito” (also p.17), in addition to
that of Charles Kinbote, that is.
On pages 18 and 19 of the Foreword my client beautifully describes his
passionate relationship with the late Shade as follows, “The calendar says
I had known him for only a few months but there exist such friendships
which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent
time, independent of rotating, malicious music.” Such a beautiful descrip-
tion can only come from one speaking with true emotion. In addition to this
statement, my client goes on to say “Never shall I forget how elated I was
upon learning…that the suburban house into which I moved…stood next
to that of the celebrated American poet whose verses I had tried to put into
Zemblan two decades earlier!” Not only does this declaration relate the
duration my client had revered Shade even prior to their meeting, his note
of translating Shade’s earlier works into Zemblan provide further evidence
of his hailing from that land.
Despite this clear evidence of the mutual friendship that existed between
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