JM: Do you think that Shade's house, instead
of lying in "parallel" to Goldsworth's, could offer one corner to
enable Kinbote to roam about and have only one side of it closed to
peeping?...I haven't yet really started to stroll along your avenues and my
present questions must be easy to answer.
J.Friedman: Unless I'm missing something, n. 47-48
says he had to walk uphill to see the north side of Shade's house and downhill
to see the south side... in the Foreword Kinbote only mentions Shade's
living-room window, so I think it's much more likely that from his house he can
only peep into one side...
I'm looking forward to the hard
ones.
JM: Detailed examination ( not detailed
enough, though) reveals that Kinbote describes three vantage points.
This mention is insufficient to contest your idea
that "from his house K can only peep into one side" (with the living-room
window).
Nevertheless, it remains problematic :
"On certain nights...the house would be dark on the
three sides I could survey from my three vantage points, that very darkness
kept telling me they were at home."
Before this paragraph, he stated:
1. From the second story of my house the Shades’
living-room window remained clearly visible so long as the branches of the
deciduous trees between us were still bare...
2. When my casement
window ceased to function because of an elm’s gross growth, I found, at the end
of the veranda, an ivied corner from which I could view rather amply the front
of the poet’s house. If I wanted to see its south side I could go down to the
back of my garage and look from behind a tulip tree across the curving downhill
road at several precious bright windows... If I yearned for the opposite side,
all I had to do was walk uphill to the top of my garden where my bodyguard of
black junipers watched the stars...the lone streetlamp on the road below....
following in the dark a weedy and rocky easterly projection of my grounds ending
in a locust grove on a slightly higher level than the north side of the poet’s
house.
Summing up: There were deciduous trees (plural) lying
between Kinbote's and Shade's domains (as watched from the second story into
Shade's living-room). An elm's growth ( singular) occluded K's casement-window
view.
When K went outside, walking along his wide
veranda until he reached a corner, he found out that it restored his vision
of the front of Shade's house ( living-room windows). K had to wander north and south, also go up and down to
get his two other glimpses from the ground - as you
said.