According to Kinbote (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), Gradus (Shade's murderer) contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus:
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade's art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man, whom he was to see for one fatal moment three weeks later, but of whose existence at the time (July 2) he could not have known. Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. Another Gradus, an Alsatian merchant, who oddly enough was totally unrelated to our killer but had been a close business friend of his kinsmen for years, adopted the boy and raised him with his own children. It would seem that at one time young Gradus studied pharmacology in Zurich, and at another, traveled to misty vineyards as an itinerant wine taster. We find him next engaging in petty subversive activities - printing peevish pamphlets, acting as messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass factories, and that sort of thing. Sometime in the forties he came to Zembla as a brandy salesman. There he married a publican's daughter. His connection with the Extremist party dates from its first ugly writhings, and when the revolution broke out, his modest organizational gifts found some appreciation in various offices. His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
In vinograd (grape) there is vino (wine) and grad (arch., city; hail). According to Frank Budgen (the author of James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 1934), Joyce compared white wine to electricity and red wine to a liquefied beefsteak: 'White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquefied beefsteak.' In his commentary Kinbote (a confirmed vegetarian) quotes Shade's poem The Nature of Electricity:
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
James Joyce only drank white wine, and his all-time favourite was a Swiss one, called Fendant de Sion. Sion is the capital of the Swiss Canton of Valais. The name 'Fendant' comes from the French verb fendre, meaning 'to split', which is what the Chasselas grape does if squeezed. After the tragic death of his daughter Professor Botkin went mad and his personality was split into Shade, Kinbote and Gradus. In his commentary Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus “Vinogradus” and “Leningradus” and repeats the word “squeeze” three times:
The Zemblan Revolution provided Gradus with satisfactions but also produced frustrations. One highly irritating episode seems retrospectively most significant as belonging to an order of things that Gradus should have learned to expect but never did. An especially brilliant impersonator of the King, the tennis ace Julius Steinmann (son of the well-known philanthropist), had eluded for several months the police who had been driven to the limits of exasperation by his mimicking to perfection the voice of Charles the Beloved in a series of underground radio speeches deriding the government. When finally captured he was tried by a special commission, of which Gradus was member, and condemned to death. The firing squad bungled their job, and a little later the gallant young man was found recuperating from his wounds at a provincial hospital. When Gradus learned of this, he flew into one of his rare rages--not because the fact presupposed royalist machinations, but because the clean, honest, orderly course of death had been interfered with in an unclean, dishonest, disorderly manner. Without consulting anybody he rushed to the hospital, stormed in, located Julius in a crowded ward and managed to fire twice, both times missing, before the gun was wrested from him by a hefty male nurse. He rushed back to headquarters and returned with a dozen soldiers but his patient had disappeared.
Such things rankle--but what can Gradus do? The huddled fates engage in a great conspiracy against Gradus. One notes with pardonable glee that his likes are never granted the ultimate thrill of dispatching their victim themselves. Oh, surely, Gradus is active, capable, helpful, often indispensable. At the foot of the scaffold, on a raw and gray morning, it is Gradus who sweeps the night's powder snow off the narrow steps; but his long leathery face will not be the last one that the man who must mount those steps is to see in this world. It is Gradus who buys the cheap fiber valise that a luckier guy will plant, with a time bomb inside, under the bed of a former henchman. Nobody knows better than Gradus how to set a trap by means of a fake advertisement, but the rich old widow whom it hooks is courted and slain by another. When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which made of me a vegetarian for life), Gradus does not take part in the infernal sacrament: he points out the right instrument and directs the carving.
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill things. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
A few moments before Shade's death, Kinbote invites the poet to a glass of Tokay (Kinbote's favorite wine) at his place:
"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"
"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."
The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.
"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).
"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."
"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."
"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.
"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-caped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"
"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." (note to Line 991)
Lob des Tokayers ("In Praise of Tokay Wine," 1815) is a song by Franz Schubert, an Austrian composer (1797-1828). The original text is by Gabriele von Baumberg (1766-1839), an Austrian lady poet who used the penname v. Traubenberg:
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein,
Du stimmest meine Leier
Zu seltnen Reimerei’n.
Mit lang entbehrter Wonne
Und neuerwachtem Scherz
Erwärmst du gleich der Sonne
Mein halb erstorbnes Herz:
Du stimmest meine Leier
Zu seltnen Reimerei’n,
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein.
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein,
Du gießest Kraft und Feuer
Durch Mark und durch Gebein.
Ich fühle neues Leben
Durch meine Adern sprühn,
Und deine Nektarreben
In meinem Busen glühn.
Du gießest Kraft und Feuer
Durch Mark und durch Gebein,
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein.
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein,
Dir soll, als Gramzerstreuer,
Dies Lied geweihet sein!
In Schwermutsvollen Launen
Beflügelst du das Blut;
Bei Blonden und bei Braunen
Gibst du dem Blödsinn Mut.
Dir soll, als Gramzerstreuer,
Dies Lied geweihet sein,
O köstlicher Tokayer,
O königlicher Wein.
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine,
You give voice to my lyre,
Causing rare versifying.
With a delight missing for so long
And a newly awakened sense of fun,
Like the sun, you warm up
My half-frozen heart.
You give voice to my lyre,
Causing rare versifying,
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine!
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine,
You pour power and fire
Through my marrow and limbs.
I feel a new life
Sparkling through my veins
And your nectar grapes
Glow in my breast.
You pour power and fire
Through my marrow and limbs.
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine!
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine,
As destroyer of sorrow, we should
Dedicate this song to you!
In grief-laden moods
You give our blood wings,
To blondes and brunettes
You give the courage to mess about.
As destroyer of sorrow, we should
Dedicate this song to you,
Oh valuable Tokay,
Oh royal wine!
(tansl. Malcolm Wren)
Baron Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg (1897-1919) was VN's first cousin and closest friend. Weintrauben is German for "grape." John Shade and Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls the poet's wife) were married in 1919 (the year when Yuri Rausch was killed in the Crimea). Richard Ellmann (Joyce's bographer) describes how Joyce discovered his favorite wine in Zurich, and gave it a nickname:
'Several evenings were spent in tasting various crus, until one night drinking with Ottocaro Weiss, who had returned from the army in January 1919, he sampled a white Swiss wine called Fendant de Sion. This seemed to be the object of his quest, and after drinking it to his satisfaction, he lifted the half emptied glass, held it against the window like a test tube, and asked Weiss, 'What does this remind you of?' Weiss looked at Joyce and at the pale golden liquid and replied, 'Orina' (urine). 'Si', said Joyce laughing, 'ma di un'archiduchessa' ('Yes, but an archduchess's). From now on the wine was known as the Archduchess'.
Cru (pl. crus) is a French vineyard producing wine grapes. Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be a cross between Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello's wife in Shakespeare's Othello. The main character in Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is a namesake of Leopold O'Odonnell (the father of Odon and his half-brother Nodo):
Nodo, Odon's half-brother, b .1916, son of Leopold O'Donnell and of a Zemblan boy impersonator; a cardsharp and despicable traitor, 171.
Odevalla, a fine town north of Onhava in E. Zembla, once the mayorship of the worthy Zule ("chessrook") Bretwit, granduncle of Oswin Bretwit (q. v., q. v., as the crows say), 149, 286.
Odon, pseudonym of Donald O'Donnell, b .1915, world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot; learns from K. about secret passage but has to leave for theater, 130; drives K. from theater to foot of Mt. Mandevil, 149; meets K. near sea cave and escapes with him in motorboat, ibid.; directs cinema picture in Paris, 171; stays with Lavender in Lex, 408; ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair, 691; see also O'Donnell, Sylvia.
O'Donnell, Sylvia, nee O'Connell, born 1895? 1890?, the much-traveled, much-married mother of Odon (q. v.), 149, 691; after marrying and divorcing college president Leopold O'Donnell in 1915, father of Odon, she married Peter Gusev, first Duke of Rahl, and graced Zembla till about 1925 when she married an Oriental prince met in Chamonix; after a number of other more or less glamorous marriages, she was in the act of divorcing Lionel Lavender, cousin of Joseph, when last seen in this Index.
In 1922 Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) published Joyce's Ulysses in her Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company.