In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van Veen calls Kim Beauharnais’s album “the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre:”
In an equally casual tone of voice Van said: 'Darling, you smoke too much, my belly is covered with your ashes. I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais's exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts.'
'You shall not slaughter him,' said Ada. 'He is subnormal, he is, perhaps, blackmailerish, but in his sordidity, there is an istoshnïy ston ('visceral moan') of crippled art. Furthermore, this page is the only really naughty one. And let's not forget that a copperhead of eight was also ambushed in the brush'.
‘Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle.’
‘Oh do!’ said Ada (skipping another abominable glimpse — apparently, through a hole in the boards of the attic). ‘Look, here’s our little Caliph Island!’
‘I don’t want to look any more. I suspect you find that filth titillating. Some nuts get a kick from motor-bikini comics.’
‘Please, Van, do glance! These are our willows, remember?’
‘"The castle bathed by the Adour:
The guidebooks recommend that tour."’
‘It happens to be the only one in color. The willows look sort of greenish because the twigs are greenish, but actually they are leafless here, it’s early spring, and you can see our red boat Souvenance through the rushes. And here’s the last one: Kim’s apotheosis of Ardis.’ (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Carte du Tendre: ‘Map of Tender Love’, sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century.
In Proust’s Un amour de Swann Swann spends his days in poring over a map of the forest of Compiègne, as though it had been that of the 'Pays du Tendre:'
Il passait ses journées penché sur une carte de la forêt de Compiègne comme si ç'avait été la carte du Tendre, s'entourait de photographies du château de Pierrefonds.
He spent his days in poring over a map of the forest of Compiègne, as though it had been that of the 'Pays du Tendre'; he surrounded himself with the photographs of Château de Pierrefonds.
Kim Beauharnais is a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Van blinds for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada (2.11).
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Proust’s novel is known as Les malheurs de Swann:
(At ten or earlier the child had read — as Van had — Les Malheurs de Swann, as the next sample reveals):
‘I think Marina would stop scolding me for my hobby ("There’s something indecent about a little girl’s keeping such revolting pets...," "Normal young ladies should loathe snakes and worms," et cetera) if I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness and place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not be roomy enough!) the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff "Sphinxian" attitude.’ (1.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Les malheurs de Swann: cross between Les malheurs de Sophie by Mme de Ségur (née Countess Rostopchin) and Proust’s Un amour de Swann.
Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when he and Ada make love for the first time), Van mentions Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series:
A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first. Oh, first! We had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some Château Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August 4?
Who cried? Stopchin cried? Larivière cried? Larivière? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait?
No, she was fast ablaze — I mean, asleep. I know, said Van, it was she, the hand-painted handmaid, who used your watercolors to touch up her eyes, or so Larivière said, who accused her and Blanche of fantastic sins.
Oh, of course! But not Marina’s poor French — it was our little goose Blanche. Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version. (1.19)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Mlle Stopchin: a representative of Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, author of Les Malheurs de Sophie (nomenclatorially occupied on Antiterra by Les Malheurs de Swann).
au feu!: fire!
flambait: was in flames.
Ashette: ‘Cendrillon’ in the French original.
According to Ada, the Night of the Burning Barn is the apotheosis of “Ardis the First:”
‘All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect —’
‘Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then — zdravstvuyte: apofeoz, the Night of the Burning Barn!’ (1.18)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): zdravstvuyte etc.: Russ., lo and behold: the apotheosis.
After Van had left Ardis forever, Blanche (a French maid at Ardis who cried “au feu!” and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase) married Trofim Fartukov (the Russian coachman in “Ardis the Second”) and gave birth to a blind child:
‘Sweetheart,’ said Van, ‘the whole of 1888 has been ripped out. One need not be a sleuth in a mystery story to see that at least as many pages have been removed as retained. I don’t mind — I mean I have no desire to see the Knabenkräuter and other pendants of your friends botanizing with you; but 1888 has been withheld and he’ll turn up with it when the first grand is spent.’
‘I destroyed 1888 myself,’ admitted proud Ada; ‘but I swear, I solemnly swear, that the man behind Blanche, in the perron picture, was, and has always remained, a complete stranger.’
‘Good for him,’ said Van. ‘Really it has no importance. It’s our entire past that has been spoofed and condemned. On second thoughts, I will not write that Family Chronicle. By the way, where is my poor little Blanche now?’
‘Oh, she’s all right. She’s still around. You know, she came back — after you abducted her. She married our Russian coachman, the one who replaced Bengal Ben, as the servants called him.’
‘Oh she did? That’s delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it.’
‘They have a blind child,’ said Ada.
‘Love is blind,’ said Van.
‘She tells me you made a pass at her on the first morning of your first arrival.’
‘Not documented by Kim,’ said Van. ‘Will their child remain blind? I mean, did you get them a really first-rate physician?’
‘Oh yes, hopelessly blind. But speaking of love and its myths, do you realize — because I never did before talking to her a couple of years ago — that the people around our affair had very good eyes indeed? Forget Kim, he’s only the necessary clown — but do you realize that a veritable legend was growing around you and me while we played and made love?’ (2.7)
Van repeats the words of the postman in VN’s novel Kamera Obskura (1932, translated into English as Laughter in the Dark, 1938), lyubov’ slepa (love is blind):
Швейцар, разговаривавший с почтальоном, посмотрел на Кречмара с любопытством.
«Прямо не верится, – сказал швейцар, когда те прошли, – прямо не верится, что у него недавно умерла дочка».
«А кто второй?» – спросил почтальон.
«Почём я знаю. Завела молодца ему в подмогу, вот и всё. Мне, знаете, стыдно, когда другие жильцы смотрят на эту… (нехорошее слово). А ведь приличный господин, сам-то, и богат, – мог бы выбрать себе подругу поосанистее, покрупнее, если уж на то пошло».
«Любовь слепа», – задумчиво произнёс почтальон. (chapter XXI)
The characters in VN’s novel include the writer Segelkranz who intimately knew the late Marcel Proust and who imitates Proust’s manner. The novel’s main character, Bruno Kretschmar, learns of Magda’s infidelity, when Segelkranz reads to him a fragment of his new novella. Its hero, Hermann, has a toothache and goes to a dentist. When Van and Ada leave for the Film Festival in Sindbad, Ada mentions the black, broken teeth of local whores:
In vain he told himself that those vile hankerings did not differ, in their intrinsic insignificance, from the anal pruritis which one tries to relieve by a sudden fit of scratching. Yet he knew that by daring to satisfy the corresponding desire for a young wench he risked wrecking his life with Ada. How horribly and gratuitously it might hurt her, he foreglimpsed one day in 1926 or ‘27 when he caught the look of proud despair she cast on nothing in particular before walking away to the car that was to take her on a trip in which, at the last moment, he had declined to join her. He had declined — and had simulated the grimace and the limp of podagra — because he had just realized, what she, too, had realized — that the beautiful native girl smoking on the back porch would offer her mangoes to Master as soon as Master’s housekeeper had left for the Film Festival in Sindbad. The chauffeur had already opened the car door, when, with a great bellow, Van overtook Ada and they rode off together, tearful, voluble, joking about his foolishness.
‘It’s funny,’ said Ada, ‘what black, broken teeth they have hereabouts, those blyadushki.’
(‘Ursus,’ Lucette in glistening green, ‘Subside, agitation of passion,’ Flora’s bracelets and breasts, the whelk of Time). (5.3)
A character in The Arabian Nights, Sinbad the Sailor hails from Bagdad. In Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe Charlus, in conversing with Jupien, compares himself to the Caliph (cf. “our little Caliph Island” mentioned by Ada) roaming about the streets of Bagdad in the guise of a common merchant:
“Si je reviens sur la question du conducteur de tramway, reprit M. de Charlus avec ténacité, c’est qu’en dehors de tout, cela pourrait présenter quelque intérêt pour le retour. Il m’arrive en effet, comme le calife qui parcourait Bagdad pris pour un simple marchand, de condescendre à suivre quelque curieuse petite personne qui dont la silhouette m’aura amusé.”
M. de Charlus is Proust’s artistic representation of the homosexual. In Kamera Obskura Horn simulates homosexuality in order to deceive Kretschmar (who becomes blind as a result of a car crash).
Describing his visit to Brownhill (Ada's school for girls), Van mentions Proust's perversion and quelque petite blanchisseuse (cf. Blanche's 'linen-folding' voice humming 'Malbrough'):
They talked about their studies and teachers, and Van said:
‘I would like your opinion, Ada, and yours, Cordula, on the following literary problem. Our professor of French literature maintains that there is a grave philosophical, and hence artistic, flaw in the entire treatment of the Marcel and Albertine affair. It makes sense if the reader knows that the narrator is a pansy, and that the good fat cheeks of Albertine are the good fat buttocks of Albert. It makes none if the reader cannot be supposed, and should not be required, to know anything about this or any other author’s sexual habits in order to enjoy to the last drop a work of art. My teacher contends that if the reader knows nothing about Proust’s perversion, the detailed description of a heterosexual male jealously watchful of a homosexual female is preposterous because a normal man would be only amused, tickled pink in fact, by his girl’s frolics with a female partner. The professor concludes that a novel which can be appreciated only by quelque petite blanchisseuse who has examined the author’s dirty linen is, artistically, a failure.’
‘Ada, what on earth is he talking about? Some Italian film he has seen?’
‘Van,’ said Ada in a tired voice, ‘you do not realize that the Advanced French Group at my school has advanced no farther than to Racan and Racine.’
‘Forget it,’ said Van.
‘But you’ve had too much Marcel,’ muttered Ada.
The railway station had a semi-private tearoom supervised by the stationmaster’s wife under the school’s idiotic auspices. It was empty, save for a slender lady in black velvet, wearing a beautiful black velvet picture hat, who sat with her back to them at a ‘tonic bar’ and never once turned her head, but the thought brushed him that she was a cocotte from Toulouse. Our damp trio found a nice corner table and with sighs of banal relief undid their raincoats. He hoped Ada would discard her heavy-seas hat but she did not, because she had cut her hair because of dreadful migraines, because she did not want him to see her in the role of a moribund Romeo.
(On fait son grand Joyce after doing one’s petit Proust. In Ada’s lovely hand.)
(But read on; it is pure V.V. Note that lady! In Van’s bed-buvard scrawl.)
As Ada reached for the cream, he caught and inspected her dead-shamming hand. We remember the Camberwell Beauty that lay tightly closed for an instant upon our palm, and suddenly our hand was empty. He saw, with satisfaction, that her fingernails were now long and sharp.
‘Not too sharp, are they, my dear,’ he asked for the benefit of dura Cordula, who should have gone to the ‘powder room’ — a forlorn hope.
‘Why, no,’ said Ada.
‘You don’t,’ he went on, unable to stop, ‘you don’t scratch little people when you stroke little people? Look at your little girl friend’s hand’ (taking it), ‘look at those dainty short nails (cold innocent, docile little paw!). She could not catch them in the fanciest satin, oh, no, could you, Ardula — I mean, Cordula?’
Both girls giggled, and Cordula kissed Ada’s cheek. Van hardly knew what reaction he had expected, but found that simple kiss disarming and disappointing. The sound of the rain was lost in a growing rumble of wheels. He glanced at his watch; glanced up at the clock on the wall. He said he was sorry — that was his train.
‘Not at all,’ wrote Ada (paraphrased here) in reply to his abject apologies, ‘we just thought you were drunk; but I’ll never invite you to Brownhill again, my love.’ (1.27)
Van's conversation with Ada and Cordula de Prey (Ada's schoolmate at Brownhill) takes place at the railway station café. In Kamera Obskura the little boy in Horn’s, Magda’s and Segelkranz's compartment of the local train asks his mother to give him an orange:
Горн сжал ей руку. Она вздохнула и, так как жара её размаяла, положила голову ему на плечо, продолжая нежно ёжиться и говорить, – всё равно французы в купе не могли понять. У окна сидела толстая усатая женщина в чёрном, рядом с ней мальчик, который всё повторял: «Donne-moi une orange, un tout petit bout d’orange!» «Fiche-moi la paiz», – отвечала мать. Он замолкал и потом начинал скулить сызнова. Двое молодых французов тихо обсуждали выгоды автомобильного дела; у одного из них была сильнейшая зубная боль, щека была повязана, он издавал сосущий звук, перекашивая рот. А прямо против Магды сидел маленький лысый господин в очках, с чёрной записной книжкой в руке – должно быть, провинциальный нотариус. (chapter XXVI)
The characters of Ada include Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary, the Editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van’s and Ada’s death):
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with us in 1957. She was (and still is — ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump [.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has been responsible for typing out this memoir — the solace of what are, no doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother’s children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her [generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her ‘Fialochka’ and allowed herself the luxury of admiring ‘little Violet’ ‘s cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner, lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4)
The situation is complicated enough, because Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox seem to be Ada's grandchildren (Van does not see this, because love is blind). To Ada's suggestion that after her death Van should marry Violet Van replies that he knew two lesbians in his life and that is enough:
Ada. Van. Ada. Vaniada. Nobody. Each hoped to go first, so as to concede, by implication, a longer life to the other, and each wished to go last, in order to spare the other the anguish or worries, of widowhood. One solution would be for you to marry Violet.
‘Thank you. J’ai tâté de deux tribades dans ma vie, ça suffit. Dear Emile says "terme qu’on évite d’employer." How right he is!’
‘If not Violet, then a local Gauguin girl. Or Yolande Kickshaw.’
Why? Good question. Anyway. Violet must not be given this part to type. I’m afraid we’re going to wound a lot of people (openwork American lilt)! Oh come, art cannot hurt. It can, and how!
Actually the question of mortal precedence has now hardly any importance. I mean, the hero and heroine should get so close to each other by the time the horror begins, so organically close, that they overlap, intergrade, interache, and even if Vaniada’s end is described in the epilogue we, writers and readers, should be unable to make out (myopic, myopic) who exactly survives, Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda.
I had a schoolmate called Vanda. And I knew a girl called Adora, little thing in my last floramor. What makes me see that bit as the purest sanglot in the book? What is the worst part of dying? (5.6)
Neither does Van realize that the girlfriend of a girlfriend who shot dead Vanda Broom (Ada's and Cordula's schoolmate at Brownhill whom Cordula calls tribadka, 1.43) on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places, is Ada.
In Proust's Du Côté de chez Swann ("Swann's Way") Marcel describes Mlle Vinteuil's lesbian games and mentions her sophisms (cf. Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series):
Mlle Vinteuil répondit par des paroles de doux reproche: «Voyons, voyons», qui prouvaient la bonté de sa nature, non qu’elles fussent dictées par l’indignation que cette façon de parler de son père eût pu lui causer (évidemment, c’était là un sentiment qu’elle s’était habituée, à l’aide de quels sophismes? à faire taire en elle dans ces minutes-là), mais parce qu’elles étaient comme un frein que pour ne pas se montrer égoïste elle mettait elle-même au plaisir que son amie cherchait à lui procurer. Et puis cette modération souriante en répondant à ces blasphèmes, ce reproche hypocrite et tendre, paraissaient peut-être à sa nature franche et bonne une forme particulièrement infâme, une forme doucereuse de cette scélératesse qu’elle cherchait à s’assimiler. Mais elle ne put résister à l’attrait du plaisir qu’elle éprouverait à être traitée avec douceur par une personne si implacable envers un mort sans défense; elle sauta sur les genoux de son amie, et lui tendit chastement son front à baiser comme elle aurait pu faire si elle avait été sa fille, sentant avec délices qu’elles allaient ainsi toutes deux au bout de la cruauté en ravissant à M. Vinteuil, jusque dans le tombeau, sa paternité. Son amie lui prit la tête entre ses mains et lui déposa un baiser sur le front avec cette docilité que lui rendait facile la grande affection qu’elle avait pour Mlle Vinteuil et le désir de mettre quelque distraction dans la vie si triste maintenant de l’orpheline.
Mlle Vinteuil is the daughter of the deceased composer whose music – his famous sonata and septet – provides the central musical leitmotiv of Proust's novel. The characters of Ada include Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher and composer who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie and who dies in Ward Five of the Kalugano hospital. In the same hospital Van recovers from a wound that he received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge. Like the two seconds (Arwin Birdfoot and Johnny Raffin, esq.), Captain Tapper (a member of the Do-Re-La country club) is homosexual. The name of Van's adversary brings to mind Chekhov's story Tapyor ("The Ballroom Pianist," 1885). In his essay on Chekhov (the author of "Ward Six," 1892), Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), Lev Shestov, the author of Apofeoz bespochvennosti ("The Apotheosis of Groundlessness," 1919), speaks of Chekhov’s story The Duel (1891) and uses the word poshlyak:
Неизвестно зачем, без любви, даже без влечения она отдаётся первому встречному пошляку. Потом ей кажется, что её с ног до головы облили грязью, и эта грязь так пристала к ней, что не смоешь даже целым океаном воды.
For no reason at all, without love, without even attraction she [Laevsky’s mistress] gives herself to the first vulgar person [poshlyak] she met. Then she feels that mud was flung at her and this mud got stuck to her whole body so that even an ocean of water would not wash it off. (VI)
A surgeon at the Kalugano hospital who tells Van about Rack's death, Dr Fitzbishop is what Russians call a poshlyak ('pretentious vulgarian'):
Dr Fitzbishop had said, rubbing his hands, that the Luga laboratory said it was the not always lethal 'arethusoides' but it had no practical importance now, because the unfortunate music teacher, and composer, was not expected to spend another night on Demonia, and would be on Terra, ha-ha, in time for evensong. Doc Fitz was what Russians call a poshlyak ('pretentious vulgarian') and in some obscure counter-fashion Van was relieved not to be able to gloat over the wretched Rack's martyrdom. (1.42)
VN's list of literary characters personifying poshlust include Laevsky in "The Duel," young Bloch in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu ("In Search of Lost Time") and Marion (Molly) Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses.
The English title of Proust's novel brings to mind Milton's Paradise Lost. In his article O Miltone i shatobrianovom perevode poteryannogo raya ("On Milton and Chateaubriand's Translation of Paradise Lost," 1836) Pushkin criticizes Alfred de Vigny's novel Cinq Mars (in which Scudéry explains to the guests of Marion Delorme, cardinal de Richelieu's mistress, his allegorical map of love) and Victor Hugo's play Cromwell. In both the novel and the play John Milton appears as a character:
Альфред де Виньи в своём «Сен-Марсе» также выводит перед нами Мильтона и вот в каких обстоятельствах:
У славной Марии Делорм, любовницы кардинала Ришелье, собирается общество придворных и учёных. Скюдери толкует им свою аллегорическую карту любви. Гости в восхищении от крепости Красоты, стоящей на реке Гордости, от деревни Записочек, от гавани Равнодушия и проч. и проч. Все осыпают г-на Скюдери напыщенными похвалами, кроме Мольера, Корнеля и Декарта, которые тут же находятся. Вдруг хозяйка представляет обществу молодого путешествующего англичанина, по имени Джона Мильтона, и заставляет его читать гостям отрывки из «Потерянного Рая».
In Alfred de Vigny’s novel all guests of Marion Delorme (except Molière, Corneille and Descartes) are delighted with the fortress of Beauty on the river of Pride, with the village of Little Notes, with the harbor of Indifference, et cetera. Young Milton (whose eyes are red because of too much vigil or shedding too many tears) is asked to read aloud the excerpts from Paradise Lost. In his article Pushkin remarks that, actually, Milton composed Paradise Lost (publ. in 1667) much later, when he was completely blind.