In Memory of Don Johnson
In a botanical conversation in “Ardis the First” Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) puns “flowers into bloomers” and Ada mentions “mollyblob:”
Van: ‘That yellow thingum’ (pointing at a floweret prettily depicted on an Eckercrown plate) ‘— is it a buttercup?’
Ada: ‘No. That yellow flower is the common Marsh Marigold, Caltha palustris. In this country, peasants miscall it "Cowslip," though of course the true Cowslip, Primula veris, is a different plant altogether.’
‘I see,’ said Van.
‘Yes, indeed,’ began Marina, ‘when I was playing Ophelia, the fact that I had once collected flowers —’
‘Helped, no doubt,’ said Ada. ‘Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep (which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U.S.A.’
‘Ah,’ said Van.
‘As in the case of many flowers,’ Ada went on, with a mad scholar’s quiet smile, ‘the unfortunate French name of our plant, souci d’eau, has been traduced or shall we say transfigured —’
‘Flowers into bloomers,’ punned Van Veen.
‘Je vous en prie, mes enfants!’ put in Marina, who had been following the conversation with difficulty and now, through a secondary misunderstanding, thought the reference was to the undergarment.
‘By chance, this very morning,’ said Ada, not deigning to enlighten her mother, ‘our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who —’
(First time she pronounced it — at that botanical lesson!)
‘— is pretty hard on English-speaking transmongrelizers — monkeys called "ursine howlers" — though I suspect her reasons are more chauvinistic than artistic and moral — drew my attention — my wavering attention — to some really gorgeous bloomers, as you call them, Van, in a Mr Fowlie’s soi-disant literal version — called "sensitive" in a recent Elsian rave — sensitive! — of Mémoire, a poem by Rimbaud (which she fortunately — and farsightedly — made me learn by heart, though I suspect she prefers Musset and Coppée)’ —
‘...les robes vertes et déteintes des fillettes...’ quoted Van triumphantly.
‘Egg-zactly’ (mimicking Dan). ‘Well, Larivière allows me to read him only in the Feuilletin anthology, the same you have apparently, but I shall obtain his oeuvres complètes very soon, oh very soon, much sooner than anybody thinks. Incidentally, she will come down after tucking in Lucette, our darling copperhead who by now should be in her green nightgown —’
‘Angel moy,’ pleaded Marina, ‘I’m sure Van cannot be interested in Lucette’s nightdress!’
‘— the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into "the sky’s bed" instead of "bed ceiler." But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d’or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d’eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine "care of the water" — although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, marybud, maybubble, and many other nick-names associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.’
‘On the other hand,’ said Van, ‘one can well imagine a similarly bilingual Miss Rivers checking a French version of, say, Marvell’s Garden —’
‘Oh,’ cried Ada, ‘I can recite "Le jardin" in my own transversion — let me see —
En vain on s’amuse à gagner
L’Oka, la Baie du Palmier...’
‘...to win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes!’ shouted Van.
‘You know, children,’ interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, ‘when I was your age, Ada, and my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies, and the last fête-d’enfants, and the next picnic, and — oh, millions of nice normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows what!’
‘But you just said you collected flowers?’ said Ada.
‘Oh, just one season, somewhere in Switzerland. I don’t remember when. It does not matter now.’ (1.10)
Ada’s “mollyblob” seems to hint at Molly Bloom, Leopold Bloom’s wife in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). There is Bloom in “bloomers.” In Joyce’s novel Leopold Bloom is a son of Rudolph Virag, a Hungarian Jew who converted to Protestantism and, after moving to Ireland, changed his name to Bloom. In his Cornell lecture on Ulysses VN points out that in Hungarian virág means “flower.” Leopold Bloom’s nom de plume, Henry Flower, is a pun on his own name and a means of reinforcing the connection between flowers and forgetfulness, insofar as one who is promiscuous while married forgets his marriage vows, among them faithfulness. The children of Demon Veen (the husband of Marina's twin sister Aqua) and Marina Durmanov (the wife of Daniel Veen, Demon's first cousin), Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina's old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall (1.1).
The eighteenth and final "episode" of Ulysses is Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. When he leaves Ardis forever, Van recalls it as an example of the inner monologue:
‘The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?’
‘I’ll take you five versts across the bog,’ said Trofim, ‘the nearest is Volosyanka.’
His vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.
Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!
‘Barin, a barin,’ said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his passenger.
‘Da?‘Dazhe skvoz’ kozhanïy fartuk ne stal-bï ya trogat’ etu frantsuzskuyu devku.’
Barin: master. Dázhe skvoz’ kózhanïy fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bï ya trógat’: I would not think of touching. Étu: this (that). Frantsúzskuyu: French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. Úzhas, otcháyanie: horror, despair. Zhálost’: pity, Kóncheno, zagázheno, rastérzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds. (1.41)
The French who exploited the inner monologue is Paul Bourget (1852-1935). Describing a weekday lunch at Ardis, Van mentions Paul Bourget’s ‘monologue intérieur’ borrowed from old Leo:
Weekday lunch at Ardis Hall. Lucette between Marina and the governess; Van between Marina and Ada; Dack, the golden-brown stoat, under the table, either between Ada and Mlle Larivière, or between Lucette and Marina (Van secretly disliked dogs, especially at meals, and especially that smallish longish freak with a gamey breath). Arch and grandiloquent, Ada would be describing a dream, a natural history wonder, a special belletristic device — Paul Bourget’s ‘monologue intérieur’ borrowed from old Leo — or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol’nïy tulup, ‘a muzhik’s sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in,’ as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be procurable by Elsies. Her spectacular handling of subordinate clauses, her parenthetic asides, her sensual stressing of adjacent monosyllables (‘Idiot Elsie simply can’t read’) — all this somehow finished by acting upon Van, as artificial excitements and exotic torture-caresses might have done, in an aphrodisiac sinistral direction that he both resented and perversely enjoyed. (1.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): monologue intérieur: the so-called ‘stream-of-consciousness’ device, used by Leo Tolstoy (in describing, for instance, Anna’s last impressions whilst her carriage rolls through the streets of Moscow).
Mr Fowlie: see Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud (1946).
soi-disant: would-be.
les robes vertes, etc.: the green and washed-out frocks of the little girls.
angel moy: Russ., ‘my angel’.
Virag (the surname of Leopold Bloom's father) is an anagram of griva (Russ., mane). In VN's play in verse Skital'tsy ("The Wanderers," 1923) Robert compares his brother Eric to a playful stallion and women to mares of all colors whose grivy (manes) Eric would gently bite:
Ведь из дому ты вылетел небось
как жеребец - из сумрачной конюшни!
Да, мир широк, и много в нем кобыл,
податливых, здоровых и красивых,-
жен всех мастей, каурых, белых, сивых,
и вороных, и в яблоках,- забыл?
Небось пока покусывал им гривы,
не думал ты, мой пилигрим игривый,
о девушке под липами, о той,
которую ты назвал бы святой,
когда б она теперь не отдавала
своей дырявой святости внаем?
Describing his first day in "Ardis the Second," Van mentions Ada's silky mane sweeping over his nipples and navel:
Lucette, always playing her part of the clinging, affectionately fussy lassy, placed both palms on Van’s hairy chest and wanted to know why he was cross.
‘I’m not cross with you,’ replied Van at last.
Lucette kissed his hand, then attacked him.
‘Cut it out!’ he said, as she wriggled against his bare thorax. ‘You’re unpleasantly cold, child.’
‘It’s not true, I’m hot,’ she retorted.
‘Cold as two halves of a canned peach. Now, roll off, please.’
‘Why two? Why?’
‘Yes, why,’ growled Ada with a shiver of pleasure, and, leaning over, kissed him on the mouth. He struggled to rise. The two girls were now kissing him alternatively, then kissing each other, then getting busy upon him again — Ada in perilous silence, Lucette with soft squeals of delight. I do not remember what Les Enfants Maudits did or said in Monparnasse’s novelette — they lived in Bryant’s château, I think, and it began with bats flying one by one out of a turret’s œil-de-bœuf into the sunset, but these children (whom the novelettist did not really know — a delicious point) might also have been filmed rather entertainingly had snoopy Kim, the kitchen photo-fiend, possessed the necessary apparatus. One hates to write about those matters, it all comes out so improper, esthetically speaking, in written description, but one cannot help recalling in this ultimate twilight (where minor artistic blunders are fainter than very fugitive bats in an insect-poor wilderness of orange air) that Lucette’s dewy little contributions augmented rather than dampened Van’s invariable reaction to the only and main girl’s lightest touch, actual or imagined. Ada, her silky mane sweeping over his nipples and navel, seemed to enjoy doing everything to jolt my present pencil and make, in that ridiculously remote past, her innocent little sister notice and register what Van could not control. The crushed flower was now being merrily crammed under the rubber belt of his black trunks by twenty tickly fingers. As an ornament it had not much value; as a game it was inept and dangerous. He shook off his pretty tormentors, and walked away on his hands, a black mask over his carnival nose. Just then, the governess, panting and shouting, arrived on the scene. ‘Mais qu’est-ce qu’il t’a fait, ton cousin?’ She kept anxiously asking, as Lucette, shedding the same completely unwarranted tears that Ada had once shed, rushed into the mauve-winged arms. (1.32)
Arthur Rimbaud (whose poem Mémoire Van and Ada use as a clue to their coded letters) was a poète maudit. Mlle Larivière's novel Les Enfants Maudits is made into a film (as The Young and The Doomed) by Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) and G. A. Vronsky (the movie man who had a brief affair with Marina and who left her for another long-lashed Khristosik, as he called all pretty starlets):
He had spent most of the day fast asleep in his room, and a long, rambling, dreary dream had repeated, in a kind of pointless parody, his strenuous ‘Casanovanic’ night with Ada and that somehow ominous morning talk with her. Now that I am writing this, after so many hollows and heights of time, I find it not easy to separate our conversation, as set down in an inevitably stylized form, and the drone of complaints, turning on sordid betrayals that obsessed young Van in his dull nightmare. Or was he dreaming now that he had been dreaming? Had a grotesque governess really written a novel entitled Les Enfants Maudits? To be filmed by frivolous dummies, now discussing its adaptation? To be made even triter than the original Book of the Fortnight, and its gurgling blurbs? Did he detest Ada as he had in his dreams? He did. (ibid.)
The name of Marina's former lover hints at Aleksey Vronski, Anna's lover in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1877). Another lover of Marina, Baron d'Onsky ('Skonky') seems to be a cross between Prince Dmitri Donskoy (who defeated Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo) and Onegin's donskoy zherebets (Don stallion) in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Two: V: 4). Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) and Baron d'Onsky have the same London hatter:
They reveled, and traveled, and they quarreled, and flew back to each other again. By the following winter he began to suspect she was being unfaithful to him, but could not determine his rival. In mid-March, at a business meal with an art expert, an easy-going, lanky, likeable fellow in an old-fashioned dress-coat, Demon screwed in his monocle, unclicked out of its special flat case a small pen-and-wash and said he thought (did not doubt, in fact, but wished his certitude to be admired) that it was an unknown product of Parmigianino’s tender art. It showed a naked girl with a peach-like apple cupped in her half-raised hand sitting sideways on a convolvulus-garlanded support, and had for its discoverer the additional appeal of recalling Marina when, rung out of a hotel bathroom by the phone, and perched on the arm of a chair, she muffled the receiver while asking her lover something that he could not make out because the bath’s voice drowned her whisper. Baron d’Onsky had only to cast one glance at that raised shoulder and at certain vermiculated effects of delicate vegetation to confirm Demon’s guess. D’Onsky had the reputation of not showing one sign of esthetic emotion in the presence of the loveliest masterpiece; this time, nonetheless, he laid his magnifier aside as he would a mask, and allowed his undisguised gaze to caress the velvety apple and the nude’s dimpled and mossed parts with a smile of bemused pleasure. Would Mr Veen consider selling it to him there and then, Mr Veen, please? Mr Veen would not. Skonky (a oneway nickname) must content himself with the proud thought that, as of today, he and the lucky owner were the sole people to have ever admired it en connaissance de cause. Back it went into its special integument; but after finishing his fourth cup of cognac, d’O. pleaded for one last peep. Both men were a little drunk, and Demon secretly wondered if the rather banal resemblance of that Edenic girl to a young actress, whom his visitor had no doubt seen on the stage in ‘Eugene and Lara’ or ‘Lenore Raven’ (both painfully panned by a ‘disgustingly incorruptible’ young critic), should be, or would be, commented upon. It was not: such nymphs were really very much alike because of their elemental limpidity since the similarities of young bodies of water are but murmurs of natural innocence and double-talk mirrors, that’s my hat, his is older, but we have the same London hatter. (1.2)
Describing Victor Vitry's film based on Van's novel Letters from Terra, Van says that horses wore hats when heat waves swept Manhattan:
Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940 by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you remember that horses wore hats — yes, hats — when heat waves swept Manhattan?) and gave the impression — which physics-fiction literature had much exploited — of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time. Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers. (5.5)
In Ulysses Leopold Bloom's card bearing the pseudonymous name of Henry Flower is hidden under the hatband of the hat that he bought from John Plasto, the hatter.
Describing his novel Letters from Terra (reviewed by the First Clown of Elsinore, a distinguished London weekly), Van mentions Max Mispel's article 'The Weed Exiles the Flower’ (Melville & Marvell):
Upon being cornered, Gwen, a fat little fille de joie (by inclination if not by profession), squealed on one of her new admirers, confessing she had begged him to write that article because she could not bear to see Van’s ‘crooked little smile’ at finding his beautifully bound and boxed book so badly neglected. She also swore that Max not only did not know who Voltemand really was, but had not read Van’s novel. Van toyed with the idea of challenging Mr Medlar (who, he hoped, would choose swords) to a duel at dawn in a secluded corner of the Park whose central green he could see from the penthouse terrace where he fenced with a French coach twice a week, the only exercise, save riding, that he still indulged in; but to his surprise — and relief (for he was a little ashamed to defend his ‘novelette’ and only wished to forget it, just as another, unrelated, Veen might have denounced — if allowed a longer life — his pubescent dream of ideal bordels) Max Mushmula (Russian for ‘medlar’) answered Van’s tentative cartel with the warm-hearted promise of sending him his next article, ‘The Weed Exiles the Flower’ (Melville & Marvell). (2.2)
The young author of "Villa Vinus: an Organized Dream," Eric Veen is a namesake of Eric Fayernet, the main character in VN's play "The Wanderers."
Weeds and Wildings, chiefly: With a Rose or Two (1891) is the last collection of poetry and final short story of Herman Melville. Rose is the name of Van's first (platonic) love:
He had just turned thirteen. He had never before left the comforts of the paternal roof. He had never before realized that such ‘comforts’ might not be taken for granted, only occurring in some introductory ready-made metaphor in a book about a boy and a school. A few blocks from the schoolgrounds, a widow, Mrs Tapirov, who was French but spoke English with a Russian accent, had a shop of objets d’art and more or less antique furniture. He visited it on a bright winter day. Crystal vases with crimson roses and golden-brown asters were set here and there in the fore part of the shop — on a gilt-wood console, on a lacquered chest, on the shelf of a cabinet, or simply along the carpeted steps leading to the next floor where great wardrobes and flashy dressers semi-encircled a singular company of harps. He satisfied himself that those flowers were artificial and thought it puzzling that such imitations always pander so exclusively to the eye instead of also copying the damp fat feel of live petal and leaf. When he called next day for the object (unremembered now, eighty years later) that he wanted repaired or duplicated, it was not ready or had not been obtained. In passing, he touched a half-opened rose and was cheated of the sterile texture his fingertips had expected when cool life kissed them with pouting lips. ‘My daughter,’ said Mrs Tapirov, who saw his surprise, ‘always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.’ As he was leaving she came in, a schoolgirl in a gray coat with brown shoulder-length ringlets and a pretty face. On another occasion (for a certain part of the thing — a frame, perhaps — took an infinite time to heal or else the entire article proved to be unobtainable after all) he saw her curled up with her schoolbooks in an armchair — a domestic item among those for sale. He never spoke to her. He loved her madly. It must have lasted at least one term. (1.4)
At the picnic on her sixteenth birthday Ada (who adores orchids and other flowers) says that she loathes roses:
Greg, assuming with touching simplicity that Ada would notice and approve, showered Mlle Larivière with a thousand little attentions — helping her out of her mauve jacket, pouring out for her the milk into Lucette’s mug from a thermos bottle, passing the sandwiches, replenishing, replenishing Mlle Larivière’s wineglass and listening with a rapt grin to her diatribes against the English, whom she said she disliked even more than the Tartars, or the, well, Assyrians.
‘England!’ she cried, ‘England! The country where for every poet, there are ninety-nine sales petits bourgeois, some of suspect extraction! England dares ape France! I have in that hamper there an English novel of high repute in which a lady is given a perfume — an expensive perfume! — called "Ombre Chevalier," which is really nothing but a fish — a delicious fish, true, but hardly suitable for scenting one’s handkerchief with. On the very next page, a soi-disant philosopher mentions "une acte gratuite" as if all acts were feminine, and a soi-disant Parisian hotelkeeper in the story says "je me regrette" for "je regrette"!’
‘D’accord,’ interjected Van, ‘but what about such atrocious bloomers in French translations from the English as for example —’
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, at that very moment Ada emitted a Russian exclamation of utmost annoyance as a steel-gray convertible glided into the glade. No sooner had it stopped than it was surrounded by the same group of townsmen, who now seemed to have multiplied in strange consequence of having shed coats and waistcoats. Thrusting his way through their circle, with every sign of wrath and contempt, young Percy de Prey, frilled-shifted and white-trousered, strode up to Marina’s deckchair. He was invited to join the party despite Ada’s trying to stop her silly mother with an admonishing stare and a private small shake of the head.
‘I dared not hope... Oh, I accept with great pleasure,’ answered Percy, whereupon — very much whereupon — the seemingly forgetful but in reality calculating bland bandit marched back to his car (near which a last wonderstruck admirer lingered) to fetch a bouquet of longstemmed roses stored in the boot.
‘What a shame that I should loathe roses,’ said Ada, accepting them gingerly. (1.39)