In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert says that he always admired l'œuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois (the Ormond masterpiece of the great Dubliner):
Half a mile or so east of number fourteen, Thayer Street tangles with a private lane and a cross street; the latter leads to the town proper; in front of the first drugstore, I saw - with what melody of relief! - Lolita’s fair bicycle waiting for her. I pushed instead of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled, and entered. Look out! some ten paces away Lolita, though the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us), cupping the tube, confidentially hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her treasure, hurriedly hung up, and walked out with a flourish.
“Tried to reach you at home,” she said brightly. “A great decision has been made. But first buy me a drink, dad.”
She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the coke, add the cherry syrup - and my heart was bursting with love-ache. That childish wrist. My lovely child. You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction.
J’ai toujours admiré l’œuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois. And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower. (2.14)
As pointed out by A. Appel, the (non-existent) French adjective 'ormonde' clearly points to Dublin's Ormond Hotel as the scene of 'Sirens' in Joyce’s Ulysses. In his ultimate ambition Leopold Bloom (the main character in Ulysses) dreams of a terracehouse or semidetached villa, described as Rus in Urbe or Qui si sana (It., “here one heals,” a popular hotel name):
In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions now coalesced?
Not to inherit by right of primogeniture, gavelkind or borough English, or possess in perpetuity an extensive demesne of a sufficient number of acres, roods and perches, statute land measure (valuation L 42), of grazing turbary surrounding a baronial hall with gatelodge and carriage drive nor, on the other hand, a terracehouse or semidetached villa, described as Rus in Urbe or Qui si Sana... (Chapter 17)
“Grazing turbary surrounding” brings to mind the three demoiselles de Tourbe (Blanche, a French handmaid at Ardis whom Mlle Larivière calls Cendrillon, and her two sisters) mentioned by Ada (the title character of VN’s novel Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle, 1969) in one of her letters to Van:
[Arizona, summer, 1890]
Mere pity, a Russian girl’s zhalost’, drew me to R. (whom musical critics have now ‘discovered’). He knew he would die young and was always, in fact, mostly corpse, never once, I swear, rising to the occasion, even when I showed openly my compassionate non-resistance because I, alas, was brimming with Van-less vitality, and had even considered buying the services of some rude, the ruder the better, young muzhik. As to P., I could explain my submitting to his kisses (first tender and plain, later growing fiercely expert, and finally tasting of me when he returned to my mouth — a vicious circle set spinning in early Thargelion, 1888) by saying that if I stopped seeing him he would divulge my affair with my cousin to my mother. He did say he could produce witnesses, such as the sister of your Blanche, and a stable boy who, I suspect, was impersonated by the youngest of the three demoiselles de Tourbe. witches all — but enough. Van, I could make much of those threats in explaining my conduct to you. I would not mention, naturally, that they were made in a bantering tone, hardly befitting a genuine blackmailer. Nor would I mention that even if he had proceeded to recruit anonymous messengers and informers, it might have ended in his wrecking his own reputation as soon as his motives and actions were exposed, as they were bound to be in the long ruin [sic! ‘run’ in her blue stocking. Ed.]. I would conceal, in a word, that I knew the coarse banter was meant only to drill-jar your poor brittle Ada — because, despite the coarseness, he had a keen sense of honor, odd though it may seem to you and me. No. I would concentrate entirely on the effect of the threat upon one ready to submit to any infamy rather than face the shadow of disclosure, for (and this, of course, neither he nor his informers could know), shocking as an affair between first cousins might have seemed to a law-abiding family, I refuse to imagine (as you and I have always done) how Marina and Demon would have reacted in ‘our’ case. By the jolts and skids of my syntax you will see that I cannot logically explain my behavior. I do not deny that I experienced a strange weakness during the perilous assignations I granted him, as if his brutal desire kept fascinating not only my inquisitive senses but also my reluctant intellect. I can swear, however, solemn Ada can swear that in the course of our ‘sylvan trysts’ I successfully evaded if not pollution, at least possession before and after your return to Ardis — except for one messy occasion when he half-took me by force — the over-eager dead man. (2.1)
In another letter to Van Ada mentions the legendary river of Old Rus:
[Los Angeles, 1889]
We are still at the candy-pink and pisang-green albergo where you once stayed with your father. He is awfully nice to me, by the way. I enjoy going places with him. He and I have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town, but you are also there, as well as the legendary river of Old Rus. Da. Oh, write me, one tiny note, I’m trying so hard to please you! Want some more (desperate) little topics? Marina’s new director of artistic conscience defines Infinity as the farthest point from the camera which is still in fair focus. She has been cast as the deaf nun Varvara (who, in some ways, is the most interesting of Chekhov’s Four Sisters). She sticks to Stan’s principle of having lore and role overflow into everyday life, insists on keeping it up at the hotel restaurant, drinks tea v prikusku (‘biting sugar between sips’), and feigns to misunderstand every question in Varvara’s quaint way of feigning stupidity — a double imbroglio, which annoys strangers but which somehow makes me feel I’m her daughter much more distinctly than in the Ardis era. She’s a great hit here, on the whole. They gave her (not quite gratis, I’m afraid) a special bungalow, labeled Marina Durmanova, in Universal City. As for me, I’m only an incidental waitress in a fourth-rate Western, hip-swinging between table-slapping drunks, but I rather enjoy the Houssaie atmosphere, the dutiful art, the winding hill roads, the reconstructions of streets, and the obligatory square, and a mauve shop sign on an ornate wooden façade, and around noon all the extras in period togs queuing before a glass booth, but I have nobody to call.
Speaking of calls, I saw a truly marvelous ornithological film the other night with Demon. I had never grasped the fact that the paleotropical sunbirds (look them up!) are ‘mimotypes’ of the New World hummingbirds, and all my thoughts, oh, my darling, are mimotypes of yours. I know, I know! I even know that you stopped reading at ‘grasped’ — as in the old days. (ibid.)
The legendary river of Old Rus is the Neva (like Pushkin's Onegin, VN's was born upon the Neva's banks). In Finnish neva means what veen means in Dutch: “peat bog.” Tourbe is French for “peat.” “Beer Tower,” as local jokers call Tourbière (Blanche’s poor village), brings to mind the tower in which Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan and Haines live in Ulysses. According to Stephen, Haines was raving all night about a black panther and Buck Mulligan saved men from drowning:
– Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
– Yes, my love?
– How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.
– God, isn’t he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knifeblade.
He shaved warily over his chin.
– He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?
– A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
– I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off. (Chapter 1)
Van does not realize that in the Night of the Burning Barn (when he and Ada make love for the first time) Ada is not a virgin and that her first lover was Dr Krolik’s brother: Carol, or Karapars, Krolik, Doctor of Philosophy, born in Turkey (in 1892 Van sees his photograph in Kim Beauharnais’s album). Karapars means in Turkish “black panther.”
When Van visits Ada in Brownhill (Ada’s school for girls), she wears a shiny black raincoat and a down-brimmed oilcloth hat as if somebody was to be salvaged from the perils of life or sea:
Van was about to march back to the station when Ada appeared — with Cordula. La bonne surprise! Van greeted them with a show of horrible heartiness (‘And how goes it with you, sweet cousin? Ah, Cordula! Who’s the chaperone, you, or Miss Veen?’). The sweet cousin sported a shiny black raincoat and a down-brimmed oilcloth hat as if somebody was to be salvaged from the perils of life or sea. A tiny round patch did not quite hide a pimple on one side of her chin. Her breath smelled of ether. Her mood was even blacker than his. He cheerily guessed it would rain. It did — hard. Cordula remarked that his trench coat was chic. She did not think it worth while to go back for umbrellas — their delicious goal was just round the corner. Van said corners were never round, a tolerable quip. Cordula laughed. Ada did not: there were no survivors, apparently. (1.27)
The chapter ends in a Joyce pastiche:
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.) (ibid.)
Da (a word used by Ada in her letter to Van) is Russian for “yes.” The eighteenth and final episode of Ulysses, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, begins and ends with "yes," a word that Joyce described as "the female word."
Qui si sana in Joyce’s novel reminds one of Marquis Quizz Quizana with whom Cordula de Prey (Ada’s schoolmate and chaperone at Brownhill) had a brief bright affair:
She was not a bright little girl. But she was a loquacious and really quite exciting little girl. He started to caress her under the table, but she gently removed his hand, whispering ‘womenses,’ as whimsically as another girl had done in some other dream. He cleared his throat loudly and ordered half-a-bottle of cognac, having the waiter open it in his presence as Demon advised. She talked on and on, and he lost the thread of her discourse, or rather it got enmeshed in the rapid landscape, which his gaze followed over her shoulder, with a sudden ravine recording what Jack said when his wife ‘phoned, or a lone tree in a clover field impersonating abandoned John, or a romantic stream running down a cliff and reflecting her brief bright affair with Marquis Quizz Quisana.
A pine forest fizzled out and factory chimneys replaced it. The train clattered past a roundhouse, and slowed down, groaning. A hideous station darkened the day.
‘Good Lord,’ cried Van, ‘that’s my stop.’ (1.42)
Kalugano blends Kaluga (in October 1812 Kutuzov prevented Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow via the Old Kaluga Road, see Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”) with Lugano (a town in Switzerland). Joyce wrote Ulysses in Trieste, in Zurich (Switzerland’s largest city) and in Paris. The young author an essay entitled “Villa Venus: an Organized Dream,” Eric Veen died in Ex (a place where Van Veen was born on Jan. 1, 1870), Switzerland:
In the spring of 1869, David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction (in no way related to the Veens of our rambling romance), escaped uninjured when the motorcar he was driving from Cannes to Calais blew a front tire on a frost-blazed road and tore into a parked furniture van; his daughter sitting beside him was instantly killed by a suitcase sailing into her from behind and breaking her neck. In his London studio her husband, an unbalanced, unsuccessful painter (ten years older than his father-in-law whom he envied and despised) shot himself upon receiving the news by cablegram from a village in Normandy called, dreadfully, Deuil.
The momentum of disaster lost none of its speed, for neither did Eric, a boy of fifteen, despite all the care and adoration which his grandfather surrounded him with, escape a freakish fate: a fate strangely similar to his mother’s.
After being removed from Note to a small private school in Vaud Canton and then spending a consumptive summer in the Maritime Alps, he was sent to Ex-en-Valais, whose crystal air was supposed at the time to strengthen young lungs; instead of which its worst hurricane hurled a roof tile at him, fatally fracturing his skull, Among the boy’s belongings David van Veen found a number of poems and the draft of an essay entitled’ Villa Venus: an Organized Dream.’
To put it bluntly, the boy had sought to solace his first sexual torments by imagining and detailing a project (derived from reading too many erotic works found in a furnished house his grandfather had bought near Vence from Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole): namely, a chain of palatial brothels that his inheritance would allow him to establish all over ‘both hemispheres of our callipygian globe.’ The little chap saw it as a kind of fashionable club, with branches, or, in his poetical phrase, ‘Floramors,’ in the vicinity of cities and spas. Membership was to be restricted to noblemen, ‘handsome and healthy,’ with an age limit of fifty (which must be praised as very broadminded on the poor kid’s part), paying a yearly fee of 3650 guineas not counting the cost of bouquets, jewels and other gallant donations. Resident female physicians, good-looking and young (‘of the American secretarial or dentist-assistant type’), would be there to check the intimate physical condition of ‘the caresser and the caressed’ (another felicitous formula) as well as their own if ‘the need arose,’ One clause in the Rules of the Club seemed to indicate that Eric, though frenziedly heterosexual, had enjoyed some tender ersatz fumblings with schoolmates at Note (a notorious preparatory school in that respect): at least two of the maximum number of fifty inmates in the major floramors might be pretty boys, wearing frontlets and short smocks, not older than fourteen if fair, and not more than twelve if dark. However, in order to exclude a regular flow of ‘inveterate pederasts,’ boy love could be dabbled in by the jaded guest only between two sequences of three girls each, all possessed in the course of the same week — a somewhat comical, but not unshrewd, stipulation.
The candidates for every floramor were to be selected by a Committee of Club Members who would take into consideration the annual accumulation of impressions and desiderata, jotted down by the guests in a special Shell Pink Book. ‘Beauty and tenderness, grace and docility’ composed the main qualities required of the girls, aged from fifteen to twenty-five in the case of ‘slender Nordic dolls,’ and from ten to twenty in that of ‘opulent Southern charmers.’ They would gambol and loll in ‘boudoirs and conservatories,’ invariably naked and ready for love; not so their attendants, attractively dressed handmaids of more or less exotic extraction, ‘unavailable to the fancy of members except by special permission from the Board.’ My favorite clause (for I own a photostat of that poor boy’s calligraph) is that any girl in her floramor could be Lady-in-Chief by acclamation during her menstrual period. (This of course did not work, and the committee compromised by having a good-looking female homosexual head the staff and adding a bouncer whom Eric had overlooked.) (2.3)
“Semidetached villa, described as Rus in Urbe or Qui si Sana” makes one think of Villa Venus, one hundred memorial floramors built by Eric’s grandfather all over the world:
Eccentricity is the greatest grief’s greatest remedy. The boy’s grandfather set at once to render in brick and stone, concrete and marble, flesh and fun, Eric’s fantasy. He resolved to be the first sampler of the first houri he would hire for his last house, and to live until then in laborious abstinence.
It must have been a moving and magnificent sight — that of the old but still vigorous Dutchman with his rugged reptilian face and white hair, designing with the assistance of Leftist decorators the thousand and one memorial floramors he resolved to erect allover the world — perhaps even in brutal Tartary, which he thought was ruled by ‘Americanized Jews,’ but then ‘Art redeemed Politics’ — profoundly original concepts that we must condone in a lovable old crank. He began with rural England and coastal America, and was engaged in a Robert Adam-like composition (cruelly referred to by local wags as the Madam-I’m-Adam House), not far from Newport, Rodos Island, in a somewhat senile style, with marble columns dredged from classical seas and still encrusted with Etruscan oyster shells — when he died from a stroke while helping to prop up a propylon. It was only his hundredth house!
His nephew and heir, an honest but astoundingly stuffy clothier in Ruinen (somewhere near Zwolle, I’m told), with a large family and a small trade, was not cheated out of the millions of guldens, about the apparent squandering of which he had been consulting mental specialists during the last ten years or so. All the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875 (and by a delicious coincidence the old Russian word for September, ‘ryuen’,’ which might have spelled ‘ruin,’ also echoed the name of the ecstatic Neverlander’s hometown). By the beginning of the new century the Venus revenues were pouring in (their final gush, it is true). A tattling tabloid reported, around 1890, that out of gratitude and curiosity ‘Velvet’ Veen traveled once — and only once — to the nearest floramor with his entire family — and it is also said that Guillaume de Monparnasse indignantly rejected an offer from Hollywood to base a screenplay on that dignified and hilarious excursion. Mere rumours, no doubt.
Eric’s grandfather’s range was wide — from dodo to dada, from Low Gothic to Hoch Modern. In his parodies of paradise he even permitted himself, just a few times, to express the rectilinear chaos of Cubism (with ‘abstract’ cast in ‘concrete’) by imitating — in the sense described so well in Vulner’s paperback History of English Architecture given me by good Dr Lagosse — such ultra-utilitarian boxes of brick as the maisons closes of El Freud in Lubetkin, Austria, or the great-necessity houses of Dudok in Friesland.
But on the whole it was the idyllic and the romantic that he favored. English gentlemen of parts found many pleasures in Letchworth Lodge, an honest country house plastered up to its bulleyes, or Itchenor Chat with its battered chimney breasts and hipped gables. None could help admiring David van Veen’s knack of making his brand-new Regency mansion look like a renovated farmhouse or of producing a converted convent on a small offshore island with such miraculous effect that one could not distinguish the arabesque from the arbutus, ardor from art, the sore from the rose. We shall always remember Little Lemantry near Rantchester or the Pseudotherm in the lovely cul-de-sac south of the viaduct of fabulous Palermontovia. We appreciated greatly his blending local banality (that château girdled with chestnuts, that castello guarded by cypresses) with interior ornaments that pandered to all the orgies reflected in the ceiling mirrors of little Eric’s erogenetics. Most effective, in a functional sense, was the protection the architect distilled, as it were, from the ambitus of his houses. Whether nestling in woodland dells or surrounded by a many-acred park, or overlooking terraced groves and gardens, access to Venus began by a private road and continued through a labyrinth of hedges and walls with inconspicuous doors to which only the guests and the guards had keys. Cunningly distributed spotlights followed the wandering of the masked and caped grandees through dark mazes of coppices; for one of the stipulations imagined by Eric was that ‘every establishment should open only at nightfall and close at sunrise.’ A system of bells that Eric may have thought up all by himself (it was really as old as the bautta and the vyshibala) prevented visitors from running into each other on the premises, so that no matter how many noblemen were waiting or wenching in any part of the floramor, each felt he was the only cock in the coop, because the bouncer, a silent and courteous person resembling a Manhattan shopwalker, did not count, of course: you sometimes saw him when a hitch occurred in connection with your credentials or credit but he was seldom obliged to apply vulgar force or call in an assistant. (ibid.)
Ada’s and Cordula’s lesbian schoolmate at Brownhill, Vanda Broom brings to mind devochka Vanda (Vanda girl) who is mentioned by Yuri Annenkov (a painter and director who in the pre-war Paris made a stage version of VN’s play “The Event,” 1938) in his memoirs Dnevnik moikh vstrech. Tsykl tragediy (“The Diary of my Meetings. A Cycle of Tragedies,” 1966):
«Студенты, всяческие студенты, в Петербурге знали блоковскую „Незнакомку“ наизусть. И „девочка“ Ванда, что прогуливалась у входа в ресторан „Квисисана“, шептала юным прохожим:
— Я уесь Незнакоумка. Хотите ознакоумиться?»
According to Annenkov, this girl used to walk to and fro near the entrance of Quisisana (a restaurant on Nevsky Avenue in St. Petersburg), whispering to the young passer-byes: “I’m the Unknown Woman. Do you want to know me?” Describing his meeting with Lucette in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set), Van compares her to Blok’s Neznakomka (“The Unknown Woman,” 1906):
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye — all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s ‘gem bulbs’ plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman.
‘Hullo there, Ed,’ said Van to the barman, and she turned at the sound of his dear rasping voice.
‘I didn’t expect you to wear glasses. You almost got le paquet, which I was preparing for the man supposedly "goggling" my hat. Darling Van! Dushka moy!’
‘Your hat,’ he said, ‘is positively lautrémontesque — I mean, lautrecaquesque — no, I can’t form the adjective.’
Ed Barton served Lucette what she called a Chambéryzette.
‘Gin and bitter for me.’
‘I’m so happy and sad,’ she murmured in Russian. ‘Moyo grustnoe schastie! How long will you be in old Lute?’
Van answered he was leaving next day for England, and then on June 3 (this was May 31) would be taking the Admiral Tobakoff back to the States. She would sail with him, she cried, it was a marvelous idea, she didn’t mind whither to drift, really, West, East, Toulouse, Los Teques. He pointed out that it was far too late to obtain a cabin (on that not very grand ship so much shorter than Queen Guinevere), and changed the subject.
‘The last time I saw you,’ said Van, ‘was two years ago, at a railway station. You had just left Villa Armina and I had just arrived. You wore a flowery dress which got mixed with the flowers you carried because you moved so fast — jumping out of a green calèche and up into the Ausonian Express that had brought me to Nice.’ (3.3)
Van mistakes Lucette for “a cocotte from Toulouse” whom he saw at the Brownhill railway station.