When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) leaves Ardis forever, the word “inkog” pops up in his stream of consciousness:
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)
In Circe, Episode 15 of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Bella (a prostitute) calls Leopold Bloom “Incog:”
BELLA
Do you want me to call the police?
BLOOM
O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he's a Trinity student. Patrons of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. (He makes a masonic sign.) Know what I mean? Nephew of the vice-chancellor. You don't want a scandal.
BELLA
(Angrily.) Trinity. Coming down here ragging after the boatraces and paying nothing. Are you my commander here or? Where is he? I'll charge him! Disgrace him, I will! (She shouts.) Zoe! Zoe!
BLOOM
(Urgently.) And if it were your own son in Oxford? (Warningly.) I know.
BELLA
(Almost speechless.) Who are. Incog!
ZOE
(In the doorway.) There's a row on.
BLOOM
What? Where? (He throws a shilling on the table and shouts.) That's for the chimney. Where? I need mountain air.
(He hurries out through the hall. The whores point. Florry follows, spilling water from her tilted tumbler. On the doorstep all the whores clustered talk volubly, pointing to the right where the fog has cleared off. From the left arrives a jingling hackney car. It slows to in front of the house. Bloom at the halldoor perceives Corny Kelleher who is about to dismount from the car with two silent lechers. He averts his face. Bella from within the hall urges on her whores. They blow ickylickysticky yumyum kisses. Corny Kelleher replies with a ghastly lewd smile. The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. Zoe and Kitty still point right. Bloom, parting them swiftly, draws his caliph's hood and poncho and hurries down the steps with sideways face. Incog Harun al Raschid he flits behind the silent lechers and hastens on by the railings with fleet step of a pard strewing the drag behind him, torn envelopes drenched in aniseed. The ashplant marks his stride.
Mountain air that Bloom needs brings to mind crystal air that was supposed to strengthen Eric Veen's young lungs:
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.’ (2.3)
Van arrives at the most fashionable and efficient English floramor (Eric Veen's Villa Venus) in a rented jolls-joyce (an ancient limousine).
Bloom’s caliph’s hood brings to mind Van’s and Ada’s little Caliph Island:
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)
In 1888 Ada visited the little Caliph Island with Philip Rack (Lucette’s music teacher):
Nonchalantly, Van went back to the willows and said:
‘Every shot in the book has been snapped in 1884, except this one. I never rowed you down Ladore River in early spring. Nice to note you have not lost your wonderful ability to blush.’
‘It’s his error. He must have thrown in a fotochka taken later, maybe in 1888. We can rip it out if you like.’
‘Sweetheart,’ said Van, ‘the whole of 1888 has been ripped out. One need not bb 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.
It is Blanche who tells Van about Rack:
But despite her demented look, Blanche was perfectly lucid. She had made up her mind a couple of days ago to leave Ardis Hall. She had just slipped her demission, with a footnote on the young lady’s conduct, under the door of Madame. She would go in a few hours. She loved him, he was her ‘folly and fever,’ she wished to spend a few secret moments with him.
He entered the toolroom and slowly closed the door. The slowness had its uncomfortable cause. She had placed her lantern on the rung of a ladder and was already gathering up and lifting her skimpy skirt. Compassion, courtesy and some assistance on her part might have helped him to work up the urge which she took for granted and whose total absence he carefully concealed under his tartan cloak; but quite aside from the fear of infection (Bout had hinted at some of the poor girl’s troubles), a graver matter engrossed him. He diverted her bold hand and sat down on the bench beside her.
Was it she who had placed that note in his jacket?
It was. She had been unable to face departure if he was to remain fooled, deceived, betrayed. She added, in naive brackets, that she had been sure he always desired her, they could talk afterwards. Je suis à toi, c’est bientôt l’aube, your dream has come true.
‘Parlez pour vous,’ answered Van. ‘I am in no mood for love-making. And I will strangle you, I assure you, if you do not tell me the whole story in every detail, at once.’
She nodded, fear and adoration in her veiled eyes. When and how had it started? Last August, she said. Votre demoiselle picking flowers, he squiring her through the tall grass, a flute in his hand. Who he? What flute? Mais le musicien allemand, Monsieur Rack. The eager informer had her own swain lying upon her on the other side of the hedge. How anybody could do it with l’immonde Monsieur Rack, who once forgot his waistcoat in a haystack, was beyond the informer’s comprehension. Perhaps because he made songs for her, a very pretty one was once played at a big public ball at the Ladore Casino, it went... Never mind how it went, go on with the story. Monsieur Rack, one starry night, in a boat on the river, was heard by the informer and two gallants in the willow bushes, recounting the melancholy tale of his childhood, of his years of hunger and music and loneliness, and his sweetheart wept and threw her head back and he fed on her bare throat, il la mangeait de baisers dégoûtants. He must have had her not more than a dozen times, he was not as strong as another gentleman — oh, cut it out, said Van — and in winter the young lady learnt he was married, and hated his cruel wife, and in April when he began to give piano lessons to Lucette the affair was resumed, but then —
‘That will do!’ he cried and, beating his brow with his fist, stumbled out into the sunlight. (1.41)
On the little Caliph Island Van shaves Ada’s groin and armpits:
One day he brought his shaving kit along and helped her to get rid of all three patches of body hair:
‘Now I’m Scheher,’ he said, ‘and you are his Ada, and that’s your green prayer carpet.’
Their visits to that islet remained engraved in the memory of that summer with entwinements that no longer could be untangled. They saw themselves standing there, embraced, clothed only in mobile leafy shadows, and watching the red rowboat with its mobile inlay of reflected ripples carry them off, waving, waving their handkerchiefs; and that mystery of mixed sequences was enhanced by such things as the boat’s floating back to them while it still receded, the oars crippled by refraction, the sun-flecks now rippling the other way like the strobe effect of spokes counterwheeling as the pageant rolls by. Time tricked them, made one of them ask a remembered question, caused the other to give a forgotten answer, and once in a small alder thicket, duplicated in black by the blue stream, they found a garter which was certainly hers, she could not deny it, but which Van was positive she had never worn on her stockingless summer trips to the magic islet.
Her lovely strong legs had, maybe, grown longer but they still preserved the sleek pallor and suppleness of her nymphet years. She could still suck her big toe. The right instep and the back of her left hand bore the same small not overconspicuous but indelible and sacred birthmark, with which nature had signed his right hand and left foot. She attempted to coat her fingernails with Scheherazade’s Lacquer (a very grotesque fad of the ‘eighties) but she was untidy and forgetful in matters of grooming, the varnish flaked off, leaving unseemly blotches, and he requested her to revert to her ‘lack-luster’ state. In compensation, he bought her in the town of Ladore (that rather smart little resort) an ankle chain of gold but she lost it in the course of their strenuous trysts and unexpectedly broke into tears when he said never mind, another lover some day would retrieve it for her. (1.35)
Ada’s words “sorry, my Latin is showing” bring to mind Mme Blavatsky’s elemental glimpsed by Mrs Cooper Oakley in Scylla and Charybdis, Episode 9 of Ulysses:
Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A. E., Arval, the Name Ineffable, in heaven hight: K. H., their master, whose identity is no secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O. P. must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious sister H. P. B.'s elemental.
O, fie! Out on't! Pfuiteufel! You naughtn't to look, missus, so you naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.
Pfuiteufel is a German word. Van wonders where Ada had picked up the word unschicklich (Germ., “improper,” understood as ‘not chic’ by Ada):
Her nipples, now pert and red, were encircled by fine black hairs which would soon go, too, being, she said, unschicklich. Where had she picked up, he wondered, that hideous word? Her breasts were pretty, pale and plump, but somehow he had preferred the little soft swellings of the earlier girl with their formless dull buds. (1.35)
“Christ’s bridesister, repentant sophia” in Stephen Dedalus’ stream of consciousness brings to mind Sofia Botkin, the “real” name of both Sybil Shade (the poet’s wife) and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) In a conversation with her husband Queen Disa (who is a virgin) mentions forty Arabian thieves. In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions Buddhism that took root at IPH in the years of its decline:
In later years it started to decline:
Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in
Pale jellies and a floating mandolin.
Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept
All is allowed, into some classes crept;
And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,
A school of Freudians headed for the tomb. (ll. 638-644)
Brothers Karamazov (1880) is a novel by Dostoevski, the author of Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1846). Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade’s poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”).
In his poem Sredi zvyozd ("Among the Stars," 1874) Afanasiy Fet (who was married to Maria Botkin) compares the stars to kalify (the caliphs):
В венцах, лучах, алмазах, как калифы,
Излишние средь жалких нужд земных,
Незыблемой мечты иерогли́фы,
Вы говорите: «Вечность мы, — ты миг.