After the death of his grandson Eric (the young author of an essay entitled ‘Villa Venus: an Organized Dream’), David van Veen (a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction) resolved to erect a thousand and one memorial floramors (palatial brothels) all over Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set):
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! (2.3)
The memorial floramors built by David van Veen seem to blend Floradora (in Sirens, Episode 11 of Ulysses, Miss Douce sings from Floradora, a musical comedy of the turn of the 20th century) with Frogmore memorial (Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s royal mausoleum) mentioned in Hades, Episode 5 of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):
He looked down at the boots he had blacked and polished. She had outlived him. Lost her husband. More dead for her than for me. One must outlive the other. Wise men say. There are more women than men in the world. Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you'll soon follow him. For Hindu widows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who knows after. Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on a guncarriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of hearts. All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the substance. Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back, waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and lie no more in her warm bed.
One of the members of the first Venus Club Council, Mr Ritcov (or Vrotic) is the pseudonym used by King Victor (the ruler of the British Commonwealth on Antiterra) for his frequent visits to Villa Venus:
Demon’s father (and very soon Demon himself), and Lord Erminin, and a Mr Ritcov, and Count Peter de Prey, and Mire de Mire, Esq., and Baron Azzuroscudo were all members of the first Venus Club Council; but it was bashful, obese, big-nosed Mr Ritcov’s visits that really thrilled the girls and filled the vicinity with detectives who dutifully impersonated hedge-cutters, grooms, horses, tall milkmaids, new statues, old drunks and so forth, while His Majesty dallied, in a special chair built for his weight and whims, with this or that sweet subject of the realm, white, black or brown. (2.3)
Demon’s father, Dedalus Veen brings to mind Stephen Dedalus (a character in Ulysses). In Proteus, Episode 3 of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus dreams of a street of harlots and Haroun al Raschid (a character in A Thousand and One Nights):
After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.
In Circe, Episode 15 of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom becomes “Incog Haroun al Raschid:”
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 Haroun 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 Ex-en-Valais’ 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)
Bloom’s ashplant makes one think of Les Frênes (“The Ashtrees”), Turgenev’s and Viardot’s villa in Bougival (near Paris). In a letter of 7/19 September, 1875, to N. V. Khanykov Turgenev says that on the next day (September 20, 1875, NS) he will move to the new-built chalet near his and Viardot's villa:
Я Вас приму в новом своём доме, куда завтра переселяюсь, а г-н и г-жа Виардо будут очень довольны, если Вы при сей оказии останетесь у них обедать, и просят меня пригласить Вас, так же как Салтыкова и Соллогуба.
According to Van, all the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875:
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). (2.3).
The Antiterran counterpart of Queen Victoria, King Victor also brings to mind Victor Hugo, the author of L'Art d'être grand-père ("The Art of Being a Grandfather," 1877). In Scylla and Charybdis, Episode 9 of Ulysses, Mr. Best mentions Hugo’s collection of poems:
–Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter’s child. MY DEAREST WIFE, Pericles says, WAS LIKE THIS MAID. Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?
–The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L’ART D’ETRE GRAND …
–Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added, another image?
Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimu...
Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s'amuse ("The King Amuses Himself," 1832) was used by Giuseppe Verdi for his opera Rigoletto (1851). Verdi's opera Traviata (1852) is based on Alexandre Dumas fils' novel La Dame aux Camelias ("The Lady with Camelias," 1848) in which the action takes place in Bougival. At the picnic on Ada's sixteenth birthday Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) sings from Verdi's opera:
Gradually their presence dissolved from Van’s mind. Everybody was now having a wonderful time. Marina threw off the pale raincoat or rather ‘dustcoat’ she had put on for the picnic (after all, with one thing and another, her domestic gray dress with the pink fichu was quite gay enough, she declared, for an old lady) and raising an empty glass she sang, with brio and very musically, the Green Grass aria: ‘Replenish, replenish the glasses with wine! Here’s a toast to love! To the rapture of love!’ With awe and pity, and no love, Van kept reverting to that poor bald patch on Traverdiata’s poor old head, to the scalp burnished by her hairdye an awful pine rust color much shinier than her dead hair. He attempted, as so many times before, to squeeze out some fondness for her but as usual failed and as usual told himself that Ada did not love her mother either, a vague and cowardly consolation. (1.39)
Molly Bloom (Leopold Bloom's wife in Ulysses) is an opera singer.