In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) one of the chapters ends with a pseudo-Shakespearean quote:
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. On those frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. (2.31)
In Scylla and Charybdis, Episode 9 of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Richard Best mentions the sense of beauty that leads us astray:
"O, I must tell you what Dowden said!
- What? asked Besteglinton.
William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William.
For terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house ....
- Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands and said: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days. Lovely!
Catamite.
- The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton.
Steadfast John replied severe:
- The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake and have it.
Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?"
Describing his boarding school at Riverlane, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that every dormitory had its catamite:
That was love, normal and mysterious. Less mysterious and considerably more grotesque were the passions which several generations of schoolmasters had failed to eradicate, and which as late as 1883 still enjoyed an unparalleled vogue at Riverlane. Every dormitory had its catamite. One hysterical lad from Upsala, cross-eyed, loose-lipped, with almost abnormally awkward limbs, but with a wonderfully tender skin texture and the round creamy charms of Bronzino’s Cupid (the big one, whom a delighted satyr discovers in a lady’s bower), was much prized and tortured by a group of foreign boys, mostly Greek and English, led by Cheshire, the rugby ace; and partly out of bravado, partly out of curiosity, Van surmounted his disgust and coldly watched their rough orgies. Soon, however, he abandoned this surrogate for a more natural though equally heartless divertissement. (1.4)
Van’s schoolmate from Upsala brings to mind “male nakedness in the bath at Upsala” mentioned in Proteus, Episode 3 of Ulysses:
Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi sétier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est Irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux Irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez? Ah oui! She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: slainte! Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause. You’re your father’s son. I know the voice. His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, La Patrie, M. Millevoye, Félix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken, bonne à tout faire, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala. Moi faire, she said. Tous les messieurs not this Monsieur, I said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn’t let my brother, not even my
own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.
“Postprandial” reminds one of Demon’s ‘prebrandial’ brandy:
Taking advantage of Larivière’s and Lucette’s absence, Van had long dallied with Ada in the comfortable nursery, and was now hanging from the wrong window, which did not give a clear view of the drive, when he heard the rich purr of his father’s motorcar. He dashed downstairs — the speed of his descent causing the heat of the banisters to burn the palm of his hand in a merry way remindful of similar occasions in his boyhood. There was nobody in the hall. Demon had entered the house from a side gallery and was now settled in the sun-dusted music room, wiping his monocle with a special zamshinka (‘shammy’) as he awaited his ‘prebrandial’ brandy (an ancient quip). His hair was dyed a raven black, his teeth were hound-white. His smooth glossy brown face with its trimly clipped black mustache and humid dark eyes beamed at his son, expressing the radiant love which Van reciprocated, and which both vainly tried to camouflage with habitual pleasantry. (1.38)
Van’s and Ada’s father, Demon Veen is the son of Dedalus Veen. Describing the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday (when Van walks on his hands for the first time), Van mentions Grandfather Dedalus Veen who once fell into the horsepond:
The early afternoon sun found new places to brighten and old places to toast. Aunt Ruth dozed with her head on an ordinary bed pillow provided by Mme Forestier, who was knitting a tiny jersey for her charges’ future half-sibling. Lady Erminin, through the bothersome afterhaze of suicide, was, reflected Marina, looking down, with old wistfulness and an infant’s curiosity, at the picnickers, under the glorious pine verdure, from the Persian blue of her abode of bliss. The children displayed their talents: Ada and Grace danced a Russian fling to the accompaniment of an ancient music box (which kept halting in mid-bar, as if recalling other shores, other, radial, waves); Lucette, one fist on her hip, sang a St Malô fisher-song; Greg put on his sister’s blue skirt, hat and glasses, all of which transformed him into a very sick, mentally retarded Grace; and Van walked on his hands.
Two years earlier, when about to begin his first prison term at the fashionable and brutal boarding school, to which other Veens had gone before him (as far back as the days ‘when Washingtonias were Wellingtonias’), Van had resolved to study some striking stunt that would give him an immediate and brilliant ascendancy. Accordingly, after a conference with Demon, King Wing, the latter’s wrestling master, taught the strong lad to walk on his hands by means of a special play of the shoulder muscles, a trick that necessitated for its acquirement and improvement nothing short of a dislocation of the caryatics.
What pleasure (thus in the MS.). The pleasure of suddenly discovering the right knack of topsy turvy locomotion was rather like learning to man, after many a painful and ignominious fall, those delightful gliders called Magicarpets (or ‘jikkers’) that were given a boy on his twelfth birthday in the adventurous days before the Great Reaction — and then what a breathtaking long neural caress when one became airborne for the first time and managed to skim over a haystack, a tree, a burn, a barn, while Grandfather Dedalus Veen, running with upturned face, flourished a flag and fell into the horsepond. (1.13)
One of the main characters in Ulysses is Stephen Dedalus. In Circe, Episode 15 of Ulysses, Philip Beaufoy tells Bloom that he ought to be ducked in the horsepond:
BEAUFOY: You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you rotter! (TO THE COURT) Why, look at the man’s private life! Leading a quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be mentioned in mixed society! The archconspirator of the age!
Describing the campus of Wordsmith University, Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions the impeccably planned dormitories:
After winding for about four miles in a general eastern direction through a beautifully sprayed and irrigated residential section with variously graded lawns sloping down on both sides, the highway bifurcates: one branch goes left to New Wye and its expectant airfield; the other continues to the campus. Here are the great mansions of madness, the impeccably planned dormitories - bedlams of jungle music - the magnificent palace of the Administration, the brick walls, the archways, the quadrangles blocked out in velvet green and chrysoprase, Spencer House and its lily pond, the Chapel, New Lecture Hall, the Library, the prisonlike edifice containing our classrooms and offices (to be called from now on Shade Hall), the famous avenue to all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare, a distant droning sound, the hint of a haze, the turquoise dome of the Observatory, wisps and pale plumes of cirrus, and the poplar-curtained Roman-tiered football field, deserted on summer days except for a dreamy-eyed youngster flying - on a long control line in a droning circle - a motor-powered model plane.
Dear Jesus, do something. (note to Lines 47-48)
Kinbote asks God to rid him of his love for little boys. A catamite is a pubescent boy who is the intimate companion of an adult man, usually in a pedrastic relationship. In his Index Kinbote mentions the statues of Igor's four hundred favorite catamites:
Igor II, reigned 1800-1845, a wise and benevolent king, son of Queen Yaruga (q. v.) and father of Thurgus III (q. v.); a very private section of the picture gallery in the Palace, accessible, only to the reigning monarch, but easily broken into through Bower P by an inquisitive pubescent, contained the statues of Igor's four hundred favorite catamites, in pink marble, with inset glass eyes and various touched up details, an outstanding exhibition of verisimilitude and bad art, later presented by K. to an Asiatic potentate.
Thurgus the Third, surnamed the Turgid. K's grandfather, d .1900 at seventy-five, after a long dull reign; sponge-bag-capped, and with only one medal on his Jaegar jacket, he liked to bicycle in the park; stout and bald, his nose like a congested plum, his martial mustache bristing with obsolete passion, garbed in a dressing gown of green silk, and carrying a flambeau in his raised hand, he used to meet, every night, during a short period in the middle-Eighties, his hooded mistress, Iris Acht (q. v.) midway between palace and theater in the secret passage later to be rediscovered by his grandson, 130. (Index)
Thurgus the Turgid seems to hint at Turgenev, the author of Ottsy i deti (“Fathers and Sons,” 1862) and Gamlet i Don Kikhot ("Hamlet and Don Quixote," 1860). On his way to Ardis Van passes through Gamlet, a half-Russian village:
They bounced on the cobblestones of Gamlet, a half-Russian village, and the chauffeur waved again, this time to a boy in a cherry tree. Birches separated to let them pass across an old bridge. Ladore, with its ruinous black castle on a crag, and its gay multicolored roofs further downstream were glimpsed — to be seen again many times much later in life. (1.5)
Describing his visit to Ramsdale in 1952, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in Lolita) mentions a Turgenev story (“Three Meetings,” 1852), in which a torrent of Italian music comes from an open window:
Should I enter my old house? As in a Turgenev story, a torrent of Italian music came from an open window—that of the living room: what romantic soul was playing the piano where no piano had plunged and plashed on that bewitched Sunday with the sun on her beloved legs? (2.33)
The title of Turgenev’s story Tri vstrechi brings to mind Vladimir Solovyov’s poem Tri svidaniya (“Three Meetings,” 1898). Po doroge v Upsalu ("On the Road to Upsala," 1893) is a poem by Solovyov, the author of Smysl lyubvi ("The Meaning of Love," 1892-94), a cycle of five essays. In the first of them Solovyov mentions Shakespeare, his Sonnets and his play Romeo and Juliet:
Случаи неразделенной любви слишком обычны, чтобы видеть в них только исключение, которое можно оставить без внимания. Да если б и так, это мало помогло бы делу, ибо и в тех случаях, где особенно сильно любовь является с обеих сторон, она не приводит к тому, что требуется теорией. По теории Ромео и Джульетта должны были бы соответственно своей великой взаимной страсти породить какого-нибудь очень великого человека, по крайней мере Шекспира, но на самом деле, как известно, наоборот: не они создали Шекспира, как следовало бы по теории, а он их, и притом без всякой страсти - путем бесполого творчества. Ромео и Джульетта, как и большинство страстных любовников, умерли, не породив никого, а породивший их Шекспир, как и прочие великие люди, родился не от безумно влюбленной пары, а от заурядного житейского брака (и сам он хотя испытывал сильную любовную страсть, как видно, между прочим, из его сонетов, но никакого замечательного потомства отсюда не произошло). Рождение Христофора Колумба было, может быть, для мировой воли еще важнее, чем рождение Шекспира; но о какой-нибудь особенной любви у его родителей мы ничего не знаем, а знаем о его собственной сильной страсти к донье Беатрисе Энрикэс, и хотя он имел от нее незаконнорожденного сына Диэго, но этот сын ничего великого не сделал, а написал только биографию своего отца, что мог бы исполнить и всякий другой. (II)
In the third essay of "The Meaning of Love" Solovyov wonders if one can imagine Shakespeare infinitely composing his plays:
Бессмертие произведений, очевидно, нисколько не требует и даже само по себе исключает непрерывное бессмертие произведших их индивидуальностей. Можно ли представить себе Шекспира, бесконечно сочиняющего свои драмы, или Ньютона, бесконечно продолжающего изучать небесную механику, не говоря уже о нелепости бесконечного продолжения такой деятельности, какою прославились Александр Великий или Наполеон.