In VN’s novel Ada (1969) the twin sisters Aqua and Marina Durmanov marry the first cousins who have the same name, Walter D. Veen:
On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.
The ‘D’ in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon’s twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns. (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Durak: ‘fool’ in Russian.
In Charles Dickens' and Wilkie Collins' novel No Thoroughfare (1867) there are two Walters too:
Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, (Walter Wilding), with disastrous consequences in adulthood. After the death of one – now a proprietor of a wine merchant's company – the executors, to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean – across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine, Marguerite, and a faithful company servant.
The narrator and main character in Ada, Van Veen was born in Ex (in the Swiss Alps) on January 1, 1870. The son of Demon Veen (who stayed at his Mediterranean Villa Armina at the time of Van's birth) and Marina, Van is officially Aqua’s son (poor mad Aqua, who had a miscarriage, was made to believe that Van is her son):
At one time Aqua believed that a stillborn male infant half a year old, a surprised little fetus, a fish of rubber that she had produced in her bath, in a lieu de naissance plainly marked X in her dreams, after skiing at full pulver into a larch stump, had somehow been saved and brought to her at the Nusshaus, with her sister’s compliments, wrapped up in blood-soaked cotton wool, but perfectly alive and healthy, to be registered as her son Ivan Veen. At other moments she felt convinced that the child was her sister’s, born out of wedlock, during an exhausting, yet highly romantic blizzard, in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge, where a Dr Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover, sat providentially waiting near a rude red stove for his boots to dry. Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 — her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband’s unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: ‘Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld’) she took advantage of his being massaged in the solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom — and experienced a delicious shock: her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along — ever since Shakespeare’s birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G.A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. Marina had spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with him at Kitezh but when she smugly divulged her intentions (just before Aqua’s arrival) he threw her out of the house. Still later, on the last short lap of a useless existence, Aqua scrapped all those ambiguous recollections and found herself reading and rereading busily, blissfully, her son’s letters in a luxurious ‘sanastoria’ at Centaur, Arizona. He invariably wrote in French calling her petite maman and describing the amusing school he would be living at after his thirteenth birthday. She heard his voice through the nightly tinnitus of her new, planful, last, last insomnias and it consoled her. He called her usually mummy, or mama, accenting the last syllable in English, the first, in Russian; somebody had said that triplets and heraldic dracunculi often occurred in trilingual families; but there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever now (except, perhaps, in hateful long-dead Marina’s hell-dwelling mind) that Van was her, her, Aqua’s, beloved son.
Being unwilling to suffer another relapse after this blessed state of perfect mental repose, but knowing it could not last, she did what another patient had done in distant France, at a much less radiant and easygoing ‘home.’ A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same man, because they both came from Vienne, Isère, and were only sons (as her son was), evolved, or rather revived, the therapistic device, aimed at establishing a ‘group’ feeling, of having the finest patients help the staff if ‘thusly inclined.’ Aqua, in her turn, repeated exactly clever Eleonore Bonvard’s trick, namely, opting for the making of beds and the cleaning of glass shelves. The astorium in St Taurus, or whatever it was called (who cares — one forgets little things very fast, when afloat in infinite non-thingness) was, perhaps, more modem, with a more refined desertic view, than the Mondefroid bleakhouse horsepittle, but in both places a demented patient could outwit in one snap an imbecile pedant. (1.3)
Nuss: German for ‘nut’.
Khristosik: little Christ (Russ.).
rukuliruyushchiy: Russ., from Fr. roucoulant, cooing.
horsepittle: ‘hospital’, borrowed from a passage in Dickens’ Bleak House. Poor Joe’s pun, not a poor Joycean one.
Upon awakening, Madame Dor (a character in No Thoroughfare) says "Mon Dieu!" twice:
She hurried from the room, and touched Madame Dor’s shoulder in passing. Madame Dor woke up with a loud snort, looked first over one shoulder and then over the other, peered down into her lap, and discovered neither stockings, worsted, nor darning-needle in it. At the same moment, footsteps became audible ascending the stairs. “Mon Dieu!” said Madame Dor, addressing herself to the stove, and trembling violently. Vendale picked up the stockings and the ball, and huddled them all back in a heap over her shoulder. “Mon Dieu!” said Madame Dor, for the second time, as the avalanche of worsted poured into her capacious lap. (Act II: Vendale Makes Love)
On the other hand, Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu seems to hint at Asmund and Signy, an Icelandic fairy tale collected in Islandische Märchen. Andrew Lang included it in The Brown Fairy Book. The Brown Fairy Book and Marguerite (the heroine of No Thoroughfare) bring to mind Brown’s poem “Peter and Margaret” that Van makes Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister, Daniel Veen’s daughter) learn by heart:
They tried all sorts of other tricks.
Once, for example, when Lucette had made of herself a particular nuisance, her nose running, her hand clutching at Van’s all the time, her whimpering attachment to his company turning into a veritable obsession, Van mustered all his persuasive skill, charm, eloquence, and said with conspiratory undertones: ‘Look, my dear. This brown book is one of my most treasured possessions. I had a special pocket made for it in my school jacket. Numberless fights have been fought over it with wicked boys who wanted to steal it. What we have here’ (turning the pages reverently) ‘is no less than a collection of the most beautiful and famous short poems in the English language. This tiny one, for example, was composed in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress, looking down on the foaming turquoise surf near Nice, an unforgettable sight for all concerned. It is called "Peter and Margaret." Now you have, say’ (turning to Ada in solemn consultation), ‘forty minutes’ (‘Give her a full hour, she can’t even memorize Mironton, mirontaine’) — ‘all right, a full hour to learn these eight lines by heart. You and I’ (whispering) ‘are going to prove to your nasty arrogant sister that stupid little Lucette can do anything. If’ (lightly brushing her bobbed hair with his lips), ‘if, my sweet, you can recite it and confound Ada by not making one single slip — you must be careful about the "here-there" and the "this-that", and every other detail — if you can do it then I shall give you this valuable book for keeps.’ (‘Let her try the one about finding a feather and seeing Peacock plain,’ said Ada drily — ‘it’s a bit harder.’) ‘No, no, she and I have already chosen that little ballad. All right. Now go in here’ (opening a door) ‘and don’t come out until I call you. Otherwise, you’ll forfeit the reward, and will regret the loss all your life.’
‘Oh, Van, how lovely of you,’ said Lucette, slowly entering her room, with her bemused eyes scanning the fascinating flyleaf, his name on it, his bold flourish, and his own wonderful drawings in ink — a black aster (evolved from a blot), a doric column (disguising a more ribald design), a delicate leafless tree (as seen from a classroom window), and several profiles of boys (Cheshcat, Zogdog, Fancytart, and Ada-like Van himself).
Van hastened to join Ada in the attic. At that moment he felt quite proud of his stratagem. He was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston address on June 2, 1901, ‘just in case,’ wrote:
‘I kept for years — it must be in my Ardis nursery — the anthology you once gave me; and the little poem you wanted me to learn by heart is still word-perfect in a safe place of my jumbled mind, with the packers trampling on my things, and upsetting crates, and voices calling, time to go, time to go. Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. Now read on:
‘Here, said the guide, was the field,
There, he said, was the wood.
This is where Peter kneeled,
That’s where the Princess stood.
No, the visitor said,
You are the ghost, old guide.
Oats and oaks may be dead,
But she is by my side.’ (1.23)
In Asmund and Signy there are two giant oaks:
A king and queen had a son, Asmund, and a daughter, Signy. Asmund loved the outdoors. He persuaded his father to give him two giant oaks, and told Signy that he would hollow them out and live in them. Signy asked to live there, too, and Asmund agreed. They lived there a time, when their father had to go to war, and their mother died...
In Kim Beauharnais’s album there is a photograph of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat.:
Then came several preparatory views of the immediate grounds: the colutea circle, an avenue, the grotto’s black O, and the hill, and the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat., and a number of other spots meant to be picturesque by the compiler of the illustrated pamphlet but looking a little shabby owing to inexperienced photography. (2.7)
Quercus ruslan Chat. brings to mind not only the green oak with its golden chain in Pushkin’s introductory poem to Ruslan and Lyudmila, but also Quercus, the novel that Cincinnatus C., the main character in VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935), reads in the fortress:
Роман был знаменитый "Quercus", и Цинциннат прочел из него уже добрую треть: около тысячи страниц. Героем романа был дуб. Роман был биографией дуба. Там, где Цинциннат остановился, дубу шел третий век; простой расчет показывал, что к концу книги он достигнет по крайней мере возраста шестисотлетнего.
Идея романа считалась вершиной современного мышления. Пользуясь постепенным развитием дерева (одиноко и мощно росшего у спуска в горный дол, где вечно шумели воды), автор чередой разворачивал все те исторические события, - или тени событий, - коих дуб мог быть свидетелем; то это был диалог между воинами, сошедшими с коней - изабелловой масти и в яблоках, - дабы отдохнуть под свежей сенью благородной листвы; то привил разбойников и песнь простоволосой беглянки; то - под синим зигзагом грозы поспешный проезд вельможи, спасающегося от царского гнева; то на плаще труп, как будто еще трепещущий - от движения лиственной тени; то - мимолетная драма в среде поселян. Был в полторы страницы параграф, в котором все слова начинались на п.
Автор, казалось, сидит со своим аппаратом где-то в вышних ветвях Quercus'a - высматривая и ловя добычу. Приходили и уходили различные образы жизни, на миг задерживаясь среди зеленых бликов. Естественные же промежутки бездействия заполнялись учеными описаниями самого дуба, с точки зрения дендрологии, орнитологии, колеоптерологии, мифологии, - или описаниями популярными, с участием народного юмора. Приводился, между прочим, подробный список всех вензелей на коре с их толкованием. Наконец немало внимания уделялось музыке вод, палитре зорь и поведению погоды.
Цинциннат почитал, отложил. Это произведение было бесспорно лучшее, что создало его время, - однако же он одолевал страницы с тоской, беспрестанно потопляя повесть волной собственной мысли: на что мне это далекое, ложное, мертвое, - мне, готовящемуся умереть? Или же начинал представлять себе, как автор, человек еще молодой, живущий, говорят, на острове в Северном, что ли, море, сам будет умирать, - и это было как-то смешно, - что вот когда-нибудь непременно умрет автор, - а смешно было потому, что единственным тут настоящим, реально несомненным была всего лишь смерть, - неизбежность физической смерти автора.
The novel was the famous Quercus, and Cincinnatus had already read a good third of it, or about a thousand pages. Its protagonist was an oak. The novel was a biography of that oak. At the place where Cincinnatus had stopped the oak was just starting on its third century; a simple calculation suggested that by the end of the book it would reach the age of six hundred at least.
The idea of the novel was considered to be the acme of modern thought. Employing the gradual development of the tree (growing lone and mighty at the edge of a canyon at whose bottom the waters never ceased to din), the author unfolded all the historic events--or shadows of events--of which the oak could have been a witness; now it was a dialogue between two warriors dismounted from their steeds--one dappled, the other dun--so as to rest under the cool ceil of its noble foliage; now highwaymen stopping by and the song of a wild-haired fugitive damsel; now, beneath the storm's blue zigzag, the hasty passage of a lord escaping from royal wrath; now, upon a spread cloak a corpse, still quivering with the throb of the leafy shadows; now a brief drama in the life of some villagers. There was a paragraph a page and a half long in which all the words began with "p."
It seemed as though the author were sitting with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the Quercus, spying out and catching his prey. Various images of life would come and go, pausing among the green macules of light. The normal periods of inaction were filled with scientific descriptions of the oak itself, from the viewpoints of dendrology, ornithology, coleopterology, mythology--or popular descriptions, with touches of folk humor. Among other things there was a detailed list of all the initials carved in the bark with their interpretations. And, finally, no little attention was devoted to the music of waters, the palette of sunsets, and the behavior of the weather.
Cincinnatus read for a while and laid it aside. This work was unquestionably the best that his age had produced; yet he overcame the pages with a melancholy feeling, plodded through the pages with dull distress, and kept drowning out the tale in the stream of his own meditation: what matters to me all this, distant, deceitful and dead--I, who am preparing to die? Or else he would begin imagining how the author, still a young man, living, so they said, on an island in the North Sea--would be dying himself; and it was somehow funny that eventually the author must needs die--and it was funny because the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself, the inevitability of the author's physical death. (Chapter XI)
The author of Quercus is compared to a man who sits with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the tree, spying out and catching his prey. In his essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), Lev Shestov says that Chekhov is constantly, as it were, in ambush, to watch and waylay human hopes:
А меж тем, справедливый Аристид и на этот раз был прав, как он был прав, когда предостерегал против Достоевского: теперь Чехова нет, об этом уже можно говорить. Возьмите рассказы Чехова — каждый порознь или, еще лучше, все вместе: посмотрите за его работой. Он постоянно точно в засаде сидит, высматривая и подстерегая человеческие надежды. И будьте спокойны за него: ни одной из них он не просмотрит, ни одна из них не избежит своей участи. Искусство, наука, любовь, вдохновение, идеалы, будущее — переберите все слова, которыми современное и прошлое человечество утешало или развлекало себя — стоит Чехову к ним прикоснуться, и они мгновенно блекнут, вянут и умирают. И сам Чехов на наших глазах блекнул, вянул и умирал — не умирало в нем только его удивительное искусство одним прикосновением, даже дыханием, взглядом убивать все, чем живут и гордятся люди. Более того, в этом искусстве он постоянно совершенствовался и дошел до виртуозности, до которой не доходил никто из его соперников в европейской литературе. Я без колебания ставлю его далеко впереди Мопассана. Мопассану часто приходилось делать напряжения, чтоб справиться со своей жертвой. От Мопассана сплошь и рядом жертва уходила хоть помятой и изломанной, но живой. В руках Чехова всё умирало.
Yet the just Aristides [the critic Mikhaylovski] was right this time too, as he was right when he gave his warning against Dostoevsky. Now that Chekhov is no more, we may speak openly. Take Chekhov's stories, each one separately, or better still, all together; look at him at work. He is constantly, as it were, in ambush, to watch and waylay human hopes. He will not miss a single one of them, not one of them will escape its fate. Art, science, love, inspiration, ideals—choose out all the words with which humanity is wont, or has been in the past, to be consoled or to be amused—Chekhov has only to touch them and they instantly wither and die. And Chekhov himself faded, withered and died before our eyes. Only his wonderful art did not die—his art to kill by a mere touch, a breath, a glance, everything whereby men live and wherein they take their pride. And in this art he was constantly perfecting himself, and he attained to a virtuosity beyond the reach of any of his rivals in European literature. Maupassant often had to strain every effort to overcome his victim. The victim often escaped from Maupassant, though crushed and broken, yet with his life. In Chekhov's hands, nothing escaped death. (I)
In Maupassant’s story La Question du latin (“The Question of Latin,” 1886) Pere Piquedent tells his pupil that he is like an oak in a desert, 'sicut quercus in solitudine':
These private lessons were given in a little room looking out on the street. It so happened that Pere Piquedent, instead of talking Latin to me, as he did when teaching publicly in the institution, kept telling me his troubles in French. Without relations, without friends, the poor man conceived an attachment to me, and poured out his misery to me.
He had never for the last ten or fifteen years chatted confidentially with any one.
"I am like an oak in a desert," he said--"'sicut quercus in solitudine'."
The other ushers disgusted him. He knew nobody in the town, since he had no time to devote to making acquaintances.
"Not even the nights, my friend, and that is the hardest thing on me. The dream of my life is to have a room with my own furniture, my own books, little things that belong to myself and which others may not touch. And I have nothing of my own, nothing except my trousers and my frock-coat, nothing, not even my mattress and my pillow! I have not four walls to shut myself up in, except when I come to give a lesson in this room. Do you see what this means--a man forced to spend his life without ever having the right, without ever finding the time, to shut himself up all alone, no matter where, to think, to reflect, to work, to dream? Ah! my dear boy, a key, the key of a door which one can lock--this is happiness, mark you, the only happiness!”
Shestov’s essay on Chekhov has for epigraph a line from Baudelaire’s sonnet with a coda Le Goût du néant (“The Taste for Nothingness”):
Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute.
Resign yourself, my heart; sleep your brutish sleep.
When Van describes Chateaubriand’s mosquito, Ada “quotes” Baudelaire’s poem L'invitation au voyage (whose title brings to mind VN’s “Invitation to a Beheading”):
During the last week of July, there emerged, with diabolical regularity, the female of Chateaubriand’s mosquito, Chateaubriand (Charles), who had not been the first to be bitten by it... but the first to bottle the offender, and with cries of vindictive exultation to carry it to Professor Brown who wrote the rather slap-bang Original Description (‘small black palpi... hyaline wings... yellowy in certain lights... which should be extinguished if one keeps open the kasements [German printer!]...’ The Boston Entomologist for August, quick work, 1840) was not related to the great poet and memoirist born between Paris and Tagne (as he’d better, said Ada, who liked crossing orchids).
Mon enfant, ma sœur,
Songe à l’épaisseur
Du grand chêne a Tagne;
Songe à la montagne,
Songe à la douceur —
— of scraping with one’s claws or nails the spots visited by that fluffy-footed insect characterized by an insatiable and reckless appetite for Ada’s and Ardelia’s, Lucette’s and Lucile’s (multiplied by the itch) blood. (1.17)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Ada who liked crossing orchids: she crosses here two French authors, Baudelaire and Chateaubriand.
mon enfant, etc.: my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness —
In a letter of Feb. 18, 1889, to Leontiev-Shcheglov (a fellow writer who nicknamed Chekhov Potyomkin) Chekhov says that he is not Potyomkin, but Cincinnatus:
Голова моя занята мыслями о лете и даче. Денно и нощно мечтаю о хуторе. Я не Потёмкин, а Цинцинат. Лежанье на сене и пойманный на удочку окунь удовлетворяют моё чувство гораздо осязательнее, чем рецензии и аплодирующая галерея. Я, очевидно, урод и плебей.
Describing his performance in variety shows as Mascodagama, Van mentions one of the special detectives at Chose — the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P.O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id.:
On February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama’s performance as ‘the most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public.’ It was repeated at the Rantariver Club several times, but nothing in the programme or in publicity notices beyond the definition ‘Foreign eccentric’ gave any indication either of the exact nature of the ‘stunt’ or of the performer’s identity. Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve of the Crimean War) — three dancing girls, a sick old clown with his old speaking goat, and one of the dancers’ husbands, a make-up man (no doubt, a multiple agent) — had already defected between France and England, somewhere in the newly constructed ‘Chunnel.’ Mascodagama’s spectacular success in a theatrical club that habitually limited itself to Elizabethan plays, with queens and fairies played by pretty boys, made first of all a great impact on cartoonists. Deans, local politicians, national statesmen, and of course the current ruler of the Golden Horde were pictured as mascodagamas by topical humorists. A grotesque imitator (who was really Mascodagama himself in an oversophisticated parody of his own act!) was booed at Oxford (a women’s college nearby) by local rowdies. A shrewd reporter, who had heard him curse a crease in the stage carpet, commented in print on his ‘Yankee twang.’ Dear Mr ‘Vascodagama’ received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van’s own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose — the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P.O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id.
During his first summer vacation, Van worked under Tyomkin, at the Chose famous clinic, on an ambitious dissertation he never completed, ‘Terra: Eremitic Reality or Collective Dream?’ He interviewed numerous neurotics, among whom there were variety artists and literary men, and at least three intellectually lucid, but spiritually ‘lost,’ cosmologists who either were in telepathic collusion (they had never met and did not even know of one another’s existence) or had discovered, none knew how or where, by means, maybe, of forbidden ‘ondulas’ of some kind, a green world rotating in space and spiraling in time, which in terms of matter-and-mind was like ours and which they described in the same specific details as three people watching from three separate windows would a carnival show in the same street. (1.30)
The Ranter, Rattner (Van’s Professor at Kingston), Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) seem to hint at Ellen Ternan (1838-1914), an English actress known for association with Charles Dickens. Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother, Marina is a professional actress. Her affair with Demon (Van's and Ada's father) started on his, her, and Daniel Veen’s birthday:
Marina’s affair with Demon Veen started on his, her, and Daniel Veen’s birthday, January 5, 1868, when she was twenty-four and both Veens thirty.
As an actress, she had none of the breath-taking quality that makes the skill of mimicry seem, at least while the show lasts, worth even more than the price of such footlights as insomnia, fancy, arrogant art; yet on that particular night, with soft snow falling beyond the plush and the paint, la Durmanska (who paid the great Scott, her impresario, seven thousand gold dollars a week for publicity alone, plus a bonny bonus for every engagement) had been from the start of the trashy ephemeron (an American play based by some pretentious hack on a famous Russian romance) so dreamy, so lovely, so stirring that Demon (not quite a gentleman in amorous matters) made a bet with his orchestra-seat neighbor, Prince N., bribed a series of green-room attendants, and then, in a cabinet reculé (as a French writer of an earlier century might have mysteriously called that little room in which the broken trumpet and poodle hoops of a forgotten clown, besides many dusty pots of colored grease, happened to be stored) proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel). In the first of these she had undressed in graceful silhouette behind a semitransparent screen, reappeared in a flimsy and fetching nightgown, and spent the rest of the wretched scene discussing a local squire, Baron d’O., with an old nurse in Eskimo boots. Upon the infinitely wise countrywoman’s suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of her bed, on a side table with cabriole legs, a love letter and took five minutes to reread it in a languorous but loud voice for no body’s benefit in particular since the nurse sat dozing on a kind of sea chest, and the spectators were mainly concerned with the artificial moonlight’s blaze upon the lovelorn young lady’s bare arms and heaving breasts.
Even before the old Eskimo had shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last dance on New Year’s Eve. Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in, the penetrative sense of her own beauty, the ardent pulses of the imagined maiden, and the gallant applause of an almost full house made her especially vulnerable to the tickle of Demon’s moustache. She had ample time, too, to change for the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed — the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat. (1.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).
Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).
Marina's impresario, the great Scott brings to mind Sir Walter Scott, the writer whom Demon preferss to Dickens:
‘I don’t know if you know,’ said Van, resuming his perch on the fat arm of his father’s chair. ‘Uncle Dan will be here with the lawyer and Lucette only after dinner.’
‘Capital,’ said Demon.
‘Marina and Ada should be down in a minute — ce sera un dîner à quatre.’
‘Capital,’ he repeated. ‘You look splendid, my dear, dear fellow — and I don’t have to exaggerate compliments as some do in regard to an aging man with shoe-shined hair. Your dinner jacket is very nice — or, rather it’s very nice recognizing one’s old tailor in one’s son’s clothes — like catching oneself repeating an ancestral mannerism — for example, this (wagging his left forefinger three times at the height of his temple), which my mother did in casual, pacific denial; that gene missed you, but I’ve seen it in my hairdresser’s looking-glass when refusing to have him put Crêmlin on my bald spot; and you know who had it too — my aunt Kitty, who married the Banker Bolenski after divorcing that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer.’
Demon preferred Walter Scott to Dickens, and did not think highly of Russian novelists. As usual, Van considered it fit to make a corrective comment:
‘A fantastically artistic writer, Dad.’
‘You are a fantastically charming boy,’ said Demon, shedding another sweet-water tear. He pressed to his cheek Van’s strong shapely hand. Van kissed his father’s hairy fist which was already holding a not yet visible glass of liquor. Despite the manly impact of their Irishness, all Veens who had Russian blood revealed much tenderness in ritual overflows of affection while remaining somewhat inept in its verbal expression.
‘I say,’ exclaimed Demon, ‘what’s happened — your shaftment is that of a carpenter’s. Show me your other hand. Good gracious’ (muttering:) ‘Hump of Venus disfigured, Line of Life scarred but monstrously long...’ (switching to a gipsy chant:) ‘You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man’ (reverting to his ordinary voice:) ‘What puzzles me as a palmist is the strange condition of the Sister of your Life. And the roughness!’
‘Mascodagama,’ whispered Van, raising his eyebrows.
‘Ah, of course, how blunt (dumb) of me. Now tell me — you like Ardis Hall?’
‘I adore it,’ said Van. ‘It’s for me the château que baignait la Dore. I would gladly spend all my scarred and strange life here. But that’s a hopeless fancy.’
‘Hopeless? I wonder. I know Dan wants to leave it to Lucile, but Dan is greedy, and my affairs are such that I can satisfy great greed. When I was your age I thought that the sweetest word in the language rhymes with "billiard," and now I know I was right. If you’re really keen, son, on having this property, I might try to buy it. I can exert a certain pressure upon my Marina. She sighs like a hassock when you sit upon her, so to speak. Damn it, the servants here are not Mercuries. Pull that cord again. Yes, maybe Dan could be made to sell.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): ce sera etc.: it will be a dinner for four
Wagging his left forefinger: that gene did not miss his daughter (see p.178, where the name of the cream is also prefigured).
Lyovka: derogative or folksy diminutive of Lyov (Leo).