Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that Aqua saw flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea:
Poor Aqua, whose fancies were apt to fall for all the fangles of cranks and Christians, envisaged vividly a minor hymnist’s paradise, a future America of alabaster buildings one hundred stories high, resembling a beautiful furniture store crammed with tall white-washed wardrobes and shorter fridges; she saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or Wark. She heard magic-music boxes talking and singing, drowning the terror of thought, uplifting the lift girl, riding down with the miner, praising beauty and godliness, the Virgin and Venus in the dwellings of the lonely and the poor. The unmentionable magnetic power denounced by evil lawmakers in this our shabby country — oh, everywhere, in Estoty and Canady, in ‘German’ Mark Kennensie, as well as in ‘Swedish’ Manitobogan, in the workshop of the red-shirted Yukonets as well as in the kitchen of the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka, and in ‘French’ Estoty, from Bras d’Or to Ladore — and very soon throughout both our Americas, and all over the other stunned continents — was used on Terra as freely as water and air, as bibles and brooms. Two or three centuries earlier she might have been just another consumable witch. (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Yukonets: inhabitant of Yukon.
The Pilgrim's Progress From This World, to That Which is to Come (1678) is a Christian allegory by John Bunyan. In “Bunyan Characters Third Series: The Holy War: 12. That Varlet Ill-Pause, The Devil's Orator” Alexander Whyte (a Scottish preacher, 1837-1921) mentions a land-shark:
'I made haste and delayed not.'--David.
John Bunyan shall himself introduce, describe, and characterise this varlet, this devil's ally and accomplice, this ancient enemy of Mansoul, whose name is Ill-pause. Well, this same Ill-pause, says our author, was the orator of Diabolus on all difficult occasions, nor took Diabolus any other one with him on difficult occasions, but just Ill-pause alone. And always when Diabolus had any special plot a-foot against Mansoul, and when the thing went as Diabolus would have it go, then would Ill-pause stand up, for he was Diabolus his orator. When Mansoul was under siege of Emmanuel his four noble captains sent a message to the men of the town that if they would only throw Ill-pause over the wall to them, that they might reward him according to his works, then they would hold a parley with the city; but if this varlet was to be let live in the city, then, why, the city must see to the consequences. At which Diabolus, who was there present, was loth to lose his orator, because, had the four captains once laid their fingers on Ill-pause, be sure his master had lost his orator. And, then, in the last assault, we read that Ill-pause, the orator that came along with Diabolus, he also received a grievous wound in the head, some say that his brain-pan was cracked. This, at any rate, I have taken notice of, that never after this was he able to do that mischief to Mansoul as he had done in times past. And then there was also at Eye-gate that Ill-pause of whom you have heard before. The same was he that was orator to Diabolus. He did much mischief to the town of Mansoul, till at last he fell by the hand of the Captain Good-hope.
1. Well, to begin with, this Ill-pause was a filthy Diabolonian varlet; a treacherous and a villainous old varlet, the author of the Holy War calls him. Now, what is a varlet? Well, a varlet is just a broken-down old valet. A varlet is a valet who has come down, and down, and down, and down again in the world, till, from once having been the servant and the trusty friend of the very best of masters, he has come to be the ally and accomplice of the very worst of masters. His first name, the name of his first office, still sticks to him, indeed; but, like himself, and with himself, his name has become depraved and corrupted till you would not know it. A varlet, then, is just short and sharp for a scoundrel who is ready for anything; and the worse the thing is the more ready he is for it. There are riff-raff and refuse always about who are ready to volunteer for any filibustering expedition; and that full as much for the sheer devilry of the enterprise as for any real profit it is to be to themselves. Wherever mischief is to be done, there your true varlet is sure to turn up. Well, just such a land-shark was this Ill-pause, who was such an ally and accomplice to Diabolus that he had need for no other. What possible certificate in evil could exceed this--that the devil took not any with him when he went out on his worst errand but this same Ill-pause, who was his orator on all his most difficult occasions?
Aqua’s giant sharks are airplanes. In March, 1905, Demon Veen (Aqua’s husband, Van’s and Ada’s father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. The element that destroys Demon is air (water is the element that destroys Van’s and Ada’s half-sister Lucette). Describing Lucette's suicide, Van mentions sharks:
She drank a ‘Cossack pony’ of Klass vodka — hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff; had another; and was hardly able to down a third because her head had started to swim like hell. Swim like hell from sharks, Tobakovich!
She had no purse with her. She almost fell from her convex ridiculous seat as she fumbled in her shirt pocket for a stray bank note.
‘Beddydee,’ said Toby the barman with a fatherly smile, which she mistook for a leer. ‘Bedtime, miss,’ he repeated and patted her ungloved hand.
Lucette recoiled and forced herself to retort distinctly and haughtily:
‘Mr Veen, my cousin, will pay you tomorrow and bash your false teeth in.’
Six, seven — no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne, after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off. These steps are something.
While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. (3.5)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) electricity (the unmentionable magnetic power) was banned after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century, but on Terra it is used as freely as water and air, as bibles and brooms. In Canto the Tenth of Don Juan Byron (the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) says that a legal broom is a moral chimney-sweeper:
A legal broom's a moral chimney-sweeper,
And that's the reason he himself's so dirty.
The endless soot bestows a tint far deeper
Than can be hid by altering his shirt; he
Retains the sable stains of the dark creeper,
At least some twenty-nine do out of thirty,
In all their habits; -- not so you, I own;
As Cæsar wore his robe you wear your gown. (XV)
The chimney-sweeper’s dirty shirt brings to mind the red-shirted Yukonets. In Yulonets there is konets (end). When Van saw Demon for the last time, a real-estate man and two lawyers were present:
The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon’s new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yam extolling the Roman faith. The poem was but the twinkle in an owl’s eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced ‘seminal’ by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 (‘Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,’ ‘Sween as poet and person,’ ‘Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography’) both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman’s control of background adjustment — or Demon’s edict. (3.7)
Landshark is a speculator, in real estate. Grombchevski blends Mikhail Gromnitski, a lawyer, with Nikolay Karabchevski, another lawyer (Gromwell hints at Cromwell). In his memoirs, Chto glaza moi videli (“What My Eyes Saw,” 1921), Karabchevski mentions VN’s father (“the starched Anglophile”), also a jurust, and quotes VDN’s words in the First Duma (Russian parliament) “May the executive authorities submit to the legislative authorities:”
На ряду с этим деятельность революционных запевал в наших трех государственных думах находила себе вполне отрицательную оценку у того же Пассовера.
О Винавере он иначе не выражался как: о "хитроумном гомункулусе", считая вообще всю партию "кадетов" "головастиками", совершенно не знающими и непонимающими России и ее интересов. Накрахмаленный англоман В. Д. Набоков, с его холостым выстрелом: "власть исполнительная, да подчинится власти законодательной", снискавшая ему лавры героического либерализма, возбуждал в нем всегда ироническое замечание: "попал пальцем в небо"! (Volume Two, Part 4)
Vinaver (one of the leaders of the KD party mentioned by Karabchevski) brings to mind the Veens (in Russian spelling, Viny) in Ada.
Because love is blind, Van fails to see that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. In his apologetic note to Lucette (written after the dinner in ‘Ursus’ and the debauche à trois in Van’s Manhattan flat) Van mentions pilots of tremendous airships:
Poor L.
We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. Pilots of tremendous airships and even coarse, smelly coachmen are known to have been driven insane by a pair of green eyes and a copper curl. We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene. These are times of emotional stress and reconditioning. Destroy and forget.
Tenderly yours A & V.
(in alphabetic order).
‘I call this pompous, puritanical rot,’ said Ada upon scanning Van’s letter. ‘Why should we apollo for her having experienced a delicious spazmochka? I love her and would never allow you to harm her. It’s curious — you know, something in the tone of your note makes me really jealous for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for "life." Ed.] Van, Van, somewhere, some day, after a sunbath or dance, you will sleep with her, Van!’
‘Unless you run out of love potions. Do you allow me to send her these lines?’
‘I do, but want to add a few words.’
Her P.S. read:
The above declaration is Van’s composition which I sign reluctantly. It is pompous and puritanical. I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly. When you’re sick of Queen, why not fly over to Holland or Italy?
A. (2.8)
Ada’s "pompous, puritanical rot" brings to mind Puritane, the Russian title of Walter Scott’s novel Old Mortality (1816). According to Van, Demon prefers Walter Scott to Dickens and does not think highly of Russian novelists (1.38). Puritanism is a form of Nonconformist Protestantism. In the same sermon Alexander Whyte quotes Jean Calvin (a French theologian and reformer in Geneva during the Protestant Reformation) who quotes Chrysostom and St. Augustine:
3. 'I was always pleased,' says Calvin, 'with that saying of Chrysostom, "The foundation of our philosophy is humility"; and yet more pleased with that of Augustine: "As," says he, "the rhetorician being asked, What was the first thing in the rules of eloquence? he answered, Pronunciation; what was the second? Pronunciation; what was the third? and still he answered, Pronunciation. So if you would ask me concerning the precepts of the Christian religion, I would answer, firstly, secondly, thirdly, and for ever, Humility."' And when Ill-pause opened his elocutionary school for the young orators of hell, he is reported to have said this to them in his opening address, 'There are only three things in my school,' he said; 'three rules, and no more to be called rules. The first is Delay, the second is Delay, and the third is Delay. Study the art of delay, my sons; make all your studies to tell on how to make the fools delay. Only get those to whom your master sends you to delay, and you will not need to envy me my laurels; you will soon have a shining crown of your own. Get the father to delay teaching his little boy how to pray. Get him on any pretext you can invent to put off speaking in private to his son about his soul. Get him to delegate all that to the minister. And then by hook or by crook get that son as he grows up to put off the Lord's Supper. And after that you will easily get him to put off purity and prayer till he is a married man and at the head of a house. Only get the idea of a more convenient season well into their heads, and their game is up, and your spurs are won. Take their arm in yours, as I used to do, at their church door, if you are posted there, and say to them as they come out that to-morrow will be time enough to give what they had thought of giving while they were still in their pew and the minister or missionary was still in the pulpit. Only, as you value your master's praises and the applause of all this place, keep them, at any cost, from striking while the iron is hot. Let them fill their hearts, and their mouths too, if it gives them any comfort, with the best intentions; only, my scholars, remember that the beginning and middle and end of your office is by hook or by crook to secure delay.' And a great crop of young orators sprang up ready for their work under that teaching and out of the persuasionary school of Ill-pause. In fine, Mansoul desired some time in which to prepare its answer.'
In his essay The Texture of Time (1922) Van several times mentions Aurelius Augustinus:
Why is it so difficult — so degradingly difficult — to bring the notion of Time into mental focus and keep it there for inspection? What an effort, what fumbling, what irritating fatigue! It is like rummaging with one hand in the glove compartment for the road map — fishing out Montenegro, the Dolomites, paper money, a telegram — everything except the stretch of chaotic country between Ardez and Somethingsoprano, in the dark, in the rain, while trying to take advantage of a red light in the coal black, with the wipers functioning metronomically, chronometrically: the blind finger of space poking and tearing the texture of time. And Aurelius Augustinus, too, he, too, in his tussles with the same theme, fifteen hundred years ago, experienced this oddly physical torment of the shallowing mind, the shchekotiki (tickles) of approximation, the evasions of cerebral exhaustion — but he, at least, could replenish his brain with God-dispensed energy (have a footnote here about how delightful it is to watch him pressing on and interspersing his cogitations, between sands and stars, with vigorous little fits of prayer). (Part Four)
Such a drought affected Hippo in the most productive months of Augustine’s bishopric that clepsydras had to be replaced by sandglasses. He defined the Past as what is no longer and the future as what is not yet (actually the future is a fantasm belonging to another category of thought essentially different from that of the Past which, at least, was here a moment ago — where did I put it? Pocket? But the search itself is already ‘past’). (ibid.)
In a conversation with Van Ada mentions the Swiss authorities and the absolutely medieval new droits de douane (custom-house dues):
‘When I was a kid,’ said Van, ‘and stayed for the first — or rather, second — time in Switzerland, I thought that "Verglas" on roadway signs stood for some magical town, always around the corner, at the bottom of every snowy slope, never seen, but biding its time. I got your cable in the Engadine where there are real magical places, such as Alraun or Alruna — which means a tiny Arabian demon in a German wizard’s mirror. By the way, we have the old apartment upstairs with an additional bedroom, number five-zero-eight.’
‘Oh dear. I’m afraid you must cancel poor 508. If I stayed for the night, 510 would do for both of us, but I’ve got bad news for you. I can’t stay. I must go back to Geneva directly after dinner to retrieve my things and maids, whom the authorities have apparently put in a Home for Stray Females because they could not pay the absolutely medieval new droits de douane — isn’t Switzerland in Washington State, sort of, après tout? Look, don’t scowl’ — (patting his brown blotched hand on which their shared birthmark had got lost among the freckles of age, like a babe in autumn woods, on peut les suivre en reconnaissant only Mascodagama’s disfigured thumb and the beautiful almond-shaped nails) — ‘I promise to get in touch with you in a day or two, and then we’ll go on a cruise to Greece with the Baynards — they have a yacht and three adorable daughters who still swim in the tan, okay?’
‘I don’t know what I loathe more,’ he replied, ‘yachts or Baynards; but can I help you in Geneva?’
He could not. Baynard had married his Cordula, after a sensational divorce — Scotch veterinaries had had to saw off her husband’s antlers (last call for that joke). (ibid.)
The father of Marina and Aqua, General Ivan Durmanov was "sur-royally antlered:"
The Durmanovs’ favorite domain, however, was Raduga near the burg of that name, beyond Estotiland proper, in the Atlantic panel of the continent between elegant Kaluga, New Cheshire, U.S.A., and no less elegant Ladoga, Mayne, where they had their town house and where their three children were born: a son, who died young and famous, and a pair of difficult female twins. Dolly had inherited her mother’s beauty and temper but also an older ancestral strain of whimsical, and not seldom deplorable, taste, well reflected, for instance, in the names she gave her daughters: Aqua and Marina (‘Why not Tofana?’ wondered the good and sur-royally antlered general with a controlled belly laugh, followed by a small closing cough of feigned detachment — he dreaded his wife’s flares). (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Tofana: allusion to ‘aqua tofana’ (see any good dictionary).
sur-royally: fully antlered, with terminal prongs.
The Durmanovs’ favorite domain, Raduga was later sold to Mr Eliot, a Jewish businessman:
Poor Dan’s erotic life was neither complicated nor beautiful, but somehow or other (he soon forgot the exact circumstances as one forgets the measurements and price of a fondly made topcoat worn on and off for at least a couple of seasons) he fell comfortably in love with Marina, whose family he had known when they still had their Raduga place (later sold to Mr Eliot, a Jewish businessman). One afternoon in the spring of 1871, he proposed to Marina in the Up elevator of Manhattan’s first ten-floor building, was indignantly rejected at the seventh stop (Toys), came down alone and, to air his feelings, set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe, adopting, like an animated parallel, the same itinerary every time. In November 1871, as he was in the act of making his evening plans with the same smelly but nice cicerone in a café-au-lait suit whom he had hired already twice at the same Genoese hotel, an aerocable from Marina (forwarded with a whole week’s delay via his Manhattan office which had filed it away through a new girl’s oversight in a dove hole marked RE AMOR) arrived on a silver salver telling him she would marry him upon his return to America. (ibid.)
Ada’s maids arrive in Geneva on a Laputa (freight airplane):
There had been trouble with her luggage. There still was. Her two maids, who were supposed to have flown over the day before on a Laputa (freight airplane) with her trunks, had got stranded somewhere. All she had was a little valise. The concierge was in the act of making some calls for her. Would Van come down? She was neveroyatno golodnaya (incredibly hungry). (Part Four)
Laputa is the flying island in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Jonathan Swift was an Anglican cleric who became Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. The airplane disaster in which Demon died took place above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region:
Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. A list of ‘leading figures’ dead in the explosion comprised the advertising manager of a department store, the acting foreman in the sheet-metal division of a facsimile corporation, a recording firm executive, the senior partner of a law firm, an architect with heavy aviation background (a first misprint here, impossible to straighten out), the vice president of an insurance corporation, another vice president, this time of a board of adjustment whatever that might be —
‘I’m hongree,’ said a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers.
‘Use bell,’ said Van, continuing in a state of odd fascination to go through the compilation of labeled lives:
— the president of a wholesale liquor-distributing firm, the manager of a turbine equipment company, a pencil manufacturer, two professors of philosophy, two newspaper reporters (with nothing more to report), the assistant controller of a wholesome liquor distribution bank (misprinted and misplaced), the assistant controller of a trust company, a president, the secretary of a printing agency —
The names of those big shots, as well as those of some eighty other men, women, and silent children who perished in blue air, were being withheld until all relatives had been reached; but the tabulatory preview of commonplace abstractions had been thought to be too imposing not to be given at once as an appetizer; and only on the following morning did Van learn that a bank president lost in the closing garble was his father. (3.7)