Describing his father’s death in a mysterious airplane disaster, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions two scholars who had mysteriously vanished (perhaps dying under false names in the never-explained accident above the smiling ocean) at the ‘eleventh hour:’
Van pursued his studies in private until his election (at thirty-five!) to the Rattner Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kingston. The Council’s choice had been a consequence of disaster and desperation; the two other candidates, solid scholars much older and altogether better than he, esteemed even in Tartary where they often traveled, starry-eyed, hand-in-hand, had mysteriously vanished (perhaps dying under false names in the never-explained accident above the smiling ocean) at the ‘eleventh hour,’ for the Chair was to be dismantled if it remained vacant for a legally limited length of time, so as to give another, less-coveted but perfectly good seat the chance to be brought in from the back parlor. Van neither needed nor appreciated the thing, but accepted it in a spirit of good-natured perversity or perverse gratitude, or simply in memory of his father who had been somehow involved in the whole affair. He did not take his task too seriously, reducing to a strict minimum, ten or so per year, the lectures he delivered in a nasal drone mainly produced by a new and hard to get ‘voice recorder’ concealed in his waistcoat pocket, among anti-infection Venus pills, while he moved his lips silently and thought of the lamplit page of his sprawling script left unfinished in his study. He spent in Kingston a score of dull years (variegated by trips abroad), an obscure figure around which no legends collected in the university or the city. Unbeloved by his austere colleagues, unknown in local pubs, unregretted by male students, he retired in 1922, after which he resided in Europe. (3.7)
The phrase “eleventh hour” has a Biblical origin; it comes from a parable in Matthew in which a few last-minute workers, hired long after the others, are paid the same wage. Despite being brought on the job after eleven hours of hard vineyard work, they were not too late.
There are in Ada eleven main characters:
1 Van Veen
2 Ada Veen
3 Lucette Veen
4 Demon Veen
5 Marina Durmanov
6 Aqua Durmanov
7 Daniel Veen (Uncle Dan)
8 Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband)
9 Dorothy Vinelander (Ada’s sister-in-law)
10 Ronald Oranger
11 Violet Knox
In the Introduction to his poem Norway (translated into English by Henry Longfellow) Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (a Norwegian-American author, 1848-95) mentions those Vikings “who in Vineland's rivers moored dauntlessly their galleons.” In his memoir essay A Visit to Turgenev (1874) Boyesen says that Turgenev told him about his work-in-progress (“Virgin Soil,” 1877) in which there would be eleven characters:
-- В таком случае, -- воскликнул я, -- слухи о том, что вы навсегда оставили перо, несправедливы?
-- Я очень обленился за последнее время, -- ответил он, -- и за последние шесть месяцев не сделал почти ничего. Вплоть до прошлого года я мог похвалиться, что не знал, в сущности, что такое болезнь, так как я обладал таким здоровым телосложением, что не чувствовал ее. Но вот недавно у меня был припадок подагры, которая угрожала перейти на желудок; затем прошлое лето ушиб себе колено на Венской выставке, провалялся около шести недель и должен был уехать в Карлсбад, не успевши повидать ни Вены, ни выставки.
-- Я видал заметку об этом в венских газетах, но, кажется, наши американские газеты, по обычаю, преувеличили размеры постигших вас несчастий. Я читал в них, что вы отказываетесь от литературной деятельности, что скорбь и семейные несчастья вызвали в вас упадок сил и т. д.
-- Да, меня действительно постигло семейное лишение, -- сказал Тургенев, к моему удивлению, с веселой улыбкой. -- Моя единственная дочь вышла замуж. Но все же это не такого рода лишение, чтобы ради него навсегда отказаться от литературной деятельности. Едва ли это даже можно назвать семейной скорбью; напротив, я испытал в связи с этим радость, став недавно дедушкой. Но во всех этого рода слухах всегда имеется зерно правды: дело в том, что я обленился. Я никогда не могу заставить себя писать, если не имеется для этого внутреннего импульса. Если работа не доставляет мне полного удовольствия, я тотчас лее прекращаю ее. Если меня утомляет сочинение повести -- значит, и самая повесть дол лена утомить читателей. Но с недавнего времени я опять начинаю чувствовать потребность в работе, и я теперь занят повестью, хранящейся у меня здесь, в письменном столе. В этой повести одиннадцать действующих лиц, и по объему она превзойдет другие мои повести.
According to Boyesen, Turgenev told him that his only daughter had married and that he recently became a grandfather. Van does not realize that, at the time of his final reunion with Ada in 1922 (after Andrey Vinelander’s death), Ada is already a grandmother and that Mr. Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, “little Violet,” and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van’s and Ada’s death) are Ada’s grandchildren.
Describing Villa Venus, Van says that all the hundred floramors (palatial brothels built by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, all over the world in memory of his grandson Eric, the author of an essay entitled "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream") 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). By the beginning of the new century the Venus revenues were pouring in (their final gush, it is true). A tattling tabloid reported, around 1890, that out of gratitude and curiosity ‘Velvet’ Veen traveled once — and only once — to the nearest floramor with his entire family — and it is also said that Guillaume de Monparnasse indignantly rejected an offer from Hollywood to base a screenplay on that dignified and hilarious excursion. Mere rumours, no doubt. (2.3).
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 at his and Viardot's villa Les frênes ("The Ash Trees") in Bougival:
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.
Eric Veen and Red Veen (Uncle Dan’s nickname) bring to mind Erik the Red (c. 950 – c. 1003), a Norse explorer, described in medieval and Icelandic saga sources as having founded the first settlement in Greenland.
According to Van, the fabulous ancestor of Ada’s husband discovered our country:
Ardis Hall — the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis — this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America — for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? The protagonist, a scion of one of our most illustrious and opulent families, is Dr Van Veen, son of Baron ‘Demon’ Veen, that memorable Manhattan and Reno figure. The end of an extraordinary epoch coincides with Van’s no less extraordinary boyhood. Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of the book. On the fabulous country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine, daughter of Marina, Daniel’s stage-struck wife. That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages.
In spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer’s magic carpet has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen, Marina’s younger daughter, has also been swept off her feet by Van, the irresistible rake. Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book.
The rest of Van’s story turns frankly and colorfully upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country. After her husband’s death our lovers are reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere.
Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more. (5.6)
Ada's birthday, July 21, is the day of Shade's death in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962). In Lucette’s Tobakoff cabin there is a steeplechase picture ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up.’ According to Van, their ship did not contemplate calling at Godhavn (a port in Greenland):
‘Hey, look!’ he cried, pointing to a poster. ‘They’re showing something called Don Juan’s Last Fling. It’s prerelease and for adults only. Topical Tobakoff!’
‘It’s going to be an unmethylated bore,’ said Lucy (Houssaie School, 1890) but he had already pushed aside the entrance drapery.
They came in at the beginning of an introductory picture, featuring a cruise to Greenland, with heavy seas in gaudy technicolor. It was a rather irrelevant trip since their Tobakoff did not contemplate calling at Godhavn; moreover, the cinema theater was swaying in counterrhythm to the cobalt-and-emerald swell on the screen. No wonder the place was emptovato, as Lucette observed, and she went on to say that the Robinsons had saved her life by giving her on the eve a tubeful of Quietus Pills. (3.5)
Describing Lucette’s suicide, Van mentions Oceanus Nox:
The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes — telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression — that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.
She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath.
A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the — not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters. (ibid.)
At the end of their long lives (even on the last day of their lives) Van and Ada translate a passage from Shade's poem into Russian:
She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed — a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern. They had spent most of the morning reworking their translation of a passage (lines 569-572) in John Shade’s famous poem:
...Sovetï mï dayom
Kak bït’ vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;
On ih vstrechaet — lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,
Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke...
(...We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives, both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another...)
Van pointed out that here was the rub — one is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy is handicapped — to a quite hopeless extent — by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends along — or your enemies for that matter — to the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvelous mortality. Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.
She did not laugh; she repeated to herself the verses that had given them such trouble. The Signy brain-shrinkers would gleefully claim that the reason the three ‘boths’ had been skipped in the Russian version was not at all, oh, not at all, because cramming three cumbersome amphibrachs into the pentameter would have necessitated adding at least one more verse for carrying the luggage.
‘Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right — I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!’ (5.6)
According to Kinbote (in Pale Fire, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), he suggested to Shade Solus Rex as a title of his poem:
We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana - but I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described to him, the characters I had made alive for him and all the unique atmosphere of my kingdom. I even suggested to him a good title -the title of the book in me whose pages he was to cut: Solus Rex, instead of which I saw Pale Fire, which meant to me nothing. I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where were the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvelous tale?
Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist's patience and a lover's urge was simply not there. Oh, but I cannot express the agony! Instead of the wild glorious romance - what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style - beautifully written of course - Shade could not write otherwise than beautifully - but void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it and make it transcend its time. (note to Line 1000)
The characters in VN’s unfinished novel Solus Rex (1940) include Dr Onze:
Процесс подходил к концу. Защита ссылалась на молодость обвиняемого, на горячую кровь, на соблазны холостой жизни — все это было грубоватой пародией на попустительство короля. Прокурор произнес звериной силы речь, переборщив и потребовав смертной казни. «Последнее слово» подсудимого внесло совсем неожиданную нотку. Истомленный долгим напряжением, измученный вынужденным барахтанием в чужих мерзостях и невольно потрясенный громами обвинителя, бедный доктор вдруг сдал, нервы его дрогнули и после нескольких непонятных, слипшихся фраз он каким-то новым, истерически ясным голосом вдруг стал рассказывать, что однажды в молодости, выпив первый в жизни стакан хазеля, согласился пойти с товарищем в публичный дом, и только потому не пошел, что упал на улице в обморок. Это свежее и непредвиденное признание вызвало в зале долго не смолкавший смех, а прокурор, потеряв голову, попытался зажать рот подсудимому. Затем присяжные, молча покурив в отведенной им комнате, вернулись, и приговор был объявлен. Доктору Онзе предлагалось тринадцать с половиной лет каторжных работ.
Приговор был многословно одобрен печатью. При тайных свиданиях друзья жали руки мученику, прощаясь с ним… Но тут, впервые в жизни, неожиданно для всех и, может быть, для самого себя, старый Гафон поступил довольно остроумно: пользуясь своим неоспоримым правом, он доктора Онзе помиловал.
The trial entered its final stage. The defense alluded to the accused’s “youth,” to his “hot blood,” to the “temptations” attending a bachelor’s life—all of which was a rather coarse parody of the king’s overindulgence. The prosecutor made a speech of savage force—and overshot the mark by demanding the death penalty. The defendant’s last word introduced an utterly unexpected note. Exhausted by lengthy tension, harrowed by having been forced to wallow in another’s filth, and involuntarily staggered by the prosecutor’s blast, the luckless scholar lost his nerve and, after a few incoherent mumblings, suddenly started, in a new, hysterically clear voice, to tell how one night in his youth, having drunk his first glass of hazel brandy, he accepted to go with a classmate to a brothel, and how he did not get there only because he fainted in the street. This unforeseen avowal convulsed the public with long laughter, while the prosecutor, losing his head, attempted to stop the defendant’s mouth by physical means. Then the jury retired for a silent smoke to the room allotted to them, and presently came back to announce the verdict. It was suggested that Dr. Onze be sentenced to eleven years’ hard labor.
The sentence was wordily approved by the press. At secret visits his friends shook hands with the martyr, as they took farewell of him.… But here, good old Gafon, for the first time in his life, unexpectedly for everybody including, maybe, his own self, acted rather wittily: he took advantage of an incontestable prerogative and granted Onze a full pardon.
Onze is French for “eleven” (in the English version of Solus Rex Dr. Onze is sentenced to eleven years’ hard labor). Dr. Onze’s first glass of hazel brandy brings to mind Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter in Pale Fire).
The Rattner Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kingston and the eleventh hour also bring to mind Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs," 1928).Ilf and Petrov are the authors of Kolumb prichalivaet k beregu (“Columbus’ Ship is Mooring,” 1936), a satire on Hollywood, and Odnoetazhnaya Amerika (“One-Storied America,” 1937), a book based on a published travelogue across the United States. In 1937 Petrov was separated from his joint twin author Ilf (who died of tuberculosis) and, five years later, in 1942, perished in an airplane crash. Ada's husband, Andrey Vinelander dies of tuberculosis.
On the other hand, Rattner reminds one of Plattner, the hero of H. G. Wells' The Plattner Story (1896). A schoolteacher in the south of England, Gottfried Plattner visits the Other World where he spends nine days (and sees, among other dead, his late mother).