Describing his first arrival at Ardis, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions the farmannikin (a special kind of box kite, untraceable nowadays even in the greatest museums housing the toys of the past):
None of the family was at home when Van arrived. A servant in waiting took his horse. He entered the Gothic archway of the hall where Bouteillan, the old bald butler who unprofessionally now wore a mustache (dyed a rich gravy brown), met him with gested delight — he had once been the valet of Van’s father — ‘Je parie,’ he said, ‘que Monsieur ne me reconnaît pas,’ and proceeded to remind Van of what Van had already recollected unaided, the farmannikin (a special kind of box kite, untraceable nowadays even in the greatest museums housing the toys of the past) which Bouteillan had helped him to fly one day in a meadow dotted with buttercups. Both looked up: the tiny red rectangle hung for an instant askew in a blue spring sky. The hall was famous for its painted ceilings. It was too early for tea: Would Van like him or a maid to unpack? Oh, one of the maids, said Van, wondering briefly what item in a schoolboy’s luggage might be supposed to shock a housemaid. The picture of naked Ivory Revery (a model)? Who cared, now that he was a man? (1.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Je parie, etc.: I bet you do not recognize me, Sir.
“Farmannikin” blends Farman (Henri Farman, an Anglo-French aviator, 1874-1958) with mannikin. The Farman III, also known as the Henri Farman 1909 biplane, was an early French aircraft designed and built by Henri Farman in 1909. Its design was widely imitated, so much so that aircraft of similar layout were generally referred to as being of the "Farman" type.
In his essay Chelovek i veshchi ("Man and Things," 1928) VN says that, as a boy, he imagined a huge museum, where they gradually gathered the toys of children who were growing up:
Наконец, есть и дети среди вещей. Это, конечно, игрушки. Они подражают взрослым вещам - и чем это подражанье полнее, тем дороже они человечьему ребенку. Меня занимал в детстве вопрос: куда денутся мои игрушки, когда я подрасту? Я воображал огромный музей, куда собирают постепенно игрушки подрастающих детей. И часто теперь, входя в какой-нибудь музей древностей, где есть римские монеты, оружие, одежды, кольчуги, мне кажется, что я попал как раз в тот музей моей мечты.
Finally, there are children among things. These are, of course, toys. They imitate grown-up things, and the more accurate the imitation, the dearer they are to a human child. In childhood, I was troubled by the question: Where will my toys go when I grow up? I imagined a huge museum, where they gradually gathered the toys of children who were growing up. And often now, when I go into a museum of antiquities where there are Roman coins, weapons, clothes, chain mail, it seems to me that I have entered that very museum of my dreams.
In his essay VN says that a clock whose hands are at ten to two brings to mind a face with Wilhelm’s whiskers* and a clock whose hands are at twenty after seven resembles a face with a Chinaman's droopy mustache:
Человек - подобие Божие, вещь - подобие человеческое. Человек, который делает вещь своим Богом, уподобляется ей. Тогда получается полный круг: вещь, Бог, человек, вещь, - а для ума прелестен полный круг. Автомат в некотором роде наиболее похож на человека. Его толкнешь - он отвечает. Ему лапку подмаслишь, он доставляет тебе приятность. Даешь ему плату, он выдает тебе товар. Но и во всякой другой вещи - я чувствую известное сходство с человеком. Подштанники на сушке при бодром ветре пускаются в идиотический, но вполне человеческий пляс. Чернильница на меня глядит одним черным глазом с блеском в зрачке. Часы, стоящие на без десяти два, напоминают лицо с усами Вильгельма, часы, стоящие на двадцать минут восьмого, напоминают лицо с усами, опущенными вниз по-китайски. Между круглым стеклянным колпаком лампы и лысой головой мыслителя, налитой светящейся мыслью, есть успокоительное сходство. Словами, которые мы употребляем для именованья различных частей нашего тела, окрестили мы части вещей, орудий, машин, уменьшая эти существительные, как будто говорим о наших детях. "Зубчики, глазок, ушко, волосок, носик, ножка, спинка, ручка, головка". Я точно окружен маленькими уродцами, и уже кажется мне, что зубчики часов грызут время, что ушко иголки, воткнутой в занавеску, подслушивает, что носик чайника, с капелькой застывшей на кончике, сейчас хморкнет, как простуженный человек. А в предметах побольше, в домах, поездах, автомобилях, фабриках, человеческое нечто становится иногда поразительно неприятным. В шварцвальдских деревнях есть насмешливые дома: оконце в крыше удлинено наподобие хитрого глаза. Чрезвычайно глазастые бывают и автомобили - благо мы даем им не три, не один, а именно два фонаря. Немудрено, что в наших сказках и на наших спиритических сеансах вещи и впрямь оживают.
Man is God’s likeness; a thing is man’s likeness. A man who makes a thing his God comes to resemble the thing. Thus, one comes full circle: thing, God, man, thing—and a full circle is pleasing to the mind. An automat is in many ways most similar to man. You push it, it responds. You grease its palm, and it brings you pleasure. You give it money, it gives you goods. But in all other kinds of things I feel a certain resemblance to man. Underpants drying in a brisk wind launch into an idiotic, but quite human, dance. An inkwell stares at me with one black eye, with a glint in its pupil. A clock whose hands are at ten to two brings to mind a face with Wilhelm’s whiskers and a clock whose hands are at twenty after seven resembles a face with a Chinaman's droopy mustache. Between the rounded bell-glass of a lamp and the bald head of a philosopher filled with luminous thought, there is a soothing resemblance. We have christened the parts of things, weapons, machines, with words we use for different parts of our bodies, making these diminutives as if we were talking of our children. “Toothlet, eyelet, earlet, hairlet, noselet, footlet, back, handle, head.” It is as though I am surrounded by little monsters, and it seems to me that the little teeth of the clock are gnawing away at time, that the “ear” of the needle stuck into the curtain is eavesdropping on me, that the teapot spout,6 with a little droplet poised on its tip, is about to sneeze like a man with a cold. But with larger objects, in houses, trains, automobiles, factories, the human element sometimes becomes startlingly unpleasant. In villages in the Schwarzwald, there are sneering houses: the little window in the roof is elongated like a sly eye. Automobiles, too, can be extremely eyelike, the more so because we give them not three, not one, but two headlights. Little wonder that in our fairy tales and in our spiritualist séances things literally come to life.
In her last note poor mad Aqua (Demon's wife, the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina) mentions the hands of a clock and compares a dial to a white face with a trick mustache:
Her last note, found on her and addressed to her husband and son, might have come from the sanest person on this or that earth.
Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.
[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’
iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): aujourd’hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).
Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.
Van’s and Ada’s father, Demon Veen is the son of Dedalus Veen (1799-1883). While Bouteillan (the French butler at Ardis, Demon's former valet) helped Van to fly the farmannikin, grandfather Dedalus Veen helped him to learn to man the Magicarpets:
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)
In his poem Komu-to ("To Someone," 1908) Bryusov mentions Dedal (Daedalus, an Athenian architect who built the labyrinth for Minos and made wings for himself and his son Icarus to escape from Crete):
Наш век вновь в Дедала поверил
Our age began to believe in Daedalus again.
Bryusov's poem begins as follows:
Фарман, иль Райт, иль кто б ты ни был!
Farman, or Wright, or whoever you are!
In her memoir essay on Valeriy Bryusov, Geroy truda (“The Hero of Toil,” 1925), Marina Tsvetaev says that Bryusov was trizhdy rimlyanin (a triple Roman):
Три слова являют нам Брюсова: воля, вол, волк. Триединство не только звуковое - смысловое: и воля - Рим, и вол - Рим, и волк - Рим. Трижды римлянином был Валерий Брюсов: волей и волом - в поэзии, волком (homo homini lupus est) в жизни.
The characters in Ada include Valerio, a ginger-haired elderly Roman, always ill-shaven and gloomy, but a dear old boy. A waiter at ‘Monaco’ (a good restaurant in the entresol of the tall building crowned by Van's penthouse apartmen), Valerio is Demon's fellow traveler in the lift:
They took a great many precautions — all absolutely useless, for nothing can change the end (written and filed away) of the present chapter. Only Lucette and the agency that forwarded letters to him and to Ada knew Van’s address. Through an amiable lady in waiting at Demon’s bank, Van made sure that his father would not turn up in Manhattan before March 30. They never came out or went in together, arranging a meeting place at the Library or in an emporium whence to start the day’s excursions — and it so happened that the only time they broke that rule (she having got stuck in the lift for a few panicky moments and he having blithely trotted downstairs from their common summit), they issued right into the visual field of old Mrs Arfour who happened to be passing by their front door with her tiny tan-and-gray long-silked Yorkshire terrier. The simultaneous association was immediate and complete: she had known both families for years and was now interested to learn from chattering (rather than chatting) Ada that Van had happened to be in town just when she, Ada, had happened to return from the West; that Marina was fine; that Demon was in Mexico or Oxmice; and that Lenore Colline had a similar adorable pet with a similar adorable parting along the middle of the back. That same day (February 3, 1893) Van rebribed the already gorged janitor to have him answer all questions which any visitor, and especially a dentist’s widow with a caterpillar dog, might ask about any Veens, with a brief assertion of utter ignorance. The only personage they had not reckoned with was the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel.
Van’s father had just left one Santiago to view the results of an earthquake in another, when Ladore Hospital cabled that Dan was dying. He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling. He had not many interests in life.
At the airport of the moonlit white town we call Tent, and Tobakov’s sailors, who built it, called Palatka, in northern Florida, where owing to engine trouble he had to change planes, Demon made a long-distance call and received a full account of Dan’s death from the inordinately circumstantial Dr Nikulin (grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov — we can’t get rid of the lettuce). Daniel Veen’s life had been a mixture of the ready-made and the grotesque; but his death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch.
Next day, February 5, around nine p.m., Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan’s lawyer, Demon noted — just as he was about to cross Alexis A venue, an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very exotic and potent pill to face the day’s ordeal on top of a sleepless journey), contented himself — quite properly — with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out of the way of Mrs R4. But precisely in regard to such a contingency, Fate had prepared an alternate continuation. As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered) by the Monaco, where he had often lunched, it occurred to him that his son (whom he had been unable to ‘contact’) might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building. He had never been up there — or had he? For a business consultation with Van? On a sun-hazed terrace? And a clouded drink? (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.)
With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute multicolored optical sparks), Demon hastened to enter the lobby and catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two on a wiggle-wheel table and the Manhattan Times among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas. Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon, placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes. Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter.
‘Then we are fellow travelers,’ said Demon inhaling not without gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain.
On that memorable morning, Van, after ordering breakfast, had climbed out of his bath and donned a strawberry-red terrycloth robe when he thought he heard Valerio’s voice from the adjacent parlor. Thither he padded, humming tunelessly, looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance).
Demon, clothed entirely in black, black-spatted, black-scarved, his monocle on a broader black ribbon than usual, was sitting at the breakfast table, a cup of coffee in one hand, and a conveniently folded financial section of the Times in the other.
He gave a slight start and put down his cup rather jerkily on noting the coincidence of color with a persistent detail in an illumined lower left-hand corner of a certain picture reproduced in the copiously illustrated catalogue of his immediate mind.
All Van could think of saying was ‘I am not alone’ (je ne suis pas seul), but Demon was brimming too richly with the bad news he had brought to heed the hint of the fool who should have simply walked on into the next room and come back one moment later (locking the door behind him — locking out years and years of lost life), instead of which he remained standing near his father’s chair.
According to Bess (which is ‘fiend’ in Russian), Dan’s buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of ‘play-zero’ (as the old whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada’s sudden departure, that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. To Dr Nikulin Dan described his rider as black, pale-bellied, with a black dorsal buckler shining like a dung beetle’s back and with a knife in his raised forelimb. On a very cold morning in late January Dan had somehow escaped, through a basement maze and a toolroom, into the brown shrubbery of Ardis; he was naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump like a kind of caparison, and, despite the rough going, had crawled on all fours, like a crippled steed under an invisible rider, deep into the wooded landscape. On the other hand, had he attempted to warn her she might have made her big Ada yawn and uttered something irrevocably cozy at the moment he opened the thick protective door.
‘I beg you, sir,’ said Van, ‘go down, and I’ll join you in the bar as soon as I’m dressed. I’m in a delicate situation.’
‘Come, come,’ retorted Demon, dropping and replacing his monocle. ‘Cordula won’t mind.’
‘It’s another, much more impressionable girl’ — (yet another awful fumble!). ‘Damn Cordula! Cordula is now Mrs Tobak.’
‘Oh, of course!’ cried Demon. ‘How stupid of me! I remember Ada’s fiancé telling me — he and young Tobak worked for a while in the same Phoenix bank. Of course. Splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap. Backbay Tobakovich!’
‘I don’t care,’ said clenched Van, ‘if he looks like a crippled, crucified, albino toad. Please, Dad, I really must —’
‘Funny your saying that. I’ve dropped in only to tell you poor cousin Dan has died an odd Boschean death. He thought a fantastic rodent sort of rode him out of the house. They found him too late, he expired in Nikulin’s clinic, raving about that detail of the picture. I’m having the deuce of a time rounding up the family. The picture is now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art.’
‘Father, I’m sorry — but I’m trying to tell you —’
‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower — mark the "as if," for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice — but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast! A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’
Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette —
‘— no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is — I mean, Vinelander is — the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols — or whoever they were — who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders — before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.’
‘I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,’ said Van, ‘what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.’
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’
Volatina, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether. Please, please, please go.
‘My gloves! Cloak! Thank you. Can I use your W.C.? No? All right. I’ll find one elsewhere. Come over as soon as you can, and we’ll meet Marina at the airport around four and then whizz to the wake, and —’
And here Ada entered. Not naked — oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio — comfortably combing her hair, sweet and sleepy. She made the mistake of crying out ‘Bozhe moy!’ and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second.
‘Or better — come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.’ He spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now — when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter. (2.10)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): R4: ‘rook four’, a chess indication of position (pun on the woman’s name).
c’est le mot: that’s the right word.
pleureuses: widow’s weeds.
Bozhe moy: Russ., good Heavens.
In March, 1905, Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7). Van does not realize 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.
Btw., Daniel Veen proposed to Marina in the Up elevator of Manhattan’s first ten-floor building and was indignantly rejected at the seventh stop (Toys):
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. (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Mr Eliot: we shall meet him again, on pages 361 and 396, in company of the author of ‘The Waistline’ and ‘Agonic Lines’.
Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s globetrotter, travelled from West to East.
Describing his last meeting with Demon, Van mentions old Eliot, the real-estate man:
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.
The table talk dealt mainly with business matters. Demon had recently bought a small, perfectly round Pacific island, with a pink house on a green bluff and a sand beach like a frill (as seen from the air), and now wished to sell the precious little palazzo in East Manhattan that Van did not want. Mr Sween, a greedy practitioner with flashy rings on fat fingers, said he might buy it if some of the pictures were thrown in. The deal did not come off. (3.7)
According to Ada, at the funeral of Marina (whose body was burnt, according to her instructions) Demon told her that he would not cheat the poor grubs. VN's essay "Man and Things" ends as follows:
Мы боимся, мы ни за что не хотим отпускать наши вещи обратно в природу, откуда вышли они. Мне почти физически больно расстаться со старыми штанами. Я храню письма, которые не перечту никогда. Вещь - подобие человеческое, и, чувствуя это подобие, нам нестерпимы ее смерть, ее уничтоженье. Древние цари ложились в гроб с доспехами, с утварью, взяли бы с собой и свой дворец, если бы это было возможно. Флобер желал быть похороненным вместе со своей чернильницей. Но чернильнице было бы скучно без пера, перу без бумаги, бумаге без стола, столу без комнаты, комнате без дома, дому без города. И как ни старайся человек, истлевает он сам, истлевают и его вещи. И лучше, чем мумии лежать в расписном саркофаге, на музейном сквозняке, - приятнее и как-то честнее, - истлеть в земле, куда возвращаются в свой черед и игрушки, и линотипы, и зубочистки, и автомобили.
We fear letting—not for anything do we want to let—our things return to the nature they came from. It is almost physically painful for me to part with old trousers. I keep letters I will never reread. A thing is a human likeness, and sensing this likeness, its death, its destruction, is unbearable for us. Ancient kings were laid in their coffins with their armor, their implements; they would have taken their palaces with them if they could. Flaubert wished to be buried with his inkwell. But the inkwell would be bored without a quill, the quill without paper, the paper without a desk, the desk without a room, the room without a house, the house without a town. And, no matter how hard man tries, he, too, decays, and his things decay, too. And better than lying like a mummy in a painted sarcophagus in a museum draft, it is far more pleasant, and somehow more honest, to decay in the ground to which, in their turn, toys, and linotypes, and toothpicks, and automobiles will return.
Mumiya v raspisnom sarkofage (a mummy in a painted sarcophagus) brings to mind "poor dummy-mummy" (as at the end of Ada Van calls Marina):
Nirvana, Nevada, Vaniada. By the way, should I not add, my Ada, that only at the very last interview with poor dummy-mummy, soon after my premature — I mean, premonitory — nightmare about, ‘You can, Sir,’ she employed mon petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha — never had before, and it sounded so odd, so tend... (voice trailing off, radiators tinkling).
‘Dummy-mum’ — (laughing). ‘Angels, too, have brooms — to sweep one’s soul clear of horrible images. My black nurse was Swiss-laced with white whimsies.’
Sudden ice hurtling down the rain pipe: brokenhearted stalactite.
Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. There is one exchange that it would be nice to enact against the green moving backdrop of one of our Ardis sets. The talk about ‘double guarantee’ in eternity. Start just before that.
‘I know there’s a Van in Nirvana. I’ll be with him in the depths moego ada, of my Hades,’ said Ada.
‘True, true’ (bird-effects here, and acquiescing branches, and what you used to call ‘golden gouts’).
‘As lovers and siblings,’ she cried, ‘we have a double chance of being together in eternity, in terrarity. Four pairs of eyes in paradise!’
‘Neat, neat,’ said Van.
Something of the sort. One great difficulty. The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes. Hard but not insurmountable (I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands). By the way, who dies first?
Ada. Van. Ada. Vaniada. Nobody. Each hoped to go first, so as to concede, by implication, a longer life to the other, and each wished to go last, in order to spare the other the anguish or worries, of widowhood. One solution would be for you to marry Violet.
‘Thank you. J’ai tâté de deux tribades dans ma vie, ça suffit. Dear Emile says "terme qu’on évite d’employer." How right he is!’
‘If not Violet, then a local Gauguin girl. Or Yolande Kickshaw.’
Why? Good question. Anyway. Violet must not be given this part to type. I’m afraid we’re going to wound a lot of people (openwork American lilt)! Oh come, art cannot hurt. It can, and how! (5.6)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): j’ai tâté etc.: I have known two Lesbians in my life, that’s enough.
terme etc.: term one avoids using.
*Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941), German emperor