In VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) the rise of Ekwilism took place in the days when a blatantly bourgeois paper happened to be publishing a cartoon sequence depicting the home life of Mr and Mrs Etermon (Everyman):
When young Paduk instituted the Party of the Average Man as based on Skotoma's book, the metamorphosis of Ekwilism had only just started and the frustrated boys who conducted those dismal meetings in a malodorous classroom were still groping for the means to make the contents of the human vessel conform to an average scale. That year a corrupt politician had been assassinated by a college student called Emrald (not Amrald, as his name is usually misspelled abroad), who at the trial came out quite irrelevantly with a poem of his own composition, a piece of jagged neurotic rhetorism extolling Skotoma because he
...taught us to worship the Common Man,
and showed us that no tree
can exist without a forest,
no musician without an orchestra,
no wave without an ocean,
and no life without death.
Poor Skotoma, of course, had done nothing of the kind, but this poem was now sung to the tune of 'Ustra mara, donjet domra' (a popular ditty lauding the intoxicating properties of gooseberry wine) by Paduk and his friends and later became an Ekwilist classic. In those days a blatantly bourgeois paper happened to be publishing a cartoon sequence depicting the home life of Mr and Mrs Etermon (Everyman). With conventional humour and sympathy bordering upon the obscene, Mr Etermon and the little woman were followed from parlour to kitchen and from garden to garret through all the mentionable stages of their daily existence, which, despite the presence of cosy armchairs and all sorts of electric thingumbobs and one thing-in-itself (a car), did not differ essentially from the life of a Neanderthal couple. Mr Etermon taking a z-nap on the divan or stealing into the kitchen to sniff with erotic avidity the sizzling stew, represented quite unconsciously a living refutation of individual immortality, since his whole habitus was a dead-end with nothing in it capable or worthy of transcending the mortal condition. Neither, however, could one imagine Etermon actually dying, not only because the rules of gentle humour forbade his being shown on his deathbed, but also because not a single detail of the setting (not even his playing poker with life-insurance salesmen) suggested the fact of absolutely inevitable death; so that in one sense Etermon, while personifying a refutation of immortality, was immortal himself, and in another sense he could not hope to enjoy any kind of afterlife simply because he was denied the elementary comfort of a death chamber in his otherwise well planned home. Within the limits of this airtight existence, the young couple were as happy as any young couple ought to be: a visit to the movies, a raise in one's salary, a rum-rum something for dinner — life was positively crammed with these and similar delights, whereas the worst that might befall one was hitting a traditional thumb with a traditional hammer or mistaking the date of the boss's birthday. Poster pictures of Etermon showed him smoking the brand that millions smoke, and millions could not be wrong, and every Etermon was supposed to imagine every other Etermon, up to the President of the State, who had just replaced dull, stolid Theodore the Last, returning at the close of the office day to the (rich) culinary and (meagre) connubial felicities of the Etermon home. Skotoma, quite apart from the senile divagations of his 'Ekwilism' (and even they implied some kind of drastic change, some kind of dissatisfaction with given conditions), had viewed what he called 'the petty bourgeois' with the wrath of orthodox anarchism and would have been appalled, just as Emrald the terrorist would have been, to know that a group of youths was worshiping Ekwilism in the guise of a cartoon-engendered Mr Etermon. Skotoma, however, had been the victim of a common delusion: his 'petty bourgeois' existed only as a printed label on an empty filing box (the iconoclast, like most of his kind, relied entirely upon generalizations and was quite incapable of noting, say, the wallpaper in a chance room or talking intelligently to a child). Actually, with a little perspicacity, one might learn many curious things about Etermons, things that made them so different from one another that Etermon, except as a cartoonist's transient character, could not be said to exist. All of a sudden transfigured, his eyes narrowly glowing, Mr Etermon (whom we have just seen mildly pottering about' the house) locks himself up in the bathroom with his prize — a prize we prefer not to name; another Etermon, straight from his shabby office, slips into the silence of a great library to gloat over certain old maps of which he will not speak at home; a third Etermon with a fourth Etermon's wife anxiously discusses the future of a child she has managed to bear him in secret during the time her husband (now back in his armchair at home) was fighting in a remote jungle land where, in his turn, he has seen moths the size of a spread fan, and trees at night pulsating rhythmically with countless fireflies. No, the average vessels are not as simple as they appear: it is a conjuror's set and nobody, not even the enchanter himself, really knows what and how much they hold.
Skotoma had dwelt in his day upon the economic aspect of Etermon; Paduk deliberately copied the Etermon cartoon in its sartorial sense. He wore the tall collar of celluloid, the famous shirt-sleeve bands and the expensive footgear — for the only brilliance Mr Etermon permitted himself was related to parts as far as possible removed from the anatomic centre of his being: glossy shoes, glossy hair. With his father's reluctant consent, the top of Paduk's pale-blue cranium was allowed to grow just enough hair to resemble Etermon's beautifully groomed pate and Etermon's washable cuffs with starlike links were affixed to Paduk's weak wrists. Although in later years this mimetic adaptation was no longer consciously pursued (while on the other hand the Etermon strip was eventually discontinued, and afterwards seemed quite atypical when looked up at a different period of fashion) Paduk never got over this stiff superficial neatness; he was known to endorse the views of a doctor, belonging to the Ekwilist party, who affirmed that if a man kept his clothes scrupulously clean, he might, and should, limit his weekday ablutions to washing nothing but his face, ears, and hands. Throughout all his later adventures, in all places, under all circumstances, in the blurry back rooms of suburban cafés, in the miserable offices where this or that obstinate newspaper of his was concocted, in barracks, in public halls, in the forests and hills where he hid with a bunch of barefooted red-eyed soldiers, and in the palace where, through an incredible whim of local history, he found himself vested with more power than any national ruler had ever enjoyed, Paduk still retained something of the late Mr Etermon, a sort of cartoon angularity, a cracked and soiled cellophane wrapper effect, through which, nevertheless, one could discern a brand-new thumbscrew, a bit of rope, a rusty knife and a specimen of the most sensitive of human organs wrenched out together with its blood-clotted roots.
In the classroom where the final examination was being held, young Paduk, his sleek hair resembling a wig too small for his shaven head, sat between Brun the Ape and a lacquered dummy representing an absentee. Adam Krug, wearing a brown dressing gown, sat directly behind. Somebody on his left asked him to pass a book to the family of his right-hand neighbour, and this he did. The book, he noticed, was in reality a rosewood box shaped and painted to look like a volume of verse and Krug understood that it contained some secret commentaries that would assist an unprepared student's panic-stricken mind. Krug regretted that he had not opened the box or book while it passed through his hands. The theme to be tackled was an afternoon with Mallarmé, an uncle of his mother, but the only part he could remember seemed to be 'le sanglot dont j'étais encore ivre'. (Chapter 5)
Stéphan Mallarmé (1842-98) was a poète maudit (accursed poet). In his sonnet Je te donne ces vers afin que si mon nom (I Give You These Verses So That If My Name) included in Les Fleurs du mal ("The Flowers of Evil," 1857) Charles Baudelaire addresses Être maudit (accursed being):
Je te donne ces vers afin que si mon nom
Aborde heureusement aux époques lointaines,
Et fait rêver un soir les cervelles humaines,
Vaisseau favorisé par un grand aquilon,
Ta mémoire, pareille aux fables incertaines,
Fatigue le lecteur ainsi qu'un tympanon,
Et par un fraternel et mystique chaînon
Reste comme pendue à mes rimes hautaines;
Être maudit à qui, de l'abîme profond
Jusqu'au plus haut du ciel, rien, hors moi, ne répond!
— Ô toi qui, comme une ombre à la trace éphémère,
Foules d'un pied léger et d'un regard serein
Les stupides mortels qui t'ont jugée amère,
Statue aux yeux de jais, grand ange au front d'airain!
I give you these verses so that if my name,
A vessel favored by a strong north wind,
Fortunately reaches the distant future's shore,
And some night sets the minds of men to dreaming,
Your memory, like fables shrouded in the past,
Will weary the reader like a dulcimer,
And by a mystical, brotherly bond
Remain suspended from my haughty verse;
Accurst being to whom, from the deep abysm
To the highest heaven, nothing responds, save me!
— O you who, like an ephemeral ghost,
Trample lightly and with a serene look
Upon the dull mortals who found you repugnant,
Jet eyed statue, tall angel with a brow of bronze!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
Être + mon/nom = Etermon. In his Hymne Baudelaire uses the phrase Au fond de mon éternité (In the depths of my eternity):
À la très chère, à la très belle
Qui remplit mon coeur de clarté,
À l'ange, À l'idole immortelle,
Salut en l'immortalité!
Elle se répand dans ma vie
Comme un air imprégné de sel,
Et dans mon âme inassouvie
Verse le goût de l'éternel.
Sachet toujours frais qui parfume
L'atmosphère d'un cher réduit,
Encensoir oublié qui fume
En secret à travers la nuit,
Comment, amour incorruptible,
T'exprimer avec vérité?
Grain de musc qui gis, invisible,
Au fond de mon éternité!
À la très bonne, à la très belle
Qui fait ma joie et ma santé,
À l'ange, à l'idole immortelle,
Salut en l'immortalité!
To the dearest, fairest woman
Who sets my heart ablaze with light,
To the angel, the immortal idol,
Greetings in immortality!
She permeates my life
Like air impregnated with salt
And into my unsated soul
Pours the taste for the eternal.
Sachet, ever fresh, that perfumes
The atmosphere of a dear nook,
Forgotten censer smoldering
Secretly through the night,
Everlasting love, how can I
Describe you truthfully?
Grain of musk that lies unseen
In the depths of my eternity!
To the dearest, fairest woman
Who is my health and my delight
To the angel, the immortal idol,
Greetings in immortality!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
"Shorn Baudelaire" (mentioned by Humbert Humbert in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) brings to mind Paduk's shaven head:
Krug's father was a biologist of considerable repute. Paduk's father was a minor inventor, a vegetarian, a theosophist, a great expert in cheap Hindu lore; at one time he seems to have been in the printing business — printing mainly the works of cranks and frustrated politicians. Paduk's mother, a flaccid lymphatic woman from the Marshland, had died in childbirth, and soon after this the widower had married a young cripple for whom he had been devising a new type of braces (she survived him, braces and all, and is still limping about somewhere). The boy Paduk had a pasty face and a grey-blue cranium with bumps: his father shaved his head for him personally once a week — some kind of mystic ritual, no doubt.
It is not known how the nickname 'toad' originated, for there was nothing in his face suggestive of that animal. It was an odd face with all its features ill their proper position but somehow diffuse and abnormal as if the little fellow had undergone one of those facial operations when the skin is borrowed from some other part of the body. The impression was due perhaps to the motionless cast of his features: he never laughed and when he happened to sneeze he had a way of doing it with a minimum of contraction and no sound at all. His small dead-white nose and neat blue galatea made him resemble en laid the wax schoolboys in the shop windows of tailors, but his hips were much plumper than those of mannikins, and he walked with a slight waddle and wore sandals which used to provoke a good deal of caustic comment. Once, when he was being badly mauled it was discovered that he had right against the skin a green undershirt, green as a billiard cloth and apparently made of the same texture. His hands were permanently clammy. He spoke in a curiously smooth nasal voice with a strong north-western accent and had an irritating trick of calling his classmates by anagrams of their names — Adam Krug for instance was Gumakrad or Dramaguk; this he did not from any sense of humour, which he totally lacked, but because, as he carefully explained to new boys, one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed. (Chapter 5)
Paduk's nickname makes one think of crapauds imprévus (unexpected toads) in the last line of Baudelaire's sonnet Le Coucher du Soleil Romantique ("The Sunset of Romanticism"):
Que le soleil est beau quand tout frais il se lève,
Comme une explosion nous lançant son bonjour!
— Bienheureux celui-là qui peut avec amour
Saluer son coucher plus glorieux qu'un rêve!
Je me souviens!... J'ai vu tout, fleur, source, sillon,
Se pâmer sous son oeil comme un coeur qui palpite...
— Courons vers l'horizon, il est tard, courons vite,
Pour attraper au moins un oblique rayon!
Mais je poursuis en vain le Dieu qui se retire;
L'irrésistible Nuit établit son empire,
Noire, humide, funeste et pleine de frissons;
Une odeur de tombeau dans les ténèbres nage,
Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du marécage,
Des crapauds imprévus et de froids limaçons.
How beautiful the Sun is when newly risen
He hurls his morning greetings like an explosion!
— Fortunate the one who can lovingly salute
His setting, more glorious than a dream!
I remember!... I have seen all, flower, stream, furrow,
Swoon under his gaze like a palpitating heart...
— Let us run to the horizon, it's late,
Let us run fast, to catch at least a slanting ray!
But I pursue in vain the sinking god;
Irresistible Night, black, damp, deadly,
Full of shudders, establishes his reign;
The odor of the tomb swims in the shadows
And at the marsh's edge my timid foot
Treads upon slimy snails and unexpected toads.
(tr. W. Aggeler)