Describing his transatlantic journey with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister who commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the ocean), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Captain Cowley (a bore and an ignoramus):
In his bedroom he found a somewhat belated invitation to the Captain’s table for dinner. It was addressed to Dr and Mrs Ivan Veen. He had been on the ship once before, in between the Queens, and remembered Captain Cowley as a bore and an ignoramus.
He called the steward and bade him carry the note back, with the penciled scrawl: ‘no such couple.’ He lay in his bath for twenty minutes. He attempted to focus on something else besides a hysterical virgin’s body. He discovered an insidious omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible — to an automatic reader — since the truncated end of one sentence, and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted to form a syntactically correct passage, the insipidity of which he might never have noticed in the present folly of his flesh, had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his typescript) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly). (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Insiste etc.: quotation from St Augustine.
William Ambrosia Cowley, also known as Ambrose Cowley and Captain Cowley, was a 17th-century English buccaneer who surveyed the Galápagos Islands during his 1683–86 circumnavigation of the world while serving under several captains such as Jonn Eaton, John Cook, and later Edward Davies. Cowley drafted the first chart of the islands in 1684, first published with the account of his voyage in 1699. In his diary he reported the discovery of the phantom Pepys Island, allegedly situated north of the Falkland Islands, prompting a number of mariners to look in vain for the nonexistent rock. Cowley named the rock after Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), an English writer and Tory politician who served as an official in the Navy Board and Member of Parliament, but is most remembered today for the diary he kept for almost a decade. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the Great Fire of London. During the Great Plague of London (1665-66) Pepys chewed tobacco as a protection against infection. Pushkin's little tragedies (all of them written in Boldino in the fall of 1830) include Pir vo vremya chumy (“A Feast in Time of Plague,” 1830). In his hymn in honor of plague Walsingham (the chairman of the feast) mentions Araviyskiy uragan (the Arabian hurricane):
Есть упоение в бою,
И бездны мрачной на краю,
И в разъяренном океане,
Средь грозных волн и бурной тьмы,
И в аравийском урагане,
И в дуновении Чумы.
There is a rapture in the battle,
And on the edge of a dark abyss,
And in the furious ocean,
Amid terrible waves and stormy darkness,
And in the Arabian hurricane,
And in the breath of Plague.
When they meet on the Tobakoff, Lucette tells Van that Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one:
At five p.m., June 3, his ship had sailed from Le Havre-de-Grâce; on the evening of the same day Van embarked at Old Hantsport. He had spent most of the afternoon playing court tennis with Delaurier, the famous Negro coach, and felt very dull and drowsy as he watched the low sun’s ardency break into green-golden eye-spots a few sea-serpent yards to starboard, on the far-side slope of the bow wave. Presently he decided to turn in, walked down to the A deck, devoured some of the still-life fruit prepared for him in his sitting room, attempted to read in bed the proofs of an essay he was contributing to a festschrift on the occasion of Professor Counterstone’s eightieth birthday, gave it up, and fell asleep. A tempest went into convulsions around midnight, but despite the lunging and creaking (Tobakoff was an embittered old vessel) Van managed to sleep soundly, the only reaction on the part of his dormant mind being the dream image of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman’s extremely compliant and accomplished niece. He wanted to make a note of it — and was amused to find that all three pencils had not only left his bed table but had neatly aligned themselves head to tail along the bottom of the outer door of the adjacent room, having covered quite a stretch of blue carpeting in the course of their stopped escape.
The steward brought him a Continental breakfast, the ship’s newspaper, and the list of first-class passengers. Under ‘Tourism in Italy,’ the little newspaper informed him that a Domodossola farmer had unearthed the bones and trappings of one of Hannibal’s elephants, and that two American psychiatrists (names not given) had died an odd death in the Bocaletto range: the older fellow from heart failure and his boy friend by suicide. After pondering the Admiral’s morbid interest in Italian mountains, Van clipped the item and picked up the passenger list (pleasingly surmounted by the same crest that adorned Cordula’s notepaper) in order to see if there was anybody to be avoided during the next days. The list yielded the Robinson couple, Robert and Rachel, old bores of the family (Bob had retired after directing for many years one of Uncle Dan’s offices). His gaze, traveling on, tripped over Dr Ivan Veen and pulled up at the next name. What constricted his heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips? Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought they could explain everything.
The level of the water slanted and swayed in his bath imitating the slow seesaw of the bright-blue, white-flecked sea in the porthole of his bedroom. He rang up Miss Lucinda Veen, whose suite was on the Main Deck amidships exactly above his, but she was absent. Wearing a white polo-neck sweater and tinted glasses, he went to look for her. She was not on the Games Deck from where he looked down at some other red-head, in a canvas chair on the Sun Deck: the girl sat writing a letter at passionate speed and he thought that if ever he switched from ponderous factitude to light fiction he would have a jealous husband use binoculars to decipher from where he stood that outpour of illicit affection.
She was not on the Promenade Deck where blanket-swathed old people were reading the number-one best seller Salzman and awaiting with borborygmic forebubbles the eleven o’clock bouillon. He betook himself to the Grill, where he reserved a table for two. He walked over to the bar and warmly greeted bald fat Toby who had served on the Queen Guinevere in 1889, and 1890, and 1891, when she was still unmarried and he a resentful fool. They could have eloped to Lopadusa as Mr and Mrs Dairs or Sardi!
He espied their half-sister on the forecastle deck, looking perilously pretty in a low-cut, brightly flowered, wind-worried frock, talking to the bronzed but greatly aged Robinsons. She turned toward him, brushing back the flying hair from her face with a mixture of triumph and embarrassment in her expression, and presently they took leave of Rachel and Robert who beamed after them, waving similarly raised hands to her, to him, to life, to death, to the happy old days when Demon paid all the gambling debts of their son, just before he was killed in a head-on car collision.
She dispatched the pozharskiya kotletï with gratitude: he was not scolding her for popping up as some sort of transcendental (rather than transatlantic) stowaway; and in her eagerness to see him she had botched her breakfast after having gone dinnerless on the eve. She who enjoyed the hollows and hills of the sea, when taking part in nautical sports, or the ups and oops, when flying, had been ignominiously sick aboard this, her first liner; but the Robinsons had given her a marvelous medicine, she had slept ten hours, in Van’s arms all the time, and now hoped that both he and she were tolerably awake except for the fuzzy edge left by the drug.
Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.
To Ardis, with him — came the prompt reply — for ever and ever. Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century before him, she would build for him, in the park, several pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up’ above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed, in the suite ‘wangled in one minute flat’ from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life during sea voyages. Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain! (3.5)
The bones and trappings of one of Hannibal’s elephants bring to mind Abram Petrovich Hannibal (1896-1781), Pushkin's great-grandfather (the Blackamor and godson of the tsar Peter the First, 1672-1725, the founder of VN's home city). In the Post Scriptum to his poem Moya Rodoslovnaya ("My Pedigree," 1830) Pushkin mentions his black grandsire Hannibal who, according to Bulgarin (a hostile critic), was bought for a bottle of rum and whose son, Osip Abramovich Gannibal (a naval officer, the poet's maternal grandfather, 1744-1806), participated in the battle of Chesma (5-7 July 1770), a naval clash in which a Russian fleet defeated and destroyed the Ottoman fleet at the harbour of Çeşme on the Aegean Sea:
Решил Фиглярин, сидя дома,
Что чёрный дед мой Ганнибал
Был куплен за бутылку рома
И в руки шкиперу попал.
Сей шкипер был тот шкипер славный,
Кем наша двигнулась земля,
Кто придал мощно бег державный
Рулю родного корабля.
Сей шкипер деду был доступен,
И сходно купленный арап
Возрос усерден, неподкупен,
Царю наперсник, а не раб.
И был отец он Ганнибала,
Пред кем средь чесменских пучин
Громада кораблей вспылала,
И пал впервые Наварин.
Решил Фиглярин вдохновенный:
Я во дворянстве мещанин.
Что ж он в семье своей почтенной?
Он?.. он в Мещанской дворянин.
In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) July 5 is Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' birthday (while the poet Shade was born in 1898, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus were born in 1915). According to Lucette, above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed in their suite there is a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up.’ Thomas Cox (c. 1665-90), known as "The Handsome Highwayman", was an English highwayman, sentenced to death and hanged at Tyburn on Sept. 12, 1690. He had a reputation for a spirited nature and it is reported that when asked if he wished to say a prayer before being hanged, he kicked the ordinary and the hangman out of the cart taking him there. He was listed in James Caulfield's Blackguardiana: or, a dictionary of rogues, bawds, pimps, whores, pickpockets, shoplifters, &c. (1793) and features in a song sung by a character in W. Harrison Ainsworth's novel Rookwood (1834):
Nor did housebreaker ever deal harder knocks
On the stubborn lid of a good strong box,
Than that prince of good fellows, TOM COX, TOM COX!
Which nobody can deny.
Tom Cox held up Thomas Killigrew (whose portrait was painted by Anthony van Dyck), jester to King Charles II, who asked Cox if he was in earnest. Cox is supposed to have replied, "I am in earnest, for though you live by jesting, I can't; therefore deliver your money, before a brace of balls make the sun shine through your body."
The old Robinson couple seems to refer to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), a novel by the Swiss author Johann David Wyss. On the other hand, Robert and Rachel Robinsons (whose son was killed in a head-on car collision) bring to mind Robin Hood (a legendary heroic outlaw) and Robin Sherwood, the Ladore postmaster:
On Sunday mornings the mail came late, because of the voluminous Sunday supplements of the papers from Balticomore, and Kaluga, and Luga, which Robin Sherwood, the old postman, in his bright green uniform, distributed on horseback throughout the somnolent countryside. As Van, humming his school song — the only tune he could ever carry — skipped down the terrace steps, he saw Robin on his old bay holding the livelier black stallion of his Sunday helper, a handsome English lad whom, it was rumored behind the rose hedges, the old man loved more vigorously than his office required. (1.20)
In VN's novel Lolita (1955) among Lolita's classmates in the Ramsdale school there is Sherva, Oleg. Pesn' o veshchem Olege ("The Song of Wise Oleg," 1822) is a poem by Pushkin. In Pushkin's poem a poisonous snake slips out of the skull of the Prince's beloved dead horse and fatally bites Oleg. Describing Lucette's visit to Kingston (Van's American University), Van mentions baby serpents:
She returned the balled handkerchief of many an old romance to her bag, which, however, remained unclosed. Chows, too, have blue tongues.
‘Mamma dwells in her private Samsara. Dad has had another stroke. Sis is revisiting Ardis.’
‘Sis! Cesse, Lucette! We don’t want any baby serpents around.’
‘This baby serpent does not quite know what tone to take with Dr V.V. Sector. You have not changed one bit, my pale darling, except that you look like a ghost in need of a shave without your summer Glanz.’
And summer Mädel. He noticed that the letter, in its long blue envelope, lay now on the mahogany sideboard. He stood in the middle of the parlor, rubbing his forehead, not daring, not daring, because it was Ada’s notepaper. (2.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): cesse: cease.
Glanz: Germ., luster.
Mädel: Germ., girl.
The element that destroys Lucette is water. In Chapter One (L: 8-9) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin says that it is time to leave skuchnyi breg mne nepriyaznennoy stikhii (the dull shore of an element inimical to me):
Придет ли час моей свободы?
Пора, пора! — взываю к ней;
Брожу над морем,10 жду погоды,
Маню ветрила кораблей.
Под ризой бурь, с волнами споря,
По вольному распутью моря
Когда ж начну я вольный бег?
Пора покинуть скучный брег
Мне неприязненной стихии
И средь полуденных зыбей,
Под небом Африки моей,11
Вздыхать о сумрачной России,
Где я страдал, где я любил,
Где сердце я похоронил.
Will the hour of my freedom come?
'Tis time, 'tis time! To it I call;
I roam above the sea,10 I wait for the right weather,
I beckon to the sails of ships.
Under the cope of storms, with waves disputing,
on the free crossway of the sea
when shall I start on my free course?
'Tis time to leave the dull shore of an element
inimical to me,
and sigh, 'mid the meridian swell, beneath the
sky of my Africa,11
for somber Russia, where
I suffered, where I loved,
where I buried my heart.
10. Written in Odessa.
11. See the first edition of Eugene Onegin. (Pushkin's notes)
As he speaks to Lucette, Van quotes Onegin's words to Tatiana in Chapter Four (XVI: 3-4) of EO:
He put on his tinted glasses and watched her stand on the diving board, her ribs framing the hollow of her intake as she prepared to ardis into the amber. He wondered, in a mental footnote that might come handy some day, if sunglasses or any other varieties of vision, which certainly twist our concept of ‘space,’ do not also influence our style of speech. The two well-formed lassies, the nurse, the prurient merman, the natatorium master, all looked on with Van.
‘Second compliment ready,’ he said as she returned to his side. ‘You’re a divine diver. I go in with a messy plop.’
‘But you swim faster,’ she complained, slipping off her shoulder straps and turning into a prone position; ‘Mezhdu prochim (by the way), is it true that a sailor in Tobakoff’s day was not taught to swim so he wouldn’t die a nervous wreck if the ship went down?’
‘A common sailor, perhaps,’ said Van. ‘When michman Tobakoff himself got shipwrecked off Gavaille, he swam around comfortably for hours, frightening away sharks with snatches of old songs and that sort of thing, until a fishing boat rescued him — one of those miracles that require a minimum of cooperation from all concerned, I imagine.’
Demon, she said, had told her, last year at the funeral, that he was buying an island in the Gavailles (‘incorrigible dreamer,’ drawled Van). He had ‘wept like a fountain’ in Nice, but had cried with even more abandon in Valentina, at an earlier ceremony, which poor Marina did not attend either. The wedding — in the Greek-faith style, if you please — looked like a badly faked episode in an ‘old movie, the priest was gaga and the dyakon drunk, and — perhaps, fortunately — Ada’s thick white veil was as impervious to light as a widow’s weeds. Van said he would not listen to that.
‘Oh, you must,’ she rejoined, ‘hotya bï potomu (if only because) one of her shafer’s (bachelors who take turns holding the wedding crown over the bride’s head) looked momentarily, in impassive profile and impertinent attitude (he kept raising the heavy metallic venets too high, too athletically high as if trying on purpose to keep it as far as possible from her head), exactly like you, like a pale, ill-shaven twin, delegated by you from wherever you were.’
At a place nicely called Agony, in Terra del Fuego. He felt an uncanny tingle as he recalled that when he received there the invitation to the wedding (airmailed by the groom’s sinister sister) he was haunted for several nights by dream after dream, growing fainter each time (much as her movie he was to pursue from flick-house to flick-house at a later stage of his life) of his holding that crown over her.
‘Your father,’ added Lucette, ‘paid a man from Belladonna to take pictures — but of course, real fame begins only when one’s name appears in that cine-magazine’s crossword puzzle. We all know it will never happen, never! Do you hate me now?’
‘I don’t,’ he said, passing his hand over her sun-hot back and rubbing her coccyx to make pussy purr. ‘Alas, I don’t! I love you with a brother’s love and maybe still more tenderly. Would you like me to order drinks?’
‘I’d like you to go on and on,’ she muttered, her nose buried in the rubber pillow.
‘There’s that waiter coming. What shall we have — Honoloolers?’
‘You’ll have them with Miss Condor’ (nasalizing the first syllable) ‘when I go to dress. For the moment I want only tea. Mustn’t mix drugs and drinks. Have to take the famous Robinson pill sometime tonight. Sometime tonight.’
‘Two teas, please.’
‘And lots of sandwiches, George. Foie gras, ham, anything.’
‘It’s very bad manners,’ remarked Van, ‘to invent a name for a poor chap who can’t answer: "Yes, Mademoiselle Condor." Best Franco-English pun I’ve ever heard, incidentally.’
‘But his name is George. He was awfully kind to me yesterday when I threw up in the middle of the tearoom.’
‘For the sweet all is sweet,’ murmured Van.
‘And so were the old Robinsons,’ she rambled on. ‘Not much chance, is there, they might turn up here? They’ve been sort of padding after me, rather pathetically, ever since we happened to have lunch at the same table on the boat-train, and I realized who they were but was sure they would not recognize the little fat girl seen in eighteen eighty-five or -six, but they are hypnotically talkative — at first we thought you were French, this salmon is really delicious, what’s your home town? — and I’m a weak fool, and one thing led to another. Young people are less misled by the passage of time than the established old who have not much changed lately and are not used to the long-unseen young changing.’
‘That’s very clever, darling,’ said Van ‘— except that time itself is motionless and changeless.’
‘Yes, it’s always I in your lap and the receding road. Roads move?’
‘Roads move.’
After tea Lucette remembered an appointment with the hairdresser and left in a hurry. Van peeled off his jersey and stayed on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the platinum sun in its aura of ‘film-color’ but only managing to fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil temptation.
A moment later, as if having spied on his solitude the pava (peahen) reappeared — this time with an apology.
Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his spectacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her innocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he looked at her face and saw in it a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features. That mulatto skin, that silver-blond hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse negative her ivory, her raven, her pale pout.
‘I was told,’ she explained, ‘that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay — voozavay entendue? — had shaved his beard, in which case he’d look rather like you, right?’
‘Logically, no, ma’am,’ replied Van.
She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude or ready — and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.
‘See you aprey,’ said Miss Condor.
Lucette’s gaze escorted to a good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those gluteal lobes and folds.
‘You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome girls!’
‘I swear,’ said Van, ‘that’s she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t deceive you.’
‘You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl. If you’re doing it now tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘You promised me a harem,’ Van gently rebuked her.
‘Not today, not today! Today is sacred.’
The cheek he intended to kiss was replaced by her quick mad mouth.
‘Come and see my cabin,’ she pleaded as he pushed her away with the very spring, as it were, of his animal reaction to the fire of her lips and tongue. ‘I simply must show you their pillows and piano. There’s Cordula’s smell in all the drawers. I beseech you!’
‘Run along now,’ said Van. ‘You’ve no right to excite me like that. I’ll hire Miss Condor to chaperone me if you do not behave yourself. We dine at seven-fifteen.’ (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): I love you with a brother’s love etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Four: XVI: 3-4.
cootooriay etc.: mispronunciation of ‘couturier’, dressmaker, ‘vous avez entendu’, you’ve heard (about him).
tu sais etc.: you know it will kill me.