Describing IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) in Canto Three of his poem, John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that IPH was a larvorium and a violet:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato. I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it - big if! - engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber). You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state.
I love great mountains. From the iron gate
Of the ramshackle house we rented there
One saw a snowy form, so far, so fair,
That one could only fetch a sigh, as if
It might assist assimilation. Iph
Was a larvorium and a violet:
A grave in Reason's early spring. And yet
It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newly dead
Stored in its strongholds through the years. (ll. 501-536)
In VN's novel Ada (1969) Ada shows to Van her larvarium, the real marvel of Ardis Manor:
‘And now,’ she said, and stopped, staring at him.
‘Yes?’ he said, ‘and now?’
‘Well, perhaps, I ought not to try to divert you — after you trampled upon those circles of mine; but I’m going to relent and show you the real marvel of Ardis Manor; my larvarium, it’s in the room next to mine’ (which he never saw, never — how odd, come to think of it!).
She carefully closed a communicating door as they entered into what looked like a glorified rabbitry at the end of a marble-flagged hall (a converted bathroom, as it transpired). In spite of the place’s being well aired, with the heraldic stained-glass windows standing wide open (so that one heard the screeching and catcalls of an undernourished and horribly frustrated bird population), the smell of the hutches — damp earth, rich roots, old greenhouse and maybe a hint of goat — was pretty appalling. Before letting him come nearer, Ada fiddled with little latches and grates, and a sense of great emptiness and depression replaced the sweet fire that had been consuming Van since the beginning of their innocent games on that day.
‘Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe (I’m crazy about everything that crawls),’ she said.
‘Personally,’ said Van, ‘I rather like those that roll up in a muff when you touch them — those that go to sleep like old dogs.’
‘Oh, they don’t go to sleep, quelle idée, they swoon, it’s a little syncope,’ explained Ada frowning. ‘And I imagine it may be quite a little shock for the younger ones.’
‘Yes, I can well imagine that, too. But I suppose one gets used to it, by-and-by, I mean.’
But his ill-informed hesitations soon gave way to esthetic empathy. Many decades later Van remembered having much admired the lovely, naked, shiny, gaudily spotted and streaked sharkmoth caterpillars, as poisonous as the mullein flowers clustering around them, and the flat larva of a local catocalid whose gray knobs and lilac plaques mimicked the knots and lichens of the twig to which it clung so closely as to practically lock with it, and, of course, the little Vaporer fellow, its black coat enlivened all along the back with painted tufts, red, blue, yellow, of unequal length, like those of a fancy toothbrush treated with certified colors. And that kind of simile, with those special trimmings, reminds me today of the entomological entries in Ada’s diary — which we must have somewhere, mustn’t we, darling, in that drawer there, no? you don’t think so? Yes! Hurrah! Samples (your round-cheeked script, my love, was a little larger, but otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing has changed):
‘The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth belong to a most uncaterpillarish caterpillar, with front segments shaped like bellows and a face resembling the lens of a folding camera. If you gently stroke its bloated smooth body, the sensation is quite silky and pleasant — until the irritated creature ungratefully squirts at you an acrid fluid from a slit in its throat.’
‘Dr Krolik received from Andalusia and kindly gave me five young larvae of the newly described very local Carmen Tortoiseshell. They are delightful creatures, of a beautiful jade nuance with silvery spikes, and they breed only on a semi-extinct species of high-mountain willow (which dear Crawly also obtained for me).’
(At ten or earlier the child had read — as Van had — Les Malheurs de Swann, as the next sample reveals):
‘I think Marina would stop scolding me for my hobby ("There’s something indecent about a little girl’s keeping such revolting pets...," "Normal young ladies should loathe snakes and worms," et cetera) if I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness and place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not be roomy enough!) the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff "Sphinxian" attitude.’
(Lovely stuff! said Van, but even I did not quite assimilate it, when I was young. So let us not bore the boor who flips through a book and thinks: ‘what a hoaxer, that old V.V.!’)
At the end of his so remote, so near, 1884 summer Van, before leaving Ardis, was to make a visit of adieu to Ada’s larvarium.
The porcelain-white, eye-spotted Cowl (or ‘Shark’) larva, a highly prized gem, had safely achieved its next metamorphosis, but Ada’s unique Lorelei Underwing had died, paralyzed by some ichneumon that had not been deceived by those clever prominences and fungoid smudges. The multicolored toothbrush had comfortably pupated within a shaggy cocoon, promising a Persian Vaporer later in the autumn. The two Puss Moth larvae had assumed a still uglier but at least more vermian and in a sense venerable aspect: their pitchforks now limply trailing behind them, and a purplish flush dulling the cubistry of their extravagant colors, they kept ‘ramping’ rapidly all over the floor of their cage in a surge of prepupational locomotion. Aqua had walked through a wood and into a gulch to do it last year. A freshly emerged Nymphalis carmen was fanning its lemon and amber-brown wings on a sunlit patch of grating, only to be choked with one nip by the nimble fingers of enraptured and heartless Ada; the Odettian Sphinx had turned, bless him, into an elephantoid mummy with a comically encased trunk of the guermantoid type; and Dr Krolik was swiftly running on short legs after a very special orange-tip above timberline, in another hemisphere, Antocharis ada Krolik (1884) — as it was known until changed to A. prittwitzi Stümper (1883) by the inexorable law of taxonomic priority.
‘But, afterwards, when all these beasties have hatched,’ asked Van, ‘what do you do with them?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I take them to Dr Krolik’s assistant who sets them and labels them and pins them in glassed trays in a clean oak cabinet, which will be mine when I marry. I shall then have a big collection, and continue to breed all kinds of leps — my dream is to have a special Institute of Fritillary larvae and violets — all the special violets they breed on. I would have eggs or larvae rushed to me here by plane from allover North America, with their foodplants — Redwood Violets from the West Coast, and a Pale Violet from Montana, and the Prairie Violet, and Egglestone’s Violet from Kentucky, and a rare white violet from a secret marsh near an unnamed lake on an arctic mountain where Krolik’s Lesser Fritillary flies. Of course, when the things emerge, they are quite easy to mate by hand — you hold them — for quite a while, sometimes — like this, in folded-wing profile’ (showing the method, ignoring her poor fingernails), ‘male in your left hand; female in your right, or vice versa, with the tips of their abdomens touching, but they must be quite fresh and soaked in their favorite violet’s reek.’ (1.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): quelle idée: the idea!
Les malheurs de Swann: cross between Les malheurs de Sophie by Mme de Ségur (née Countess Rostopchin) and Proust’s Un amour de Swann.
Shade's larvorium and Ada's larvarium bring to mind the following entries in Helena Blavatsky's Theosophical Glossary:
Lararium (Lat.). An apartment in the house of ancient Romans where the Lares or household gods were preserved, with other family relics.
Lares (Lat.). These were of three kinds: Lares familiares, the guardians and invisible presidents of the family circle; Lares parvi, small idols used for divinations and augury: and Lares præstites, which were supposed to maintain order among the others. The Lares are the manes or ghosts of disembodied people. Apuleius says that the tumulary inscription, To the gods manes who lived, meant that the Soul had been transformed in a Lemure; and adds that though “the human Soul is a demon that our languages may name genius”, and “is an immortal god though in a certain sense she is born at the same time as the man in whom she is, yet we may say that she dies in the same way that she is born”. Which means in plainer language that Lares and Lemures are simply the shells cast off by the EGO, the high spiritual and immortal Soul, whose shell, and also its astral reflection, the animal Soul, die, whereas the higher Soul prevails throughout eternity.
Larva (Lat.). The animal Soul. Larvæ are the shadows of men that have lived and died.
The name of Ada's beloved teacher of natural history, Krolik means in Russian "rabbit." In Helena Blavatsky's Theosophical Glossary there is an entry "Hare-Worship:"
Hare-Worship. The hare was sacred in many lands and especially among the Egyptians and Jews. Though the latter consider it an unclean, hoofed animal, unfit to eat, yet it was held sacred by some tribes. The reason for this was that in a certain species of hare the male suckled the little ones. It was thus considered to be androgynous or hermaphrodite, and so typified an attribute of the Demiurge, or creative Logos. The hare was a symbol of the moon, wherein the face of the prophet Moses is to be seen to this day, say the Jews. Moreover the moon is connected with the worship of Jehovah, a deity pre-eminently the god of generation, perhaps also for the same reason that Eros, the god of sexual love, is represented as carrying a hare. The hare was also sacred to Osiris. Lenormand writes that the hare “has to be considered as the symbol of the Logos . . . the Logos ought to be hermaphrodite and we know that the hare is an androgynous type”.