Explaning a cryptic hydrogram from Chicago, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) tells his father that he has to see a mad girl artist called Doris or Odris who draws only gee-gees and sugar daddies:
In mid-July, 1886, while Van was winning the table-tennis tournament on board a ‘luxury’ liner (that now took a whole week to reach in white dignity Manhattan from Dover!), Marina, both her daughters, their governess, and two maids were shivering more or less simultaneous stages of Russian influentsa at various stops on their way by train from Los Angeles to Ladore. A hydrogram from Chicago awaiting Van at his father’s house on July 21 (her dear birthday!) said: ‘dadaist impatient patient arriving between twenty-fourth and seventh call doris can meet regards vicinity.’
‘Which reminds me painfully of the golubyanki (petits bleus) Aqua used to send me,’ remarked Demon with a sigh (having mechanically opened the message). ‘Is tender Vicinity some girl I know? Because you may glare as much as you like, but this is not a wire from doctor to doctor.’
Van raised his eyes to the Boucher plafond of the breakfast room, and shaking his head in derisive admiration, commented on Demon’s acumen. Yes, that was right. He had to travel incontinently to Garders (anagram of ‘regards,’ see?) to a hamlet the opposite way from Letham (see?) to see a mad girl artist called Doris or Odris who drew only gee-gees and sugar daddies.
Van rented a room under a false name (Boucher) at the only inn of Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River, some twenty miles from Ardis. He spent the night fighting the celebrated mosquito, or its cousin, that liked him more than the Ardis beast had. The toilet on the landing was a black hole, with the traces of a fecal explosion, between a squatter’s two giant soles. At 7 a.m. on July 25 he called Ardis Hall from. the Malahar post office and got connected with Bout who was connected with Blanche and mistook Van’s voice for the butler’s.
‘Dammit, Pa,’ he said into his bedside dorophone, ‘I’m busy!’
‘I want Blanche, you idiot,’ growled Van.
‘Oh, pardon,’ cried Bout, ‘un moment, Monsieur.’
A bottle was audibly uncorked (drinking hock at seven in the morning!) and Blanche took over, but scarcely had Van begun to deliver a carefully worded message to be transmitted to Ada, when Ada herself who had been on the qui vive all night answered from the nursery, where the clearest instrument in the house quivered and bubbled under a dead barometer.
‘Forest Fork in Forty-Five minutes. Sorry to spit.’
‘Tower!’ replied her sweet ringing voice, as an airman in heaven blue might say ‘Roger.’
He rented a motorcycle, a venerable machine, with a saddle upholstered in billiard cloth and pretentious false mother-of-pearl handlebars, and drove, bouncing on tree roots along a narrow ‘forest ride.’ The first thing he saw was the star gleam of her dismissed bike: she stood by it, arms akimbo, the black-haired white angel, looking away in a daze of shyness, wearing a terrycloth robe and bedroom slippers. As he carried her into the nearest thicket he felt the fever of her body, but only realized how ill she was when after two passionate spasms she got up full of tiny brown ants and tottered, and almost collapsed, muttering about gipsies stealing their jeeps.
It was a beastly, but beautiful, tryst. He could not remember —
(That’s right, I can’t either. Ada.)
— one word they said, one question, one answer, he rushed her back as close to the house as he dared (having kicked her bike into the bracken) — and that evening when he rang up Blanche, she dramatically whispered that Mademoiselle had une belle pneumonie, mon pauvre Monsieur.
Ada was much better three days later, but he had to return to Man to catch the same boat back to England — and join a circus tour which involved people he could not let down.
His father saw him off. Demon had dyed his hair a blacker black. He wore a diamond ring blazing like a Caucasian ridge. His long, black, blue-ocellated wings trailed and quivered in the ocean breeze. Lyudi oglyadïvalis’ (people turned to look). A temporary Tamara, all kohl, kasbek rouge, and flamingo-boa, could not decide what would please her daemon lover more — just moaning and ignoring his handsome son or acknowledging bluebeard’s virility as reflected in morose Van, who could not stand her Caucasian perfume, Granial Maza, seven dollars a bottle.
(You know, that’s my favorite chapter up to now, Van, I don’t know why, but I love it. And you can keep your Blanche in her young man’s embrace, even that does not matter. In Ada’s fondest hand.)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): golubyanka: Russ., small blue butterfly.
petit bleu: Parisian slang for pneumatic post (an express message on blue paper).
cousin: mosquito.
mademoiselle etc.: the young lady has a pretty bad pneumonia, I regret to say, Sir.
Granial Maza: a perfume named after Mt Kazbek’s ‘gran’ almaza’ (diamond’s facet) of Lermontov’s The Demon.
In his poem Names (1799) S. T. Coleridge mentions, among other names, Doris:
I ask’d my fair one happy day,
What I should call her in my lay;
By what sweet name from Rome or Greece;
Lalage, Nesera, Chloris,
Sappho, Lesbia, or Doris,
Arethusa or Lucrece.
“Ah!” replied my gentle fair,
“Beloved, what are names but air?
Choose thou whatever suits the line;
Call me Sappho, call me Chloris,
Call me Lalage or Doris,
Only, only call me Thine.”
According to Coleridge's fair one, names are but air. The element that destroys Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father who in March 1905 perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) is air. 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. The name Coleridge brings to mind "ridge" that Aqua (Demon's wife, poor mad twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina) left to Van:
Demon spoke on: ‘I cannot disinherit you: Aqua left you enough "ridge" and real estate to annul the conventional punishment. And I cannot denounce you to the authorities without involving my daughter, whom I mean to protect at all cost. But I can do the next proper thing, I can curse you, I can make this our last, our last —’
Van, whose finger had been gliding endlessly to and fro along the mute but soothingly smooth edge of the mahogany desk, now heard with horror the sob that shook Demon’s entire frame, and then saw a deluge of tears flowing down those hollow tanned cheeks. In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity. Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? The funest gamester… the pale fatal girl, in another well-known melodrama…. In this one. Van gave him a clean handkerchief to replace the soiled rag. His own marble calm did not surprise Van. The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion.
Demon regained his composure (if not his young looks) and said:
‘I believe in you and your common sense. You must not allow an old debaucher to disown an only son. If you love her, you wish her to be happy, and she will not be as happy as she could be once you gave her up. You may go. Tell her to come here on your way down.’
Down. My first is a vehicle that twists dead daisies around its spokes; my second is Oldmanhattan slang for ‘money’; and my whole makes a hole.
As he traversed the second-floor landing, he saw, through the archway of two rooms, Ada in her black dress standing, with her back to him, at the oval window in the boudoir. He told a footman to convey her father’s message to her and passed almost at a run through the familiar echoes of the stone-flagged vestibule.
My second is also the meeting place of two steep slopes. Right-hand lower drawer of my practically unused new desk — which is quite as big as Dad’s, with Sig’s compliments.
He judged it would take him as much time to find a taxi at this hour of the day as to walk, with his ordinary swift swing, the ten blocks to Alex Avenue. He was coatless, tieless, hatless; a strong sharp wind dimmed his sight with salty frost and played Medusaean havoc with his black locks. Upon letting himself in for the last time into his idiotically cheerful apartment, he forthwith sat down at that really magnificent desk and wrote the following note:
Do what he tells you. His logic sounds preposterous, prepsupposing [sic] a vague kind of ‘Victorian’ era, as they have on Terra according to ‘my mad’ [?], but in a paroxysm of [illegible] I suddenly realized he was right. Yes, right, here and there, not neither here, nor there, as most things are. You see, girl, how it is and must be. In the last window we shared we both saw a man painting [us?] but your second-floor level of vision probably prevented your seeing that he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared. Good-bye, girl.
Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened — or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. Anyway, what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples. It was to gray by the time that Ada, then in her thirties, said, when they spoke of their voluntary separation:
‘I would have killed myself too, had I found Rose wailing over your corpse. "Secondes pensées sont les bonnes," as your other, white, bonne used to say in her pretty patois. As to the apron, you are quite right. And what you did not make out was that the artist had about finished a large picture of your meek little palazzo standing between its two giant guards. Perhaps for the cover of a magazine, which rejected that picture. But, you know, there’s one thing I regret,’ she added: ‘Your use of an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury — not yours, not my Van’s. I should never have told you about the Ladore policeman. You should never have taken him into your confidence, never connived with him to burn those files — and most of Kalugano’s pine forest. Eto unizitel’no (it is humiliating).’
‘Amends have been made,’ replied fat Van with a fat man’s chuckle. ‘I’m keeping Kim safe and snug in a nice Home for Disabled Professional People, where he gets from me loads of nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography.’
There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do. (2.11)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): ridge: money.
secondes pensées etc.: second thoughts are the good ones.
bonne: housemaid.
S. T. Coleridge's poem Names is a translation from G. E. Lessing, a German philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic (1729-81) whose wife died in childbirth - a fact mentioned by Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in VN's novel Dar (The Gift, 1937). According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. Describing his life with Lolita in Beardsley, Humbert says that Lolita wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on Doris Lee’s hay was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the foreground:
January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia: none of the townspeople had ever seen such weather. Other presents came tumbling in. For her birthday I bought her a bicycle, the doe-like and altogether charming machine already mentionedand added to this a History of Modern American Painting: her bicycle manner, I mean her approach to it, the hip movement in mounting, the grace and so on, afforded me supreme pleasure; but my attempt to refine her pictorial taste was a failure; she wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on Doris Lee’s hay was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the foreground, and could not understand why I said Grant Wood or Peter Hurd was good, and Reginald Marsh or Frederick Waugh awful. (2.12)
Dolores Haze (Lolita's full name) was born on January 1, 1935. January 1 is also Van Veen's birthday. Doris Lee's hay brings to mind a thorny twig in the inviting hay that caused an inch-long cut on Ada's buttocks:
Her neck had been, and remained, his most delicate, most poignant delight, especially when she let her hair flow freely, and the warm, white, adorable skin showed through in chance separations of glossy black strands. Boils and mosquito bites had stopped pestering her, but he discovered the pale trace of an inch-long cut which ran parallel to her vertebrae just below the waist and which resulted from a deep scratch caused last August by an erratic hatpin — or rather by a thorny twig in the inviting hay.
(You are merciless, Van.)
On that secret islet (forbidden to Sunday couples — it belonged to the Veens, and a notice-board calmly proclaimed that ‘trespassers might get shot by sportsmen from Ardis Hall,’ Dan’s wording) the vegetation consisted of three Babylonian willows, a fringe of alder, many grasses, cattails, sweet-flags, and a few purple-lipped twayblades, over which Ada crooned as she did over puppies or kittens. (1.35)
When Van and Ada watch Kim Beauharnais's album, Ada mentions their little Caliph Island:
In an equally casual tone of voice Van said: ‘Darling, you smoke too much, my belly is covered with your ashes. I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais’s exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts.’
‘You shall not slaughter him,’ said Ada. ‘He is subnormal, he is, perhaps, blackmailerish, but in his sordidity, there is an istoshnïy ston (‘visceral moan’) of crippled art. Furthermore, this page is the only really naughty one. And let’s not forget that a copperhead of eight was also ambushed in the brush’.
‘Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle.’
‘Oh do!’ said Ada (skipping another abominable glimpse — apparently, through a hole in the boards of the attic). ‘Look, here’s our little Caliph Island!’
‘I don’t want to look any more. I suspect you find that filth titillating. Some nuts get a kick from motor-bikini comics.’
‘Please, Van, do glance! These are our willows, remember?’
‘"The castle bathed by the Adour:
The guidebooks recommend that tour."’
‘It happens to be the only one in color. The willows look sort of greenish because the twigs are greenish, but actually they are leafless here, it’s early spring, and you can see our red boat Souvenance through the rushes. And here’s the last one: Kim’s apotheosis of Ardis.’
The entire staff stood in several rows on the steps of the pillared porch behind the Bank President Baroness Veen and the Vice President Ida Larivière. Those two were flanked by the two prettiest typists, Blanche de la Tourberie (ethereal, tearstained, entirely adorable) and a black girl who had been hired, a few days before Van’s departure, to help French, who towered rather sullenly above her in the second row, the focal point of which was Bouteillan, still wearing the costume sport he had on when driving off with Van (that picture had been muffed or omitted). On the butler’s right side stood three footmen; on his left, Bout (who had valeted Van), the fat, flour-pale cook (Blanche’s father) and, next to French, a terribly tweedy gentleman with sightseeing strappings athwart one shoulder: actually (according to Ada), a tourist, who, having come all the way from England to see Bryant’s Castle, had bicycled up the wrong road and was, in the picture, under the impression of accidentally being conjoined to a group of fellow tourists who were visiting some other old manor quite worth inspecting too. The back rows consisted of less distinguished menservants and scullions, as well as of gardeners, stableboys, coachmen, shadows of columns, maids of maids, aids, laundresses, dresses, recesses — getting less and less distinct as in those bank ads where limited little employees dimly dimidiated by more fortunate shoulders, but still asserting themselves, still smile in the process of humble dissolve.
‘Isn’t that wheezy Jones in the second row? I always liked the old fellow.’
‘No,’ answered Ada, ‘that’s Price. Jones came four years later. He is now a prominent policeman in Lower Ladore. Well, that’s all.’
Nonchalantly, Van went back to the willows and said:
‘Every shot in the book has been snapped in 1884, except this one. I never rowed you down Ladore River in early spring. Nice to note you have not lost your wonderful ability to blush.’
‘It’s his error. He must have thrown in a fotochka taken later, maybe in 1888. We can rip it out if you like.’
‘Sweetheart,’ said Van, ‘the whole of 1888 has been ripped out. One need not bb a sleuth in a mystery story to see that at least as many pages have been removed as retained. I don’t mind — I mean I have no desire to see the Knabenkräuter and other pendants of your friends botanizing with you; but 1888 has been withheld and he’ll turn up with it when the first grand is spent.’
‘I destroyed 1888 myself,’ admitted proud Ada; ‘but I swear, I solemnly swear, that the man behind Blanche, in the perron picture, was, and has always remained, a complete stranger.’
‘Good for him,’ said Van. ‘Really it has no importance. It’s our entire past that has been spoofed and condemned. On second thoughts, I will not write that Family Chronicle. By the way, where is my poor little Blanche now?’
‘Oh, she’s all right. She’s still around. You know, she came back — after you abducted her. She married our Russian coachman, the one who replaced Bengal Ben, as the servants called him.’
‘Oh she did? That’s delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it.’
‘They have a blind child,’ said Ada.
‘Love is blind,’ said Van.
‘She tells me you made a pass at her on the first morning of your first arrival.’
‘Not documented by Kim,’ said Van. ‘Will their child remain blind? I mean, did you get them a really first-rate physician?’
‘Oh yes, hopelessly blind. But speaking of love and its myths, do you realize — because I never did before talking to her a couple of years ago — that the people around our affair had very good eyes indeed? Forget Kim, he’s only the necessary clown — but do you realize that a veritable legend was growing around you and me while we played and made love?’
She had never realized, she said again and again (as if intent to reclaim the past from the matter-of-fact triviality of the album), that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids, whose reading consisted of Gwen de Vere and Klara Mertvago, adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis’s ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle), added freshly composed lines — naive, lackey-daisical, but heartfelt — to cyclic folk songs. Eccentric police officers grew enamored with the glamour of incest. Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love. Nightwatchmen fought insomnia and the fire of the clap with the weapons of Vaniada’s Adventures. Herdsmen, spared by thunderbolts on remote hillsides, used their huge ‘moaning horns’ as ear trumpets to catch the lilts of Ladore. Virgin chatelaines in marble-floored manors fondled their lone flames fanned by Van’s romance. And another century would pass, and the painted word would be retouched by the still richer brush of time.
‘All of which,’ said Van, ‘only means that our situation is desperate.’ (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): ars: Lat., art.
Carte du Tendre: ‘Map of Tender Love’, sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century.
Knabenkräuter: Germ., orchids (and testicles).
perron: porch.
Van blinds Kim Beauharnais (a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis) for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada. But because love is blind, Van fails to see that Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband) and Ada have at least two children and that 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.