At the dinner with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) and her family in Bellevue Hotel in Mont Roux in October 1905 Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Maître Jorat, or Raton:
‘Tomorrow morning, je veux vous accaparer, ma chère. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps, informed you, Lucette’s accounts in several Swiss banks —’ and he trotted out a prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. ‘I suggest,’ he added, ‘that if you have no other engagements’ — (sending a questioning glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval) — ‘you and I go to see Maître Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me, my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour drive from here — who has given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh — I mean sign with a sigh — the matter is tedious. All right? All right.’
‘But, Ada,’ clarioned Dora, ‘you forget that tomorrow morning we wanted to visit the Institute of Floral Harmony in the Château Piron!’
‘You’ll do it after tomorrow, or Tuesday, or Tuesday week,’ said Van. ‘I’d gladly drive all three of you to that fascinating lieu de méditation but my fast little Unseretti seats only one passenger, and that business of untraceable deposits is terribly urgent, I think.’ (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): je veux etc.: I want to get hold of you, my dear.
enfin: in short.
Luzon: Amer., mispronunciation of ‘Lausanne’.
lieu: place.
The Jorat (Germ., der Jurten) is the area of the Canton of Vaud (Switzerland) located between the Gros-de-Vaud, West and the Broye, East. It is a hill range that stretches from above Lausanne at the South and stretches toward Payerne at the North. Notar (German for "notary") in reverse, Raton is a city in northeastern New Mexico, US. On the other hand, Bertrand et Raton, ou l'Art de conspirer (1833) is a five-act comedy by Eugène Scribe (a French dramatist and librettist, 1791-1861). In his diary (the entry of January 8, 1835) Pushkin says that a stage performance of Scribe's play Bertrand and Raton was banned in St. Petersburg at the request of Count Otto von Blome (1770-1849), the Danish envoy (and Russian spy) in St. Petersburg in 1804-1841:
На днях в театре граф Фикельмон, говоря, что Bertrand и Raton не были играны на петербургском театре по представлению Блума, датского посланника (и нашего старинного шпиона), присовокупил: «Je ne sais pourquoi; dans la comédie il n'est seulement pas question du Danemarck». Я прибавил: «Pas plus qu'en Europe».
Scribe's play Bertrand and Raton brings to mind Bernard Rattner, Van's closest friend at Chose (Van's English University) and his colleague at Kingston (Van's American University). Van writes a letter to Bernard Rattner from the Kalugano hospital (where Van recovers from a wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge):
He wrote Cordula a short letter, saying he had met with a little accident, was in the suite for fallen princes in Lakeview Hospital, Kalugano, and would be at her feet on Tuesday. He also wrote an even shorter letter to Marina, in French, thanking her for a lovely summer. This, on second thought, he decided to send from Manhattan to the Pisang Palace Hotel in Los Angeles. A third letter he addressed to Bernard Rattner, his closest friend at Chose, the great Rattner’s nephew. ‘Your uncle has most honest standards,’ he wrote, in part, ‘but I am going to demolish him soon.’ (1.42)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): uncle: ‘my uncle has most honest principles’.
(Eug. Onegin, One: I:1)
Kalugano is a portmanteau combining Kaluga (a city in Russia, SW of Moscow) with Lugano, a lake and city in Switzerland. Van begins to work on his novel Letters from Terra living with Cordula de Prey (Van's mistress who marries Ivan G. Tobak, the shipowner, and, after divorcing him, Baynard) in her Manhattan apartment. Describing his novel, Van mentions his nephew, Mr. Gromwell (the great Grombchevski's nephew):
Letters from Terra, by Voltemand, came out in 1891 on Van’s twenty-first birthday, under the imprint of two bogus houses, ‘Abencerage’ in Manhattan, and ‘Zegris’ in London.
(Had I happened to see a copy I would have recognized Chateaubriand’s lapochka and hence your little paw, at once.)
His new lawyer, Mr Gromwell, whose really beautiful floral name suited somehow his innocent eyes and fair beard, was a nephew of the Great Grombchevski, who for the last thirty years or so had managed some of Demon’s affairs with good care and acumen. Gromwell nursed Van’s personal fortune no less tenderly; but he had little experience in the intricacies of book-publishing matters, and Van was an absolute ignoramus there, not knowing, for example, that ‘review copies’ were supposed to go to the editors of various periodicals or that advertisements should be purchased and not be expected to appear by spontaneous generation in full-page adulthood between similar blurbs boosting The Possessed by Miss Love and The Puffer by Mr Dukes.
For a fat little fee, Gwen, one of Mr Gromwell’s employees, was delegated not only to entertain Van, but also to supply Manhattan bookstores with one-half of the printed copies, whilst an old lover of hers in England was engaged to place the rest in the bookshops of London. The notion that anybody kind enough to sell his book should not keep the ten dollars or so that every copy had cost to manufacture seemed unfair and illogical to Van. Therefore he felt sorry for all the trouble that underpaid, tired, bare-armed, brunette-pale shopgirls had no doubt taken in trying to tempt dour homosexuals with his stuff (‘Here’s a rather fancy novel about a girl called Terra’), when he learned from a careful study of a statement of sales, which his stooges sent him in February, 1892, that in twelve months only six copies had been sold — two in England and four in America. Statistically speaking no reviews could have been expected, given the unorthodox circumstances in which poor Terra’s correspondence had been handled. Curiously enough, as many as two did appear. One, by the First Clown in Elsinore, a distinguished London weekly, popped up in a survey entitled, with a British journalist’s fondness for this kind of phoney wordplay, ‘Terre à terre, 1891,’ and dealt with the year’s ‘Space Romances,’ which by that time had begun to fine off. He sniffed Voltemand’s contribution as the choicest of the lot, calling it (alas, with unerring flair) ‘a sumptuously fripped up, trite, tedious and obscure fable, with a few absolutely marvelous metaphors marring the otherwise total ineptitude of the tale.’
The only other compliment was paid to poor Voltemand in a little Manhattan magazine (The Village Eyebrow) by the poet Max Mispel (another botanical name — ‘medlar’ in English), member of the German Department at Goluba University. Herr Mispel, who liked to air his authors, discerned in Letters from Terra the influence of Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists) as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, thus transliterated by Captain de Roux, according to Burton in his adaptation of Nefzawi’s treatise on the best method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females (The Perfumed Garden, Panther edition, p.187, a copy given to ninety-three-year-old Baron Van Veen by his ribald physician Professor Lagosse). His critique ended as follows: ‘If Mr Voltemand (or Voltimand or Mandalatov) is a psychiatrist, as I think he might be, then I pity his patients, while admiring his talent.’
Upon being cornered, Gwen, a fat little fille de joie (by inclination if not by profession), squealed on one of her new admirers, confessing she had begged him to write that article because she could not bear to see Van’s ‘crooked little smile’ at finding his beautifully bound and boxed book so badly neglected. She also swore that Max not only did not know who Voltemand really was, but had not read Van’s novel. Van toyed with the idea of challenging Mr Medlar (who, he hoped, would choose swords) to a duel at dawn in a secluded corner of the Park whose central green he could see from the penthouse terrace where he fenced with a French coach twice a week, the only exercise, save riding, that he still indulged in; but to his surprise — and relief (for he was a little ashamed to defend his ‘novelette’ and only wished to forget it, just as another, unrelated, Veen might have denounced — if allowed a longer life — his pubescent dream of ideal bordels) Max Mushmula (Russian for ‘medlar’) answered Van’s tentative cartel with the warm-hearted promise of sending him his next article, ‘The Weed Exiles the Flower’ (Melville & Marvell). (2.2)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Abencerage, Zegris: Families of Granada Moors (their feud inspired Chateaubriand).
fille de joie: whore.
Describing the last occasion on which he saw his father (Demon Veen, Van's and Ada's father, who in March 1905 perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific), Van mentions two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell):
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 yarn 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.
Van pursued his studies in private until his election (at thirty-five!) to the Rattner Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kingston. The Council’s choice had been a consequence of disaster and desperation; the two other candidates, solid scholars much older and altogether better than he, esteemed even in Tartary where they often traveled, starry-eyed, hand-in-hand, had mysteriously vanished (perhaps dying under false names in the never-explained accident above the smiling ocean) at the ‘eleventh hour,’ for the Chair was to be dismantled if it remained vacant for a legally limited length of time, so as to give another, less-coveted but perfectly good seat the chance to be brought in from the back parlor. Van neither needed nor appreciated the thing, but accepted it in a spirit of good-natured perversity or perverse gratitude, or simply in memory of his father who had been somehow involved in the whole affair. He did not take his task too seriously, reducing to a strict minimum, ten or so per year, the lectures he delivered in a nasal drone mainly produced by a new and hard to get ‘voice recorder’ concealed in his waistcoat pocket, among anti-infection Venus pills, while he moved his lips silently and thought of the lamplit page of his sprawling script left unfinished in his study. He spent in Kingston a score of dull years (variegated by trips abroad), an obscure figure around which no legends collected in the university or the city. Unbeloved by his austere colleagues, unknown in local pubs, unregretted by male students, he retired in 1922, after which he resided in Europe. (3.7)
Study for "Still Life: Old Shoes and Chair" (1949) is a drawing (ink and wash on paper) by Abraham Rattner (an American artist, 1895-1978). On the other hand, Julius Rattner (as pointed out by Abdella Bouazza) is a character in Wyndham Lewis's novel The Apes of God (1930). The novel is a satire of London's contemporary literary and artistic scene. Among the satirised writers are the Sitwell siblings (Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell). The name Sitwell makes one think of another, less-coveted but perfectly good seat that would be given a chance to be brought in from the back parlor, if the Rattner Chair of Philosophy is dismantled after remaining vacant for a legally limited length of time.
Bertrand the monkey and Raton the cat are the characters in Jean de La Fontaine's fable Le Singe et le Chat ("The Monkey and the Cat," 1679). “Tien et mien, — dit Lafontaine…” (1818-19) is a poem (self-translation into French) by Pushkin:
“Tien et mien, — dit Lafontaine —
Du monde a rompu le lien.” —
Quant à moi, je n’en crois rien.
Que serait ce, ma Climène,
Si tu n’étais plus la mienne,
Si je n’étais plus le tien?
At the end of her letter to Van Ada repeats the word tvoya (thine) three times:
‘O dear Van, this is the last attempt I am making. You may call it a document in madness or the herb of repentance, but I wish to come and live with you, wherever you are, for ever and ever. If you scorn the maid at your window I will aerogram my immediate acceptance of a proposal of marriage that has been made to your poor Ada a month ago in Valentine State. He is an Arizonian Russian, decent and gentle, not overbright and not fashionable. The only thing we have in common is a keen interest in many military-looking desert plants especially various species of agave, hosts of the larvae of the most noble animals in America, the Giant Skippers (Krolik, you see, is burrowing again). He owns horses, and Cubistic pictures, and "oil wells" (whatever they are-our father in hell who has some too, does not tell me, getting away with off-color allusions as is his wont). I have told my patient Valentinian that I shall give him a definite answer after consulting the only man I have ever loved or shall ever love. Try to ring me up tonight. Something is very wrong with the Ladore line, but I am assured that the trouble will be grappled with and eliminated before rivertide. Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya (thine). A.’
In the next paragraph Van mentions Bernard Rattner:
Van took a clean handkerchief from a tidy pile in a drawer, an action he analogized at once by plucking a leaf from a writing pad. It is wonderful how helpful such repetitive rhythms on the part of coincidental (white, rectangular) objects can be at such chaotic moments. He wrote a short aerogram and returned to the parlor. There he found Lucette putting on her fur coat, and five uncouth scholars, whom his idiot valet had ushered in, standing in a silent circle around the bland graceful modeling of the coming winter’s fashions. Bernard Rattner, a heavily bespectacled black-haired, red-cheeked thick-set young man greeted Van with affable relief.
‘Good Log!’ exclaimed Van, ‘I had understood we were to meet at your uncle’s place.’
With a quick gesture he centrifuged them to waiting-room chairs, and despite his pretty cousin’s protests (‘It’s a twenty minute’s walk; don’t accompany me’) campophoned for his car. Then he clattered, in Lucette’s wake, down the cataract of the narrow staircase, katrakatra (quatre à quatre). Please, children not katrakatra (Marina).
‘I also know,’ said Lucette as if continuing their recent exchange, ‘who he is.’
She pointed to the inscription ‘Voltemand Hall’ on the brow of the building from which they now emerged.
Van gave her a quick glance — but she simply meant the courtier in Hamlet. (2.5)
Btw., Osyol byl samykh chestnykh pravil ("The donkey had most honest principles") is Line 4 of Krylov's fable Osyol i muzhik ("The Donkey and the Boor," 1819). Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) translated or adapted many fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695), a French poet whom Pushkin, in his poem Gorodok ("A Townlet," 1815), calls Vanyusha Lafonten:
И ты, певец любезный,
Поэзией прелестной
Сердца привлёкший в плен,
Ты здесь, лентяй беспечный,
Мудрец простосердечный,
Ванюша Лафонтен!
On her deathbed Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) employed Van's petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha:
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. (5.6)