Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions a Phree Pharmacy that Aqua, in her erratic student years, organized in Belokonsk (on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra, the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse,’ a city in N.W. Canada) with Milton Abraham’s invaluable help:
In her erratic student years Aqua had left fashionable Brown Hill College, founded by one of her less reputable ancestors, to participate (as was also fashionable) in some Social Improvement project or another in the Severnïya Territorii. She organized with Milton Abraham’s invaluable help a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk, and fell grievously in love there with a married man, who after one summer of parvenu passion dispensed to her in his Camping Ford garçonnière preferred to give her up rather than run the risk of endangering his social situation in a philistine town where businessmen played ‘golf’ on Sundays and belonged to ‘lodges.’ The dreadful sickness, roughly diagnosed in her case, and in that of other unfortunate people, as an ‘extreme form of mystical mania combined with existalienation’ (otherwise plain madness), crept over her by degrees, with intervals of ecstatic peace, with skipped areas of precarious sanity, with sudden dreams of eternity-certainty, which grew ever rarer and briefer. (1.3)
A Phree Pharmacy brings to mind James Wormold's Phastkleaners in Graham Greene's novel (a black comedy) Our Man in Havana (1958):
A shutter across the way creaked open and then regularly blew to in the slight breeze from the sea, click clack like an ancient clock. Wormold said, ‘I must be off.’
‘Phastkleaners will get on without you, Mr Wormold.’ It was a day of uncomfortable truths. ‘Like my patients,’ Dr Hasselbacher added with kindliness.
‘People have to get ill, they don’t have to buy vacuum cleaners.’
‘But you charge them more.’
‘And get only twenty per cent for myself. One can’t save much on twenty per cent.’
‘This is not an age for saving, Mr Wormold.’
‘I must for Milly. If something happened to me…’
‘We none of us have a great expectation of life nowadays, so why worry?’ ‘All these disturbances are very bad for trade. What’s the good of a vacuum cleaner if the power’s cut off?’
‘I could manage a small loan, Mr Wormold.’
‘No, no. It’s not like that. My worry isn’t this year’s or even next year’s, it’s a long-term worry.’
‘Then it’s not worth calling a worry. We live in an atomic age, Mr Wormold. Push a button piff bang where are we? Another Scotch, please.’ ‘And that’s another thing. You know what the firm has done now? They’ve sent me an Atomic Pile Cleaner.’
‘Really? I didn’t know science had got that far.’
‘Oh, of course, there’s nothing atomic about it it’s only a name. Last year there was the Turbo Jet; this year it’s the Atomic. It works off the light-plug just the same as the other.’
‘Then why worry?’ Dr Hasselbacher repeated like a theme tune, leaning into his whisky.
‘They don’t realize that sort of name may go down in the States, but not here, where the clergy are preaching all the time against the misuse of science. Milly and I went to the Cathedral last Sunday - you know how she is about Mass, thinks she’ll convert me, I wouldn’t wonder. Well, Father Mendez spent half an hour describing the effect of a hydrogen bomb. Those who believe in heaven on earth, he said, are creating a hell he made it sound that way too -it was very lucid. How do you think I liked it on Monday morning when I had to make a window display of the new Atomic Pile Suction Cleaner? It wouldn’t have surprised me if one of the wild boys around here had broken the window. Catholic Action, Christ the King, all that stuff. I don’t know what to do about it, Hasselbacher.’ ‘Sell one to Father Mendez for the Bishop’s palace.’ (Chapter I)
A character in Our Man in Havana, Beatrice Severn (the secretary sent from London to assist Jim Wormold) reminds one of the Severnïya Territorii (a North American province also known as the Severn Tories). In Belokonsk, Aqua makes love to a married man in his Camping Ford garçonnière. The narrator and main character in Graham Greene's novel The Comedians (1965), Brown (an English hotel owner whose name brings to mind fashionable Brown Hill College that Aqua had left) has an ongoing adulterous affair with Martha Pineda, the German-born wife of a South American ambassador. Their trysts are frequently restricted by secrecy and surveillance, leading them to have sex in the cramped back seat of her Peugeot while it is parked in various locations around Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Greene's novel is set in Haiti during the regime of François Duvalier (1907-1971), also known as Papa Doc, and his secret police, the Tonton Macoute. Papa Doc brings to mind a 'papa Fig,' as Van calls Dr. Sig Heiler (Aqua's last doctor):
Being unwilling to suffer another relapse after this blessed state of perfect mental repose, but knowing it could not last, she did what another patient had done in distant France, at a much less radiant and easygoing ‘home.’ A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same man, because they both came from Vienne, Isère, and were only sons (as her son was), evolved, or rather revived, the therapistic device, aimed at establishing a ‘group’ feeling, of having the finest patients help the staff if ‘thusly inclined.’ Aqua, in her turn, repeated exactly clever Eleonore Bonvard’s trick, namely, opting for the making of beds and the cleaning of glass shelves. The astorium in St Taurus, or whatever it was called (who cares — one forgets little things very fast, when afloat in infinite non-thingness) was, perhaps, more modem, with a more refined desertic view, than the Mondefroid bleakhouse horsepittle, but in both places a demented patient could outwit in one snap an imbecile pedant.
In less than a week Aqua had accumulated more than two hundred tablets of different potency. She knew most of them — the jejune sedatives, and the ones that knocked you out from eight p.m. till midnight, and several varieties of superior soporifics that left you with limpid limbs and a leaden head after eight hours of non-being, and a drug which was in itself delightful but a little lethal if combined with a draught of the cleansing fluid commercially known as Morona; and a plump purple pill reminding her, she had to laugh, of those with which the little gypsy enchantress in the Spanish tale (dear to Ladore schoolgirls) puts to sleep all the sportsmen and all their bloodhounds at the opening of the hunting season. Lest some busybody resurrect her in the middle of the float-away process, Aqua reckoned she must procure for herself a maximum period of undisturbed stupor elsewhere than in a glass house, and the carrying out of that second part of the project was simplified and encouraged by another agent or double of the Isère Professor, a Dr Sig Heiler whom everybody venerated as a great guy and near-genius in the usual sense of near-beer. Such patients who proved by certain twitchings of the eyelids and other semiprivate parts under the control of medical students that Sig (a slightly deformed but not unhandsome old boy) was in the process of being dreamt of as a ‘papa Fig,’ spanker of girl bottoms and spunky spittoon-user, were assumed to be on the way to haleness and permitted, upon awakening, to participate in normal outdoor activities such as picnics. Sly Aqua twitched, simulated a yawn, opened her light-blue eyes (with those startlingly contrasty jet-black pupils that Dolly, her mother, also had), put on yellow slacks and a black bolero, walked through a little pinewood, thumbed a ride with a Mexican truck, found a suitable gulch in the chaparral and there, after writing a short note, began placidly eating from her cupped palm the multicolored contents of her handbag, like any Russian country girl lakomyashchayasya yagodami (feasting on berries) that she had just picked in the woods. She smiled, dreamily enjoying the thought (rather ‘Kareninian’ in tone) that her extinction would affect people about ‘as deeply as the abrupt, mysterious, never explained demise of a comic strip in a Sunday paper one had been taking for years. It was her last smile. She was discovered much sooner, but had also died much faster than expected, and the observant Siggy, still in his baggy khaki shorts, reported that Sister Aqua (as for some reason they all called her) lay, as if buried prehistorically, in a fetus-in-utero position, a comment that seemed relevant to his students, as it may be to mine.
Her last note, found on her and addressed to her husband and son, might have come from the sanest person on this or that earth.
Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.
[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’
iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): horsepittle: ‘hospital’, borrowed from a passage in Dickens’ Bleak House. Poor Joe’s pun, not a poor Joycean one.
aujourd’hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).
Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.
The element that destroys Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father who married Aqua on April 23, 1869, in Kaluga and who in March 1905 perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) is air. Vacuum cleaners use moving air to create a pressure difference that lifts and carries dirt away from surfaces. A vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited by the British Intelligence Service, James Wormold (the main character in Our Man in Havana) brings to mind the poor grubs whom, according to Ada, Demon promised not to cheat:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles? (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.
chiens etc.: dogs not allowed.
Dementiy Labirintovich (as Ada's husband calls Demon) makes one think of The Labyrinthine Ways, the American title of Graham Greene's novel (set in the Mexican state of Tabasco) The Power and the Glory (1940). Ada's camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, brings to mind the Camping Ford garçonnière of Aqua's Belokonsk lover. Graham Greene (an English writer, 1904-1991) had a deep connection to County Mayo, Ireland, specifically to Achill Island, where he lived and wrote during the late 1940s. Greene was introduced to County Mayo by his mistress, Catherine Walston. She was the American wife of a wealthy British MP and owned a remote cottage in the village of Dooagh on Achill Island. Demon Veen is an Irish Baron:
‘How did you like my brother?’ asked Dorothy. ‘On redchayshiy chelovek (he’s, a most rare human being). I can’t tell you how profoundly affected he was by the terrible death of your father, and, of course, by Lucette’s bizarre end. Even he, the kindest of men, could not help disapproving of her Parisian sans-gêne, but he greatly admired her looks — as I think you also did — no, no, do not negate it! — because, as I have always said, her prettiness seemed to complement Ada’s, the two halves forming together something like perfect beauty, in the Platonic sense’ (that cheerless smile again). ‘Ada is certainly a "perfect beauty," a real muirninochka — even when she winces like that — but she is beautiful only in our little human terms, within the quotes of our social esthetics — right, Professor? — in the way a meal or a marriage or a little French tramp can be called perfect.’
‘Drop her a curtsey,’ gloomily remarked Van to Ada.
‘Oh, my Adochka knows how devoted I am to her’ — (opening her palm in the wake of Ada’s retreating hand). ‘I’ve shared all her troubles. How many podzharïh (tight-crotched) cowboys we’ve had to fire because they delali ey glazki (ogled her)! And how many bereavements we’ve gone through since the new century started! Her mother and my mother; the Archbishop of Ivankover and Dr Swissair of Lumbago (where mother and I reverently visited him in 1888); three distinguished uncles (whom, fortunately, I hardly knew); and your father, who, I’ve always maintained, resembled a Russian aristocrat much more than he did an Irish Baron. Incidentally, in her deathbed delirium — you don’t mind, Ada, if I divulge to him ces potins de famille? — our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other — that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?’
‘I don’t attend school any longer,’ said Van, stifling a yawn; ‘and, furthermore, in my works, I try not to "explain" anything, I merely describe.’
‘Still, you cannot deny that certain insights —’
It went on and on like that for more than an hour and Van’s clenched jaws began to ache. Finally, Ada got up, and Dorothy followed suit but continued to speak standing:
‘Tomorrow dear Aunt Beloskunski-Belokonski is coming to dinner, a delightful old spinster, who lives in a villa above Valvey. Terriblement grande dame et tout ça. Elle aime taquiner Andryusha en disant qu’un simple cultivateur comme lui n’aurait pas dû épouser la fille d’une actrice et d’un marchand de tableaux. Would you care to join us — Jean?’
Jean replied: ‘Alas, no, dear Daria Andrevna: Je dois "surveiller les kilos." Besides, I have a business dinner tomorrow.’
‘At least’ — (smiling) — ‘you could call me Dasha.’
‘I do it for Andrey,’ explained Ada, ‘actually the grand’ dame in question is a vulgar old skunk.’
‘Ada!’ uttered Dasha with a look of gentle reproof. (3.8)
Dr Swissair of Lumbago is the Antiterran counterpart of Albert Schweitzer (an Alsatian polymath, 1875-1965, who founded and sustained a hospital in French Equatorial Africa). In the 1940s Graham Greene was a British intelligence officer in Freetown, British Sierra Leone. Greene's travels and experiences in Africa profoundly shaped his writing, resulting in classic travelogues and novels (including The Heart of the Matter, 1948) set against colonial backdrops. Greene is the author of the script for the 1937 documentary short film The Future's in the Air, which highlighted commercial air travel and mail delivery by Imperial Airways. Its subject is the expansion of British imperial aviation and mail routes from Australia to England. Describing his first morning in "Ardis the Second," Van mentions the shooting script of a film that G. A. Vronsky (the movie man) and Marina want to make of Mlle Larivière’s novel Les Enfants Maudits:
The shooting script was now ready. Marina, in dorean robe and coolie hat, reclined reading in a long-chair on the patio. Her director, G. A. Vronsky, elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest, was alternately sipping his vodka-and-tonic and feeding Marina typewritten pages from a folder. On her other side, crosslegged on a mat, sat Pedro (surname unknown, stagename forgotten), a repulsively handsome, practically naked young actor, with satyr ears, slanty eyes, and lynx nostrils, whom she had brought from Mexico and was keeping at a hotel in Ladore.
Ada, lying on the edge of the swimming pool, was doing her best to make the shy dackel face the camera in a reasonably upright and decent position, while Philip Rack, an insignificant but on the whole likable young musician who in his baggy trunks looked even more dejected and awkward than in the green velvet suit he thought fit to wear for the piano lessons he gave Lucette, was trying to take a picture of the recalcitrant chop-licking animal and of the girl’s parted breasts which her half-prone position helped to disclose in the opening of her bathing suit.
If one dollied now to another group standing a few paces away under the purple garlands of the patio arch, one might take a medium shot of the young maestro’s pregnant wife in a polka-dotted dress replenishing goblets with salted almonds, and of our distinguished lady novelist resplendent in mauve flounces, mauve hat, mauve shoes, pressing a zebra vest on Lucette, who kept rejecting it with rude remarks, learned from a maid but uttered in a tone of voice just beyond deafish Mlle Larivière’s field of hearing.
Lucette remained topless. Her tight smooth skin was the color of thick peach syrup, her little crupper in willow-green shorts rolled drolly, the sun lay sleek on her russet bob and plumpish torso: it showed but a faint circumlocation of femininity, and Van, in a scowling mood, recalled with mixed feelings how much more developed her sister had been at not quite twelve years of age.
He had spent most of the day fast asleep in his room, and a long, rambling, dreary dream had repeated, in a kind of pointless parody, his strenuous ‘Casanovanic’ night with Ada and that somehow ominous morning talk with her. Now that I am writing this, after so many hollows and heights of time, I find it not easy to separate our conversation, as set down in an inevitably stylized form, and the drone of complaints, turning on sordid betrayals that obsessed young Van in his dull nightmare. Or was he dreaming now that he had been dreaming? Had a grotesque governess really written a novel entitled Les Enfants Maudits? To be filmed by frivolous dummies, now discussing its adaptation? To be made even triter than the original Book of the Fortnight, and its gurgling blurbs? Did he detest Ada as he had in his dreams? He did. (1.32)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Les Enfants Maudits: the accursed children.
du sollst etc.: Germ., you must not listen.
an ne parle pas etc.: one does not speak like that in front of a dog.
At the beginning of his story Honolulu (1921) W. Somerset Maugham (an English writer, 1874-1965) mentions the people whom he knows more intimately than so many of his friends, Alyosha, and Vronsky, and a dozen more:
The wise traveller travels only in imagination. An old Frenchman (he was really a Savoyard) once wrote a book called Voyage autour de ma Chambre. I have not read it and do not even know what it is about, but the title stimulates my fancy. In such a journey I could circumnavigate the globe. An eikon by the chimneypiece can take me to Russia with its great forests of birch and its white, domed churches. The Volga is wide, and at the end of a straggling village, in the wine-shop, bearded men in rough sheepskin coats sit drinking. I stand on the little hill from which Napoleon first saw Moscow and I look upon the vastness of the city. I will go down and see the people whom I know more intimately than so many of my friends, Alyosha, and Vronsky, and a dozen more. But my eyes fall on a piece of porcelain and I smell the acrid odours of China. I am borne in a chair along a narrow causeway between the padi fields, or else I skirt a tree-clad mountain. My bearers chat gaily as they trudge along in the bright morning and every now and then, distant and mysterious, I hear the deep sound of a monastery bell. In the streets of Peking there is a motley crowd and it scatters to allow passage to a string of camels, stepping delicately, that bring skins and strange drugs from the stony deserts of Mongolia. In England, in London, there are certain afternoons in winter when the clouds hang heavy and low and the light is so bleak that your heart sinks, but then you can look out of your window, and you see the coconut trees crowded upon the beach of a coral island. The strand is silvery and when you walk along in the sunshine it is so dazzling that you can hardly bear to look at it. Overhead the mynah birds are making a great to-do, and the surf beats ceaselessly against the reef. Those are the best journeys, the journeys that you take at your own fireside, for then you lose none of your illusions.
Honolulu is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, located in the Pacific Ocean. The airplane disaster in which Demon Veen dies happened between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region:
Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. A list of ‘leading figures’ dead in the explosion comprised the advertising manager of a department store, the acting foreman in the sheet-metal division of a facsimile corporation, a recording firm executive, the senior partner of a law firm, an architect with heavy aviation background (a first misprint here, impossible to straighten out), the vice president of an insurance corporation, another vice president, this time of a board of adjustment whatever that might be —
‘I’m hongree,’ said a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers.
‘Use bell,’ said Van, continuing in a state of odd fascination to go through the compilation of labeled lives:
— the president of a wholesale liquor-distributing firm, the manager of a turbine equipment company, a pencil manufacturer, two professors of philosophy, two newspaper reporters (with nothing more to report), the assistant controller of a wholesome liquor distribution bank (misprinted and misplaced), the assistant controller of a trust company, a president, the secretary of a printing agency —
The names of those big shots, as well as those of some eighty other men, women, and silent children who perished in blue air, were being withheld until all relatives had been reached; but the tabulatory preview of commonplace abstractions had been thought to be too imposing not to be given at once as an appetizer; and only on the following morning did Van learn that a bank president lost in the closing garble was his father. (3.7)
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 action in Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana takes place in Cuba during the reign of Batista (just before the Castro coup of 1959). Demon Veen learns of Uncle Dan's death in Havana (the capital of and largest city in Cuba):
Van’s father had just left one Santiago to view the results of an earthquake in another, when Ladore Hospital cabled that Dan was dying. He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling. He had not many interests in life.
At the airport of the moonlit white town we call Tent, and Tobakov’s sailors, who built it, called Palatka, in northern Florida, where owing to engine trouble he had to change planes, Demon made a long-distance call and received a full account of Dan’s death from the inordinately circumstantial Dr Nikulin (grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov — we can’t get rid of the lettuce). Daniel Veen’s life had been a mixture of the ready-made and the grotesque; but his death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch. (2.10)