When Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) first meets Armande, she has a book, the paperback edition of Mr. R.’s novel Figures in a Golden Window, in her lap:
He made Armande's acquaintance in a Swiss railway carriage one dazzling afternoon between Thur and Versex on the eve of his meeting with Mr. R. He had boarded a slow train by mistake; she had chosen one that would stop at the small station from which a bus line went up to Witt, where her mother owned a chalet. Armande and Hugh had simultaneously settled in two window seats facing each other on the lake side of the coach. An American family occupied the corresponding four-seat side across the aisle. Hugh unfolded the Journal de Genève.
Oh, she was pretty and would have been exquisitely so had her lips been fuller. She had dark eyes, fair hair, a honey-hued skin. Twin dimples of the crescentic type came down her tanned cheeks on the sides of her mournful mouth. She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse. A book lay in her lap under her black-gloved hands. He thought, he recognized that flame-and-soot paperback. The mechanism of their first acquaintance was ideally banal.
They exchanged a glance of urbane disapproval as the three American kids began pulling sweaters and pants out of a suitcase in savage search for something stupidly left behind (a heap of comics - by now taken care of, with the used towels, by a brisk hotel maid). One of the two adults, catching Armande's cold eye, responded with a look of good-natured helplessness. The conductor came for the tickets.
Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he had been right: it was indeed the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden Window.
"One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.
She considered the book in her lap as if seeking in it some explanation of his remark. Her skirt was very short.
"I mean," he said, "I work for that particular publisher. For the American publisher of the hard-cover edition. Do you like it?"
She answered in fluent but artificial English that she detested surrealistic novels of the poetic sort. She demanded hard realistic stuff reflecting our age. She liked books about Violence and Oriental Wisdom. Did it get better farther on?
"Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa, when the little girl, the narrator's daughter - "
"June."
"Yes. June sets her new dollhouse on fire and the whole villa burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it is all rather symbolic, in the grand manner, and, well, curiously tender at the same time, as the blurb says, or at least said, in our first edition. That cover is by the famous Paul Plam."
She would finish it, of course, no matter how boring, because every task in life should be brought to an end like completing that road above Witt, where they had a house, a chalet de luxe, but had to trudge up to the Drakonita cableway until that new road had been finished. The Burning Window or whatever it was called had been given her only the day before, on her twenty-third birthday, by the author's stepdaughter whom he probably -
"Julia."
Yes. Julia and she had both taught in the winter at a school for foreign young ladies in the Tessin. Julia's stepfather had just divorced her mother whom he had treated in an abominable fashion. What had they taught? Oh, posture, rhythmics - things like that.
Hugh and the new, irresistible person had by now switched to French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English. Asked to guess her nationality he suggested Danish or Dutch. No, her father's family came from Belgium, he was an architect who got killed last summer while supervising the demolition of a famous hotel in a defunct spa; and her mother was born in Russia, in a very noble milieu, but of course completely ruined by the revolution. Did he like his job? Would he mind pulling that dark blind down a little? The low sun's funeral. Was that a proverb, she queried? No, he had just made it up. (Chapter 9)
Hugh Person asks Armande’s permission to call on her on Wednesday, the fourth:
“Would you permit me to call on you, say Wednesday, the fourth? Because I shall be by then at the Ascot Hotel in your Witt, where I am told there is some excellent skiing even in summer. The main object of my stay here, on the other hand, is to find out when the old rascal's current book will be finished. It is queer to recall how keenly only the day before yesterday I had looked forward to seeing the great man at last in the flesh.” (Chapter 10)
On the next day, Thursday, Hugh Person meets Armande and Julia in Witt and Armande tells Julia that there will not be much snow in Moscow in August:
Armande informed Percy that Julia had come all the way from Geneva to consult her about the translation of a number of phrases with which she, Julia, who was going tomorrow to Moscow, desired to "impress" her Russian friends.
Percy, here, worked for her stepfather.
"My former stepfather, thank Heavens," said Julia. "By the way, Percy, if that's your nom de voyage, perhaps you may help. As she explained, I want to dazzle some people in Moscow, who promised me the company of a famous young Russian poet. Armande has supplied me with a number of darling words, but we got stuck at - " (taking a slip of paper from her bag) - "I want to know how to say:
'What a cute little church, what a big snowdrift.' You see we do it first into French and she thinks 'snowdrift' is rafale de neige, but I'm sure it can't be rafale in French and rafalovich in Russian, or whatever they call a snowstorm."
"The word you want," said our Person, "is congère, feminine gender, I learned it from my mother."
"Then it's sugrob in Russian," said Armande and added dryly: "Only there won't be much snow there in August." (Chapter 13)
In 1965 (the year of Hugh Person’s second visit to Switzerland) August 4 was Wednesday. It seems that Hugh Person makes Armande's acquaintance on Thursday, July 29, 1965. The previous day, July 28, 1965 (also Wednesday), was Armande's twenty-third birthday. At the end of his narrative poem Graf Nulin (“Count Null,” 1825) Pushkin mentions Lidin (Verin in the draft), a landowner of twenty-three:
Смеялся Лидин, их сосед,
Помещик двадцати трёх лет.
It was their neighbor Lidin,
a landowner of twenty-three, who laughed.
In Pushkin's poem Natalia Pavlovna, "a Russian Lucrece, who boxes the ears of a transient Tarquin (while quietly cuckolding her husband, a landed gentleman, with his twenty-three-year-old neighbor)," is reading the fourth volume of a sentimental novel, The Love of Eliza and Arman, or the Correspondence of Two Families:
Она сидит перед окном;
Пред ней открыт четвёртый том
Сентиментального романа:
Любовь Элизы и Армана,
Иль переписка двух семей. —
Роман классической, старинный,
Отменно длинный, длинный, длинный,
Нравоучительный и чинный,
Без романтических затей.
She sits beside the window;
In front of her the fourth volume
of a sentimental novel is open:
The Love of Eliza and Arman,
or the Correspondence of Two Families.
A classical, old novel,
perfectly long, long, long,
moralistic and proper,
without romantic embellishments.
In a letter of March 7 (?), 1826, to Pletnyov (to whom Eugene Onegin is dedicated) Pushkin calls his “Count Null” povest’ v rode Beppo (“a tale in the genre of Beppo”):
Знаешь ли? уж если печатать что, так возьмёмся за Цыганов. Надеюсь, что брат по крайней мере их перепишет ― а ты пришли рукопись ко мне ― я доставлю предисловие и м. б. примечания ― и с рук долой. А то всякой раз, как я об них подумаю или прочту слово в журн., у меня кровь портится ― в собрании же моих поэм для новинки поместим мы другую повесть в роде Верро, которая у меня в запасе.
Beppo: A Venetian Story (1817) is a poem in octaves by Lord Byron. Describing his first meeting with Armande in his diary, Hugh Person mentions Byron:
In a diary he kept in fits and starts Hugh wrote that night in Versex:
"Spoke to a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a romantic tumult never felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule aurait juré avec la dernière syllabe de mon prénom. I believe Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu. Charmingly sophisticated, yet marvelously naive. Chalet above Witt built by father. If you find yourself in those parages. Wished to know if I liked my job. My job! I replied; "Ask me what I can do, not what I do, lovely girl, lovely wake of the sun through semitransparent black fabric. I can commit to memory a whole page of the directory in three minutes flat but am incapable of remembering my own telephone number. I can compose patches of poetry as strange and new as you are, or as anything a person may write three hundred years hence, but I have never published one scrap of verse except some juvenile nonsense at college. I have evolved on the playing courts of my father's school a devastating return of service - a cut clinging drive - but am out of breath after one game. Using ink and aquarelle I can paint a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence with all the mountains of paradise reflected therein, but am unable to draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the blazing windows of a villa by Plam. I have taught French in American schools but have never been able to get rid of my mother's Canadian accent, though I hear it clearly when I whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Déjanire that I may mount sur mon bûcher. I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree. I possess a doctor's degree in philosophy, but have no German. I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius.' By a coincidence worthy of that other genius, his stepdaughter had given her the book she was reading. Julia Moore has no doubt forgotten that I possessed her a couple of years ago. Both mother and daughter are intense travelers. They have visited Cuba and China, and such-like dreary, primitive spots, and speak with fond criticism of the many charming and odd people they made friends with there. Parlez-moi de son stepfather. Is he très fasciste? Could not understand why I called Mrs. R.'s left-wingism a commonplace bourgeois vogue. Mais au contraire, she and her daughter adore radicals! Well, I said, Mr. R., lui, is immune to politics. My darling thought that was the trouble with him. Toffee-cream neck with a tiny gold cross and a grain de beauté. Slender, athletic, lethal!" (Chapter 9)
As has been pointed out before, chamar means "fly whisk; a fan of feathers used in the East Indies as one of the insignias of royalty." In his poem Opyat’ belila, sepiya i sazha (“Again the whiting, sepia and soot," 1921) G. Ivanov mentions the sunset's peacock fan (pavliniy veyer):
Опять белила, сепия и сажа,
И трубы гениев гремят в упор.
Опять архитектурного пейзажа
Стеснённый раскрывается простор!
Горбатый мост прорезали лебедки,
Павлиний веер распустил закат,
И, лёгкие, как парусные лодки,
Над куполами облака летят,
На плоские ступени отблеск лунный
Отбросил зарево. И, присмирев,
На чёрном цоколе свой шар чугунный
Тяжёлой лапою сжимает лев.
In his poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron, o, bez sozhalen'ya ("Like Byron to Greece, oh, without regret," 1927) G. Ivanov mentions blednyi ogon’ (pale fire):
Как в Грецию Байрон, о, без сожаленья,
Сквозь звёзды и розы, и тьму,
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья:
- И ты не поможешь ему.
Сквозь звёзды, которые снятся влюблённым,
И небо, где нет ничего,
В холодную полночь - платком надушённым.
- И ты не удержишь его.
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья,
Как Байрон за бледным огнём,
Сквозь полночь и розы, о, без сожаленья:
- И ты позабудешь о нём.
In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls his poem “this transparent thingum:”
Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) (ll. 957-962)
The name Nulin, of the Count in Pushkin's poem, comes from nul' (zero, null, nil, nought). In his last letter to his publisher Mr. R. (the author of Figures in a Golden Window) mentions Euler, the mathematician who called zero the perfect number:
Dear Phil,
This, no doubt, is my last letter to you. I am leaving you. I am leaving you for another even greater Publisher. In that House I shall be proofread by cherubim - or misprinted by devils, depending on the department my poor soul is assigned to. So adieu, dear friend, and may your heir auction this off most profitably.
Its holographical nature is explained by the fact that I prefer it not to be read by Tom Tam or one of his boy typists. I am mortally sick after a botched operation in the only private room of a Bolognese hospital. The kind young nurse who will mail it has told me with dreadful carving gestures something I paid her for as generously as I would her favors if I still were a man. Actually the favors of death knowledge are infinitely more precious than those of love. According to my almond-eyed little spy, the great surgeon, may his own liver rot, lied to me when he declared yesterday with a deathhead's grin that the operazione had been perfetta. Well, it had been so in the sense Euler called zero the perfect number. Actually, they ripped me open, cast one horrified look at my decayed fegato, and without touching it sewed me up again. Actually, they ripped me open, cast one horrified look at my decayed fegato, and without touching it sewed me up again. I shall not bother you with the Tamworth problem. You should have seen the smug expression of the oblong fellow's bearded lips when he visited me this morning. As you know - as everybody, even Marion, knows - he gnawed his way into all my affairs, crawling into every cranny, collecting every German-accented word of mine, so that now he can boswell the dead man just as he had bossed very well the living one. I am also writing my and your lawyer about the measures I would like to be taken after my departure in order to thwart Tamworth at every turn of his labyrinthian plans. (Chapter 21)
Judging by the gross mistake in the novel's last sentence ("Easy, you know, does it, son"), Mr. R. went straight to Hell (and became a devil himself) where he is misprinted by devils. The transparent narrators in VN’s novel seem to be the devils. “The Devil – had he fidelity” is a poem by Emily Dickinson:
The Devil - had he fidelity
Would be the best friend -
Because he has ability -
But Devils cannot mend -
Perfidy is the virtue
That would but he resign
The Devil - without question
Were thoroughly divine.
VN’s novel seems to be an odd volume from the bibliotheca of the devils mentioned by Pushkin in Chapter Four (XXX: 1-2) of Eugene Onegin:
Но вы, разрозненные томы
Из библиотеки чертей,
Великолепные альбомы,
Мученье модных рифмачей,
Вы, украшенные проворно
Толстого кистью чудотворной
Иль Баратынского пером,
Пускай сожжёт вас божий гром!
Когда блистательная дама
Мне свой in-quarto подаёт,
И дрожь и злость меня берёт,
И шевелится эпиграмма
Во глубине моей души,
А мадригалы им пиши!
But you, odd volumes
from the bibliotheca of the devils,
the gorgeous albums,
the rack of fashionable rhymesters;
you, nimbly ornamented
by Tolstoy's wonder-working brush,
or Baratïnski's pen,
let the Lord's levin burn you!
Whenever her in-quarto a resplendent lady
proffers to me,
a tremor and a waspishness possess me,
and at the bottom of my soul
there stirs an epigram —
but madrigals you have to write for them!