The main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972), Hugh Person dies in a hotel fire. Describing Hugh Person's death, the spectral narrators in VN's novel mention the orgasm of art that courses through the whole spine with incomparably more force than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic:
Person visited the bathroom, emptied his bladder, and thought of taking a shower, but she could come any moment now - if she came at all! He pulled on his smart turtleneck, and found a last antacid tablet in a remembered but not immediately located coat pocket (it is curious what difficulty some people have in distinguishing at one glance the right side from the left in a chaired jacket). She always said that real men had to be impeccably dressed, yet ought not to bathe too often. A male whiff from the gousset could, she said, be most attractive in certain confrontations, and only ladies and chambermaids should use deodorants. Never in his life had he waited for anybody or anything with such excitement. His brow was moist, he had the shakes, the corridor was long and silent, the few occupants of the hotel were mostly downstairs, in the lounge, chatting or playing cards, or just happily balancing on the soft brink of sleep. He bared the bed and rested his head on the pillow while the heels of his shoes were still in communication with the floor. Novices love to watch such fascinating trifles as the shallow hollow in a pillow as seen through a person's forehead, frontal bone, rippling brain, occipital bone, the back of the head, and its black hair. In the beginning of our always entrancing, sometimes terrifying, new being that kind of innocent curiosity (a child playing with wriggly refractions in brook water, an African nun in an arctic convent touching with delight the fragile clock of her first dandelion) is not unusual, especially if a person and the shadows of related matter are being followed from youth to death. Person, this person, was on the imagined brink of imagined bliss when Armande's footfalls approached - striking out both "imagined" in the proof's margin (never too wide for corrections and queries!). This is where the orgasm of art courses through the whole spine with incomparably more force than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic. (Chapter 26)
Hugh Person first meets Armande on July 29, 1965, the day after her twenty-third birthday (on which Julia gave her a copy of Mr. R.’s novel Figures in the Golden Window). Armande's zodiac sign is Leo. Aries, Leo and Sagittarius are the zodiac signs of fire. “You cannot put a Fire out” is a poem by Emily Dickinson (whose zodiac sign was Sagittarius):
You cannot put a Fire out—
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan—
Upon the slowest Night—
You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor—
A Flood in the poem's second stanza brings to mind the disastrous Neva flood of 1824 described by Pushkin in his poem Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman,” 1833). With Domik v Kolomne (“A Small Cottage in Kolomna,” 1830) and Uedinyonnyi domik na Vasilievskom (“The Remote House on Vasilievski Island,” 1829), a gothic story that Pushkin told at the Karamzins and that was taken down and published, with Pushkin’s blessings, by Vladimir Titov (who wrote under the penname Tit Kosmokratov), “The Bronze Horsman” (subtitled Peterburgskaya povest’, "A St. Petersburg Tale") forms a kind of triptych. The characters in Titov’s story include the devil in disguise of a mysterious rich man. When Vera (a young girl with whom Pavel, the devil's inexperienced young friend, is in love) spurns the devil’s advances, a fire begins in her house. At the end of the story the author asks:
Откуда у чертей эта охота вмешиваться в людские дела, когда никто не просит их?
Why do the devils want to intervene in human affairs, when nobody asks them to do it?
The transparent narrators in VN’s novel seem to be the devils. At the beginning of his last letter Mr. R. tells Phil (Mr. R.’s publisher) that he is leaving him for another even greater Publisher:
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. (Chapter 21)
Judging by the gross mistake in the novel's last sentence ("Easy, you know, does it, son"), after his death Mr. R. went straight to Hell (and became a devil himself) where he is misprinted by devils.
Phil gets Mr. R.’s letter on the day of its author’s death:
Note added by the recipient:
Received on the day of the writer's death. File under Repos - R. (Chapter 21)
In her poem A Coffin Emily Dickinson mentions small Repose:
A Coffin — is a small Domain,
Yet able to contain
A Citizen of Paradise
In it diminished Plane.
A Grave — is a restricted Breadth —
Yet ampler than the Sun —
And all the Seas He populates
And Lands He looks upon
To Him who on its small Repose
Bestows a single Friend —
Circumference without Relief —
Or Estimate — or End —
On the other hand, Repos in the recipient’s note brings to mind pokoy (repose) in Pushkin’s poem Pora, moy drug, pora! Pokoya serdtse prosit… (“'Tis time, my dear, 'tis time. The heart demands repose,” 1835):
Пора, мой друг, пора! покоя сердце просит —
Летят за днями дни, и каждый час уносит
Частичку бытия, а мы с тобой вдвоём
Предполагаем жить, и глядь — как раз умрём.
На свете счастья нет, но есть покой и воля.
Давно завидная мечтается мне доля —
Давно, усталый раб, замыслил я побег
В обитель дальную трудов и чистых нег.
'Tis time, my dear, 'tis time. The heart demands repose.
Day after day flits by, and with each hour there goes
A little bit of life; but meanwhile you and I
Together plan to dwell… yet lo! 'tis then we die.
There is no bliss on earth: there is peace and freedom, though.
An enviable lot I long have yearned to know:
Long have I, weary slave, been contemplating flight
To a remote abode of work and pure delight.
(VN’s translation)
“There is no bliss on earth” in the poem’s second stanza brings to mind “the imagined brink of imagined bliss” mentioned by the ghostly narrator when he describes Hugh Person’s death. An African nun in an arctic convent mentioned a little earlier in the same paragraph makes one think of Pushkin (the poet who had African blood) and a remote abode of work and pure delight in the above poem’s last line.
A Drawer in Emily Dickinson's poem "You cannot put a Fire out" brings to mind a top-secret drawer mentioned by Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette in VN's novel Ada (1969):
‘Do you remember Grandmother’s scrutoir between the globe and the gueridon? In the library?’
‘I don’t even know what a scrutoir is; and I do not visualize the gueridon.’
‘But you remember the globe?’
Dusty Tartary with Cinderella’s finger rubbing the place where the invader would fall.
‘Yes, I do: and a kind of stand with golden dragons painted all over it.’
‘That’s what I meant by "gueridon." It was really a Chinese stand japanned in red lacquer, and the scrutoir stood in between.’
‘China or Japan? Make up your mind. And I still don’t know how your inscrutable looks. I mean, looked in 1884 or 1888.’
Scrutoir. Almost as bad as the other with her Blemolopias and Molospermas.
‘Van, Vanichka, we are straying from the main point. The point is that the writing desk or if you like, secretaire —’
‘I hate both, but it stood at the opposite end of the black divan.’
Now mentioned for the first time — though both had been tacitly using it as an orientator or as a right hand painted on a transparent signboard that a philosopher’s orbitless eye, a peeled hard-boiled egg cruising free, but sensing which of its ends is proximal to an imaginary nose, sees hanging in infinite space; whereupon, with Germanic grace, the free eye sails around the glass sign and sees a left hand shining through — that’s the solution! (Bernard said six-thirty but I may be a little late.) The mental in Van always rimmed the sensuous: unforgettable, roughish, villous, Villaviciosa velour.
‘Van, you are deliberately sidetracking the issue —’
‘One can’t do that with an issue.’
‘— because at the other end, at the heel end of the Vaniada divan — remember? — there was only the closet in which you two locked me up at least ten times.’
‘Nu uzh i desyat’ (exaggeration). Once — and never more. It had a keyless hole as big as Kant’s eye. Kant was famous for his cucumicolor iris.’
‘Well, that secretaire,’ continued Lucette, considering her left shoe, her very chic patent-leather Glass shoe, as she crossed her lovely legs, ‘that secretaire enclosed a folded card table and a top-secret drawer. And you thought, I think, it was crammed with our grandmother’s love letters, written when she was twelve or thirteen. And our Ada knew, oh, she knew, the drawer was there but she had forgotten how to release the orgasm or whatever it is called in card tables and bureaus.’
Whatever it is called.
‘She and I challenged you to find the secret chuvstvilishche (sensorium) and make it work. It was the summer Belle sprained her backside, and we were left to our own devices, which had long lost the particule in your case and Ada’s, but were touchingly pure in mine. You groped around, and felt, and felt for the little organ, which turned out to be a yielding roundlet in the rosewood under the felt you felt — I mean, under the felt you were feeling: it was a felted thumb spring, and Ada laughed as the drawer shot out.’
‘And it was empty,’ said Van.
‘Not quite. It contained a minuscule red pawn that high’ (showing its barleycorn-size with her finger — above what? Above Van’s wrist). ‘I kept it for luck; I must still have it somewhere. Anyway, the entire incident pre-emblematized, to quote my Professor of Ornament, the depravation of your poor Lucette at fourteen in Arizona. Belle had returned to Canady, because Vronsky had defigured The Doomed Children; her successor had eloped with Demon; papa was in the East, maman hardly ever came home before dawn, the maids joined their lovers at star-rise, and I hated to sleep alone in the corner room assigned to me, even if I did not put out the pink night-light of porcelain with the transparency picture of a lost lamb, because I was afraid of the cougars and snakes’ [quite possibly, this is not remembered speech but an extract from her letter or letters. Ed.], ‘whose cries and rattlings Ada imitated admirably, and, I think, designedly, in the desert’s darkness under my first floor window. Well [here, it would seem, taped speech is re-turned-on], to make a short story sort of longish —’
Old Countess de Prey’s phrase in praise of a lame mare in her stables in 1884, thence passed on to her son, who passed it on to his girl who passed it on to her half-sister. Thus instantly reconstructed by Van sitting with tented hands in a red-plush chair.
‘— I took my pillow to Ada’s bedroom where a similar night-light transparency thing showed a blond-bearded faddist in a toweling robe embracing the found lamb. The night was oven-hot and we were stark naked except for a bit of sticking plaster where a doctor had stroked and pricked my arm, and she was a dream of white and black beauty, pour cogner une fraise, touched with fraise in four places, a symmetrical queen of hearts.’
Next moment they grappled and had such delicious fun that they knew they would be doing it always together, for hygienic purposes, when boyless and boiling. (2.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): coigner etc.: pun (‘to coin a phrase’).
fraise: strawberry red.
According to Lucette, Ada had forgotten how to release the orgasm or whatever it is called in card tables and bureaus. A minuscule red pawn that the drawer contains brings to mind a pencil that Hugh Person finds in the middle drawer of an old desk in his hotel room:
In his search for a commode to store his belongings Hugh Person, a tidy man, noticed that the middle drawer of an old desk relegated to a dark corner of the room, and supporting there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly by the lodger or servant (actually neither) who had been the last to check if it was empty (nobody had). My good Hugh tried to woggle it in; at first it refused to budge; then, in response to the antagony of a chance tug (which could not help profiting from the cumulative energy of several jogs) it shot out and spilled a pencil. This he briefly considered before putting it back.
It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never found. Now comes the act of attention.
In his shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath but one should be above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors). On the whole, it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned make. Going back a number of seasons (not as far, though, as Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction, we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is placed in a metal cylinder which has a blue eye, a sapphire with a hole drilled in it, and through this the caviar is forced. It issues in one continuous appetizing rodlet (watch for our little friend!), which looks as if it retained the shape of an earthworm's digestive tract (but watch, watch, do not be deflected!). It is now being cut into the lengths required for these particular pencils (we glimpse the cutter, old Elias Borrowdale, and are about to mouse up his forearm on a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in our haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.
Now let us not lose our precious bit of lead while we prepare the wood. Here's the tree! This particular pine! It is cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark. We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here's the board that will yield the integument of the pencil in the shallow drawer (still not closed). We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes.
Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us! But he won't, oh no. (Chapter 3)