After his first meeting with Armande Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) describes her in his diary as “slender, athletic, lethal:”
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)
“Slender” seems to anticipate The Slender Slut, a title mentioned by Mr. R. during his meeting with Hugh Person in the bar of the Versex Palace:
He did do something about it, despite all that fond criticism of himself. He wrote her a note from the venerable Versex Palace where he was to have cocktails in a few minutes with our most valuable author whose best book you did not like. 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.
There was even more of it than our Person had expected on the strength of recent pictures. As he peeped through a vestibule window and watched him emerge from his car, no clarion of repute, no scream of glamour reverbed through his nervous system, which was wholly occupied with the bare-thighed girl in the sun-shot train. Yet what a grand sight R. presented - his handsome chauffeur helping the obese old boy on one side, his black-bearded secretary supporting him on the other, and two chasseurs from the hotel going through a mimicry of tentative assistance on the porch steps. The reporter in Person noted that Mr. R. wore Wallabees of a velvety cocoa shade, a lemon shirt with a lilac neck scarf, and a rumpled gray suit that seemed to have no distinction whatever - at least, to a plain American. Hullo, Person! They sat down in the lounge near the bar.
The illusory quality of the entire event was enhanced by the appearance and speech of the two characters. That monumental man with his clayey makeup and false grin, and Mr. Tamworth of the brigand's beard, seemed to be acting out a stiffly written scene for the benefit of an invisible audience from which Person, a dummy, kept turning away as if moved with his chair by Sherlock's concealed landlady, no matter how he sat or where he looked in the course of the brief but boozy interview. It was indeed all sham and waxworks as compared to the reality of Armande, whose image was stamped on the eye of his mind and shone through the show at various levels, sometimes upside down, sometimes on the teasing marge of his field of vision, but always there, always, true and thrilling. The commonplaces he and she had exchanged blazed with authenticity when placed for display against the forced guffaws in the bogus bar.
"Well, you certainly look remarkably fit," said Hugh with effusive mendacity after the drinks had been ordered.
Baron R. had coarse features, a sallow complexion, a lumpy nose with enlarged pores, shaggy bellicose eyebrows, an unerring stare, and a bulldog mouth full of bad teeth. The streak of nasty inventiveness so conspicuous in his writings also appeared in the prepared parts of his speech, as when he said, as he did now, that far from "looking fit" he felt more and more a creeping resemblance to the cinema star Reubenson who once played old gangsters in Florida-staged films; but no such actor existed.
"Anyway - how are you?" asked Hugh, pressing his disadvantage.
"To make a story quite short," replied Mr. R. (who had an exasperating way not only of trotting out hackneyed formulas in his would-be colloquial thickly accented English, but also. of getting them wrong), "I had not been feeling any too healthy, you know, during the winter. My liver, you know, was holding something against me."
He took a long sip of whiskey, and, rinsing his mouth with it in a manner Person had never yet witnessed, very slowly replaced his glass on the low table. Then, à deux with the muzzled stuff, he swallowed it and shifted to his second English style, the grand one of his most memorable characters:
"Insomnia and her sister Nocturia harry me, of course, but otherwise I am as hale as a pane of stamps. I don't think you met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth: like the English breed of black-blotched swine."
"No," said Hugh, "it does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson."
"O.K., son. And how's Phil?"
They discussed briefly R.'s publisher's vigor, charm, and acumen.
"Except that he wants me to write the wrong books. He wants - " assuming a coy throaty voice as he named the titles of a competitor's novels, also published by Phil - "he wants A Boy for Pleasure but would settle for The Slender Slut, and all I can offer him is not Tralala but the first and dullest tome of my Tralatitions."
"I assure you that he is waiting for the manuscript with utmost impatience. By the way - "
By the way, indeed! There ought to exist some rhetorical term for that twist of nonlogic. A unique view through a black weave ran by the way. By the way, I shall lose my mind if I do not get her.
" - by the way, I met a person yesterday who has just seen your stepdaughter - "
"Former stepdaughter," corrected Mr. R. "Quite a time no see, and I hope it remains so. Same stuff, son" (this to the barman).
"The occasion was rather remarkable. Here was this young woman, reading - "
"Excuse me," said the secretary warmly, and folding a note he had just scribbled, passed it to Hugh.
"Mr. R. resents all mention of Miss Moore and her mother."
And I don't blame him. But where was Hugh's famous tact? Giddy Hugh knew quite well the whole situation, having got it from Phil, not Julia, an impure but reticent little girl.
This part of our translucing is pretty boring, yet we must complete our report.
Mr. R. had discovered one day, with the help of a hired follower, that his wife Marion was having an affair with Christian Pines, son of the well-known cinema man who had directed the film Golden Windows (precariously based on the best of our author's novels). Mr. R. welcomed the situation since he was assiduously courting Julia Moore, his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, and now had plans for the future, well worthy of a sentimental lecher whom three or four marriages had not sated yet. Very soon, however, he learned from the same sleuth, who is at present dying in a hot dirty hospital on Formosa, an island, that young Pines, a handsome frog-faced playboy, soon also to die, was the lover of both mother and daughter, whom he had serviced in Cavaliere, Cal., during two summers. Hence the separation acquired more pain and plenitude than R. had expected. In the midst of all this, our Person, in his discreet little way (though actually he was half an inch taller than big R.), had happened to nibble, too, at the corner of the crowded canvas. (Chapter 10)
“Athletic” makes one think of a dozen lithe athletes mentioned by the spectral narrators of Transparent Thinks at the end of their discussion of love:
We shall now discuss love.
What powerful words, what weapons, are stored up in the mountains, at suitable spots, in special caches of the granite heart, behind painted surfaces of steel made to resemble the mottling of the adjacent rocks! But when moved to express his love, in the days of brief courtship and marriage, Hugh Person did not know where to look for words that would convince her, that would touch her, that would bring bright tears to her hard dark eyes! Per contra, something he said by chance, not planning the pang and the poetry, some trivial phrase, would prompt suddenly a hysterically happy response on the part of that dry-souled, essentially unhappy woman. Conscious attempts failed. If, as happened sometimes, at the grayest of hours, without the remotest sexual intent, he interrupted his reading to walk into her room and advance toward her on his knees and elbows like an ecstatic, undescribed, unarboreal sloth, howling his adoration, cool Armande would tell him to get up and stop playing the fool. The most ardent addresses he could think up - my princess, my sweetheart, my angel, my animal, my exquisite beast - merely exasperated her. "Why," she inquired, "can't you talk to me in a natural human manner, as a gentleman talks to a lady, why must you put on such a clownish act, why can't you be serious, and plain, and believable?" But love, he said, was anything but believable, real life was ridiculous, yokels laughed at love. He tried to kiss the hem of her skirt or bite the crease of her trouserleg, her instep, the toe of her furious foot - and as he groveled, his unmusical voice muttering maudlin, exotic, rare, common nothings and every-things, into his own ear, as it were, the simple expression of love became a kind of degenerate avian performance executed by the male alone, with no female in sight - long neck straight, then curved, beak dipped, neck straightened again. It all made him ashamed of himself but he could not stop and she could not understand, for at such times he never came up with the right word, the right waterweed.
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle. She called her mother, to her face, skotina, "brute" - not being aware, naturally, that she would never see her again after leaving with Hugh for New York and death. She liked to give carefully planned parties, and no matter how long ago this or that gracious gathering had taken place (ten months, fifteen months, or even earlier before her marriage, at her mother's house in Brussels or Witt) every party and topic remained for ever preserved in the humming frost of her tidy mind. She visualized those parties in retrospect as stars on the veil of the undulating past, and saw her guests as the extremities of her own personality: vulnerable points that had to be treated thenceforth with nostalgic respect. If Julia or June remarked casually that they had never met art critic C. (the late Charles Chamar's cousin), whereas both Julia and June had attended the party, as registered in Armande's mind, she might get very nasty, denouncing the mistake in a disdainful drawl, and adding, with belly-dance contortions: "In that case you must have forgotten also the little sandwiches from PČre Igor" (some special shop) "which you enjoyed so much." Hugh had never seen such a vile temper, such morbid amour-propre, so self-centered a nature. Julia, who had skied and skated with her, thought her a darling, but most women criticized her, and in telephone chats with one another mimicked her rather pathetic little tricks of attack and retort. If anybody started to say "Shortly before I broke my leg - " she would chime in with the triumphant: "And I broke both in my childhood!" For some occult reason she used an ironic and on the whole disagreeable tone of voice when addressing her husband in public.
She had strange whims. During their honeymoon in Stresa, on their last night there (his New York office was clamoring for his return), she decided that last nights were statistically the most dangerous ones in hotels without fire escapes, and their hotel looked indeed most combustible, in a massive old-fashioned way. For some reason or other, television producers consider that there is nothing more photogenic and universally fascinating than a good fire. Armande, viewing the Italian telenews, had been upset or feigned to be upset (she was fond of making herself interesting) by one such calamity on the local screen - little flames like slalom flaglets, huge ones like sudden demons, water squirting in intersecting curves like so many rococo fountains, and fearless men in glistening oilskin who directed all sorts of muddled operations in a fantasy of smoke and destruction. That night at Stresa she insisted they rehearse (he in his sleeping shorts, she in a Chudo-Yudo pajama) an acrobatic escape in the stormy murk by climbing down the overdecorated face of their hotel, from their fourth story to the second one, and thence to the roof of a gallery amidst tossing remonstrative trees. Hugh vainly reasoned with her. The spirited girl affirmed that as an expert rock-climber she knew it could be done by using footholds which various applied ornaments, generous juttings and little railed balconies here and there provided for one's careful descent. She ordered Hugh to follow her and train an electric torch on her from above. He was also supposed to keep close enough to help her if need be by holding her suspended, and thus increased in vertical length, while she probed the next step with a bare toe.
Hugh, despite forelimb strength, was a singularly inept anthropoid. He badly messed up the exploit. He got stuck on a ledge just under their balcony. His flashlight played erratically over a small part of the façade before slipping from his grasp. He called down from his perch entreating her to return. Underfoot a shutter opened abruptly. Hugh managed to scramble back onto his balcony, still roaring her name, though persuaded by now that she had perished. Eventually, however, she was located in a third-floor room where he found her wrapped up in a blanket smoking peacefully, supine on the bed of a stranger, who sat in a chair by the bed, reading a magazine.
Her sexual oddities perplexed and distressed Hugh. He put up with them during their trip. They became routine stuff when he returned with a difficult bride to his New York apartment. Armande decreed they regularly make love around teatime, in the living room, as upon an imaginary stage, to the steady accompaniment of casual small talk, with both performers decently clothed, he wearing his best business suit and a polka-dotted tie, she a smart black dress closed at the throat. In concession to nature, undergarments could be parted, or even undone, but only very, very discreetly, without the least break in the elegant chit-chat: impatience was pronounced unseemly, exposure, monstrous. A newspaper or coffee-table book hid such preparations as he absolutely had to conduct, wretched Hugh, and woe to him if he winced or fumbled during the actual commerce; but far worse than the awful pull of long underwear in the chaos of his pinched crotch or the crisp contact with her armor-smooth stockings was the prerequisite of light colloquy, about acquaintances, or politics, or zodiacal signs, or servants, and in the meantime, with visible hurry banned, the poignant work had to be brought surreptitiously to a convulsive end in a twisted half-sitting position on an uncomfortable little divan. Hugh's mediocre potency might not have survived the ordeal had she concealed from him more completely than she thought she did the excitement derived from the contrast between the fictitious and the factual - a contrast which after all has certain claims to artistic subtlety if we recall the customs of certain Far Eastern people, virtually halfwits in many other respects. But his chief support lay in the never deceived expectancy of the dazed ecstasy that gradually idiotized her dear features, notwithstanding her efforts to maintain the flippant patter. In a sense he preferred the parlor setting to the even less normal decor of those rare occasions when she desired him to possess her in bed, well under the bedclothes, while she telephoned, gossiping .with a female friend or hoaxing an unknown male. Our Person's capacity to condone all this, to find reasonable explanations and so forth, endears him to us, but also provokes limpid mirth, alas, at times. For example, he told himself that she refused to strip because she was shy of her tiny pouting breasts and the scar of a ski accident along her thigh. Silly Person!
Was she faithful to him throughout the months of their marriage spent in frail, lax, merry America? During their first and last winter there she went a few times to ski without him, at Aval, Quebec, or Chute, Colorado. While alone, he forbade himself to dwell in thought on the banalities of betrayal, such as holding hands with a chap or permitting him to kiss her good night. Those banalities were to him quite as excruciating to imagine as would be voluptuous intercourse. A steel door of the spirit remained securely shut as long as she was away, but no sooner had she arrived, her face brown and shiny, her figure as trim as that of an air hostess, in that blue coat with flat buttons as bright as counters of gold, than something ghastly opened up in him and a dozen lithe athletes started swarming around and prying her apart in all the motels of his mind, although actually, as we know, she had enjoyed full conjunction with only a dozen crack lovers in the course of three trips.
Nobody, least of all her mother, could understand why Armande married a rather ordinary American with a not very solid job, but we must end now our discussion of love. (Chapter 17)
“Lethal” comes from Lethe (a river that flows in the Underworld) and brings to mind ya vody Lety p’yu (I drink the waters of Lethe), a phrase used by Pushkin in his mock epic in octaves Domik v Kolomne (“A Small Cottage in Kolomna,” 1830):
Тогда блажен, кто крепко словом правит
И держит мысль на привязи свою,
Кто в сердце усыпляет или давит
Мгновенно прошипевшую змию;
Но кто болтлив, того молва прославит
Вмиг извергом... Я воды Леты пью,
Мне доктором запрещена унылость:
Оставим это, — сделайте мне милость! (XII)
In the preceding stanza of his poem Pushkin says that he would have been glad if a fire engulfed the tall house that stands on the spot where a poor widow used to live with her daughter in a small cottage:
Мне стало грустно: на высокий дом
Глядел я косо. Если в эту пору
Пожар его бы охватил кругом,
То моему б озлобленному взору
Приятно было пламя. Странным сном
Бывает сердце полно; много вздору
Приходит нам на ум, когда бредем
Одни или с товарищем вдвоем. (XI)
Priyatno bylo plamya (the flame would please me) brings to mind Paul Plam, the author of the cover of Figures in a Golden Window (Mr. R.'s novel that Armande is reading on the train). According to Hugh Person, he is unable to draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the blazing windows of a villa by Plam. The famous Paul Plam is a namesake of Pavel, the main character in Uedinyonnyi domik na Vasilievskom (“The Remote House on Vasilievski Island,” 1829), a story that Pushkin told at the Karamzins and that was published, with Pushkin’s blessings, by Vladimir Titov (who wrote under the penname Tit Kosmokratov). With "A Small Cottage in Kolomna" and Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horsman,” 1833), Pushkin's poem subtitled Peterburgskaya povest’ (a St. Petersburg Tale), “The Remote House on Vasilievski Island” forms a kind of triptych. The characters in Titov’s story include the devil in disguise of a mysterious rich man (Pavel's friend Varfolomey). When Vera (the girl with whom Pavel is in love) spurns the devil’s advances, a fire begins in her house. At the end of Titov's story the author asks:
Откуда у чертей эта охота вмешиваться в людские дела, когда никто не просит их?
Why do the devils want to interfere in human affairs, when nobody asks them to do it?
At the end of VN's novel Hugh Person dies in a hotel fire. The spectral narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils. VN’s novel is razroznennyi tom (an odd volume) from the devils’ library 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 devils’ library,
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!
In the draft Pushkin’s “Small Cottage in Kolomna” has the epigraph from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV, 279-80): Modo vir, modo femina (now a man, now a woman). According to Mr. R., his publisher wants A Boy for Pleasure but would settle for The Slender Slut, and all Mr. R. can offer him is not Tralala but the first and dullest tome of his Tralatitions.
See also the updated version of my previous post, “versipel in Pale Fire; Versex in Transparent Things.”