Reading the galleys of Mr. R.’s Tralatitions, Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) ponders the name of an incidental character "Adam von Librikov:"
After a long consultation with Phil it had been decided not to do anything about the risks of defamation involved in the frankness with which R. described his complicated love life. He had "paid for it once in solitude and remorse, and now was ready to pay in hard cash any fool whom his story might hurt" (abridged and simplified citation from his latest letter). In a long chapter of a much more libertine nature (despite the grandiose wording) than the jock talk of the fashionable writers he criticized, R. showed a mother and daughter regaling their young lover with spectacular caresses on a mountain ledge above a scenic chasm and in other less perilous spots. Hugh did not know Mrs. R. intimately enough to assess her resemblance to the matron of the book (loppy breasts, flabby thighs, coon-bear grunts during copulation, and so forth); but the daughter in manner and movement, in breathless speech, in many other features with which he was not consciously familiar but which fitted the picture, was certainly Julia, although the author had made her fair-haired, and played down the Eurasian quality of her beauty. Hugh read with interest and concentration, but through the translucidity of the textual flow he still was correcting proof as some of us try to do - mending a broken letter here, indicating italics there, his eye and his spine (the true reader's main organ) collaborating rather than occluding each other. Sometimes he wondered what the phrase really meant - what exactly did "rimiform" suggest and how did a "balanic plum" look, or should he cap the 'b' and insert a 'k' after 'l'? The dictionary he used at home was less informative than the huge battered one in the office and he was now slumped by such beautiful things as "all the gold of a kew tree" and "a dappled nebris." He queried the middle word in the name of an incidental character "Adam von Librikov" because the German particle seemed to clash with the rest; or was the entire combination a sly scramble? He finally crossed out his query, but on the other hand reinstated the "Reign of Cnut" in another passage: a humbler proofreader before him had supposed that either the letters in the last word should be transposed or that it be corrected to "the Knout" - she was of Russian descent, like Armande.
Our Person, our reader, was not sure he entirely approved of R.'s luxuriant and bastard style; yet, at its best ("the gray rainbow of a fog-dogged moon"), it was diabolically evocative. He also caught himself trying to establish on the strength of fictional data at what age, in what circumstances, the writer had begun to debauch Julia: had it been in her childhood – tickling her in her bath, kissing her wet shoulders, then one day carrying her wrapped in a big towel to his lair, as delectably described in the novel? Or did he flirt with her in her first college year, when he was paid two thousand dollars for reading to an enormous gown-and-town audience some short story of his, published and republished many times before but really wonderful stuff? How good to have that type of talent! (Chapter 19)
An anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, Adam von Librikov also brings to mind Heinrich Heine's poem Adam der Erste ("Adam the First"):
Du schicktest mit dem Flammenschwert
Den himmlischen Gendarmen,
Und jagtest mich aus dem Paradies,
Ganz ohne Recht und Erbarmen!
Ich ziehe fort mit meiner Frau
Nach andren Erdenländern;
Doch daß ich genossen des Wissens Frucht,
Das kannst du nicht mehr ändern.
Du kannst nicht ändern, daß ich weiß,
Wie sehr du klein und nichtig,
Und machst du dich auch noch so sehr
Durch Tod und Donnern wichtig.
O Gott! wie erbärmlich ist doch dies
Consilium abeundi!
Das nenne ich einen Magnifikus
Der Welt, ein lumen mundi!
Vermissen werde ich nimmermehr
Die paradiesischen Räume;
Das war kein wahres Paradies -
Es gab dort verbotene Bäume.
Ich will mein volles Freiheitsrecht!
Find ich die g'ringste Beschränknis,
Verwandelt sich mir das Paradies
In Hölle und Gefängnis.
You sent me, with flaming sword,
your guard from the heavenly city,
and chased me out of Paradise
neither with right nor pity.
I’ll take my wife and we’ll move on,
to other lands be ranging;
but that I ate from the wisdom tree
is now beyond your changing.
You cannot change my knowing of
your pettiness and blunders,
no matter how you try to bluff
us men by death and thunders.
O God! How pitiful is this
decision of ejection!
How worthy of heaven’s governor!
How brilliant his perfection!
Your Garden of Eden, your Paradise,
I’ll never miss a minute;
that was no real paradise,
with a tree forbidden in it.
I ask full freedom as my right,
for freedom’s banner has risen!
The slightest limitation would turn
your Eden to hell and to prison.
and A. D. Hope’s poem Imperial Adam (1955):
Imperial Adam, naked in the dew,
Felt his brown flanks and found the rib was gone.
Puzzled he turned and saw where, two and two,
The mighty spoor of Yahweh marked the lawn.
Then he remembered through mysterious sleep
The surgeon fingers probing at the bone,
The voice so far away, so rich and deep:
"It is not good for him to live alone."
Turning once more he found Man's counterpart
In tender parody breathing at his side.
He knew her at first sight, he knew by heart
Her allegory of sense unsatisfied.
The pawpaw drooped its golden breasts above
Less generous than the honey of her flesh;
The innocent sunlight showed the place of love;
The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.
This plump gourd severed from his virile root,
She promised on the turf of Paradise
Delicious pulp of the forbidden fruit;
Sly as the snake she loosed her sinuous thighs,
And waking, smiled up at him from the grass;
Her breasts rose softly and he heard her sigh --
From all the beasts whose pleasant task it was
In Eden to increase and multiply
Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind:
He took her in his arms and there and then,
Like the clean beasts, embracing from behind,
Began in joy to found the breed of men.
Then from the spurt of seed within her broke
Her terrible and triumphant female cry,
Split upward by the sexual lightning stroke.
It was the beasts now who stood watching by:
The gravid elephant, the calving hind,
The breeding bitch, the she-ape big with young
Were the first gentle midwives of mankind;
The teeming lioness rasped her with her tongue;
The proud vicuna nuzzled her as she slept
Lax on the grass; and Adam watching too
Saw how her dumb breasts at their ripening wept,
The great pod of her belly swelled and grew,
And saw its water break, and saw, in fear,
It squaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.
In his poem Love and Poetry (unfortunately, I cannot say when it was published) A. D. Hope (an Australian poet, 1907-2000, whose first book came out in 1955, when the author was forty-eight) mentions “the tralatition of cunts:”
It pleased young Pushkin in Odessa once
To have a light of love, not quite a whore,
Who had shared Byron’s bed some years before.
Succession by the tralatition of cunts
Is, like Elijah’s mantle, rare enough;
Poets like Byron, Pushkin, rarer still;
Rarest of all, she had a name to fill
An exile’s heart even in Kishinëv:
Calypso Polychroni! When she sang
Some Turkish song, he heard from classic ground
Odysseus with his axe while her woods rang
And made his Bessarabian wastes resound;
What time his hero sailed for Greece, and there
Let fall Don Juan’s mantle unaware.
“The tralatition of cunts” brings to mind not only the title of Mr. R.’s novel, but also "Reign of Cnut" (a humbler proofreader before Hugh Person had supposed that the letters in "Cnut" should be transposed) and Cunning Stunts, an "avant garde" play that Hugh Person and Julia Moore see in a New York theater:
Julia liked tall men with strong hands and sad eyes. Hugh had met her first at a party in a New York house. A couple of days later he ran into her at Phil's place and she asked if he cared to see Cunning Stunts, an "avant garde" hit, she had two tickets for herself and her mother, but the latter had had to leave for Washington on legal business (related to the divorce proceedings as Hugh correctly surmised): would he care to escort her? In matters of art, "avant garde" means little more than conforming to some daring philistine fashion, so, when the curtain opened, Hugh was not surprised to be regaled with the sight of a naked hermit sitting on a cracked toilet in the middle of an empty stage. Julia giggled, preparing for a delectable evening. Hugh was moved to enfold in his shy paw the childish hand that had accidentally touched his kneecap. She was wonderfully pleasing to the sexual eye with her doll's face, her slanting eyes and topaz-teared earlobes, her slight form in an orange blouse and black skirt, her slender-jointed limbs, her exotically sleek hair squarely cut on the forehead. No less pleasing was the conjecture that in his Swiss retreat, Mr. R., who had bragged to an interviewer of being blessed with a goodish amount of telepathic power, was bound to experience a twinge of jealousy at the present moment of spacetime.
Rumors had been circulating that the play might be banned after its very first night. A number of rowdy young demonstrators in protest against that contingency managed to disrupt the performance which they were actually supporting. The bursting of a few festive little bombs filled the hall with bitter smoke, a brisk fire started among unwound serpentines of pink and green toilet paper, and the theater was evacuated. Julia announced she was dying of frustration and thirst. A famous bar next to the theater proved hopelessly crowded and "in the radiance of an Edenic simplification of mores" (as R. wrote in another connection) our Person took the girl to his flat. Unwisely he wondered – after a too passionate kiss in the taxi had led him to spill a few firedrops of impatience - if he would not disappoint the expectations of Julia, who according to Phil had been debauched at thirteen by R., right at the start of her mother's disastrous marriage.
The bachelor's flat Hugh rented on East Sixty-fifth had been found for him by his firm. Now it so happened that those rooms were the same in which Julia had visited one of her best young males a couple of years before. She had the good taste to say nothing, but the image of that youth, whose death in a remote war had affected her greatly, kept coming out of the bathroom or fussing with things in the fridge, and interfering so oddly with the small business in hand that she refused to be unzipped and bedded. Naturally after a decent interval the child gave in and soon found herself assisting big Hugh in his blundersome love-making." No' sooner, however, had the poking and panting run their customary course and Hugh, with a rather forlorn show of jauntiness, had gone for more drinks, than me image of bronzed and white-buttocked Jimmy Major again replaced bony reality. She noticed that the closet mirror as seen from the bed reflected exactly the same still-life arrangement, oranges in a wooden bowl, as it had in the garland-brief days of Jim, a voracious consumer of the centenarian's fruit. She was almost sorry when upon looking around she located the source of the vision in the folds of her bright things thrown over the back of a chair.
She canceled their next assignation at the last moment and soon afterwards went off to Europe. In Person's mind the affair left hardly anything more than a stain of light lipstick on tissue paper - and a romantic sense of having embraced a great writer's sweetheart. Time, however, sets to work on those ephemeral affairs, and a new flavor is added to the recollection.
We now see a torn piece of La Stampa and an empty wine bottle. A lot of construction work was going on. (Chapter 11)
Cnut the Great (also known as Canute) was King of England from 1016, King of Denmark from 1018, and King of Norway from 1028 until his death in 1035. "The Knout" (suggested by Hugh Person's humbler predecessor instead of "Cnut") seems to hint at prelesti knuta (the charms of the knout) mentioned by Pushkin in the last line of his epigram on Karamzin:
В его «Истории» изящность, простота
Доказывают нам, без всякого пристрастья,
Необходимость самовластья
И прелести кнута.
In his "History" elegance, simplicity
prove to us, without any prejudice,
the need of autocracy
and the charms of the knout.
In his poem Jetzt wohin? ("Where To Now?") Heine says that he would go to Russia but fears he will not be able to endure die Knute (the knout) there in winter:
Jetzt wohin? Der dumme Fuß
will mich gern nach Deutschland tragen;
doch es schüttelt klug das Haupt
mein Verstand und scheint zu sagen:
Zwar beendigt ist der Krieg,
doch die Kriegsgerichte blieben,
und es heißt, du habest einst
viel Erschießliches geschrieben.
Das ist wahr, unangenehm
wär mir das Erschossenwerden;
bin kein Held, es fehlen mir
die pathetischen Gebärden.
Gern würd ich nach England gehen,
wären dort nicht Kohlendämpfe
und Engländer – schon ihr Duft
gibt Erbrechen mir und Krämpfe.
Manchmal kommt mir in den Sinn
nach Amerika zu segeln,
nach dem großen Freiheitsstall,
der bewohnt von Gleichheitsflegeln –
doch es ängstet mich ein Land,
wo die Menschen Tabak käuen,
wo sie ohne König kegeln,
wo sie ohne Spuknapf speien.
Rußland, dieses schöne Reich
könnte mir vielleicht behagen,
doch im Winter könnte ich
dort die Knute nicht ertragen.
Traurig schau ich in die Höh,
wo viele tausend Sterne nicken –
aber meinen eignen Stern
kann ich nirgends dort erblicken.
Hat im güldnen Labyrinth
sich vielleicht verirrt am Himmel
wie ich selber mich verirrt
in dem irdischen Getümmel. –
Where to now? My silly foot
Hauls to Germany away;
But my reason, more astute,
Shakes its head and seems to say:
Though the war is at an end,
Military courts are not,
And you wrote, I understand,
Things for which you could be shot.
Being shot? I’d take no joy,
No, it doesn’t tempt at all.
I’m no hero, can’t deploy
All those gestures tragical.
England, yes — but all that coal,
Raising all that steam and damp:
And the English! Just their smell
Makes me vomit, gives me cramp.
Often I’ve a mind to sail
To the country of the Yanks,
Home of freedom’s cattle–stall
For egalitarian punks:
But a land is frightening
Where tobacco ‘quids’ are chewed,
Skittles played without a king,
Spittle in no basin spewed.
Russia! There’s a splendid realm,
Quite agreeable, no doubt —
Then again, in winter–time,
I could not abide the knout.
Mournfully I scan the sky:
Twinkling stars uncountable!
Nowhere to be seen is my
Private star, my personal.
In that golden maze I fear
Overhead it’s gone astray:
In the earthly tumult here
I myself have lost my way.
According to Heinrich Heine (a German poet who lived in exile in Paris), his French friends mispronounced his name "Enry Enn" and sometimes shortened it to "Rien" ("Mr. Nobody"). R. is Rien's initial.
In his interview in Strong Opinions (pp. 194-195) VN calls a Russian writer who appears in Transparent Things "a minor Dostoevski" and mentions a Swiss gambling house:
Allow me to quote a passage from my first page which baffled the wise and misled the silly: "When we concentrate on a material object . . . the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object." A number of such instances of falling through the present's "tension film" are given in the course of the book. There is the personal history of a pencil. There is also, in a later chapter, the past of a shabby room, where, instead of focusing on Person and the prostitute, the spectral observer drifts down into the middle of the previous century and sees a Russian traveler, a minor Dostoevski, occupying that room, between Swiss gambling house and Italy.
In Dostoevski's novel Igrok ("The Gambler," 1867) the croupier in casino often repeats: "faites vos jeux, rien ne va plus" ("place your bets, no more bets"). Dostoevski is the author of Besy ("The Possessed," 1872). Besy is plural of bes (the devil). The spectral narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils.