Describing his first physical contact with Ada, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) calls the shattal tree (the Tree of Knowledge that grows at Ardis) "that dappled tree:"
Their first free and frantic caresses had been preceded by a brief period of strange craftiness, of cringing stealth. The masked offender was Van, but her passive acceptance of the poor boy’s behavior seemed tacitly to acknowledge its disreputable and even monstrous nature. A few weeks later both were to regard that phase of his courtship with amused condescension; at the time, however, its implicit cowardice puzzled her and distressed him — mainly because he was keenly conscious of her being puzzled.
Although Van had never had the occasion to witness anything close to virginal revolt on the part of Ada — not an easily frightened or overfastidious little girl (‘Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe’), he could rely on two or three dreadful dreams to imagine her, in real, or at least responsible, life, recoiling with a wild look as she left his lust in the lurch to summon her governess or mother, or a gigantic footman (not existing in the house but killable in the dream — punchable with sharp-ringed knuckles, puncturable like a bladder of blood), after which he knew he would be expelled from Ardis —
(In Ada’s hand: I vehemently object to that ‘not overfastidious.’ It is unfair in fact, and fuzzy in fancy. Van’s marginal note: Sorry, puss; that must stay.)
— but even if he were to will himself to mock that image so as to blast it out of all consciousness, he could not feel proud of his conduct: in those actual undercover dealings of his with Ada, by doing what he did and the way he did it, with that unpublished relish, he seemed to himself to be either taking advantage of her innocence or else inducing her to conceal from him, the concealer, her awareness of what he concealed.
After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established — high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping — nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette. Henceforth, at certain moments of their otherwise indolent days, in certain recurrent circumstances of controlled madness, a secret sign was erected, a veil drawn between him and her —
(Ada: They are now practically extinct at Ardis. Van: Who? Oh, I see.)
— not to be removed until he got rid of what the necessity of dissimulation kept degrading to the level of a wretched itch.
(Och, Van!) (1.16)
"That dappled tree" brings to mind "Glory be to God for dappled things," the first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Pied Beauty:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
La Beauté ("Beauty") is a sonnet by Charles Baudelaire. At the end of his poem Les Litanies de Satan ("Litanies of Satan") Baudelaire mentions l'Arbre de Science (the Tree of Knowledge):
Prière
Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs
Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs
De l'Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence!
Fais que mon âme un jour, sous l'Arbre de Science,
Près de toi se repose, à l'heure où sur ton front
Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s'épandront!
Prayer
Glory and praise to you, O Satan, in the heights
Of Heaven where you reigned and in the depths
Of Hell where vanquished you dream in silence!
Grant that my soul may someday repose near to you
Under the Tree of Knowledge, when, over your brow,
Its branches will spread like a new Temple!
(tr. William Aggeler)
In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert pairs stippled Hopkins with shorn Baudelaire:
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
“You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own;” and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not known a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. (2.32)
A sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze is Lolita's father. Describing Ada’s eyes, Van mentions an internal parasite resembling the written word ‘deified:’
The eyes. Ada’s dark brown eyes. What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word ‘deified’? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi? Yet I have to describe yours. The iris: black brown with amber specks or spokes placed around the serious pupil in a dial arrangement of identical hours. The eyelids: sort of pleaty, v skladochku (rhyming in Russian with the diminutive of her name in the accusative case). Eye shape: languorous. The procuress in Wicklow, on that satanic night of black sleet, at the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life (Van, thank goodness, is ninety now — in Ada’s hand) dwelt with peculiar force on the ‘long eyes’ of her pathetic and adorable grandchild. How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world! (1.17)
When Van and Ada climb the shattal tree, Ada mentions l’ardeur de la canicule (the extreme heat of summer):
One afternoon they were climbing the glossy-limbed shattal tree at the bottom of the garden. Mlle Larivière and little Lucette, screened by a caprice of the coppice but just within earshot, were playing grace hoops. One glimpsed now and then, above or through the foliage, the skimming hoop passing from one unseen sending stick to another. The first cicada of the season kept trying out its instrument. A silver-and-sable skybab squirrel sat sampling a cone on the back of a bench.
Van, in blue gym suit, having worked his way up to a fork just under his agile playmate (who naturally was better acquainted with the tree’s intricate map) but not being able to see her face, betokened mute communication by taking her ankle between finger and thumb as she would have a closed butterfly. Her bare foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other, and the next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud — the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his wristwatch and a cotton frock.
(‘Remember?’
‘Yes, of course, I remember: you kissed me here, on the inside —’
‘And you started to strangle me with those devilish knees of yours —’
‘I was seeking some sort of support.’)
That might have been true, but according to a later (considerably later!) version they were still in the tree, and still glowing, when Van removed a silk thread of larva web from his lip and remarked that such negligence of attire was a form of hysteria.
‘Well,’ answered Ada, straddling her favorite limb, ‘as we all know by now, Mlle La Rivière de Diamants has nothing against a hysterical little girl’s not wearing pantalets during l’ardeur de la canicule.’
‘I refuse to share the ardor of your little canicule with an apple tree.’
‘It is really the Tree of Knowledge — this specimen was imported last summer wrapped up in brocade from the Eden National Park where Dr Krolik’s son is a ranger and breeder.’
‘Let him range and breed by all means,’ said Van (her natural history had long begun to get on his nerves), ‘but I swear no apple trees grow in Iraq.’
‘Right, but that’s not a true apple tree.’
(‘Right and wrong,’ commented Ada, again much later: ‘We did discuss the matter, but you could not have permitted yourself such vulgar repartees then. At a time when the chastest of chances allowed you to snatch, as they say, a first shy kiss! Oh, for shame. And besides, there was no National Park in Iraq eighty years ago.’ ‘True,’ said Van. ‘And no caterpillars bred on that tree in our orchard.’ ‘True, my lovely and larveless.’ Natural history was past history by that time.) (1.15)
French for "ardor," ardeur rhymes with "grandeur." God's Grandeur is a sonnet by Hopkins:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
In a letter to Robert Bridges Hopkins says that the image of "shook foil" was inspired by "tinsel," metal "leaf," and "sheet lightening," and "fork lightening." In Lolita Humbert's photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning). Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van mentions sheet lightning:
So the trivial patter went. Who does not harbor in the darkest gulf of his mind such bright recollections? Who has not squirmed and covered his face with his hands as the dazzling past leered at him? Who, in the terror and solitude of a long night —
‘What was that?’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.
‘Sheet lightning,’ suggested Van.
‘If you ask me,’ said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.’
Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. In expectation of the rumble, Marina started to count under her breath, as if she were praying or checking the pulse of a very sick person. One heartbeat was supposed to span one mile of black night between the living heart and a doomed herdsman, felled somewhere — oh, very far — on the top of a mountain. The rumble came — but sounded rather subdued. A second flash revealed the structure of the French window. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): certicle: anagram of ‘electric’.
The Antiamberians of Ladore County hint at electricity (electrum means in Latin "amber") banned on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century (1.3). In his sonnet Correspondances Baudelaire mentions l'ambre (a perfume):
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.
Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.
Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.
There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,
With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.
(tr. W. Aggeler)
Baudelaire died in 1867. In Konstantin Leontiev's 1867 novel Ispoved' muzha ("Confessions of a Husband") written in diary form the narrator asks chto takoe elektrichestvo (what is electricity):
Да, кстати о стеклах. Я люблю иногда по очереди глядеть то в жолтое, то в синее, то в красное стекло, то в обыкновенное белое, из моих окон в сад. И вот что мне приходит в голову: отчего же именно белое представляет все в настоящем виде? В жолтом стекле все веселее, как небывалым солнцем облита и озолочена зелень сада; веселье доходит до боли, до крика! В красное — все зловеще и блистательно, как зарево большого пожара, как первое действие всемiрного конца. Не знаю, в которое из двух, в синее или в лиловое, — все ужаснее и мертвее: сад, море и скалы; все угасло и оцепенело... Так ли мы видим все? И почему мы думаем, что мы именно правы? что деревья зелены, заря красна, скала черна? Никем невиданный эфир волнуется в беспредельности; его размеренные волны ударяют в нерв глаза... Но что такое нерв? Проводник электричества до ячейки? Но что такое электричество? Но что такое ячейка? И кто поклянется, что стенки ее, не шутя, уже без ткани и что в недрах ее не кипит бездонная пропасть жизни? И тем более, почему мы думаем о нравственных предметах с такой самоуверенностью? Почему человек должен жить в обществе? Почему здравый смысл в этом деле здрав а не повальная ошибка? Ведь мы смотрим на средние века как на безумие веры, а XXI век не взглянет ли на наш как на безумие положительности, здравого смысла и пользолюбия? Был же один человек (Дальтон, кажется), который не видал никогда никаких красок, и весь ландшафт вселенной был для него непокрашенной гравюрой. Почему же он не прав? Потому что не так, как все? Да и Сократ был не так, как все, и Авраама соседи, верно, считали безумным, когда он ушел от отца, чтобы развить единобожие! (the entry of May, 1850)
In Leontiev’s novel Podlipki (1861) subtitled Zapiski Vladimira Ladneva (“The Notes of Vladimir Ladnev”) Teryaev (Ladnev's neighbor) invites Ladnev to his place and mentions drevo poznaniya dobra i zla (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) that grows in his garden:
После этого Теряев стал для меня своим человеком. Были минуты, в которые я даже не мог удержаться от улыбки легкой радости, когда он входил в комнату. Но в апреле, после святой, тетушка тронулась в путь с тремя девицами. Мы с Теряевым провожали их до первой станции на почтовой тройке в телеге. Он рассказывал мне о своей деревне, которая всего шесть верст от Подлипок, о том, как он умеет жить и как он будет угощать меня самым лучшим запрещенным плодом, и прибавил:
— У меня, батюшка, там такое древо познания добра и зла, что вы, отец, целый месяц облизываться будете. Superfine.
Древо познания добра и зла напомнило мне об адамовой голове, и я невольно улыбнулся. Он принял это за Улыбку ликующего заранее воображения и, с жаром схватив меня за колено, продолжал:
— Да-с, упою вас самой квинтэссенцией! Я люблю вас. Если б не ваше бабье воспитание, так вы были бы отличный малый. Да я вас переделаю.
Я был уверен, что переделка не удастся, потому что под словами «бабье воспитание» он разумеет, вероятно, самые заветные мысли и чувства мои, которые я любил и лелеял, как самые нежные, изящные цветы моей жизни, и только по врожденной неосторожности и детской суетности выставлял напоказ, всегда с внутренним упреком и болью. Но слова «я вас люблю» действовали сильно. Соединив их с воспоминанием о Гизо и волосах, откинутых за пылающие уши, я готов был сам полюбить его. Случай спас меня. Навстречу ехал обоз.
— Сворачивай, сворачивай, чорт возьми!
Передний мужичок спит ничком на телеге. Еще мгновение — и кнут в руках Теряева. Ни одного не пропустил он так, задел хотя слегка или по крайней мере заставил откинуться в сторону. На возвратном пути я отвечал ему только да и нет; он поглядел на меня пристально и угадал в чем дело.
— А! вы не любите этого! — воскликнул он смеясь, — это правда; теперь оно скверно, но вот надо отпустить их всех и тогда можно будет тешиться. Это уже будет отношение одной свободной личности к другой... (Part Two, chapter XII)
ardilla + giants = Ardis + gitanilla
ardilla - Sp., squirrel
gitanilla - gipsy girl (on Demonia VN's Lolita is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg)