At the Goodson airport Van tells Demon (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) that he is in for another spell of surgery and calls the surgeons "butchers:"
At the Goodson Airport, in one of the gilt-framed mirrors of its old-fashioned waiting room, Van glimpsed the silk hat of his father who sat awaiting him in an armchair of imitation marblewood, behind a newspaper that said in reversed characters: ‘Crimea Capitulates.’ At the same moment a raincoated man with a pleasant, somewhat porcine, pink face accosted Van. He represented a famous international agency, known as the VPL, which handled Very Private Letters. After a first flash of surprise, Van reflected that Ada Veen, a recent mistress of his, could not have chosen a smarter (in all senses of the word) way of conveying to him a message whose fantastically priced, and prized, process of transmission insured an absoluteness of secrecy which neither torture nor mesmerism had been able to break down in the evil days of 1859. It was rumored that even Gamaliel on his (no longer frequent, alas) trips to Paris, and King Victor during his still fairly regular visits to Cuba or Hecuba, and, of course, robust Lord Goal, Viceroy of France, when enjoying his randonnies all over Canady, preferred the phenomenally discreet, and in fact rather creepy, infallibility of the VPL organization to such official facilities as sexually starved potentates have at their disposal for deceiving their wives. The present messenger called himself James Jones, a formula whose complete lack of connotation made an ideal pseudonym despite its happening to be his real name. A flurry and flapping had started in the mirror but Van declined to act hastily. In order to gain time (for, on being shown Ada’s crest on a separate card, he felt he had to decide whether or not to accept her letter), he closely examined the badge resembling an ace of hearts which J.J. displayed with pardonable pride. He requested Van to open the letter, satisfy himself of its authenticity, and sign the card that then went back into some secret pit or pouch within the young detective’s attire or anatomy. Cries of welcome and impatience from Van’s father (wearing for the flight to France a scarlet-silk-lined black cape) finally caused Van to interrupt his colloquy with James and pocket the letter (which he read a few minutes later in the lavatory before boarding the airliner).
‘Stocks,’ said Demon, ‘are on the zoom. Our territorial triumphs, et cetera. An American governor, my friend Bessborodko, is to be installed in Bessarabia, and a British one, Armborough, will rule Armenia. I saw you enlaced with your little Countess near the parking lot. If you marry her I will disinherit you. They’re quite a notch below our set.’
‘In a couple of years,’ said Van, ‘I’ll slide into my own little millions’ (meaning the fortune Aqua had left him). ‘But you needn’t worry, sir, we have interrupted our affair for the time being — till the next time I return to live in her girlinière’ (Canady slang).
Demon, flaunting his flair, desired to be told if Van or his poule had got into trouble with the police (nodding toward Jim or John who having some other delivery to make sat glancing through Crime Copulate Bessarmenia).
‘Poule,’ replied Van with the evasive taciturnity of the Roman rabbi shielding Barabbas.
‘Why gray?’ asked Demon, alluding to Van’s overcoat. ‘Why that military cut? It’s too late to enlist.’
‘I couldn’t — my draft board would turn me down anyway.’
‘How’s the wound?’
‘Komsi-komsa. It now appears that the Kalugano surgeon messed up his job. The rip seam has grown red and raw, without any reason, and there’s a lump in my armpit. I’m in for another spell of surgery — this time in London, where butchers carve so much better. Where’s the mestechko here? Oh, I see it. Cute (a gentian painted on one door, a lady fern on the other: have to go to the herbarium).’ (2.1)
Darkbloom (“Notes to Ada”): poule: tart.
komsi etc.: comme-ci comme-ça in Russ. mispronunciation: so-so.
mestechko: Russ., little place.
In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What You Will (Act Five, scene 1) Sir Toby Belch mentions Dick surgeon:
DUKE ORSINO
How now, gentleman! how is't with you?
SIR TOBY BELCH
That's all one: has hurt me, and there's the end
on't. Sot, didst see Dick surgeon, sot?
CLOWN
O, he's drunk, Sir Toby, an hour agone; his eyes
were set at eight i' the morning.
The characters in Shakespeare's history play Henry VI, Part 2 include Dick the Butcher. In Shakespeare's play Dick the Butcher says:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. (Act IV, scene 2).
At Chose (Van's and Demon's English University) Van plays poker with Dick C. (a cardsharp) and the French twins:
He now constatait avec plaisir, as he told his victims, that only a few hundred pounds separated him from the shoreline of the minimal sum he needed to appease his most ruthless creditor. whereupon he went on fleecing poor Jean and Jacques with reckless haste, and then found himself with three honest aces (dealt to him lovingly by Van) against Van’s nimbly mustered four nines. This was followed by a good bluff against a better one; and with Van’s generously slipping the desperately flashing and twinkling young lord good but not good enough hands, the latter’s martyrdom came to a sudden end (London tailors wringing their hands in the fog, and a moneylender, the famous St Priest of Chose, asking for an appointment with Dick’s father). After the heaviest betting Van had yet seen, Jacques showed a forlorn couleur (as he called it in a dying man’s whisper) and Dick surrendered with a straight flush to his tormentor’s royal one. Van, who up to then had had no trouble whatever in concealing his delicate maneuvers from Dick’s silly lens, now had the pleasure of seeing him glimpse the second joker palmed in his, Van’s, hand as he swept up and clasped to his bosom the ‘rainbow ivory’ — Plunkett was full of poetry. The twins put on their ties and coats and said they had to quit. (1.28)
Darkbloom (“Notes to Ada”): constatait etc.: noted with pleasure.
A moneylender, the famous St Priest of Chose brings to mind Shylock, a Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Dick is a diminutive of Richard. Dr Fitzbishop (the Kalugano surgeon who messed up his job) and James Jones (the VPL messanger who hands Van a letter from Ada) seem to hint at Richard FitzJames (died 1522), an English academic and administrator who became successively Bishop of Rochester, Bishop of Chichester and Bishop of London. Richard II and Richard III are history plays by Shakespeare. According to Ada, Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) studied history at Chose:
He greeted the dawn of a placid and prosperous century (more than half of which Ada and I have now seen) with the beginning of his second philosophic fable, a ‘denunciation of space’ (never to be completed, but forming in rear vision, a preface to his Texture of Time). Part of that treatise, a rather mannered affair, but nasty and sound, appeared in the first issue (January, 1904) of a now famous American monthly, The Artisan, and a comment on the excerpt is preserved in one of the tragically formal letters (all destroyed save this one) that his sister sent him by public post now and then. Somehow, after the interchange occasioned by Lucette’s death such nonclandestine correspondence had been established with the tacit sanction of Demon:
And o’er the summits of the Tacit
He, banned from Paradise, flew on:
Beneath him, like a brilliant’s facet,
Mount Peck with snows eternal shone.
It would seem indeed that continued ignorance of each other’s existence might have looked more suspicious than the following sort of note:
Agavia Ranch
February 5, 1905
I have just read Reflections in Sidra, by Ivan Veen, and I regard it as a grand piece, dear Professor. The ‘lost shafts of destiny’ and other poetical touches reminded me of the two or three times you had tea and muffins at our place in the country about twenty years ago. I was, you remember (presumptuous phrase!), a petite fille modèle practicing archery near a vase and a parapet and you were a shy schoolboy (with whom, as my mother guessed, I may have been a wee bit in love!), who dutifully picked up the arrows I lost in the lost shrubbery of the lost castle of poor Lucette’s and happy, happy Adette’s childhood, now a ‘Home for Blind Blacks’ — both my mother and L., I’m sure, would have backed Dasha’s advice to turn it over to her Sect. Dasha, my sister-in-law (you must meet her soon, yes, yes, yes, she’s dreamy and lovely, and lots more intelligent than I), who showed me your piece, asks me to add she hopes to ‘renew’ your acquaintance — maybe in Switzerland, at the Bellevue in Mont Roux, in October. I think you once met pretty Miss ‘Kim’ Blackrent, well, that’s exactly dear Dasha’s type. She is very good at perceiving and pursuing originality and all kinds of studies which I can’t even name! She finished Chose (where she read History — our Lucette used to call it ‘Sale Histoire,’ so sad and funny!). For her you’re le beau ténébreux, because once upon a time, once upon libellula wings, not long before my marriage, she attended — I mean at that time, I’m stuck in my ‘turnstyle’ — one of your public lectures on dreams, after which she went up to you with her latest little nightmare all typed out and neatly clipped together, and you scowled darkly and refused to take it. Well, she’s been after Uncle Dementiy to have him admonish le beau ténébreux to come to Mont Roux Bellevue Hotel, in October, around the seventeenth, I guess, and he only laughs and says it’s up to Dashenka and me to arrange matters.
So ‘congs’ again, dear Ivan! You are, we both think, a marvelous, inimitable artist who should also ‘only laugh,’ if cretinic critics, especially lower-upper-middle-class Englishmen, accuse his turnstyle of being ‘coy’ and ‘arch,’ much as an American farmer finds the parson ‘peculiar’ because he knows Greek.
P.S.
Dushevno klanyayus’ (‘am souledly bowing’, an incorrect and vulgar construction evoking the image of a ‘bowing soul’) nashemu zaochno dorogomu professoru (‘to our "unsight-unseen" dear professor’), o kotorom mnogo slïshal (about whom have heard much) ot dobrago Dementiya Dedalovicha i sestritsï (from good Demon and my sister).
S uvazheniem (with respect),
Andrey Vaynlender (3.7)
Darkbloom (“Notes to Ada”): And o’er the summits of the Tacit etc.: parody of four lines in Lermontov’s The Demon (see also p.115).
le beau ténébreux: wrapt in Byronic gloom.
In March 1905 (a month after Ada wrote her letter to Van) Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (Van reads about the catastrophe in which his father died in a newspaper). Describing his last meeting with Father, Van mentions two lawyers:
The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon’s new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yam extolling the Roman faith. The poem was but the twinkle in an owl’s eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced ‘seminal’ by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 (‘Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,’ ‘Sween as poet and person,’ ‘Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography’) both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman’s control of background adjustment — or Demon’s edict.
The table talk dealt mainly with business matters. Demon had recently bought a small, perfectly round Pacific island, with a pink house on a green bluff and a sand beach like a frill (as seen from the air), and now wished to sell the precious little palazzo in East Manhattan that Van did not want. Mr Sween, a greedy practitioner with flashy rings on fat fingers, said he might buy it if some of the pictures were thrown in. The deal did not come off. (3.7)
Van's lawyer, Gromwell is the nephew of the great Grombchevski:
Letters from Terra, by Voltemand, came out in 1891 on Van’s twenty-first birthday, under the imprint of two bogus houses, ‘Abencerage’ in Manhattan, and ‘Zegris’ in London.
(Had I happened to see a copy I would have recognized Chateaubriand’s lapochka and hence your little paw, at once.)
His new lawyer, Mr Gromwell, whose really beautiful floral name suited somehow his innocent eyes and fair beard, was a nephew of the Great Grombchevski, who for the last thirty years or so had managed some of Demon’s affairs with good care and acumen. Gromwell nursed Van’s personal fortune no less tenderly; but he had little experience in the intricacies of book-publishing matters, and Van was an absolute ignoramus there, not knowing, for example, that ‘review copies’ were supposed to go to the editors of various periodicals or that advertisements should be purchased and not be expected to appear by spontaneous generation in full-page adulthood between similar blurbs boosting The Possessed by Miss Love and The Puffer by Mr Dukes.
For a fat little fee, Gwen, one of Mr Gromwell’s employees, was delegated not only to entertain Van, but also to supply Manhattan bookstores with one-half of the printed copies, whilst an old lover of hers in England was engaged to place the rest in the bookshops of London. The notion that anybody kind enough to sell his book should not keep the ten dollars or so that every copy had cost to manufacture seemed unfair and illogical to Van. Therefore he felt sorry for all the trouble that underpaid, tired, bare-armed, brunette-pale shopgirls had no doubt taken in trying to tempt dour homosexuals with his stuff (‘Here’s a rather fancy novel about a girl called Terra’), when he learned from a careful study of a statement of sales, which his stooges sent him in February, 1892, that in twelve months only six copies had been sold — two in England and four in America. Statistically speaking no reviews could have been expected, given the unorthodox circumstances in which poor Terra’s correspondence had been handled. Curiously enough, as many as two did appear. One, by the First Clown in Elsinore, a distinguished London weekly, popped up in a survey entitled, with a British journalist’s fondness for this kind of phoney wordplay, ‘Terre à terre, 1891,’ and dealt with the year’s ‘Space Romances,’ which by that time had begun to fine off. He sniffed Voltemand’s contribution as the choicest of the lot, calling it (alas, with unerring flair) ‘a sumptuously fripped up, trite, tedious and obscure fable, with a few absolutely marvelous metaphors marring the otherwise total ineptitude of the tale.’ (2.2)
Darkbloom (“Notes to Ada”): Abencerage, Zegris: Families of Granada Moors (their feud inspired Chateaubriand).
fille de joie: whore.
Van's penname, Voltemand hints at a courtier in Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Shakespeare's play Hamlet wants to kill and eventually kills his uncle, King Claudius (the murderer of Hamlet's father). In Ada, Demon finds out about his children's affair by chance, thanks to the death of Van's and Ada's Uncle Dan. Van does not realize that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair.
One of the the reviewers of Van's novel Letters from Terra, the poet Max Mispel promises to Van to send him his next article, "The Weed Exiles the Flower" (Melville & Marvell). Herman Melville is the author of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that crippled him on the ship's previous voyage. According to Ada, at the funeral of Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother), she met d'Onsky's son, a person with only one arm:
My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles? (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): D’Onsky: see p.17.
comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.
chiens etc.: dogs not allowed.
The author of Don Quixote, Cervantes was one-armed. The epigraph to Tolstoy's Anna Karenin is "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord" (Romans 12:19). Describing his meetings with Ada in October, 1905, in Mont Roux, Van mentions Aleksey and Anna and the Romans:
That meeting, and the nine that followed, constituted the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age. The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white ‘Nuremberg Virgin’-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor — in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat for the blue haze of an extraordinary October which kept dreamy and warm throughout the duration of adultery, they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Aleksey etc.: Vronski and his mistress.