Before the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a fresh oeillet in his father's lapel eye:
Demon shed his monocle and wiped his eyes with the modish lace-frilled handkerchief that lodged in the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. His tear glands were facile in action when no real sorrow made him control himself.
‘You look quite satanically fit, Dad. Especially with that fresh oeillet in your lapel eye. I suppose you have not been much in Manhattan lately — where did you get its last syllable?’
Homespun pun in the Veenish vein.
‘I offered myself en effet a trip to Akapulkovo,’ answered Demon, needlessly and unwillingly recollecting (with that special concussion of instant detail that also plagued his children) a violet-and-black-striped fish in a bowl, a similarly striped couch, the subtropical sun bringing out the veins of an onyx ashtray on the stone floor, a batch of old, orange-juice-stained Povesa (playboy) magazines, the jewels he had brought, the phonograph singing in a dreamy girl’s voice’ Petit nègre, au champ qui fleuronne,’ and the admirable abdomen of a very expensive, and very faithless and altogether adorable young Créole.
‘Did what’s-her-name go with you?’
‘Well, my boy, frankly, the nomenclature is getting more and more confused every year. Let us speak of plainer things. Where are the drinks? They were promised me by a passing angel.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): en effet: indeed.
petit nègre: little Negro in the flowering field.
Oeillet is French for "carnation." In his poem Vita nova (1913) Vadim Shershenevich describes his grave and famously compares the maggots to the guests at a dinner party wearing tailcoats with carnations in their lapel eyes (chervi polzut iz rasshchelin, budto s gvozdikoy vo frake gosti na zvanyi obed):
Руки луна уронила -
Два голубые луча.
(Вечер задумчив и ясен!)
Ах, над моею могилой
Тонкий, игрушечный ясень
Теплится, словно свеча.
Грустно лежу я во мраке,
Замкнут в себе, как сонет...
(Ласкова плесени зелень!)
Черви ползут из расщелин,
Будто с гвоздикой во фраке
Гости на званый обед.
According to Ada, at the funeral of Marina (Van’s, Ada's and Lucette's mother) Demon told her that he will not cheat the poor grubs:
‘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.
Demon's tear glands are facile in action when no real sorrow makes him control himself. In March, 1905 (half a year before Van's meeting with Ada in Mont Roux), Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. 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.
On the other hand, the fresh oeillet in Demon’s lapel eye brings to mind Violet Knox’s velvet carnation:
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with us in 1957. She was (and still is — ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump [.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has been responsible for typing out this memoir — the solace of what are, no doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother’s children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her [generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her ‘Fialochka’ and allowed herself the luxury of admiring ‘little Violet’ ‘s cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner, lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4)
Because love is blind, Van fails to see that Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) and Ada have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary, the editor of Ada who marries Violet Knox after Van's and Ada's death) and Violet Knox are Ada's grandchildren.
The surname Shershenevich comes from shershen' (hornet); but it also makes one think of the French stock phrase cherchez la femme (look for the woman).
Btw., in their Sonnet du trou du cul ("Sonnet to an Asshole," 1871) Rimbaud and Verlaine mention un œillet violet:
Obscur et froncé comme un œillet violet
Il respire, humblement tapi parmi la mousse
Humide encor d’amour qui suit la fuite douce ?
Des Fesses blanches jusqu’au cœur de son ourlet.
Des filaments pareils à des larmes de lait
Ont pleuré, sous le vent cruel qui les repousse,
À travers de petits caillots de marne rousse
Pour s’aller perdre où la pente les appelait.
Mon Rêve s’aboucha souvent à sa ventouse ;
Mon âme, du coït matériel jalouse,
En fit son larmier fauve et son nid de sanglots.
C’est l’olive pâmée, et la flûte câline,
C’est le tube où descend la céleste praline :
Chanaan féminin dans les moiteurs éclos !
Dark and frilly like a purple carnation
He breathes, humbly crouching among the moss.
Wet again with love that follows the gentle flight
From the white buttocks to the heart of her hem.
Filaments like tears of milk
Wept, under the cruel wind that pushes them back,
Through little clots of russet marl
To lose themselves where the slope was calling them.
My Dream often abutted on its suction cup;
My soul, jealous material coitus,
Made it his tawny teardrop and his nest of sobs.
It is the swooning olive, and the coaxing flute;
This is the tube where the celestial praline descends:
Feminine Chanaan in the damp enclosures!
(tr. A. Merat)
Luc in reverse, cul (Fr., ass) reminds one of Mlle Larivière's novel L'ami Luc (mentioned by Van just before he parts with Greg Erminin):
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform’ my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.
‘Aha,’ said Van, ‘I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.’
‘Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me — yes, Tobak! — that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good health?’ (Van bowed,) ‘And how is the guvernantka belletristka?’
‘Her last novel is called L‘ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.’
They parted laughing. (3.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): guvernantka etc.: Russ., governess-novelist.
Before the family dinner Van tells Demon that he looks satanically fit. In his poem Letnee nebo pokhozhe na kozhu mulatki ("The summer sky resembles the skin of a mulatto girl," 1913) Shershenevich says that men have Satan's eyelash in their lapel eyes:
Летнее небо похоже на кожу мулатки,
Солнце, как красная ссадина ни щеке:
С грохотом рушатся витрины и палатки,
И дома, провалившись, тонут в реке.
Падают с отчаяньем в пропасть экипажи,
В гранитной мостовой все камни раздражены,
Женщины без платки, на голове — плюмажи,
И у мужчин в петлице — ресница Сатаны.
И только Вы, с электричеством во взоре,
Слегка нахмурившись, глазом одним
Глядите, как Гамлет, в венке из теорий,
Дико мечтает над черепом моим.
Воздух бездушен и миндально-горек,
Автомобили рушатся в провалы минут,
И Вы поете: Мой бедный Йорик,
Королевы жизни покойный шут!