Describing King Victor’s last visit to Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a line composed by Seneca that King Victor (the Antiterran ruler of the British Commonwealth) wrote in the Shell Pink Book:
In 1905 a glancing blow was dealt Villa Venus from another quarter. The personage we have called Ritcov or Vrotic had been induced by the ailings of age to withdraw his patronage. However, one night he suddenly arrived, looking again as ruddy as the proverbial fiddle; but after the entire staff of his favorite floramor near Bath had worked in vain on him till an ironic Hesperus rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky, the wretched sovereign of one-half of the globe called for the Shell Pink Book, wrote in it a line that Seneca had once composed:
subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt,
— and departed, weeping. About the same time a respectable Lesbian who conducted a Villa Venus at Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa, throttled with her own hands (she had been a Russian weightlifter) two of her most beautiful and valuable charges. It was all rather sad. (2.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): subsidunt etc.: mountains subside and heights deteriorate.
King Victor quotes a line from Seneca's epigram Omnia tempus edax depascitur (Everything is devoured by voracious Time):
Omnia tempus edax depascitur, omnia carpit,
omnia sede movet, nil sinit esse diu.
Flumina deficiunt, profugum mare litora siccant,
subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt.
Quid tam parva loquor? moles pulcherrima caeli
ardebit flammis tota repente suis.
Omnia mors poscit. Lex est, non poena, perire:
hic aliquo mundus tempore nullus erit.
Everything is devoured by voracious Time, everything destroyed,
it changes everything settled, lets nothing be for long.
Rivers fail, the land dries up the fleeing sea,
mountains dwindle and high peaks fall.
How can we talk of such small things? The whole vast structure of sky
will suddenly burn up in its own flames.
Death demands everything. It is the law, not a penalty, to perish.
There will come a time when the world is no more.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 19 begins with the line "Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws:"
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Eric Veen's essay 'Villa Venus: an Organized Dream' brings to mind Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis (1593) and Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1596). The epigraph to Venus and Adonis is from Ovid's Amores:
'Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.'
Let the mob admire base things;
may Golden Apollo serve me
full goblets from the Castalian Fount.
Plena ministret aqua brings to mind poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina who married Demon Veen, Van's and Ada's father, on Shakespeare's birthday, 1.3). In his apologetic note to Lucette (written after the dinner in 'Ursus' and debauch à trois in Van's Manhattan flat) Van uses the word apollo:
Van walked over to a monastic lectern that he had acquired for writing in the vertical position of vertebrate thought and wrote what follows:
Poor L.
We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. Pilots of tremendous airships and even coarse, smelly coachmen are known to have been driven insane by a pair of green eyes and a copper curl. We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene. These are times of emotional stress and reconditioning. Destroy and forget.
Tenderly yours A & V.
(in alphabetic order).
‘I call this pompous, puritanical rot,’ said Ada upon scanning Van’s letter. ‘Why should we apollo for her having experienced a delicious spazmochka? I love her and would never allow you to harm her. It’s curious — you know, something in the tone of your note makes me really jealous for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for "life." Ed.] Van, Van, somewhere, some day, after a sunbath or dance, you will sleep with her, Van!’
‘Unless you run out of love potions. Do you allow me to send her these lines?’
‘I do, but want to add a few words.’
Her P.S. read:
The above declaration is Van’s composition which I sign reluctantly. It is pompous and puritanical. I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly. When you’re sick of Queen, why not fly over to Holland or Italy?
A. (2.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): spazmochka: Russ., little spasm.
On the other hand, flavus Apollo reminds one of Flavita, the Russian Scrabble played at Ardis by Van, Ada and Lucette:
Pedantic Ada once said that the looking up of words in a lexicon for any other needs than those of expression — be it instruction or art — lay somewhere between the ornamental assortment of flowers (which could be, she conceded, mildly romantic in a maidenly headcocking way) and making collage-pictures of disparate butterfly wings (which was always vulgar and often criminal). Per contra, she suggested to Van that verbal circuses, ‘performing words,’ ‘poodle-doodles,’ and so forth, might be redeemable by the quality of the brain work required for the creation of a great logogriph or inspired pun and should not preclude the help of a dictionary, gruff or complacent.
That was why she admitted ‘Flavita.’ The name came from alfavit, an old Russian game of chance and skill, based on the scrambling and unscrambling of alphabetic letters. It was fashionable throughout Estoty and Canady around 1790, was revived by the ‘Madhatters’ (as the inhabitants of New Amsterdam were once called) in the beginning of the nineteenth century, made a great comeback, after a brief slump, around 1860, and now a century later seems to be again in vogue, so I am told, under the name of ‘Scrabble,’ invented by some genius quite independently from its original form or forms.
Its chief Russian variety, current in Ada’s childhood, was played in great country houses with 125 lettered blocks. The object was to make rows and files of words on a board of 225 squares. Of these, 24 were brown, 12 black, 16 orange, 8 red, and the rest golden-yellow (i.e., flavid, in concession to the game’s original name). Every letter of the Cyrillic alphabet rated a number of points (the rare Russian F as much as 10, the common A as little as 1). Brown doubled the basic value of a letter, black tripled it. Orange doubled the sum of points for the whole word, red tripled the sum. Lucette would later recall how her sister’s triumphs in doubling, tripling, and even nonupling (when passing through two red squares) the numerical value of words evolved monstrous forms in her delirium during a severe streptococcal ague in September, 1888, in California.
For each round of the game each player helped himself to seven blocks from the container where they lay face down, and arrayed in turn his word on the board. In the case of the opening coup, on the still empty field, all he had to do was to align any two or all of his seven letters in such a way as to involve the central square, marked with a blazing heptagon. Subsequently, the catalyst of one of the letters already on the board had to be used for composing one’s word, across or down. That player won who collected the greatest number of points, letter by letter and word by word.
The set our three children received in 1884 from an old friend of the family (as Marina’s former lovers were known), Baron Klim Avidov, consisted of a large folding board of saffian and a boxful of weighty rectangles of ebony inlaid with platinum letters, only one of which was a Roman one, namely the letter J on the two joker blocks (as thrilling to get as a blank check signed by Jupiter or Jurojin). It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa.
By July the ten A’s had dwindled to nine, and the four D’s to three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned Armchair, but the D was lost — faking the fate of its apostrophizable double as imagined by a Walter C. Keyway, Esq., just before the latter landed, with a couple of unstamped postcards, in the arms of a speechless multilinguist in a frock coat with brass buttons. The wit of the Veens (says Ada in a marginal note) knows no bounds. (1.36)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): alfavit: Russ., alphabet.
particule: ‘de’ or ‘d’’.
Baron Klim Avidov is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. In her essay Nabokov i ego Lolita (“Nabokov and his Lolita,” 1959) and in her memoirs The Italics are Mine (1969) Nina Berberova compares the author of Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defense," 1930) to a Phoenix. "Long-liv'd Phoenix" in Shakespeare's Sonnet 19 brings to mind old issues of Golos Feniksa that Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) reads to her sick brother:
Much to Van’s amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed to visit him ‘because of the constant necessity of routine tests’ — or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront disaster in manly solitude. (3.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Golos etc.: Russ., The Phoenix Voice, Russian language newspaper in Arizona.
Dorothy Vinelander eventually marries a Mr Brod or Bred:
So she did write as she had promised? Oh, yes, yes! In seventeen years he received from her around a hundred brief notes, each containing around one hundred words, making around thirty printed pages of insignificant stuff — mainly about her husband’s health and the local fauna. After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada’s choosing the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband’s endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin’s select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the ‘Lyaskan Herculanum’); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another question. (3.8)
Nero's former tutor, Seneca died (was ordered to commit suicide) in 65 AD, fourteen years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculanum. The USSR collapsed in 1991, fourteen years after VN's death. At the Lyceum Pushkin occupied Room 14. VN (who shared with Shakespeare his birthday) was born in 1899, a hundred years after Pushkin's birth. In 1884, when he first comes to Ardis, Van is fourteen. Van revisits Ardis in 1888. Vita somnium breve ("Life is a Short Dream," 1888) is a painting by Arnold Böcklin, the author of Isle of the Dead and The Island of Life (1888) who had fourteen children. In De Brevitate Vitae ("On the Shortness of Life") Seneca quotes Hippocrates' words "Vita brevis, ars longa." Btw., in a sonnet there are fourteen lines.