Describing Kim Beauharnais's album, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) uses the phrase "art my foute:"
In an equally casual tone of voice Van said: ‘Darling, you smoke too much, my belly is covered with your ashes. I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais’s exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts.’
‘You shall not slaughter him,’ said Ada. ‘He is subnormal, he is, perhaps, blackmailerish, but in his sordidity, there is an istoshnïy ston (‘visceral moan’) of crippled art. Furthermore, this page is the only really naughty one. And let’s not forget that a copperhead of eight was also ambushed in the brush’.
‘Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle.’
‘Oh do!’ said Ada (skipping another abominable glimpse — apparently, through a hole in the boards of the attic). ‘Look, here’s our little Caliph Island!’
‘I don’t want to look any more. I suspect you find that filth titillating. Some nuts get a kick from motor-bikini comics.’
‘Please, Van, do glance! These are our willows, remember?’
‘"The castle bathed by the Adour:
The guidebooks recommend that tour."’
‘It happens to be the only one in color. The willows look sort of greenish because the twigs are greenish, but actually they are leafless here, it’s early spring, and you can see our red boat Souvenance through the rushes. And here’s the last one: Kim’s apotheosis of Ardis.’
The entire staff stood in several rows on the steps of the pillared porch behind the Bank President Baroness Veen and the Vice President Ida Larivière. Those two were flanked by the two prettiest typists, Blanche de la Tourberie (ethereal, tearstained, entirely adorable) and a black girl who had been hired, a few days before Van’s departure, to help French, who towered rather sullenly above her in the second row, the focal point of which was Bouteillan, still wearing the costume sport he had on when driving off with Van (that picture had been muffed or omitted). On the butler’s right side stood three footmen; on his left, Bout (who had valeted Van), the fat, flour-pale cook (Blanche’s father) and, next to French, a terribly tweedy gentleman with sightseeing strappings athwart one shoulder: actually (according to Ada), a tourist, who, having come all the way from England to see Bryant’s Castle, had bicycled up the wrong road and was, in the picture, under the impression of accidentally being conjoined to a group of fellow tourists who were visiting some other old manor quite worth inspecting too. The back rows consisted of less distinguished menservants and scullions, as well as of gardeners, stableboys, coachmen, shadows of columns, maids of maids, aids, laundresses, dresses, recesses — getting less and less distinct as in those bank ads where limited little employees dimly dimidiated by more fortunate shoulders, but still asserting themselves, still smile in the process of humble dissolve.
‘Isn’t that wheezy Jones in the second row? I always liked the old fellow.’
‘No,’ answered Ada, ‘that’s Price. Jones came four years later. He is now a prominent policeman in Lower Ladore. Well, that’s all.’
Nonchalantly, Van went back to the willows and said:
‘Every shot in the book has been snapped in 1884, except this one. I never rowed you down Ladore River in early spring. Nice to note you have not lost your wonderful ability to blush.’
‘It’s his error. He must have thrown in a fotochka taken later, maybe in 1888. We can rip it out if you like.’
‘Sweetheart,’ said Van, ‘the whole of 1888 has been ripped out. One need not bb a sleuth in a mystery story to see that at least as many pages have been removed as retained. I don’t mind — I mean I have no desire to see the Knabenkräuter and other pendants of your friends botanizing with you; but 1888 has been withheld and he’ll turn up with it when the first grand is spent.’
‘I destroyed 1888 myself,’ admitted proud Ada; ‘but I swear, I solemnly swear, that the man behind Blanche, in the perron picture, was, and has always remained, a complete stranger.’
‘Good for him,’ said Van. ‘Really it has no importance. It’s our entire past that has been spoofed and condemned. On second thoughts, I will not write that Family Chronicle. By the way, where is my poor little Blanche now?’
‘Oh, she’s all right. She’s still around. You know, she came back — after you abducted her. She married our Russian coachman, the one who replaced Bengal Ben, as the servants called him.’
‘Oh she did? That’s delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it.’
‘They have a blind child,’ said Ada.
‘Love is blind,’ said Van.
‘She tells me you made a pass at her on the first morning of your first arrival.’
‘Not documented by Kim,’ said Van. ‘Will their child remain blind? I mean, did you get them a really first-rate physician?’
‘Oh yes, hopelessly blind. But speaking of love and its myths, do you realize — because I never did before talking to her a couple of years ago — that the people around our affair had very good eyes indeed? Forget Kim, he’s only the necessary clown — but do you realize that a veritable legend was growing around you and me while we played and made love?’ (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): foute: French swear word made to sound ‘foot’.
ars: Lat., art.
Carte du Tendre: ‘Map of Tender Love’, sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century.
Knabenkräuter: Germ., orchids (and testicles).
perron: porch.
In Shakespeare's history play Henry IV, Part 2 (Act Five, Scene 3) Pistol uses the French swear word "foutre:"
A foutre for the world, and worldlings base!
I speak of Africa and golden joys.
In the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) Ada explores Van's male organ and mentions the rivers of Africa:
He discarded his makeshift kilt, and her tone of voice changed immediately.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said as one child to another. ‘It’s all skinned and raw. Does it hurt? Does it hurt horribly?’
‘Touch it quick,’ he implored.
‘Van, poor Van,’ she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies, ‘yes, I’m sure it smarts, would it help if I’d touch, are you sure?’
‘You bet,’ said Van, ‘on n’est pas bête à ce point’ (‘there are limits to stupidity,’ colloquial and rude).
‘Relief map,’ said the primrose prig, ‘the rivers of Africa.’ Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. ‘Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact’ (positively chattering), ‘I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom.’
‘God, we all are,’ said Van.
‘Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!’
‘Squeeze, you goose, can’t you see I’m dying.’
But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly — and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.
She looked down in dismay.
‘Not what you think,’ remarked Van calmly. ‘This is not number one. Actually it’s as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Speke.’
(I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Oh, I am honest, that’s how it went. I wasn’t sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous fingertrips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart. Sorry, no — if people remembered the same they would not be different people. That’s-how-it-went. But we are not ‘different’! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am — it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. That’s better, said Ada.)
Please, take over.
Van stretched himself naked in the now motionless candlelight.
‘Let us sleep here,’ he said. ‘They won’t be back before dawn relights Uncle’s cigar.’
‘My nightie is trempée,’ she whispered.
‘Take it off, this plaid sleeps two.’
‘Don’t look, Van.’
‘That’s not fair,’ he said and helped her to slip it up and over her hair-shaking head. She was shaded with a mere touch of coal at the mystery point of her chalk-white body. A bad boil had left a pink scar between two ribs. He kissed it, and lay back on his clasped hands. She was inspecting from above his tanned body the ant caravan to the oasis of the navel; he was decidedly hirsute for so young a boy. Her young round breasts were just above his face. I denounce the philistine’s post-coital cigarette both as a doctor and an artist. It is, however, true that Van was not unaware of a glass box of Turkish Traumatis on a console too far to be reached with an indolent stretch. The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter, and Ada was presently watching, cheek on fist, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch, and ponderous upswing of virile revival.
But the shag of the couch was as tickly as the star-dusted sky. Before anything new happened, Ada went on all fours to rearrange the lap robe and cushions. Native girl imitating rabbit. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy’s sandcastle-molding position; but she turned over, naïvely ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo. She was right. For the first time in their love story, the blessing, the genius of lyrical speech descended upon the rough lad, he murmured and moaned, kissing her face with voluble tenderness, crying out in three languages — the three greatest in all the world — pet words upon which a dictionary of secret diminutives was to be based and go through many revisions till the definitive edition of 1967. When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him as if she had been love-making for years in all our dreams — but impatient young passion (brimming like Van’s overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird uttered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well pleased with the night treat, the cook’s niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas) — and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress, and giving the couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent bedrooms. (1.19)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): The Nile is settled: a famous telegram sent by an African explorer.
parlez pour vous: speak for yourself.
trempée: soaked.
Ada (who in the Night of the Burning Barn is not as pure as the night sky) turns over and embraces Van the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1.3) the Nurse tells Juliet: "Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit." Van's oath "art my foute" also brings to mind Juliet's words to Romeo in Shakespeare's play (2.2) ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy: Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot Nor arm nor face nor any other part Belonging to a man:'
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy:
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot
Nor arm nor face nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O be some other name.
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
Because Van and Ada are brother and sister, they cannot marry, and hence Van's name is Ada's enemy. There is Van in Vanda, the name of a girl (Vanda Broom, Ada's lesbian schoolmate at Brownhill) who is in love with Ada and whom Ada mentions when Van leaves Ardis in September, 1884:
She kissed him allover the face, she kissed his hands, then again his lips, his eyelids, his soft black hair. He kissed her ankles, her knees, her soft black hair.
‘When, my love, when again? In Luga? Kaluga? Ladoga? Where, when?’
‘That’s not the point,’ cried Van, ‘the point, the point, the point is — will you be faithful, will you be faithful to me?’
‘You spit, love,’ said wan-smiling Ada, wiping off the P’s and the F’s. ‘I don’t know. I adore you. I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go. But! But, my love, my Van, I’m physical, horribly physical, I don’t know, I’m frank, qu’y puis-je? Oh dear, don’t ask me, there’s a girl in my school who is in love with me, I don’t know what I’m saying —’
‘The girls don’t matter,’ said Van, ‘it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you. Last night I tried to make a poem about it for you, but I can’t write verse; it begins, it only begins: Ada, our ardors and arbors — but the rest is all fog, try to fancy the rest.’
They embraced one last time, and without looking back he fled.
Stumbling on melons, fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop, Van returned to the Forest Fork. Morio, his favorite black horse, stood waiting for him, held by young Moore. He thanked the groom with a handful of stellas and galloped off, his gloves wet with tears. (1.25)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): qu’y puis-je? what can I do about it?
Stumbling on melons... arrogant fennels: allusions to passages in Marvell’s ‘Garden’ and Rimbaud’s ‘Mémoire’.
The name of Van's groom, Moore is an anagram of Romeo. On the other hand, Thomas Moore is the author of Lalla Rookh (1817), an Oriental romance. Describing Flavita (the Russian Scrabble), Van mentions Lalla Rookh chessmen:
Van, a first-rate chess player — he was to win in 1887 a match at Chose when he beat the Minsk-born Pat Rishin (champion of Underhill and Wilson, N.C.) — had been puzzled by Ada’s inability of raising the standard of her, so to speak, damsel-errant game above that of a young lady in an old novel or in one of those anti-dandruff color-photo ads that show a beautiful model (made for other games than chess) staring at the shoulder of her otherwise impeccably groomed antagonist across a preposterous traffic jam of white and scarlet, elaborately and unrecognizably carved, Lalla Rookh chessmen, which not even cretins would want to play with — even if royally paid for the degradation of the simplest thought under the itchiest scalp. (1.36)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Pat Rishin: a play on ‘patrician’. One may recall Podgoretz (Russ. ‘underhill’) applying that epithet to a popular critic, would-be expert in Russian as spoken in Minsk and elsewhere. Minsk and Chess also figure in Chapter Six of Speak, Memory (p.133, N.Y. ed. 1966).
A preposterous traffic jam of white and scarlet brings to mind Scarlet mentioned by Silence in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 (5.3):
FALSTAFF.
I pray thee now, deliver them like a man of this world.
PISTOL.
A foutre for the world and worldlings base!
I speak of Africa and golden joys.
FALSTAFF.
O base Assyrian knight, what is thy news?
Let King Cophetua know the truth thereof.
SILENCE.
And Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John. [Singing.]
Robin Hood makes one think of Robin Sherwood, the old postman, mentioned by Van when he describes the morning after the Night of the Burning Barn:
On Sunday mornings the mail came late, because of the voluminous Sunday supplements of the papers from Balticomore, and Kaluga, and Luga, which Robin Sherwood, the old postman, in his bright green uniform, distributed on horseback throughout the somnolent countryside. As Van, humming his school song — the only tune he could ever carry — skipped down the terrace steps, he saw Robin on his old bay holding the livelier black stallion of his Sunday helper, a handsome English lad whom, it was rumored behind the rose hedges, the old man loved more vigorously than his office required. (1.20)
In Ardis Hall there is a portrait of Vincent Veen, Bishop of Balticomore and Como:
Van thrust his bare toe into a sneaker, retrieving the while its mate from under the bed; he hurried down, past a pleased-looking Prince Zemski and a grim Vincent Veen, Bishop of Balticomore and Como. (1.20)
Grim Vincent Veen is a namesake of Vincent van Gogh, the author of La Nuit étoilée (Starry Night Over the Rhône, 1888) and The Starry Night (1889). According to Ada, Vanda Broom was shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places:
Would she like to stay in this apartment till Spring Term (he thought in terms of Terms now) and then accompany him to Kingston, or would she prefer to go abroad for a couple of months — anywhere, Patagonia, Angola, Gululu in the New Zealand mountains? Stay in this apartment? So, she liked it? Except some of Cordula’s stuff which should be ejected — as, for example, that conspicuous Brown Hill Alma Mater of Almehs left open on poor Vanda’s portrait. She had been shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places. It was, Van said, sad. Little Lucette no doubt had told him about a later escapade? Punning in an Ophelian frenzy on the feminine glans? Raving about the delectations of clitorism? ‘N’exagérons pas, tu sais,’ said Ada, patting the air down with both palms. ‘Lucette affirmed,’ he said, ‘that she (Ada) imitated mountain lions.’
He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest.
‘That’s right,’ said the other total-recaller.
And, by the way, Grace — yes, Grace — was Vanda’s real favorite, pas petite moi and my little crest. She (Ada) had, hadn’t she, a way of always smoothing out the folds of the past — making the flutist practically impotent (except with his wife) and allowing the gentleman farmer only one embrace, with a premature eyakulyatsiya, one of those hideous Russian loanwords? Yes, wasn’t it hideous, but she’d love to play Scrabble again when they’d settled down for good. But where, how? Wouldn’t Mr and Mrs Ivan Veen do quite nicely anywhere? What about the ‘single’ in each passport? They’d go to the nearest Consulate and with roars of indignation and/or a fabulous bribe have it corrected to married, for ever and ever. (2.6).
Ragusa is the Italian name of Dubrovnik. In his plays Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew and Henry VI Shakespeare refers to the mighty Dubrovnik ships. In Shakespeare's Tempest (4.1) Iris (one of Prospero's spirits) mentions broome-groues (broom-groves). It seems that the girlfriend of a girlfriend who shot poor Vanda Broom dead was Ada herself.
In Arles van Gogh was visited by his friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin. At the end of Van's Family Chronicle Ada tells Van that one solution would be for him to marry Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, "little Violet," and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) or a local Gauguin girl:
Something of the sort. One great difficulty. The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes. Hard but not insurmountable (I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands). By the way, who dies first?
Ada. Van. Ada. Vaniada. Nobody. Each hoped to go first, so as to concede, by implication, a longer life to the other, and each wished to go last, in order to spare the other the anguish or worries, of widowhood. One solution would be for you to marry Violet.
‘Thank you. J’ai tâté de deux tribades dans ma vie, ça suffit. Dear Emile says "terme qu’on évite d’employer." How right he is!’
‘If not Violet, then a local Gauguin girl. Or Yolande Kickshaw.’
Why? Good question. Anyway. Violet must not be given this part to type. I’m afraid we’re going to wound a lot of people (openwork American lilt)! Oh come, art cannot hurt. It can, and how! (5.6)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): j’ai tâté etc.: I have known two Lesbians in my life, that’s enough.
terme etc.: term one avoids using.
Yolande Kickshaw seems to hint at Yolande Ardissone (b. 1927), a French painter whose vivid, impressionistic style was strongly influenced by Gauguin, Renoir and especially Van Gogh. Kickshaw is a corruption of quelque chose (Fr., something). Chose is Van's (and Demon Veen's) English University.
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) and Violet Knox are Ada's grandchildren.