The action in VN's novel Ada (1969) takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. Describing Victor Vitry's film Letters from Terra, Van Veen (the narrator and main character) mentions the lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry, and compares her to some lewd elf:
Ada, who resented the insufficiency of her brother’s fame, felt soothed and elated by the success of The Texture of Time (1924). That work, she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park. She said she had been somehow responsible for the metamorphoses of the lovely larvae that had woven the silk of ‘Veen’s Time’ (as the concept was now termed in one breath, one breeze, with ‘Bergson’s Duration,’ or ‘Whitehead’s Bright Fringe’). But a considerably earlier and weaker work, the poor little Letters from Terra, of which only half a dozen copies existed — two in Villa Armina and the rest in the stacks of university libraries — was even closer to her heart because of its nonliterary associations with their 1892-93 sojourn in Manhattan. Sixty-year-old Van crustily and contemptuously dismissed her meek suggestion to the effect that it should be republished, together with the Sidra reflections and a very amusing anti-Signy pamphlet on Time in Dreams. Seventy-year-old Van regretted his disdain when Victor Vitry, a brilliant French director, based a completely unauthorized picture on Letters from Terra written by ‘Voltemand’ half a century before.
Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940 by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you remember that horses wore hats — yes, hats — when heat waves swept Manhattan?) and gave the impression — which physics-fiction literature had much exploited — of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time. Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers.
In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies. In an impressive historical survey of Terra rigged up by Vitry — certainly the greatest cinematic genius ever to direct a picture of such scope or use such a vast number of extras (some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors) — kingdoms fell and dictatordoms rose, and republics, half-sat, half-lay in various attitudes of discomfort. The conception was controversial, the execution flawless. Look at all those tiny soldiers scuttling along very fast across the trench-scarred wilderness, with explosions of mud and things going pouf-pouf in silent French now here, now there!
In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive émotion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933, Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914-1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement, and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one).
Van and Ada saw the film nine times, in seven different languages, and eventually acquired a copy for home use. They found the historical background absurdly farfetched and considered starting legal proceedings against Vitry — not for having stolen the L.F.T. idea, but for having distorted Terrestrial politics as obtained by Van with such diligence and skill from extrasensorial sources and manic dreams. But fifty years had elapsed, and the novella had not been copyrighted; in fact, Van could not even prove that ‘Voltemand’ was he. Reporters, however, ferreted out his authorship, and in a magnanimous gesture, he allowed it to be publicized.
Three circumstances contributed to the picture’s exceptional success. One factor was, of course, that organized religion, disapproving of Terra’s appeal to sensation-avid sects, attempted to have the thing banned. A second attraction came from a little scene that canny Vitry had not cut out: in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position. Finally, the third, and even more human reason, was that the lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry, after titillating the spectators with her skimpy skirts and sexy rags in the existential sequences, came out of her capsule on Antiterra stark naked, though, of course, in miniature, a millimeter of maddening femininity dancing in ‘the charmed circle of the microscope’ like some lewd elf, and revealing, in certain attitudes, I’ll be damned, a pinpoint glint of pubic floss, gold-powered! (5.5)
"Some lewd elf" brings to mind VN's story Kartofel'nyi elf ("The Potato Elf," 1929), about a circus dwarf. Its characters include the conjuror Shock and his wife Nora. Nora Helmer is the main character in Ibsen's play A Doll's House (1879). Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was a Norwegian playwright. Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry seems to blend Hedda Gabler, the title character of a play (1891) by Ibsen, with Greta Garbo (1905-90), a Swedish-born Hollywood actress. Describing his meeting with Cordula de Prey in a bookshop, Van mentions Cordula's ‘garbotosh’ (belted mackintosh):
‘Marina gives me a glowing account of you and says uzhe chuvstvuetsya osen’. Which is very Russian. Your grandmother would repeat regularly that’ already-is-to-be-felt-autumn’ remark every year, at the same time, even on the hottest day of the season at Villa Armina: Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her. You look splendid, sïnok moy, but I can well imagine how fed up you must be with her two little girls, Therefore, I have a suggestion —’
‘Oh, I liked them enormously,’ purred Van. ‘Especially dear little Lucette.’
‘My suggestion is, come with me to a cocktail party today. It is given by the excellent widow of an obscure Major de Prey — obscurely related to our late neighbor, a fine shot but the light was bad on the Common, and a meddlesome garbage collector hollered at the wrong moment. Well, that excellent and influential lady who wishes to help a friend of mine’ (clearing his throat) ‘has, I’m told, a daughter of fifteen summers, called Cordula, who is sure to recompense you for playing Blindman’s Buff all summer with the babes of Ardis Wood.’
‘We played mostly Scrabble and Snap,’ said Van. ‘Is the needy friend also in my age group?’
‘She’s a budding Duse,’ replied Demon austerely, ‘and the party is strictly a "prof push." You’ll stick to Cordula de Prey, I, to Cordelia O’Leary.’
‘D’accord,’ said Van.
Cordula’s mother, an overripe, overdressed, overpraised comedy actress, introduced Van to a Turkish acrobat with tawny hairs on his beautiful orang-utan hands and the fiery eyes of a charlatan — which he was not, being a great artist in his circular field. Van was so taken up by his talk, by the training tips he lavished on the eager boy, and by envy, ambition, respect and other youthful emotions, that he had little time for Cordula, round-faced, small, dumpy, in a turtle-neck sweater of dark-red wool, or even for the stunning young lady on whose bare back the paternal hand kept resting lightly as Demon steered her toward this or that useful guest. But that very same evening Van ran into Cordula in a bookshop and she said, ‘By the way, Van — I can call you that, can’t I? Your cousin Ada is my schoolmate. Oh, yes. Now, explain, please, what did you do to our difficult Ada? In her very first letter from Ardis, she positively gushed — our Ada gushed! — about how sweet, clever, unusual, irresistible —’
‘Silly girl. When was that?’
‘In June, I imagine. She wrote again later, but her reply — because I was quite jealous of you — really I was! — and had fired back lots of questions — well, her reply was evasive, and practically void of Van.’
He looked her over more closely than he had done before. He had read somewhere (we might recall the precise title if we tried, not Tiltil, that’s in Blue Beard...) that a man can recognize a Lesbian, young and alone (because a tailored old pair can fool no one), by a combination of three characteristics: slightly trembling hands, a cold-in-the-head voice, and that skidding-in-panic of the eyes if you happen to scan with obvious appraisal such charms as the occasion might force her to show (lovely shoulders, for instance). Nothing whatever of all that (yes — Mytilène, petite isle, by Louis Pierre) seemed to apply to Cordula, who wore a ‘garbotosh’ (belted mackintosh) over her terribly unsmart turtle and held both hands deep in her pockets as she challenged his stare. Her bobbed hair was of a neutral shade between dry straw and damp. Her light blue iris could be matched by millions of similar eyes in pigment-poor families of French Estoty. Her mouth was doll-pretty when consciously closed in a mannered pout so as to bring out what portraitists call the two ‘sickle folds’ which, at their best, are oblong dimples and, at their worst, the creases down the well-chilled cheeks of felt-booted apple-cart girls. When her lips parted, as they did now, they revealed braced teeth, which, however, she quickly remembered to shutter.
‘My cousin Ada,’ said Van, ‘is a little girl of eleven or twelve, and much too young to fall in love with anybody, except people in books. Yes, I too found her sweet. A trifle on the bluestocking side, perhaps, and, at the same time, impudent and capricious — but, yes, sweet.’
‘I wonder,’ murmured Cordula, with such a nice nuance of pensive tone that Van could not tell whether she meant to close the subject, or leave it ajar, or open a new one.
‘How could I get in touch with you?’ he asked. ‘Would you come to Riverlane? Are you a virgin?’
‘I don’t date hoodlums,’ she replied calmly, ‘but you can always "contact" me through Ada. We are not in the same class, in more ways than one’ (laughing); ‘she’s a little genius, I’m a plain American ambivert, but we are enrolled in the same Advanced French group, and the Advanced French group is assigned the same dormitory so that a dozen blondes, three brunettes and one redhead, la Rousse, can whisper French in their sleep’ (laughing alone).
‘What fun. Okay, thanks. The even number means bunks, I guess. Well, I’ll be seeing you, as the hoods say.’ (1.27)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): d'accord: Okay.
Van begins to work on his novel Letters from Terra when he lives in Cordula's Manhattan apartment:
His main industry consisted of research at the great granite-pillared Public Library, that admirable and formidable palace a few blocks from Cordula’s cosy flat. One is irresistibly tempted to compare the strange longings and nauseous qualms that enter into the complicated ecstasies accompanying the making of a young writer’s first book with childbearing. Van had only reached the bridal stage; then, to develop the metaphor, would come the sleeping car of messy defloration; then the first balcony of honeymoon breakfasts, with the first wasp. In no sense could Cordula be compared to a writer’s muse but the evening stroll back to her apartment was pleasantly saturated with the afterglow and afterthought of the accomplished task and the expectation of her caresses; he especially looked forward to those nights when they had an elaborate repast sent up from ‘Monaco,’ a good restaurant in the entresol of the tall building crowned by her penthouse and its spacious terrace. The sweet banality of their little ménage sustained him much more securely than the company of his constantly agitated and fiery father did at their rare meetings in town or was to do during a fortnight in Paris before the next term at Chose. Except gossip — gossamer gossip — Cordula had no conversation and that also helped. She had instinctively realized very soon that she should never mention Ada or Ardis. He, on his part, accepted the evident fact that she did not really love him. Her small, clear, soft, well-padded and rounded body was delicious to stroke, and her frank amazement at the variety and vigor of his love-making anointed what still remained of poor Van’s crude virile pride. She would doze off between two kisses. When he could not sleep, as now often happened, he retired to the sitting room and sat there annotating his authors or else he would walk up and down the open terrace, under a haze of stars, in severely restricted meditation, till the first tramcar jangled and screeched in the dawning abyss of the city.
When in early September Van Veen left Manhattan for Lute, he was pregnant. (1.43)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): the last paragraph of Part One imitates, in significant brevity of intonation (as if spoken by an outside voice), a famous Tolstoyan ending, with Van in the role of Kitty Lyovin.
Van's works include Clairvoyeurism (1903):
He liked composing his works (Illegible Signatures, 1895; Clairvoyeurism, 1903; Furnished Space, 1913; The Texture of Time, begun 1922), in mountain refuges, and in the drawing rooms of great expresses, and on the sun decks of white ships, and on the stone tables of Latin public parks. He would uncurl out of an indefinitely lengthy trance, and note with wonder that the ship was going the other way or that the order of his left-hand fingers was reversed, now beginning, clockwise, with his thumb as on his right hand, or that the marble Mercury that had been looking over his shoulder had been transformed into an attentive arborvitae. He would realize all at once that three, seven, thirteen years, in one cycle of separation, and then four, eight, sixteen, in yet another, had elapsed since he had last embraced, held, bewept Ada.
Clairvoyeurism seems to blend yasnovidtsy (clairvoyants) mentioned by VN at the beginning of his poem O pravitelyakh ("On Rulers," 1944):
Вы будете (как иногда
говорится)
смеяться, вы будете (как ясновидцы
говорят) хохотать, господа -
но, честное слово,
у меня есть приятель,
которого
привела бы в волнение мысль поздороваться
с главою правительства или другого какого
предприятия.
You will (as sometimes
people say)
laugh; you will (as clairvoyants
say) roar with laughter, gentlemen—
but, word of honor,
I have a crony,
who
would be thrilled to shake hands
with the head of a state or of any other
enterprise.
with "the most jaded voyeur" mentioned by Humbert Humbert in VN's novel Lolita (1955):
In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green, fawn, and golden of a mellow academic townlet, one was bound to have a few amiable fine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself on the exact temperature of my relations with them: never rude, always aloof. My west-door neighbor, who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don’t mind if these verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just sufficiently articulate to sound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precluded any evolution toward chumminess. Of the two houses flanking the bit of scrubby waste opposite, one was closed, and the other contained two professors of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedly feminine Miss Fabian, whose only subject of brief sidewalk conversation with me was (God bless their tact!) the young loveliness of my daughter and the nave charm of Gaston Godin. My east-door neighbor was by far the most dangerous one, a sharp-nosed stock character whose late brother had been attached to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. I remember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living room window, feverishly awaiting my darling’s return from school. The odious spinster, trying to conceal her morbid inquisitiveness under a mask of dulcet goodwill, stood leaning on her slim umbrella (the sleet had just stopped, a cold wet sun had sidled out), and Dolly, her brown coat open despite the raw weather, her structural heap of books pressed against her stomach, her knees showing pink above her clumsy wellingtons, a sheepish frightened slittle smile flitting over and off her snub-nosed face, whichowing perhaps to the pale wintry lightlooked almost plain, in a rustic, German, mägdlein-like way, as she stood there and dealt with Miss East’s questions “And where is your mother, my dear? And what is your poor father’s occupation? And where did you love before?” Another time the loathsome creature accosted me with a welcoming whinebut I evaded her; and a few days later there came from her a note in a blue-margined envelope, a nice mixture of poison and treacle, suggesting Dolly come over on a Sunday and curl up in a chair to look through the “loads of beautiful books my dear mother gave me when I was a child, instead of having the radio on at full blast till all hours of the night.”
I had also to be careful in regard to a Mrs. Holigan, a charwoman and cook of sorts whom I had inherited with the vacuum cleaner from the previous tenants. Dolly got lunch at school, so that this was no trouble, and I had become adept at providing her with a big breakfast and warming up the dinner that Mrs. Holigan prepared before leaving. That kindly and harmless woman had, thank God, a rather bleary eye that missed details, and I had become a great expert in bedmaking; but still I was continuously obsessed by the feeling that some fatal stain had been left somewhere, or that, on the rare occasions where Holigan’s presence happened to coincide with Lo’s, simple Lo might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy kitchen chat. I often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass, and any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window to obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would have paid a small fortune to watch. (2.5)
Describing Lolita's passion for theater, Humbert mentions Ibsen's Hedda Gabler:
By permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit. It now appeared that it had not been merely a matter of learning the answers to such questions as what is the basic conflict in “Hedda Gabler,” or where are the climaxes in “Love Under the Lindens,” or analyze the prevailing mood of “Cherry Orchard”; it was really a matter of learning to betray me. How I deplored now the exercises in sensual simulation that I had so often seen her go through in our Beardsley parlor when I would observe her from some strategic point while she, like a hypnotic subject of a performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated version of infantile make-believe by going through the mimetic actions of hearing a moan in the dark, seeing for the first time a brand new young stepmother, tasting something she hated, such as buttermilk, smelling crushed grass in a lush orchard, or touching mirages of objects with her sly, slender, girl-child hands. Among my papers I still have a mimeographed sheet suggesting:
Tactile drill. Imagine Yourself picking up and holding: a pingpong ball, an apple, a sticky date, a new flannel-fluffed tennis ball, a hot potato, an ice cube, a kitten, a puppy, a horseshoe, a feather, a flashlight.
Knead with your fingers the following imaginary things: a piece of brad, india rubber, a friend’s aching temple, a sample of velvet, a rose petal.
You are a blind girl. Palpate the face of: a Greek youth, Cyrano, Santa Claus, a baby, a laughing faun, a sleeping stranger, your father. (2.20)
In his poem "On Rulers" VN calls Hitler volk v makintoshe (the trench-coated wolf ):
волк в макинтоше,
в фуражке с немецким крутым козырьком,
охрипший и весь перекошенный,
в остановившемся автомобиле
the trench-coated wolf
in his army cap with a German steep peak,
hoarse-voiced, his face all distorted,
speaking from immobile convertible.
In the Russian original the wolf wears a macintosh. When she goes to Kaluga to consult the gynecologist Seitz, Ada wears an unfashionable belted macintosh:
Ada, wearing an unfashionable belted macintosh that he disliked, with her handbag on a strap over one shoulder, had gone to Kaluga for the whole day - officially to try on some clothes, unofficially to consult Dr Krolik's cousin, the gynecologist Seitz (or 'Zayats,' as she transliterated him mentally since it also belonged, as Dr 'Rabbit' did, to the leporine group in Russian pronunciation). (1.37)
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 (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, “little Violet,” and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada’s grandchildren.
PS. Revisiting Kobaltana (a place where the Zemblan crown are hidden) in one of my recent posts, I failed to see that in Rembrandt (a Dutch painter, 1606-69) there was Brandt (a Swedish chemist and mineralogist, 1694-1768, who discovered cobalt). In VN’s novel Pnin (1957) in Lake's studio there is a reproduction of the head of Christ from Rembrandt's 'The Pilgrims of Emmaus.' According to Lake (one of Victor’s teachers at St. Bart’s), the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets, at which point the sequence does not grade into red again but passes into another spiral, which starts with a kind of lavender grey and goes on to Cinderella shades transcending human perception. “Lavender grey” brings to mind Joe Lavender, the owner of Villa Libitina visited by Gradus (Shade’s murderer who is also known as de Grey) in Switzerland.
In his Commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Eystein, a painter who showed himself to be a prodigious master of the trompe l'oeil in the depiction of various objects surrounding his dignified dead models:
Under the unshakable but quite erroneous belief that the crown jewels were concealed somewhere in the Palace, the new administration had engaged a couple of foreign experts (see note to line 681) to locate them. The good work had been going on for a month. The two Russians, after practically dismantling the Council Chamber and several other rooms of state, had transferred their activities to that part of the gallery where the huge oils of Eystein had fascinated several generations of Zemblan princes and princesses. While unable to catch a likeness, and therefore wisely limiting himself to a conventional style of complimentary portraiture, Eystein showed himself to be a prodigious master of the trompe l'oeil in the depiction of various objects surrounding his dignified dead models and making them look even deader by contrast to the fallen petal or the polished panel that he rendered with such love and skill. But in some of those portraits Eystein had also resorted to a weird form of trickery: among his decorations of wood or wool, gold or velvet, he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device which was apparently meant to enhance the effect of his tactile and tonal values had, however, something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein's talent, but the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye. But to return to our technicians whose tapping is approaching along the gallery toward the bend where the King and Odon stand ready to part. At this spot hung a portrait representing a former Keeper of the Treasure, Count Kernel, who was painted with fingers resting lightly on an embossed and emblazoned box whose side facing the spectator consisted of an inset oblong made of real bronze, while upon the shaded top of the box, drawn in perspective, the artist had pictured a plate with the beautifully executed, twin-loved, brainlike, halved kernel of a walnut.
"They are in for a surprise," murmured Odon in his mother tongue, while in a corner the fat guard was going through some dutiful, rather lonesome, rifle-butt-banging formalities.
The two Soviet professionals could be excused for assuming they would find a real receptacle behind the real metal. At the present moment they were about to decide whether to pry out the plaque or take down the picture; but we can anticipate a little and assure the reader that the receptacle, an oblong hole in the wall, was there all right; it contained nothing, however, except the broken bit of a nutshell.
Somewhere an iron curtain had gone up, baring a painted one, with nymphs and nenuphars. "I shall bring you your flute tomorrow," cried Odon meaningfully in the vernacular, and smiled, and waved, already bemisted, already receding into the remoteness of his Thespian world. (note to Line 130)
Eystein Magnusson was King of Norway (as Eystein I) from 1103 to 1123 together with his brothers Sigurd the Crusader and Olaf Magnusson, although since Olaf died before adulthood, only Eystein and Sigurd were effective rulers of the country. According to Snorri Sturluson (an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician, 1179-1241), Eystein "was the handsomest man that could be seen. He had blue open eyes; his hair yellow and curling; his stature not tall, but of the middle size."