Describing his lovemakings with Ada in "Ardis the First," Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions voluptuous and tender stuff that Italian masters allowed themselves to produce in between too many pious Resurrections during a too long and lusty Renaissance:
They went boating and swimming in Ladore, they followed the bends of its adored river, they tried to find more rhymes to it, they walked up the hill to the black ruins of Bryant’s Castle, with the swifts still flying around its tower. They traveled to Kaluga and drank the Kaluga Waters, and saw the family dentist. Van, flipping through a magazine, heard Ada scream and say ‘chort’ (devil) in the next room, which he had never heard her do before. They had tea at a neighbor’s, Countess de Prey — who tried to sell them, unsuccessfully, a lame horse. They visited the fair at Ardisville where they especially admired the Chinese tumblers, a German clown, and a sword-swallowing hefty Circassian Princess who started with a fruit knife, went on to a bejeweled dagger and finally engulfed, string and all, a tremendous salami sausage.
They made love — mostly in glens and gullies.
To the average physiologist, the energy of those two youngsters might have seemed abnormal. Their craving for each other grew unbearable if within a few hours it was not satisfied several times, in sun or shade, on roof or in cellar, anywhere. Despite uncommon resources of ardor, young Van could hardly keep pace with his pale little amorette (local French slang). Their immoderate exploitation of physical joy amounted to madness and would have curtailed their young lives had not summer, which had appeared in prospect as a boundless flow of green glory and freedom, begun to hint lazily at possible failings and fadings, at the fatigue of its fugue — the last resort of nature, felicitous alliterations (when flowers and flies mime one another), the coming of a first pause in late August, a first silence in early September. The orchards and vineyards were particularly picturesque that year; and Ben Wright was fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina and Mlle Larivière home from the Vendange Festival at Brantôme near Ladore.
Which reminds us. Catalogued in the Ardis library under ‘Exot Lubr’ was a sumptuous tome (known to Van through Miss Vertograd’s kind offices) entitled ‘Forbidden Masterpieces: a hundred paintings representing a private part of Nat. Gal. (Sp. Sct.), printed for H.R.M. King Victor.’ This was (beautifully photographed in color) the kind of voluptuous and tender stuff that Italian masters allowed themselves to produce in between too many pious Resurrections during a too long and lusty Renaissance. The volume itself had been either lost or stolen or lay concealed in the attic among Uncle Ivan’s effects, some of them pretty bizarre. Van could not recollect whose picture it was that he had in mind, but thought it might have been attributed to Michelangelo da Caravaggio in his youth. It was an oil on unframed canvas depicting two misbehaving nudes, boy and girl, in an ivied or vined grotto or near a small waterfall overhung with bronze-tinted and dark emerald leaves, and great bunches of translucent grapes, the shadows and limpid reflections of fruit and foliage blending magically with veined flesh. (1.22)
Voskresenie ("Resurrection," 1899) is Leo Tolstoy's last novel. In Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1875-77) Vronski and Anna travel to Italy where they meet Mikhaylov (a Russian artist who painted a scene with Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate). The term Renaissance was coined by Jules Michelet (1798-1874) in his multivolume work Histoire de France (on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set, England annexed France in 1815). In an unsent letter of March 19, 1870, to Strakhov Tolstoy speaks of prostitution and quotes Michelet who says that only the woman exists and the man is but le mâle de la femme:
Я с большим удовольствием прочел вашу статью о женщинах и обеими руками подписываюсь под ее выводы; но одна уступка, кот[орую] вы делаете о женщинах бесполых, мне кажется, портит всё дело. Таких женщин нет, как нет четвероногих людей.
Отрожавшая женщина и не нашедшая мужа женщина все-таки женщина, и если мы будем иметь в виду не то людское общество, кот[орое] обещают нам устроить Милли и пр., а то, которое существует и всегда существовало по вине непризнаваемого ими кого-то, мы увидим, что никакой надобности нет придумывать исход для отрожавшихся и не нашедших мужа женщин: на этих женщин без контор, кафедр и телеграфов всегда есть и было требование, превышающее предложение. — Повивальные бабки, няньки, экономки, распутные женщины. Никто не сомневается в необходимости и недостатке пов[ивальных] бабок, и всякая несемейная женщина, не хотящая распутничать телом и душою, не будет искать кафедры, а пойдет насколько умеет помогать родильницам. Няньки — в самом обширном народном смысле. Тетки, бабки, сестры это няньки, находящие себе в семье в высшей степени ценимое призвание. Где семья, в кот[орой] бы не было такой няньки, кроме нанятой? И счастлива та семья и те дети, где она есть. И женщина, не хотящая распутничать душой и телом, вместо телеграфной конторы всегда выберет это призвание, — даже не выберет, а сама собой нечаянно впадет в эту колею и с сознанием пользы и любви пойдет по ней до смерти. Не говорю о наемных няньках, кот[орых] мы выписывали из Швейцарии, Англии, Германии.
Под экономками, кроме наемных, опять я разумею тещ, матерей, сестер, теток, бездетных жен. Опять призвание женственное, в высшей степени полезное и достойное. Не знаю, почему для достоинства женщины — человека вообще выше передавать чужие депеши или писать рапорты, чем соблюдать состояние семьи и здоровье ее членов.
Вы, может быть, удивитесь, что в число этих почетных званий я включаю и несчастных б.... Это я обязан сделать потому, что мои доводы строятся не на том, что бы мне желательно было, а на том, что есть и всегда было. Эти несчастные всегда были и есть и, по-моему, было бы безбожием и бессмыслием допускать, что бог ошибся, устроив это так, и еще больше ошибся Христос, объявив прощение одной из них. Я только смотрю на то, что есть, стараюсь понять, для чего оно есть. То, что этот род женщин нужен, нам доказывает то, что мы выписали их из Европы; то же, для чего они необходимы, нетрудно понять, если мы только допустим то, что всегда было, что род человеческий развивается только в семье. Семья только в самом первобытном и простом быту может держаться без помощи магдалин, как это мы видим в глуши, в мелких деревнях; но чуть только является большое скопление в центрах — большие села, маленькие города, большие города — столицы, так являются они и всегда соразмерно величине центра. Только земледелец, никогда не отлучающийся от дома, может, женившись молодым, оставаться верным своей жене и она ему, но в усложненных формах жизни, мне кажется очевидным, что это невозможно (в массе, разумеется). Что же было делать тем законам, кот[орые] управляют миром? Остановить скопление центров и развитие? Это противоречило другим целям. Допустить свободную перемену жен и мужей (как этого хотят пустобрехи либералы) — это тоже не входило в цели провидения по причинам ясным для нас — это разрушало семью. И потому по закону экономии сил явилось среднее — появление магдалин, соразмерное усложнению жизни. Представьте себе Лондон без своих 80 т[ысяч] магдалин. Что бы сталось с семьями? Много ли бы удержалось жен, дочерей чистыми? Что бы сталось с законами нравственности, кот[орые] так любят блюсти люди. Мне кажется, что этот класс женщин необходим для семьи, при теперешних усложненных формах жизни. — Так что, если мы только не будем думать, что общественное устройство произошло по воле каких-то дураков и злых людей, как это думают Милли, а по воле, непости[жи]мой нам, то нам будет ясно место, занимаемое в нем несемейной женщиной. —
Они смотрят с точки зрения гордости, т. е. желания показать, что они устроят мир лучше, чем он устроен, и потому ничего не видят; но стоит только посмотреть с точки зрения существующего, и всё станет ясно. Они говорят о женщине хорошо. Призвание женщины все-таки главное — рождение, воспитание, кормление детей. Мишеле прекрасно говорит, что есть только женщина, а что мужчина есть le mâle de la femme. Посмотрите же на эту женщину, исполняющую свой прямой долг. Тот, кто жил с женщиной и любил ее, тот знает, что у э[той] женщины, рожающей в продолжение 10, 15 лет, бывает период, в котором она бывает подавлена трудом. Она носит или кормит; старших надо учить, одевать, кормить, болезни, воспитание, муж и вместе с тем темперамент, кот[орый] должен действовать, ибо она должна рожать. В этом периоде женщина бывает, как в тумане напряжения, она должна выказать упругость энергии непостижимую, если бы мы не видали ее. Это вроде того, как наши северн[ые] мужики в 3 мес[яца] лета убирают поля. В этом-то периоде представьте себе женщину, подлежащую искушениям всей толпы неженатых кобелей, у к[оторых] нет магдалин, и главное — представьте себе женщину без помощи других несемейных женщин — сестер, матерей, теток, нянек. И где есть женщина, управившаяся одна в этом периоде? — Так какое же нужно еще назначение несемейным женщинам? они все разойдутся в помощницы рожающим, и всё их будет мало, и всё будут мереть дети от недосмотра и будут от недосмотра дурно накормлены и воспитаны.
Magdaliny (the magdalenes), as Tolstoy calls prostitutes, bring to mind Ada's mournful magdalene hair:
The three of them formed a pretty Arcadian combination as they dropped on the turf under the great weeping cedar, whose aberrant limbs extended an oriental canopy (propped up here and there by crutches made of its own flesh like this book) above two black and one golden-red head as they had above you and me on dark warm nights when we were reckless, happy children.
Van, sprawling supine, sick with memories, put his hands behind his nape and slit his eyes at the Lebanese blue of the sky between the fascicles of the foliage. Lucette fondly admired his long lashes while pitying his tender skin for the inflamed blotches and prickles between neck and jaw where shaving caused the most trouble. Ada, her keepsake profile inclined, her mournful magdalene hair hanging down (in sympathy with the weeping shadows) along her pale arm, sat examining abstractly the yellow throat of a waxy-white helleborine she had picked. She hated him, she adored him. He was brutal, she was defenseless.
Lucette, always playing her part of the clinging, affectionately fussy lassy, placed both palms on Van’s hairy chest and wanted to know why he was cross.
‘I’m not cross with you,’ replied Van at last.
Lucette kissed his hand, then attacked him.
‘Cut it out!’ he said, as she wriggled against his bare thorax. ‘You’re unpleasantly cold, child.’
‘It’s not true, I’m hot,’ she retorted.
‘Cold as two halves of a canned peach. Now, roll off, please.’
‘Why two? Why?’
‘Yes, why,’ growled Ada with a shiver of pleasure, and, leaning over, kissed him on the mouth. He struggled to rise. The two girls were now kissing him alternatively, then kissing each other, then getting busy upon him again — Ada in perilous silence, Lucette with soft squeals of delight. I do not remember what Les Enfants Maudits did or said in Monparnasse’s novelette — they lived in Bryant’s château, I think, and it began with bats flying one by one out of a turret’s œil-de-bœuf into the sunset, but these children (whom the novelettist did not really know — a delicious point) might also have been filmed rather entertainingly had snoopy Kim, the kitchen photo-fiend, possessed the necessary apparatus. One hates to write about those matters, it all comes out so improper, esthetically speaking, in written description, but one cannot help recalling in this ultimate twilight (where minor artistic blunders are fainter than very fugitive bats in an insect-poor wilderness of orange air) that Lucette’s dewy little contributions augmented rather than dampened Van’s invariable reaction to the only and main girl’s lightest touch, actual or imagined. Ada, her silky mane sweeping over his nipples and navel, seemed to enjoy doing everything to jolt my present pencil and make, in that ridiculously remote past, her innocent little sister notice and register what Van could not control. The crushed flower was now being merrily crammed under the rubber belt of his black trunks by twenty tickly fingers. As an ornament it had not much value; as a game it was inept and dangerous. He shook off his pretty tormentors, and walked away on his hands, a black mask over his carnival nose. Just then, the governess, panting and shouting, arrived on the scene. ‘Mais qu’est-ce qu’il t’a fait, ton cousin?’ She kept anxiously asking, as Lucette, shedding the same completely unwarranted tears that Ada had once shed, rushed into the mauve-winged arms. (1.32)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Les Enfants Maudits: the accursed children.
mais qu’est-ce etc.: but what did your cousin do to you.
The author of an essay entitled 'Villa Venus: an Organized Dream,' Eric Veen derived his project from reading too many erotic works found in a furnished house his grandfather had bought near Vence from Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole:
In the spring of 1869, David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction (in no way related to the Veens of our rambling romance), escaped uninjured when the motorcar he was driving from Cannes to Calais blew a front tire on a frost-blazed road and tore into a parked furniture van; his daughter sitting beside him was instantly killed by a suitcase sailing into her from behind and breaking her neck. In his London studio her husband, an unbalanced, unsuccessful painter (ten years older than his father-in-law whom he envied and despised) shot himself upon receiving the news by cablegram from a village in Normandy called, dreadfully, Deuil.
The momentum of disaster lost none of its speed, for neither did Eric, a boy of fifteen, despite all the care and adoration which his grandfather surrounded him with, escape a freakish fate: a fate strangely similar to his mother’s.
After being removed from Note to a small private school in Vaud Canton and then spending a consumptive summer in the Maritime Alps, he was sent to Ex-en-Valais, whose crystal air was supposed at the time to strengthen young lungs; instead of which its worst hurricane hurled a roof tile at him, fatally fracturing his skull, Among the boy’s belongings David van Veen found a number of poems and the draft of an essay entitled 'Villa Venus: an Organized Dream.’
To put it bluntly, the boy had sought to solace his first sexual torments by imagining and detailing a project (derived from reading too many erotic works found in a furnished house his grandfather had bought near Vence from Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole): namely, a chain of palatial brothels that his inheritance would allow him to establish all over ‘both hemispheres of our callipygian globe.’ The little chap saw it as a kind of fashionable club, with branches, or, in his poetical phrase, ‘Floramors,’ in the vicinity of cities and spas. Membership was to be restricted to noblemen, ‘handsome and healthy,’ with an age limit of fifty (which must be praised as very broadminded on the poor kid’s part), paying a yearly fee of 3650 guineas not counting the cost of bouquets, jewels and other gallant donations. Resident female physicians, good-looking and young (‘of the American secretarial or dentist-assistant type’), would be there to check the intimate physical condition of ‘the caresser and the caressed’ (another felicitous formula) as well as their own if ‘the need arose,’ One clause in the Rules of the Club seemed to indicate that Eric, though frenziedly heterosexual, had enjoyed some tender ersatz fumblings with schoolmates at Note (a notorious preparatory school in that respect): at least two of the maximum number of fifty inmates in the major floramors might be pretty boys, wearing frontlets and short smocks, not older than fourteen if fair, and not more than twelve if dark. However, in order to exclude a regular flow of ‘inveterate pederasts,’ boy love could be dabbled in by the jaded guest only between two sequences of three girls each, all possessed in the course of the same week — a somewhat comical, but not unshrewd, stipulation.
The candidates for every floramor were to be selected by a Committee of Club Members who would take into consideration the annual accumulation of impressions and desiderata, jotted down by the guests in a special Shell Pink Book. ‘Beauty and tenderness, grace and docility’ composed the main qualities required of the girls, aged from fifteen to twenty-five in the case of ‘slender Nordic dolls,’ and from ten to twenty in that of ‘opulent Southern charmers.’ They would gambol and loll in ‘boudoirs and conservatories,’ invariably naked and ready for love; not so their attendants, attractively dressed handmaids of more or less exotic extraction, ‘unavailable to the fancy of members except by special permission from the Board.’ My favorite clause (for I own a photostat of that poor boy’s calligraph) is that any girl in her floramor could be Lady-in-Chief by acclamation during her menstrual period. (This of course did not work, and the committee compromised by having a good-looking female homosexual head the staff and adding a bouncer whom Eric had overlooked.)
Eccentricity is the greatest grief’s greatest remedy. The boy’s grandfather set at once to render in brick and stone, concrete and marble, flesh and fun, Eric’s fantasy. He resolved to be the first sampler of the first houri he would hire for his last house, and to live until then in laborious abstinence.
It must have been a moving and magnificent sight — that of the old but still vigorous Dutchman with his rugged reptilian face and white hair, designing with the assistance of Leftist decorators the thousand and one memorial floramors he resolved to erect allover the world — perhaps even in brutal Tartary, which he thought was ruled by ‘Americanized Jews,’ but then ‘Art redeemed Politics’ — profoundly original concepts that we must condone in a lovable old crank. He began with rural England and coastal America, and was engaged in a Robert Adam-like composition (cruelly referred to by local wags as the Madam-I’m-Adam House), not far from Newport, Rodos Island, in a somewhat senile style, with marble columns dredged from classical seas and still encrusted with Etruscan oyster shells — when he died from a stroke while helping to prop up a propylon. It was only his hundredth house!
His nephew and heir, an honest but astoundingly stuffy clothier in Ruinen (somewhere near Zwolle, I’m told), with a large family and a small trade, was not cheated out of the millions of guldens, about the apparent squandering of which he had been consulting mental specialists during the last ten years or so. All the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875 (and by a delicious coincidence the old Russian word for September, ‘ryuen’,’ which might have spelled ‘ruin,’ also echoed the name of the ecstatic Neverlander’s hometown). By the beginning of the new century the Venus revenues were pouring in (their final gush, it is true). A tattling tabloid reported, around 1890, that out of gratitude and curiosity ‘Velvet’ Veen traveled once — and only once — to the nearest floramor with his entire family — and it is also said that Guillaume de Monparnasse indignantly rejected an offer from Hollywood to base a screenplay on that dignified and hilarious excursion. Mere rumours, no doubt. (2.3)
The penname of Mlle Larivière, Lucette's governess who writes fiction, Guillaume de Monparnasse hints at Maupassant (a French writer who did not exist on Antiterra). Maupassant's story La Maison Tellier (1881) is dedicated to Ivan Turgenev. In a letter of September 19, 1875, to N. V. Khanykov Turgenev says that on the next day (September 20, 1875) he will move to the new-built chalet at his and Viardot's villa Les frênes ("The Ash Trees") in Bougival:
Я Вас приму в новом своём доме, куда завтра переселяюсь, а г-н и г-жа Виардо будут очень довольны, если Вы при сей оказии останетесь у них обедать, и просят меня пригласить Вас, так же как Салтыкова и Соллогуба.
In an unsent letter of April 9, 1857, to Turgenev Tolstoy says taht the railway is to voyage what a brothel is to love - as comfortable, but as inhumanly automatical and deadly monotonous:
Хоть несколько слов, да напишу вам, дорогой Иван Сергеич, потому что ужасно много думал о вас всю дорогу. Вчера вечером, в 8 часов, когда я после поганой железной дороги пересел в дилижанс на открытое место и увидал дорогу, лунную ночь, все эти звуки и духи дорожные, всю мою тоску и болезнь как рукой сняло или, скорей, превратило в эту тихую, трогательную радость, которую вы знаете. Отлично я сделал, что уехал из этого содома. Ради бога, уезжайте куда-нибудь и вы, но только не по железной дороге. Железная дорога к путешествию то, что бордель к любви,- так же удобно, но так же нечеловечески машинально и убийственно однообразно.
The "floramor" chapter of Ada is preceded by Van's dream of luxury trains:
A sense of otiose emptiness was all Van derived from those contacts with Literature. Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains. He decided that after completing his medical studies at Kingston (which he found more congenial than good old Chose) he would undertake long travels in South America, Africa, India. As a boy of fifteen (Eric Veen’s age of florescence) he had studied with a poet’s passion the time-table of three great American transcontinental trains that one day he would take — not alone (now alone). From Manhattan, via Mephisto, El Paso, Meksikansk and the Panama Chunnel, the dark-red New World Express reached Brazilia and Witch (or Viedma, founded by a Russian admiral). There it split into two parts, the eastern one continuing to Grant’s Horn, and the western returning north through Valparaiso and Bogota. On alternate days the fabulous journey began in Yukonsk, a two-way section going to the Atlantic seaboard, while another, via California and Central America, roared into Uruguay. The dark blue African Express began in London and reached the Cape by three different routes, through Nigero, Rodosia or Ephiopia. Finally, the brown Orient Express joined London to Ceylon and Sydney, via Turkey and several Chunnels. It is not clear, when you are falling asleep, why all continents except you begin with an A.
Those three admirable trains included at least two carriages in which a fastidious traveler could rent a bedroom with bath and water closet, and a drawing room with a piano or a harp. The length of the journey varied according to Van’s predormient mood when at Eric’s age he imagined the landscapes unfolding all along his comfortable, too comfortable, fauteuil. Through rain forests and mountain canyons and other fascinating places (oh, name them! Can’t — falling asleep), the room moved as slowly as fifteen miles per hour but across desertorum or agricultural drearies it attained seventy, ninety-seven night-nine, one hund, red dog — (2.2)
In his deathbed delirium Bazarov (the main character in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, 1862) sees red dogs.