Ada, Cordula, & Greta Garbo
In Part I, chapter 27 of ADA, Van meets Cordula
de Prey, Ada's 15 year-old schoolmate whom jealous Van suspects of being
Ada's sexual partner. The account, first of Van's meeting Cordula at a
party and again that evening in a bookshop; then of
his subsequent date with Ada (with Cordula as unwelcome
chaperone) near the girls' boarding school, is rife with lesbian
motifs. Among them is an allusion to Greta Garbo whose image is partly
projected on both girls.
Cordula at the party is described as
wearing 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 eyes....".
Some months later, Van and Ada (with
chaperone Cordula) have a most unsatisfactory date on a rainy afternoon.
Ada "sported a shiny black raincoat and a
down-brimmed oilcloth hat as if someone was to be salvaged from the perils
of life or the sea."
The Garbo image refers to her role in her first
talking film, the 1930 "Anna Christie" based (fairly closely) on Eugene
O'Neil's play. Garbo's character, a reformed prostitute and
man-hater, has come home to her drunken Swedish father, the captain of a
grungy coal barge in New York harbor. Father and
daughter have not seen each other since she was
five. In a fierce storm at sea, they rescue a brash,
handsome sailor. In the rescue scene, Anna appears in her oilskin slicker
and hat. The slicker (sans hat but avec turtleneck) appears in the movie
poster below. Note well VN's phrase "as if someone was to be salvaged from
the perils ... of the sea."
Cordula not only wears the "garbotosh" but
Anna's turtle neck sweater and has "bobbed hair .. of a neutral shade
between dry straw and damp" as well as light blue eyes. This accords
with Anna's bobbed hair and Garbo's real-life blonde hair
and blue eyes (not evident in the black and
white film. (But see the movie poster below.)
Rather than identifying the Garbo-Anna
image with only one of his characters, VN assigns elements of it
to both girls, drawing on both Garbo's dramatic role and Garbo herself. In
fact, neither Ada nor Cordula bear much physical resemblance to Garbo or
Anna. Narrator Van (and author VN) draw in these elements as part of Van's
preoccupation with Cordula and Ada's lesbian relationship. The Garbo film
has no suggestion that Anna has lesbian inclinations. But Garbo
herself was widely rumored to have lesbian lovers. The issue has been
vigorous promoted by some feminist scholars and, most recently, by the
publication of the correspondence between Garbo and one of her
alleged lovers, who is the subject of a new biography entitled "'That
Furious Lesian': The Story of Mercedes de Acosta" by Robert Schanke
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2003 )($45).
VN was not, apparently, an admirer of the
heavily Freudian playwright O'Neil, a Nobel Prize winner in
1936. Although VN left no record of his opinion of "Anna Christie," he
witheringly deconstructed "Mourning Becomes Electra" (and O'Neil himself) in
his essay "The Tragedy of Tragedy."
D. Barton Johnson