I
thank Mr. Strickland for his informative series of suggestions. I have pursued at least one of them. It
follows:
Don
Johnson
-----------------------------------------------------
April 23, 2004
Nabokov’s Ada
and Pierre Louÿs’ Chansons de Bilitis:
The Tree of Knowledge
Pierre Louÿs’
1894 Les Chansons de Bilitis is one of the classics of the lesbian
canon. The work was something of a
mystification since it purported to be the memoir of a sixth century B.C Greek
courtesan whose tomb had recently excavated on Cypress.
A prose poem of a hundred and
forty-three stanzas in the form of inscriptions on the tomb walls, it recounts Bilitis’ girlhood as a goatherd in what is now southern
Turkey (then Pamphilia) near the Mediterrean.
She is early introduced to sex by a newly-married friend and then a young
herdsman. She has an infant whom she
deserts at sixteen when she moves to Mytilène
on the Isle of Lesbos where she is befriended by the
poet Sappho and has a ten-year liaison with a beloved
but faithless mistress. After a painful break-up, she moves on to Cypress, then
a thriving and decadent community where she establishes herself as a wealthy
and famed courtesan par excellence,
while not forsaking the pleasures afforded by those of her own sex At forty, she retires and writes her poetic
biography which survives on the walls of
her tomb. The entire work, ostensibly translated from the Greek, is the work of
Pierre Louÿs (1870-1924), a twenty-three-year-old
Parisian who was immersed in the culture of the ancient eastern Mediterranean and
went on to even greater, if transient, fame as the author of the equally
scandalous novel Aphrodite
(1906), a tale of bisexual courtesan life
in Alexandria. He was to become a friend of André Gide,
Claude Debussy, Maurice Maeterlinck, Gabriele d’Annunzio,
and Oscar Wilde. Les Chansons de Bilitis was a pan-European scandal and became a
lushly illustrated, privately printed collector’s item in many languages.
There was even a Russian version in 1907. Les Chansons de Bilitis, now mostly forgotten,
makes two fleeting, but explicit appearances in Nabokov’s ADA – both in connection with
lesbianism.
Soon after that first Ardis summer, Van encounters Ada’s
boarding-school dorm-mate Cordula de Prey who tells
him of Ada’s letters raving about her visiting cousin. Ada has mentioned in a letter to
Van that one of her school mates is in love with her (158).
Van inspects Cordula closely:
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 (164-165).
It takes Van a moment to
place the source of the presumed traits of a lesbian – “(yes
— Mytilène, petite isle, by Louis Pierre)”
[1]. Mytilène was the city on the small island
of Lesbos where Bilitis
knew the poet Sappho. Pierre Louis was the pseudonym
of Pierre Louÿs. The name Bilitis is introduced a few page later when it is mentioned en passant that Ada and Lucette’s
governess Ida Larivière “had been
platonically and irrevocably in love ever since she had seen [Marina]
in ‘Bilitis’”
(194). Nor is this the only lesbian allusion. Cordula’s “garbotosh”
and stance are those of Greta Garbo in a poster
promoting her first talking film-- Eugene O’Neil’s Anna Christie. Garbo was widely rumored to be a lesbian.
Van’s first (mis-)recollection (“not Tiltil, that’s in Blue Beard” come from Maurice
Maeterlinck’s play L’oiseau bleu (1909) in which the names of the woodcutter’s
children, Tyltyl and Mytyl,
lead him to Sappho’s Mytilène.
Cordula
further fuels Van’s suspicions (and continues the French theme) with her
comments that she and Ada
are in the Advanced French goup that share a
dormitory. In his next letter Van asks Ada
whether Cordula is the lezbianochka she had earlier referred to. Van remains
suspicious when Ada
denies it. The theme is reintensified during durig Van miserable rainy-day visit to Ada’s
school where their meeting is “chaperoned” by Cordula,
again in her Garbo outfit. Van is tormented by his
imaginings of their ecstactic “twinned
…entwinement,…: Corada, Adula” (168). He imagines taking revenge by telling
the pair of the sexual antics of Cordula’s cousin at Riverlane,
but contents himself with a literary discussion of Proust’s
characters, Marcel and Albertine, whose actions make
sense only if the reader knows the narrator is “a pansy” – a
fatal flaw since author’s life should be extraneous to his art. The
lesbian theme is enacted throughout the novel by Ada and Lucette
and echoed here and there in allusions to Ada’s
and Cordula’s schoolmate, the tribadka Vanda (!) Broom. Cf.
the French tribade
defined by the four-volume 1957 Emile Littré Dictionnaire
as a “Terme qu’on
évite d’employer.
Femme qui abuse de son sexe avec une
autre femme” (584).
The above, more or less explicit
allusions to Pierre Louÿs’ Chansons de Bilitis do not exhaust
its presence in Ada, although we now enter
upon more slippery ground. Let us call this new theme “The Tree of
Knowledge.”
For the big picnic on Ada’s
twelfth birthday and Ida’s forty-second jour
de fête, the
child was permitted to wear her lolita …, a
rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt …. .
She had stepped into it, naked, … and pulled it on with a brisk
jiggle of the hips which provoked her governess’s familiar rebuke: mais ne te trémousse
pas comme ça quand tu mets
ta jupe! Une petite fille de
bonne maison, etc.
Per contra, the omission of panties was ignored by Ida Larivière, a
bosomy woman of great and repulsive beauty (in nothing but corset and gartered
stockings at the moment) who was not above making secret concessions to the
heat of the dog-days herself; but in tender Ada’s case the practice had
deprecable effects. The child tried to assuage the rash in the soft arch, with all its
accompaniment of sticky, itchy, not altogether unpleasurable
sensations, by tightly straddling the cool limb of a Shattal
apple tree, much to Van’s disgust as we shall see more than once.
….Neither hygiene, nor sophistication of taste, were, as Van kept
observing, typical of the Ardis household (I-13
77-78).
A
few days later find the children climbing the shattal
tree at the bottom of the garden (I-15, pp. 94-95)
Her bare
foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the
branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other, and the
next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face
and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud
— the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his
wristwatch and a cotton frock.
(‘Remember?’
‘Yes, of course, I remember: you
kissed me here, on the inside —’
‘And you started to strangle me with
those devilish knees of yours —’
‘I was seeking some sort of
support.’)
That might have been true, but according to
a later (considerably later!) version they were still in the tree, and still
glowing, when Van removed a silk thread of larva web from his lip and remarked
that such negligence of attire was a form of hysteria.
‘Well,’ answered Ada, straddling her favorite limb, ‘as we all know by
now, Mlle La Rivière de Diamants
has nothing against a hysterical little girl’s not wearing pantalets
during l’ardeur de la canicule.’
‘I refuse to share the ardor of your
little canicule with an apple tree.’
‘It is really the Tree
of Knowledge — this specimen was imported last summer … from the Eden National Park ….”
For a detailed exegesis, I refer the reader to Brian
Boyd’s “Annotations to Ada 15: Part I Chapter 15”
in issue 44 of The Nabokovian
(65ff). For our purposes, it suffices to remark two things. The identification
of the Edenic shattal as
the “Tree of Knowledge,” i.e., carnal knowledge, and of Ada’s
slip (with its “lip-to-lips” consequences) as “The Fall.” Pay
particular note to the first excerpt in which Ada arouses herself by rubbing her
genitalia against the tree branch. Van
is not yet on the scene.
Now—what might this have to do with Louÿs’ Les Chansons de Bilitis? The image of a young girl masturbating again
a tree limb is not a frequent one in world literature but, as it happens, it is
precisely the scene that opens The Songs of Bilitis.
I
L'ARBRE
Je me suis dévêtue pour monter à un arbre;
mes cuisses nues embrassaient l'écorce lisse
et humide; mes sandales marchaient
sur les
branches.
Tout en haut, mais
encore sous les feuilles
et à l'ombre de la chaleur, je me suis mise
à
cheval sur une fourche écartée
en balançant
mes pieds dans le vide.
Il avait plu. Des gouttes d'eau tombaient
et
coulaient sur ma peau. Mes mains étaient
tachées de
mousse, et mes orteils étaient
rouges, à
cause des fleurs écrasées.
Je sentais le bel arbre vivre quand le vent
passait au travers; alors je serrais mes
jambes davantage et j'appliquais mes lèvres
ouvertes sur la nuque chevelue
d'un rameau.
THE TREE
I undressed to climb a tree;
my naked thighs embraced the smooth and humid bark; my sandals climbed upon the
branches.
High up, but still
beneath the leaves and shaded from the heat, I straddled a wide-spread fork and
swung my feet into the void.
It had rained. Drops
of water fell and flowed upon my skin. My hands were soiled with moss and my
heels were reddened by the crushed blossoms.
I felt the lovely tree
living when the wind passed through it; so I locked my legs tighter, and
crushed my open lips to the hairy nape of a bough.
Lest the reader think I have an overactive imagination, please note that the next chapter but one (in which they first kiss) opens with a double entendre:
The
hugest dictionary in the library said under Lip: ‘Either of a pair of
fleshy folds surrounding an orifice.’
Mileyshiy Emile, as Ada called Monsieur Littré,
spoke thus: ‘Partie
extérieure et charnue
qui forme le contour de la bouche...
Les deux bords d’une plaie simple’ (we
simply speak with our wounds; wounds procreate) ‘...C’est le membre
qui lèche.’ Dearest Emile!
Nabokov’s choice from
“the hugest dictionary,” (Merriam-Webster II) is in fact the fifth
among the definitions. The first locates “lips” at the opening of the mouth. English
“lips” and the French “lèvres” refer to both the upper and lower orifices
and presumably are cognate with the Latin labium, pl. labia. Also perhaps
of note is that Ada’s shattal tree is
from Edenic Asia Minor as is Bilitis
herself. Their positions astraddle the branch leave no doubt about which
lips are intended. They are, by the way, about the same age.
Ada is not the first Nabokov work to
cite Les Chansons de Bilitis.
The protagonist of Podvig
(Glory) Nabokov’s fourth novel (1932) flees revolutionary Russia
aboard a freighter. Seventeen-year-old Martin is seduced by a flamboyant Petersburg
society poetess. After their arrival in Athens,
Alla presents him with Pierre Louÿs’
Chansons de Bilitis
“in the cheap edition illustrated with the naked forms of adolescents,
from which she would read to him, meaningfully pronouncing the French, in the
early evening on the Acropolis, the most appropriate place, one might
say” (30). (įĢĢĮ … ŠĻ ŠŅieŚÄe ×ß įĘÉĪŁ,
ŠĻÄĮŅÉĢĮ ÅĶÕ "šeÓĪÉ
āÉĢÉŌÉÓß", ÄÅŪÅ×ĻÅ ÉŚÄĮĪiÅ, ÉĢĢĄÓŌŅÉŅĻ×ĮĪĪĻÅ ĘÉĒÕŅĮĶÉ ĒĻĢŁČß ŠĻÄŅĻÓŌĖĻ×ß, [38] É
ŽÉŌĮĢĮ ÅĶÕ ×ÓĢÕČß, ףŅĮŚÉŌÅĢŲĪĻ ŠŅĻÉŚĪĻÓŃ ĘŅĮĪĆÕŚÓĖiŃ ÓĢĻ×Į, ŠĻÄ×ÅŽÅŅß, ĪĮ įĖŅĻŠĻĢe, ĪĮ ÓĮĶĻĶß, ŌĮĖß ÓĖĮŚĮŌŲ, ŠĻÄČĻÄŃŻÅĶß ĶeÓŌe). The low opinion of the
thirty-year-old Nabokov of Les Chansons
de Bilitis is evident. But perhaps it had
once been otherwise.
One of Ada’s themes is the Ardis
library from which Van filches erotic reading material for himself and Ada, whose access is strictly
regulated. Nabokov has remarked that between the ages
of ten and fifteen in St. Petersbburg he probably
read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian,
and French -- than in any other five-year period in my life” (SO-42). The
Nabokov family library has long since been dispersed but
its printed catalogue survives: Sistematicheskii
katalog Biblioteki Vladimira Dmitrievicha Nabokova. (S-Peterburg:
Tovarishchestvo Xudozhestvennoi
Pechati, 1904). Item numbers 372 & 373 are
“Louys,
P. Aphrodite. Paris, 1901”
and “Louys, P. Les Chansons
de Bilitis, Paris MDCCCXCVIII” (1898).
* Be it noted that
Van’s three infallible characteristics for recognizing lesbians are to be
found in Louÿs’ novella where short hair
and skimpy bosoms are the typifying traits.
D. Barton Johnson,
Editor NABOKV-L