The main character in VN's novel Transparent Things (1972), Hugh Person is staying at the Ascot Hotel in Witt:
As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted "Peterson" and pronounced "Parson" by some) extricated his angular bulk from the taxi that had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort from Trux, and while his head was still lowered in an opening meant for emerging dwarfs, his eyes went up - not to acknowledge the helpful gesture sketched by the driver who had opened the door for him but to check the aspect of the Ascot Hotel (Ascot!) against an eight-year-old recollection, one fifth of his life, engrained by grief. A dreadful building of gray stone and brown wood, it sported cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut) which by some mnemoptical trick he remembered as apple green. The steps of the porch were flanked with electrified carriage lamps on a pair of iron posts. Down those steps an aproned valet came tripping to take the two bags, and (under one arm) the shoebox, all of which the driver had alertly re-moved from the yawning boot. Person pays alert driver.
The unrecognizable hall was no doubt as squalid as it had always been.
At the desk, while signing his name and relinquishing his passport, he asked in French, English, German, and English again if old Kronig, the director whose fat face and false joviality he so clearly recalled, was still around.
The receptionist (blond bun, pretty neck) said no, Monsieur Kronig had left to become manager, imagine, of the Fantastic in Blur (or so it sounded). A grassgreen skyblue postcard depicting reclining clients was produced in illustration or proof. The caption was in three languages and only the German part was idiomatic. The English one read: Lying Lawn - and, as if on purpose, a fraudulent perspective had enlarged the lawn to monstrous proportions.
"He died last year," added the girl (who en face did not resemble Armande one bit), abolishing whatever interest a photochrome of the Majestic in Chur might have presented. "So there is nobody who might remember me?"
"I regret," she said with his late wife's habitual intonation.
She also regretted that since he could not tell her which room on the third floor he had occupied she, in turn, could not give it to him, especially as the floor was full. Clasping his brow Person said it was in the middle three-hundreds and faced east, the sun welcomed him on his bedside rug, though the room had practically no view. He wanted it very badly, but the law required that records be destroyed when a director, even a former director, did what Kronig had done (suicide being a form of account fakery, one supposed). Her assistant, a handsome young fellow in black, with pustules on chin and throat, took Person up to a fourth-floor room and all the way kept staring with a telly viewer's absorption at the blank bluish wall gliding down, while, on the other hand, the no less rapt mirror in the lift reflected, for a few lucid instants, the gentleman from Massachusetts, who had a long, lean, doleful face with a slightly undershot jaw and a pair of symmetrical folds framing his mouth in what would have been a rugged, horsey, mountain-climbing arrangement had not his melancholy stoop belied every inch of his fantastic majesty. The window faced east all right but there certainly was a view: namely, a tremendous crater full of excavating machines (silent on Saturday afternoon and all Sunday).
The apple-green-aproned valet brought the two valises and the cardboard box with "Fit" on its wrapper; after which Person remained alone. He knew the hotel to be antiquated but this was overdoing it. The belle chambre au quatrième, although too large for one guest and too cramped for a group, lacked every kind of comfort. He remembered that the lower room where he, a big man of thirty-two, had cried more often and more bitterly than he ever had in his sad childhood, had been ugly too but at least had not been so sprawling and cluttered as his new abode. Its bed was a nightmare. Its "bathroom" contained a bidet (ample enough to accommodate a circus elephant, sitting) but no bath. The toilet seat refused to stay up. The tap expostulated, letting forth a strong squirt of rusty water before settling down to produce the meek normal stuff - which you do not appreciate sufficiently, which is a flowing mystery, and, yes, yes, which deserves monuments to be erected to it, cool shrines! Upon leaving that ignoble lavatory, Hugh gently closed the door after him but like a stupid pet it whined and immediately followed him into the room. Let us now illustrate our difficulties. (Chapter 2)
Hugh Person first met his wife Armande on a local Swiss train. In Oscar Wilde's humorous story The Canterville Ghost (1887) Ascot is the nearest railway station to Canterville Chase:
As Canterville Chase is seven miles from Ascot, the nearest railway station, Mr. Otis had telegraphed for a waggonette to meet them, and they started on their drive in high spirits. It was a lovely July evening, and the air was delicate with the scent of the pine-woods. Now and then they heard a wood pigeon brooding over its own sweet voice, or saw, deep in the rustling fern, the burnished breast of the pheasant. Little squirrels peered at them from the beech-trees as they went by, and the rabbits scudded away through the brushwood and over the mossy knolls, with their white tails in the air. As they entered the avenue of Canterville Chase, however, the sky became suddenly overcast with clouds, a curious stillness seemed to hold the atmosphere, a great flight of rooks passed silently over their heads, and, before they reached the house, some big drops of rain had fallen.
Not a belief in ghosts makes Person revisit dreary drab Witt:
What had you expected of your pilgrimage, Person? A mere mirror rerun of hoary torments? Sympathy from an old stone? Enforced re-creation of irrecoverable trivia? A search for lost time in an utterly distinct sense from Goodgrief's dreadful "Je me souviens, je me souviens de la maison où je suis né" or, indeed, Proust's quest? He had never experienced here (save once at the end of his last ascent) anything but boredom and bitterness. Something else had made him revisit dreary drab Witt.
Not a belief in ghosts. Who would care to haunt half-remembered lumps of matter (he did not know that Jacques lay buried under six feet of snow in Chute, Colorado), uncertain itineraries, a club hut which some spell prevented him from reaching and whose name anyway had got hopelessly mixed with "Draconite," a stimulant no longer in production but still advertised on fences, and even cliff walls. Yet something connected with spectral visitations had impelled him to come all the way from another continent. Let us make this a little clearer. (Chapter 25)
Goodgrief's dreadful "Je me souviens, je me souviens de la maison où je suis né" brings to mind an eight-year-old recollection, one fifth of Person's life, engrained by grief. In Oscar Wilde's fairy tale The Young King (1891) the King says: "Shall Joy wear what Grief has fashioned?"
Hugh Person dies (chokes to death) in a hotel fire. On the eve of his death Person talks in the lounge of the Ascot Hotel to Monsieur Wilde, a Swiss businessman. Oscar Wilde rented a furnished apartment at the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris, where he stayed until his death in 1900, famously saying that he was “dying beyond his means.” George d'Anthès (Pushkin's adversary in the poet's fatal duel, 1812-95) was born in Colmar, to aristocratic Alsatian parents. Wilde's last words were "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go." The last sentence in Transparent Things ("Easy, you know, does it, son") brings to mind Wilde's words "It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself." At the end of his poem Priznanie ("Confession," 1826) Pushkin asks the girl to feign that she loves him and says: "Ah, to deceive me is not difficult. I myself am glad to be deceived."
An opening (of the taxi that brought Hugh Person to Witt) meant for emerging dwarfs brings to mind the Dwarf in Oscar Wilde's fairy tale The Birthday of the Infanta (1891). Hugh Person first met Armande on Thursday, July 29, 1965, on the day following her twenty-third birthday:
He made Armande's acquaintance in a Swiss railway carriage one dazzling afternoon between Thur and Versex on the eve of his meeting with Mr. R. He had boarded a slow train by mistake; she had chosen one that would stop at the small station from which a bus line went up to Witt, where her mother owned a chalet. Armande and Hugh had simultaneously settled in two window seats facing each other on the lake side of the coach. An American family occupied the corresponding four-seat side across the aisle. Hugh unfolded the Journal de Genève.
Oh, she was pretty and would have been exquisitely so had her lips been fuller. She had dark eyes, fair hair, a honey-hued skin. Twin dimples of the crescentic type came down her tanned cheeks on the sides of her mournful mouth. She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse. A book lay in her lap under her black-gloved hands. He thought, he recognized that flame-and-soot paperback. The mechanism of their first acquaintance was ideally banal.
They exchanged a glance of urbane disapproval as the three American kids began pulling sweaters and pants out of a suitcase in savage search for something stupidly left behind (a heap of comics - by now taken care of, with the used towels, by a brisk hotel maid). One of the two adults, catching Armande's cold eye, responded with a look of good-natured helplessness. The conductor came for the tickets.
Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he had been right: it was indeed the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden Window.
"One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.
She considered the book in her lap as if seeking in it some explanation of his remark. Her skirt was very short.
"I mean," he said, "I work for that particular publisher. For the American publisher of the hard-cover edition. Do you like it?"
She answered in fluent but artificial English that she detested surrealistic novels of the poetic sort. She demanded hard realistic stuff reflecting our age. She liked books about Violence and Oriental Wisdom. Did it get better farther on?
"Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa, when the little girl, the narrator's daughter - "
"June."
"Yes. June sets her new dollhouse on fire and the whole villa burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it is all rather symbolic, in the grand manner, and, well, curiously tender at the same time, as the blurb says, or at least said, in our first edition. That cover is by the famous Paul Plam."
She would finish it, of course, no matter how boring, because every task in life should be brought to an end like completing that road above Witt, where they had a house, a chalet de luxe, but had to trudge up to the Drakonita cableway until that new road had been finished. The Burning Window or whatever it was called had been given her only the day before, on her twenty-third birthday, by the author's stepdaughter whom he probably -
"Julia."
Yes. Julia and she had both taught in the winter at a school for foreign young ladies in the Tessin. Julia's stepfather had just divorced her mother whom he had treated in an abominable fashion. What had they taught? Oh, posture, rhythmics - things like that.
Hugh and the new, irresistible person had by now switched to French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English. Asked to guess her nationality he suggested Danish or Dutch. No, her father's family came from Belgium, he was an architect who got killed last summer while supervising the demolition of a famous hotel in a defunct spa; and her mother was born in Russia, in a very noble milieu, but of course completely ruined by the revolution. Did he like his job? Would he mind pulling that dark blind down a little? The low sun's funeral. Was that a proverb, she queried? No, he had just made it up. (Chapter 9)
The maiden name of Armande's mother, Potapov reminds one of the English title of VN's story Kartofel'nyi El'f ("The Potato Elf," 1928). Its main character, Fred Dobson, is a circus dwarf. In the album that Armande's mother shows to Hugh Person there are photographs of Armande as an infant:
The albums were quite as candid as the house, though less depressing. The Armande series, which exclusively interested our voyeur malgré lui, was inaugurated by a photograph of the late Potapov, in his seventies, looking very dapper with his gray little imperial and his Chinese house jacket, making the wee myopic sign of the Russian cross over an invisible baby in its deep cot. Not only did the snapshots follow Armande through all the phases of the past and all the improvements of amateur photography, but the girl also came in various states of innocent undress. Her parents and aunts, the insatiable takers of cute pictures, believed in fact that a girl child of ten, the dream of a Lutwidgean, had the same right to total nudity as an infant. The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest from anybody overhead on the landing, and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess. (Chapter 12)