David van Veen & Vatican in Ada; Emblem Bay & Iris Acht in Pale Fire

Describing Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Eric’s grandfather David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction who built one hundred memorial floramors (palatial brothels) all over the world:

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.’ (2.3)

David Slaying Goliath (c. 1616) is a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. A Flemish artist and diplomat, Rubens was a pupil of Otto van Veen (1556-1629). Otto van Veen is the author of Emblem books, including Quinti Horatii Flacci emblemata (1607), Amorum emblemata (1608), and Amoris divini emblemata (1615). At the end of Ada’s next chapter ("a lecture on dreams") Van says that there can be no emblem or parable in a village idiot’s hallucinations or in last night’s dream of any of us in this hall:

I have some notes here on the general character of dreams. One puzzling feature is the multitude of perfect strangers with clear features, but never seen again, accompanying, meeting, welcoming me, pestering me with long tedious tales about other strangers — all this in localities familiar to me and in the midst of people, deceased or living, whom I knew well; or the curious tricks of an agent of Chronos — a very exact clock-time awareness, with all the pangs (possibly full-bladder pangs in disguise) of not getting somewhere in time, and with that clock hand before me, numerically meaningful, mechanically plausible, but combined — and that is the curious part — with an extremely hazy, hardly existing passing-of-time feeling (this theme I will also reserve for a later chapter). All dreams are affected by the experiences and impressions of the present as well as by memories of childhood; all reflect, in images or sensations, a draft, a light, a rich meal or a grave internal disorder. Perhaps the most typical trait of practically all dreams, unimportant or portentous — and this despite the presence, in stretches or patches, of fairly logical (within special limits) cogitation and awareness (often absurd) of dream-past events — should be understood by my students as a dismal weakening of the intellectual faculties of the dreamer, who is not really shocked to run into a long-dead friend. At his best the dreamer wears semi-opaque blinkers; at his worst he’s an imbecile. The class (1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, et cetera) will carefully note (rustle of bluebooks) that, owing to their very nature, to that mental mediocrity and bumble, dreams cannot yield any semblance of morality or symbol or allegory or Greek myth, unless, naturally, the dreamer is a Greek or a mythicist. Metamorphoses in dreams are as common as metaphors in poetry. A writer who likens, say, the fact of imagination’s weakening less rapidly than memory, to the lead of a pencil getting used up more slowly than its erasing end, is comparing two real, concrete, existing things. Do you want me to repeat that? (cries of ‘yes! yes!’) Well, the pencil I’m holding is still conveniently long though it has served me a lot, but its rubber cap is practically erased by the very action it has been performing too many times. My imagination is still strong and serviceable but my memory is getting shorter and shorter. I compare that real experience to the condition of this real commonplace object. Neither is a symbol of the other. Similarly, when a teashop humorist says that a little conical titbit with a comical cherry on top resembles this or that (titters in the audience) he is turning a pink cake into a pink breast (tempestuous laughter) in a fraise-like frill or frilled phrase (silence). Both objects are real, they are not interchangeable, not tokens of something else, say, of Walter Raleigh’s decapitated trunk still topped by the image of his wetnurse (one lone chuckle). Now the mistake — the lewd, ludicrous and vulgar mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin (actually seen in a dream by the patient) as a significant abstraction of the real object, as a bumpkin’s bonbon or one-half of the bust if you see what I mean (scattered giggles). There can be no emblem or parable in a village idiot’s hallucinations or in last night’s dream of any of us in this hall. In those random visions nothing — underscore ‘nothing’ (grating sound of horizontal strokes) — can be construed as allowing itself to be deciphered by a witch doctor who can then cure a madman or give comfort to a killer by laying the blame on a too fond, too fiendish or too indifferent parent — secret festerings that the foster quack feigns to heal by expensive confession fests (laughter and applause). (2.4)

In his Commentary and Index to Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Embla Point and Emblem Bay:

No such qualms disturbed him as he [the king] sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She [Queen Disa] enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains; but the part concerning Garh displeased her as if, paradoxically, she would have preferred him to have gone through a bit of wholesome hough-magandy with the wench. She told him sharply to skip such interludes, and he made her a droll little bow. But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant expression appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared. That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. (note to ll. 433-434)

Embla, a small old town with a wooden church surrounded by sphagnum bogs at the saddest, loneliest, northmost point of the misty peninsula, 149, 433.

Emblem, meaning "blooming" in Zemblan; a beautiful bay with bluish and black, curiously striped rocks and a luxurious growth of heather on its gentle slopes, in the southmost part of W. Zembla, 433.

“Curiously striped rocks” bring to mind polosatye tiki (the striped ticking) mentioned by I. Annenski in the last line of his poem Toska vokzala (“Train-Station Sadness,” 1909):

О, канун вечных будней,
Скуки липкое жало…
В пыльном зное полудней
Гул и краска вокзала…

Полумертвые мухи
На забитом киоске,
На пролитой известке
Слепы, жадны и глухи.

Флаг линяло-зеленый,
Пара белые взрывы,
И трубы отдаленной
Без ответа призывы.

И эмблема разлуки
В обманувшем свиданьи —
Кондукто́р однорукий
У часов в ожиданьи…

Есть ли что-нибудь нудней,
Чем недвижная точка,
Чем дрожанье полудней
Над дремотой листочка…

Что-нибудь, но не это…
Подползай — ты обязан;
Как ты жарок, измазан,
Все равно — ты не это!

Уничтожиться, канув
В этот омут безликий,
Прямо в одурь диванов,
В полосатые тики!..

O, eve of eternal humdrum,
The viscid stinger of dullness…
In the dusty heat of noon, the din
And colour of the train station…

The half-dead flies
On the boarded-up kiosk,
On the spilled whitewash,
Are blind, greedy and deaf.

A faded-green banner,
White bursts of steam,
And the distant chimney’s
Unanswered call.

The emblem of parting
In a deceitful assignation —
The one-armed conductor
By the clock, in anticipation…

Is there something more tedious
Than a motionless point,
Than the quiver of noon
Above the drowsiness of a leaf…

Anything, but this…
Nestle closer — you must;
How flushed you are, besmeared,
Anything — but not this!

To be annihilated, by falling
Into this faceless pool,
Into the stupor of couches,
The striped ticking!..  

(tr. Linda Southby)

In his poem Annenski (who died of heart failure at a railway station) calls the one-armed conductor emblema razluki (the emblem of parting). According to Ada, at Marina’s funeral Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) and d’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, wept comme des fontaines (3.8). In Canto Three of his poem Shade describes his heart attack and mentions a tall white fountain:

                                      Give me now 

Your full attention. I can't tell you how 

I knew - but I did know that I had crossed 

The border. Everything I loved was lost 

But no aorta could report regret.

A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; 

And blood-black nothingness began to spin 

A system of cells interlinked within 

Cells interlinked within cells interlinked 

Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct 

Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. (ll. 697-707)

The counterpart of Shade's "tall white fountain" is Mrs. Z.'s "tall white mountain" (misprinted as "fountain" in Jim Coates' article about Mrs. Z.'s heart attack). Describing the decline of Villa Venus, Van quotes Seneca's line subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt ("mountains subside and hights deteriorate," as Vivian Darkbloom translates it in his 'Notes to Ada'):

In 1905 a glancing blow was dealt Villa Venus from another quarter. The personage we have called Ritcov or Vrotic had been induced by the ailings of age to withdraw his patronage. However, one night he suddenly arrived, looking again as ruddy as the proverbial fiddle; but after the entire staff of his favorite floramor near Bath had worked in vain on him till an ironic Hesperus rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky, the wretched sovereign of one-half of the globe called for the Shell Pink Book, wrote in it a line that Seneca had once composed:

subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt,

— and departed, weeping. About the same time a respectable Lesbian who conducted a Villa Venus at Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa, throttled with her own hands (she had been a Russian weightlifter) two of her most beautiful and valuable charges. It was all rather sad. (2.3)

Seneca is a character in Apollon Maykov's lyric drama Tri smerti ("Three Deaths," 1851). Maykov is the author of Na smert' Lermontova ("On Lermontov's Death," 1841). Describing Villa Venus, Van mentions the viaduct of fabulous Palermontovia:

But on the whole it was the idyllic and the romantic that he favored. English gentlemen of parts found many pleasures in Letchworth Lodge, an honest country house plastered up to its bulleyes, or Itchenor Chat with its battered chimney breasts and hipped gables. None could help admiring David van Veen’s knack of making his brand-new Regency mansion look like a renovated farmhouse or of producing a converted convent on a small offshore island with such miraculous effect that one could not distinguish the arabesque from the arbutus, ardor from art, the sore from the rose. We shall always remember Little Lemantry near Rantchester or the Pseudotherm in the lovely cul-de-sac south of the viaduct of fabulous Palermontovia. We appreciated greatly his blending local banality (that château girdled with chestnuts, that castello guarded by cypresses) with interior ornaments that pandered to all the orgies reflected in the ceiling mirrors of little Eric’s erogenetics. Most effective, in a functional sense, was the protection the architect distilled, as it were, from the ambitus of his houses. Whether nestling in woodland dells or surrounded by a many-acred park, or overlooking terraced groves and gardens, access to Venus began by a private road and continued through a labyrinth of hedges and walls with inconspicuous doors to which only the guests and the guards had keys. Cunningly distributed spotlights followed the wandering of the masked and caped grandees through dark mazes of coppices; for one of the stipulations imagined by Eric was that ‘every establishment should open only at nightfall and close at sunrise.’ A system of bells that Eric may have thought up all by himself (it was really as old as the bautta and the vyshibala) prevented visitors from running into each other on the premises, so that no matter how many noblemen were waiting or wenching in any part of the floramor, each felt he was the only cock in the coop, because the bouncer, a silent and courteous person resembling a Manhattan shopwalker, did not count, of course: you sometimes saw him when a hitch occurred in connection with your credentials or credit but he was seldom obliged to apply vulgar force or call in an assistant. (2.3)

Like Lermontov's poem Son ("A Dream," 1841), VN's Ada seems to be a triple dream (a dream within a dream within a dream). Yumor Lermontova ("Lermontov's Humor") is an essay by Innokentiy Annenski included in Vtoraya Kniga otrazheniy (“The Second Book of Reflections,” 1909). In his essay Balmont-lirik (“Balmont the Lyric Poet”) Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody," Annenski's penname) complains that we do not want to look at poetry seriously and mentions emblema (the emblem):

Да и не хотим мы глядеть на поэзию серьёзно, т. е. как на искусство. На словах поэзия будет для нас, пожалуй, и служение, и подвиг, и огонь, и алтарь, и какая там ещё не потревожена эмблема, а на деле мы всё ещё ценим в ней сладкий лимонад, не лишённый, впрочем, и полезности, которая даже строгим и огорчённым русским читателем очень ценится. Разве можно думать над стихами? Что же тогда останется для алгебры? (II) 

"How can one brood over verses? What will then remain for algebra?" In Pushkin’s little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri says that he cut up music like a corpse and measured harmony by algebra:

Звуки умертвив,
Музыку я разъял, как труп. Поверил
Я алгеброй гармонию.

Having stifled sounds,
I cut up music like a corpse. I measured
Harmony by algebra. (scene I)

At the end of Pushkin’s little tragedy Salieri wonders if the creator of Vatican (Michelangelo, the author of David) was no murderer after all:

Ты заснёшь
Надолго, Моцарт! но ужель он прав,
И я не гений? Гений и злодейство
Две вещи несовместные. Неправда:
А Бонаротти? или это сказка
Тупой, бессмысленной толпы — и не был
Убийцею создатель Ватикана?

Your sleep
Will be a long one, Mozart. But is he right,
And I’m no genius? Genius and villainy
Are two things incompatible. Not true:
What about Buonarotti? Or is that just
A fable of stupid, senseless crowd,
And the Vatican’s creator was no murderer? (Scene II)

Describing Demon’s duel with d’Onsky, Van mentions smart little Vatican, a Roman spa:

Upon being questioned in Demon’s dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so. Since prudent Veen preferred killing his man in Europe (decrepit but indestructible Gamaliel was said to be doing his best to forbid duels in the Western Hemisphere — a canard or an idealistic President’s instant-coffee caprice, for nothing was to come of it after all), Demon rented the fastest petroloplane available, overtook the Baron (looking very fit) in Nice, saw him enter Gunter’s Bookshop, went in after him, and in the presence of the imperturbable and rather bored English shopkeeper, back-slapped the astonished Baron across the face with a lavender glove. The challenge was accepted; two native seconds were chosen; the Baron plumped for swords; and after a certain amount of good blood (Polish and Irish — a kind of American ‘Gory Mary’ in barroom parlance) had bespattered two hairy torsoes, the whitewashed terrace, the flight of steps leading backward to the walled garden in an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement, the apron of a quite accidental milkmaid, and the shirtsleeves of both seconds, charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, the latter gentlemen separated the panting combatants, and Skonky died, not ‘of his wounds’ (as it was viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston — a city where, incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of Glass Biota at the local museum. (1.2)

In Canto One of his poem Shade describes his childhood and mentions a lemniscate left upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft bicycle tires:

In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps

But really envied nothing - save perhaps

The miracle of a lemniscate left

Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft

Bicycle tires. (ll. 135-139)

The infinity symbol ∞ is sometimes called “lemniscate.” In his poem ∞ (1904) Annenski compares the infinity symbol ∞ to oprokinutoe 8 (8 toppled over):

Девиз Таинственной похож
На опрокинутое 8:
Она - отраднейшая ложь
Из всех, что мы в сознаньи носим.

The Mysterious Motto resembles

8 toppled over:

it is the most heartening lie

of all we bear in our consciousness.

Otto (btw., Otto van Veen is also known by his Latinized name Otto Venius or Octavius Vaenius) means in Italian what acht means in German: “eight.” In his Commentary and Index Kinbote mentions Iris Acht, a celebrated Zemblan actress, the favourite of Thurgus the Third (the King’s grandfather who liked to bicycle in the park). Thurgus the Third (surnamed the Turgid) brings to mind Turgenev. In a letter of Sept. 7/19, 1875, to N. V. Khanykov Turgenev says that on the next day (Sept. 20, 1875, NS) 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.

According to Van, all the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875:

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)

Guillaume de Monparnasse (sic, the leaving out of the 't' makes it more intime) is the penname of Mlle Larivière, Lucette's governess who writes fiction. It hints at Guy de Maupassant, the writer who does not exist on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set). Maupassant's story La Maison Tellier (1881) is dedicated to Ivan Turgenev. Turgenev is the author of Dym ("Smoke," 1867). In several poems from his cycle "Italian Verses" (1909) Alexander Blok compares Florence to dymnyi iris (smoky iris). There is Blok in yabloko (apple). In the first stanza of his poem Upon Appleton House Andrew Marvell mentions "Work of no Foreign Architect:"

Within this sober Frame expect
Work of no Foreign Architect;
That unto Caves the Quarries drew,
And Forests did to Pastures hew;
Who of his great Design in pain
Did for a Model vault his Brain,
Whose Columns should so high be raised
To arch the Brows that on them gazed.

In the poem's epilogue Marvell mentions the dark Hemisphere:

But now the Salmon-Fishers moist
Their leathern Boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in Shoes,
Have shod their Heads in their Canoes.
How Tortoise like, but not so slow,
These rational Amphibii go!
Let’s in: for the dark Hemisphere
Does now like one of them appear.

In his essay "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream" Eric Veen mentions "both hemispheres of our callipygian globe:"

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. (2.3)

According to Leo Tolstoy's son Ilya, the phrase arkhitektor vinovat ("the architect is to blame") was proverbial in the Tolstoy family:

Перебегая из залы в гостиную, я зацепился ногой за порог, упал, и от моей чашки остались одни осколочки.

Конечно, я заревел во весь голос и сделал вид, что расшибся гораздо больше, чем на самом деле.

Мамá кинулась меня утешать и сказала мне, что я сам виноват, потому что был неосторожен.

Это меня рассердило ужасно, и я начал кричать, что виноват не я, а противный архитектор, который сделал в двери порог, и если бы порога не было, я бы не упал.

Папá это услыхал и начал смеяться: "Архитектор виноват, архитектор виноват," - и мне от этого стало ещё обиднее, и я не мог ему простить, что он надо мной смеётся.

С этих пор поговорка "архитектор виноват" так и осталась в нашей семье, и папá часто любил её повторять, когда кто-нибудь старался свалить свою вину на другого.

The name Van Veen also seems to hint at Ivan Golovin, the main character of Tolstoy's story Smert' Ivana Ilyicha ("The Death of Ivan Ilyich," 1886). Describing his conversation with Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) in "Ardis the Second," Van mentions the ivanilich (a kind of sighing old hassock upholstered in leather):

Naked-faced, dull-haired, wrapped up in her oldest kimono (her Pedro had suddenly left for Rio), Marina reclined on her mahogany bed under a golden-yellow quilt, drinking tea with mare’s milk, one of her fads.

‘Sit down, have a spot of chayku,’ she said. ‘The cow is in the smaller jug, I think. Yes, it is.’ And when Van, having kissed her freckled hand, lowered himself on the ivanilich (a kind of sighing old hassock upholstered in leather): ‘Van, dear, I wish to say something to you, because I know I shall never have to repeat it again. Belle, with her usual flair for the right phrase, has cited to me the cousinage-dangereux-voisinage adage — I mean "adage," I always fluff that word — and complained qu’on s’embrassait dans tous les coins. Is that true?’

Van’s mind flashed in advance of his speech. It was, Marina, a fantastic exaggeration. The crazy governess had observed it once when he carried Ada across a brook and kissed her because she had hurt her toe. I’m the well-known beggar in the saddest of all stories. (1.37)

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): chayku: Russ., tea (diminutive).

Ivanilich: a pouf plays a marvelous part in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where it sighs deeply under a friend of the widow’s.

cousinage: cousinhood is dangerous neighborhood.

on s’embrassait: kissing went on in every corner.

Голиаф + вино/овин + лак/кал = Головин + фиалка

Голиаф - Goliath

вино - wine

овин - barn

лак - varnish

кал - faeces

Головин - Golovin

фиалка - violet (flower)