In a Manhattan bookshop Cordula de Prey (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Ada's schoolmate at Brownhill) tells Van that she does not date the hoodlums:
‘Marina gives me a glowing account of you and says uzhe chuvstvuetsya osen’. Which is very Russian. Your grandmother would repeat regularly that’ already-is-to-be-felt-autumn’ remark every year, at the same time, even on the hottest day of the season at Villa Armina: Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her. You look splendid, sïnok moy, but I can well imagine how fed up you must be with her two little girls, Therefore, I have a suggestion —’
‘Oh, I liked them enormously,’ purred Van. ‘Especially dear little Lucette.’
‘My suggestion is, come with me to a cocktail party today. It is given by the excellent widow of an obscure Major de Prey — obscurely related to our late neighbor, a fine shot but the light was bad on the Common, and a meddlesome garbage collector hollered at the wrong moment. Well, that excellent and influential lady who wishes to help a friend of mine’ (clearing his throat) ‘has, I’m told, a daughter of fifteen summers, called Cordula, who is sure to recompense you for playing Blindman’s Buff all summer with the babes of Ardis Wood.’
‘We played mostly Scrabble and Snap,’ said Van. ‘Is the needy friend also in my age group?’
‘She’s a budding Duse,’ replied Demon austerely, ‘and the party is strictly a "prof push." You’ll stick to Cordula de Prey, I, to Cordelia O’Leary.’
‘D’accord,’ said Van.
Cordula’s mother, an overripe, overdressed, overpraised comedy actress, introduced Van to a Turkish acrobat with tawny hairs on his beautiful orang-utan hands and the fiery eyes of a charlatan — which he was not, being a great artist in his circular field. Van was so taken up by his talk, by the training tips he lavished on the eager boy, and by envy, ambition, respect and other youthful emotions, that he had little time for Cordula, round-faced, small, dumpy, in a turtle-neck sweater of dark-red wool, or even for the stunning young lady on whose bare back the paternal hand kept resting lightly as Demon steered her toward this or that useful guest. But that very same evening Van ran into Cordula in a bookshop and she said, ‘By the way, Van — I can call you that, can’t I? Your cousin Ada is my schoolmate. Oh, yes. Now, explain, please, what did you do to our difficult Ada? In her very first letter from Ardis, she positively gushed — our Ada gushed! — about how sweet, clever, unusual, irresistible —’
‘Silly girl. When was that?’
‘In June, I imagine. She wrote again later, but her reply — because I was quite jealous of you — really I was! — and had fired back lots of questions — well, her reply was evasive, and practically void of Van.’
He looked her over more closely than he had done before. 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. Her bobbed hair was of a neutral shade between dry straw and damp. Her light blue iris could be matched by millions of similar eyes in pigment-poor families of French Estoty. Her mouth was doll-pretty when consciously closed in a mannered pout so as to bring out what portraitists call the two ‘sickle folds’ which, at their best, are oblong dimples and, at their worst, the creases down the well-chilled cheeks of felt-booted apple-cart girls. When her lips parted, as they did now, they revealed braced teeth, which, however, she quickly remembered to shutter.
‘My cousin Ada,’ said Van, ‘is a little girl of eleven or twelve, and much too young to fall in love with anybody, except people in books. Yes, I too found her sweet. A trifle on the bluestocking side, perhaps, and, at the same time, impudent and capricious — but, yes, sweet.’
‘I wonder,’ murmured Cordula, with such a nice nuance of pensive tone that Van could not tell whether she meant to close the subject, or leave it ajar, or open a new one.
‘How could I get in touch with you?’ he asked. ‘Would you come to Riverlane? Are you a virgin?’
‘I don’t date hoodlums,’ she replied calmly, ‘but you can always "contact" me through Ada. We are not in the same class, in more ways than one’ (laughing); ‘she’s a little genius, I’m a plain American ambivert, but we are enrolled in the same Advanced French group, and the Advanced French group is assigned the same dormitory so that a dozen blondes, three brunettes and one redhead, la Rousse, can whisper French in their sleep’ (laughing alone).
‘What fun. Okay, thanks. The even number means bunks, I guess. Well, I’ll be seeing you, as the hoods say.’ (1.27)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): d’accord: Okay.
The name of Daniel Veen's family estate, Ardis hints at paradise. Paradise Lost (1667) is a poem by John Milton (an English poet, 1608-74). In his essay "Milton I" (1936) T. S. Eliot mentions hoodlumism:
There is a large class of persons, including some who appear in print as critics, who regard any censure upon a 'great' poet as a breach of the peace, as an act of wanton iconoclasm, or even hoodlumism. The kind of derogatory criticism that I have to make upon Milton is not intended for such persons, who cannot understand that it is more important, in some vital respects, to be a good poet than to be a great poet; and of what I have to say I consider that the only jury of judgment is that of the ablest poetical practitioners of my own time.
The most important fact about Milton, for my purpose is his blindness. I do not mean that to go blind in middle life is itself enough to determine the whole nature of a man's poetry. Blindness must be considered in conjunction with Milton's personality and character, and the peculiar education which he received. It must also be considered in connexion with his devotion to, and expertness in the art of music. Had Milton been a man of very keen senses - I mean of all the five senses - his blindness would not have mattered so much. But for a man whose sensuousness, such as it was, had been withered early by book-learning, and whose gifts were naturally aural, it mattered a great deal. It would seem, indeed, to have helped him to concentrate on what he could do best.
Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) on May 31, 1901, in Paris (a city also known as Lute on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra), Van mentions Milton Eliot, the real-estate magnate:
The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days ‘Alphonse Cinq,’ believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla — here a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’ colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye — all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s ‘gem bulbs’ plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman.
‘Hullo there, Ed,’ said Van to the barman, and she turned at the sound of his dear rasping voice.
‘I didn’t expect you to wear glasses. You almost got le paquet, which I was preparing for the man supposedly "goggling" my hat. Darling Van! Dushka moy!’
‘Your hat,’ he said, ‘is positively lautrémontesque — I mean, lautrecaquesque — no, I can’t form the adjective.’
Ed Barton served Lucette what she called a Chambéryzette.
‘Gin and bitter for me.’
‘I’m so happy and sad,’ she murmured in Russian. ‘Moyo grustnoe schastie! How long will you be in old Lute?’
Van answered he was leaving next day for England, and then on June 3 (this was May 31) would be taking the Admiral Tobakoff back to the States. She would sail with him, she cried, it was a marvelous idea, she didn’t mind whither to drift, really, West, East, Toulouse, Los Teques. He pointed out that it was far too late to obtain a cabin (on that not very grand ship so much shorter than Queen Guinevere), and changed the subject. (3.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): affalés etc.: sprawling in their armchairs.
bouffant: puffed up.
gueule etc.: simian facial angle.
grustnoe etc.: Russ., she addresses him as ‘my sad bliss’.
On Demonia VN's Lolita (1955) is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg:
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 (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg’s novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish ‘t,’ not a thick English one), a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt, with red poppies or peonies, ‘deficient in botanical reality,’ as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream.
(Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.) (1.13)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared. Incidentally, that title’s pronunciation has nothing to do with English or Russian (pace an anonymous owl in a recent issue of the TLS).
Osberg is an anagram of Borges. An Argentine writer, J. L. Borges (1899-1986) went completely blind by the age of fifty-five, in 1955. All five senses mentioned by T. S. Eliot in his essay on Milton bring to mind "Do the Senses make Sense?", a modest work of John Ray, Jr. (in Lolita, the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript):
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
Just before his meeting with Lucette, Van meets Cordula (now married to Ivan G. Tobak, the shipowner) and makes love to her:
A moment later, as happens so often in farces and foreign cities, Van ran into another friend. With a surge of delight he saw Cordula in a tight scarlet skirt bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop. Van stroked her with his fingertips, and as she straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition), he quoted the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them:
The Veens speak only to Tobaks
But Tobaks speak only to dogs.
The passage of years had but polished her prettiness and though many fashions had come and gone since 1889, he happened upon her at a season when hairdos and skirtlines had reverted briefly (another much more elegant lady was already ahead of her) to the style of a dozen years ago, abolishing the interruption of remembered approval and pleasure. She plunged into a torrent of polite questions — but he had a more important matter to settle at once — while the flame still flickered.
‘Let’s not squander,’ he said, ‘the tumescence of retrieved time on the gush of small talk. I’m bursting with energy, if that’s what you want to know. Now look; it may sound silly and insolent but I have an urgent request. Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It’s a must!’
‘Really, Van!’ exclaimed angry Cordula. ‘You go a bit far. I’m a happy wife. My Tobachok adores me. We’d have ten children by now if I’d not been careful with him and others.’
‘You’ll be glad to learn that this other has been found utterly sterile.’
‘Well, I’m anything but. I guess I’d cause a mule to foal by just looking on. Moreover, I’m lunching today with the Goals.’
‘C’est bizarre, an exciting little girl like you who can be so tender with poodles and yet turns down a poor paunchy stiff old Veen.’
‘The Veens are much too gay as dogs go.’
‘Since you collect adages,’ persisted Van, ‘let me quote an Arabian one. Paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl’s sash. Eh bien?’
‘You are impossible. Where and when?’
‘Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I’ve never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that’s what tout confort promises — and not much else.’
‘I must be home not later than eleven-thirty, it’s almost eleven now.’
‘It will take five minutes. Please!’
Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five. Very pleased with himself, Van walked with her for a stretch through the brown and green Bois de Belleau in the direction of her osobnyachyok (small mansion).
‘That reminds me,’ he said, ‘I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I’ve had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years — the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan’s place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore. I want to relinquish that flat. Would you like to accept it as a belated wedding present from an admirer? Good. We shall do it again some day. Tomorrow I have to be in London and on the third my favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff, will take me to Manhattan. Au revoir. Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new. Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?’
‘That’s right. And where’s the other?’
‘I think we’ll part here. It’s twenty minutes to twelve. You’d better toddle along.’
‘Au revoir. You’re a very bad boy and I’m a very bad girl. But it was fun — even though you’ve been speaking to me not as you would to a lady friend but as you probably do to little whores. Wait. Here’s a top secret address where you can always’ — (fumbling in her handbag) — ‘reach me’ — (finding a card with her husband’s crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph) — ‘at Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August.’
She looked around, rose on her toes like a ballerina, and kissed him on the mouth. Sweet Cordula! (3.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): moue: little grimace.