Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Notice the “Casanova” that introduces another archetype of sexual license, and the irony of Blanche’s claiming to be almost a virgin in almost the same breath as she refers to an appointment with her gynecologist because she suspects the whites—which will turn out to be gonorrhea rather than leucorrhea. And notice that in her first direct speech Blanche identifies herself as “a poor peat-digger’s daughter.” Indeed, she will be named in full Blanche de la Tourberie: she has a surname that if translated into Dutch would become “van Veen.”

  On Van’s last morning at Ardis the First, Bouteillan gives him advice:

  “Monsieur should be prudent. The winds of the wilderness are indiscreet. Tel un lis sauvage confiant au désert—”

  “Quite the old comedy retainer, aren’t you?” remarked Van drily.

  “Non, Monsieur,” answered Bouteillan, holding on to his cap. “Non. Tout simplement j’aime bien Monsieur et sa demoiselle.”

  “If,” said Van, “you’re thinking of little Blanche, then you’d better quote Delille not to me, but to your son, who’ll knock her up any day now.”

  The old Frenchman glanced at Van askance, pozheval gubami (chewed his lips), but said nothing.

  (157)

  Bouteillan presumably issues his warning because he has heard about Van and Ada’s ardor and activities from Blanche. Van attempts to deflect Bouteillan’s comments about himself and Ada by questioning Blanche’s fidelity to Bouteillan, and he succeeds: the comment shuts Bouteillan up, and we can deduce, from the later evidence of Kim’s blackmail album, that Blanche’s relationship with Bout has indeed already begun. Van in this final chapter of Ardis the First is obsessed by the thought that Ada could be unfaithful to him in his absence, and although she has yet to be unfaithful, Blanche’s infidelity anticipates what will happen in Ada’s case by the time Van returns to Ardis.

  On arriving at Ardis the Second, unexpectedly, Van witnesses Ada’s hand being held and kissed twice by Percy de Prey. Stung with jealousy, he tears apart the diamond necklace he has brought for Ada. But she allays his suspicions, and they make love throughout a “strenuous ‘Casanovanic’ night” (198) only to be interrupted while “still fiercely engaged” by Blanche “back from a rendezvous with old Sore the Burgundian night watchman” (191). Again, the fact that Blanche once more has a new partner serves as an omen of Ada’s own infidelities, whatever Ada may for the moment convince Van to believe.

  During a Flavita (Russian Scrabble) game where Van takes notes “in the hope—not quite unfulfilled—of ‘catching sight of the lining of time’ (which, as he was later to write, is ‘the best informal definition of portents and prophecies’)” (227), Ada scores 383 points with a single word, TORFYaNUYu. Lucette objects:

  “It’s a place name! One can’t use it! It’s the name of the first little station after Ladore Bridge!”

  “That’s right, pet,” sang out Ada. “Oh, pet, you are so right! Yes, Torfyanaya, or as Blanche says, La Tourbière, is, indeed, the pretty but rather damp village where our cendrillon’s family lives. But, mon petit, in our mother’s tongue—que dis-je, in the tongue of a maternal grandmother we all share—a rich beautiful tongue which my pet should not neglect for the sake of a Canadian brand of French— this quite ordinary adjective means ‘peaty,’ feminine gender, accusative case.”

  (228)

  The portent will become clear later, when on what will be his last morning at Ardis Van discovers that it is Blanche who has slipped him a note warning him that he is being deceived by Ada. Visiting him as the night wanes, “in a wretched simulacrum of seduction,” Blanche tells Van she loves him, “he was her ‘folly and fever,’ she wished to spend a few secret moments with him” (292). This time he is too preoccupied with the warning note to be stirred, “quite aside from the fear of infection” (293). Questioned, Blanche tells him of Ada’s affair with Philip Rack. He stumbles out into the dawn, packs his bags, and confronts Ada, who, unaware that he has been referring to Rack, admits to her affair not with Rack but with Percy de Prey.

  Van leaves Ardis, driven by the Russian coachman Trofim Fartukov, and drops off Blanche on the way (she has slipped him the note about Ada only because she, too, has decided to leave Ardis Hall). Offering him further vivid details about Ada’s relations with Percy, she

  rambled on and on until they reached Tourbière…. Van let her out….

  He kissed Cendrillon’s shy hand and resumed his seat in the carriage, clearing his throat and plucking at his trousers before crossing his legs. Vain Van Veen.

  “The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?”

  “I’ll take you five versts across the bog,” said Trofim, “the nearest is Volosyanka.”

  His vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.

  Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern… . Who wants Ardis Hall!

  “Barin, a barin,” said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his passenger.

  “Da?”

  “Dazhe skvoz’ kozhanïy fartuk ne stal-bï ya trogat’ etu frantsuzskuyu devku.”

  Bárin: master. Dázhe skvoz’ kózhanïy fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bï ya trógat’: I would not think of touching. Étu: this (that). Frantsúzskuyu: French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. Úzhas, otcháyanie: horror, despair. Zhálost’: pity. Kóncheno, zagázheno, rastérzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds.

  (299–300)

  Notice here the counterpointing of Blanche with Van’s departure from Ardis and Ada; the stress on Blanche as hailing from “Tourbière… Torfyanka… the bog”; the phrase “Vain Van Veen,” which also plays on the Dutch pronunciation of veen, close to English “vain”; the irony that at the very moment Van is filled with outrage at Ada’s multiple infidelities he can himself be stirred with desire for Blanche; the sounding of the virginity and Venus/venereal themes, by way of the place-name Volosyanka and thence “Maidenhair… . Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern”; and at the very moment Van rejects Ardis one last time (“Who wants Ardis Hall!”), Trofim’s declaration that he would not touch Blanche “even through a leathern apron.” In fact, Trofim will marry her, and they will have a damaged child, just as Van will return to Ada, and as a result another child, Lucette, will have her light put out (NAPC 155).

  Notice, too, that the unrecognized prophecy in the Scrabble game (“TORFYaNUYu… Yes, Torfyanaya, or as Blanche says, La Tourbière, is, indeed, the pretty but rather damp village where our cendrillon’s family lives. But, mon petit,… French—this quite ordinary adjective means ‘peaty,’ feminine gender, accusative case”)—a prophecy of the disclosure that will end Ardis the Second—returns in the reference now to Blanche’s “Tourbière… Cendrillon’s shy hand… Torfyanka… Frantsúzskuyu: French (adj., accus.)” (NAPC 221). Blanche de la Tourberie’s multiple partners and her desire to have Van, too, as a partner lead her to pass him that note that alerts him to Ada Veen’s multiple partners and so turn Ardis the Second for Van from a paradise regained into a hell of infidelity and jealousy.

  LUCETTE

  If Blanche’s active sexual experience presents one ironic comment on the idylls of Ardis and the myths of love that she does so much to disseminate, Lucette’s innocence presents another: at first, apparently comic as Van and Ada try to evade her curious eyes, but ultimately tragic as she becomes embroiled in their amours. Blanche offers herself to Van, who is repulsed at the thought of her venereal disease. Lucette offers herself to Van, who knows how damaged she is, not from having too many lovers but from having had none. A witness to Van’s amours with Ada since she was eight, an eavesdropper, a spy, Lucette wants only him.

  Nabokov signals the Lucette-Blanche parallel and contrast in many ways, through the Cinderella and the deflower motifs and especially, as I show in Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness
, through the ironic combination, in very different ways, of claims of virginity and signs of sexual damage (NAPC 152–55).14

  Here I want to focus on another motif that links them and that suggests how central to Nabokov’s conception of Ada was the idea of complicating our response to the venereal Veens: the motif of peat, bog, marsh in the name of Blanche’s village and especially in the Dutch name of the Veens.

  Marsh Marigold

  Ada may collect “bog orchids,” but the center of the bog-peat-marsh theme in the Veen name is Lucette, identified with the “marsh marigold” that Wallace Fowlie carelessly omitted from his 1946 translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Mémoire.” Fowlie, not realizing at the time that the phrase souci d’eau meant “marsh marigold,” translated it word for word as “care of the water”—as Lucette, indeed, becomes the “care of the water” when she jumps to her death in the Atlantic (Ada 63–65).15

  Nabokov collected this particular piece of straw in 1960 or soon after, when Bollingen Press, which was preparing his translation of Eugene One-gin for publication, sent him their reprint edition of Huntington Cairns’s anthology The Limits of Art: Poetry and Prose Chosen by Ancient and Modern Critics. His copy preserves his outraged marginalia to Fowlie’s translation of Rimbaud’s poem on pages 1346–48, including beside an underlined “care of the water”: “!! yellow flower le souci d’eau C. palustris!”16

  Nabokov must have seen Fowlie’s version of Rimbaud before reading Freeling’s Double-Barrel and may well have followed Freeling’s hint that the Dutch veen means “peat, bog, marsh,” precisely because he remembered this “marsh marigold.” As he admits, he prefers “obscure facts”—veen as Dutch “marsh,” souci d’eau as French “marsh marigold”—“to clear symbols” (SO 7). And as someone who has a character define genius as “seeing… the invisible links between things” (LATH! 40), Nabokov appears to have anticipated that this link would somehow be fruitful, to have consulted an atlas, discovered Erica among the -veen place-names of Drenthe, and, recalling Venus Erycina, developed the idea for an ironic treatment of the myths of love that we find already foreshadowed in the passage he wrote down in a flash at the end of 1965.

  I have discussed elsewhere the ironies of “deflowering”—Lucette’s too-early sexual initiation by Van and Ada but her dying a virgin because she wants no one but Van—that Nabokov builds around the fact that Fowlie unwittingly “deflowers” Rimbaud’s “Mémoire” by substituting for souci d’eau “the care of the water,” a phrase that itself foreshadows Lucette’s death, both because she dies by water and because her death is a suicide, a near-echo or anagram of souci d’eau.17 As first-time readers we view Lucette as a minor comic complication of Van and Ada’s love, a farcical but easily removed hindrance to their ardor, but we discover as we read on, and as we reread, how tragic her entanglement in their love has become. As in the case of Blanche, the other recurrent witness of the Veens’ passions, Lucette shifts from comical witness to tragic victim of unrestrained ardor, and in her case also from the periphery to the center of the novel, precisely because her fate so complicates Van and Ada’s presentation of their love as triumphant. If Nabokov saw these possibilities very soon after reading Freeling’s novel, with its Veens and peat bogs, its whiff of incest, and its air of eavesdropping, if he saw from very early on the chance for an ironic exploration of myths of love—as seems the case from the decrepit Villa Venus in his first sketch for Ada—how nevertheless could he weave the peat-bog pattern through Lucette, when she has the same surname as Ada?

  Images of Imitation

  That indeed was a challenge, but Nabokov already had another piece of straw at hand for his nest. He encountered Fowlie’s mistranslation of Rimbaud’s souci d’eau at the beginning of the 1960s. He read Freeling’s Double-Barrel some time in 1964 or 1965. In between, he noticed a New Yorker advertisement for Barton and Guestier wines in which two models in modern dress imitate the poses of two spectators in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous poster for the Divan Japonais cabaret, 75 rue des Martyrs, reproduced on the wall behind them, over the slogan “the wines you loved in Paris!” The advertisement appeared in the inside front cover of the New Yorker on March 23, 1963, an issue in which an excerpt from The Gift depicting Yasha Chernyshevsky’s suicide was also published, and it ran for several years.18

  The advertisement, of course, becomes the basis for Van’s meeting with and description of Lucette in Paris on May 31, 1901 (3.3), at which she hears of his plan to cross the Atlantic on the Tobakoff in four days’ time and determines to make one final effort to seduce him.

  The advertisement was suggestive for Nabokov in many ways. It raises the question of the relationship between art and life, a central one throughout his thought and work and especially in Ada, where the relationship between the world of the book, Antiterra, and the world of the reader, Terra or Earth, confronts us on page after page and where the relationship between pictures (paintings, drawings, films, photographs) and events unsettles us again and again. The quiet but unmistakable contrast in period between the dress of the figures in the poster and the mimics in the photograph sounds the note of anachronism, which plays so insistently throughout Ada. The relationship between model and mimic also connects with the question of natural mimicry, a key point of contact between Nabokov’s science and his art and a subject whose artistic treatment would reach its apotheosis in his work in Ada 1.16 (Ada painting imitations of mimetic orchids: more of this in a moment). Above all, the advertisement as a whole suggests the idea of imitation and doubling so important in Ada, from the imitation or doubling of planets (Antiterra and Terra, Venus and Earth) to the imitation or doubling of sisters or cousins (Aqua and Marina, Ada and Lucette, Walter D. Veen and Walter D. Veen) or eras or events (Ardis the First and Ardis the Second, the picnics on Ada’s twelfth and sixteenth birthdays), most important of all in Lucette’s imitative relationship to her sister, especially in her fatal love for Van.

  There is no reason to suppose Nabokov saw all these possibilities as soon as he saw the advertisement. Indeed, he kept working on other things but sometime in 1964 or more probably 1965, read Freeling’s Double-Barrel, where veen as a surname and the Dutch for “peat, bog, marsh” meshed with the “marsh marigold” of Fowlie’s translation and with Venus and Venus Erycina. Now he could add the Barton and Guestier advertisement to his first ideas for a family of Veens as positive and negative embodiments of Venus, to Freeling’s hints of incest and eavesdropping and Fowlie’s inadvertent cue for a suicide by drowning (“the care of the water”). The advertisement’s emphasis on imitation and doubling may have suggested a Veen who imitates her sister (“I knew it was hopeless,” [Lucette] said, looking away. “I did my best. I imitated all her shtuchki (little stunts)” [386]), who becomes embroiled in her sister’s love for their brother, whose image entangles with her sister’s in her brother’s mind and life. And the idea of a Veen who imitates a second Veen who makes love to a third Veen in an Ardis that imitates Eden but who ultimately commits suicide because of her entanglement evokes once again Bosch’s triptych, with its Edenic image of Adam and Eve alone to the left, its frenzy of repetitive sensuality and sexuality in the center, its hellish consequences to the right.

  Doubling and imitation pervade Ada. The most extraordinary example of mimicry in Nabokov, and perhaps the most extraordinary crossing of the boundary of art and science, art and nature, art and life, occurs when Ada, as she paints aquarelles on July afternoons in 1884, inventively imitates natural orchids that themselves imitate the females of insects whose males then copulate with the orchids. Nabokov here pointedly plays with the Venus theme, the veen-bog theme, and the idea of an endless repetition or imitation of sexuality in Ardis, in the Villa Venuses, and in the central panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights. Nabokov has Ada introduce odd changes and twists into her aquarelle of a mirror of Venus blossom (the genuine but extraordinary mirror of Venus or simply mirror orchid, Ophrys speculum), which Ada herself “seemed in her turn to mim
ic” (99). Van, leaning over her as she performs this mimicry, then rushes away with his mental image of her to masturbate over in a form of pseudo-copulation of his own, imitating the male wasps that copulate with the mirrory sheen of the orchid lip that mimics the metallic look of the female wasps. In a further mimetic mix, Ada paints a blend of Ophrys scolopax (= speculum under another name) and the invented Ophrys veenae (which one would expect to be a bog orchid, if the Dutch sense of veen supplied the grounds for the name).19

  Four years later Lucette, trying to imitate her sister, shows how far she falls short of Ada’s naturalistic and artistic brilliance as she tries merely to trace an orchid from one of the local bogs:

  In the meantime obstinate Lucette kept insisting that the easiest way to draw a flower was to place a sheet of transparent paper over the picture (in the present case a red-bearded pogonia, with indecent details of structure, a plant peculiar to the Ladoga bogs) and trace the outline of the thing in colored inks. Patient Ada wanted her to copy not mechanically but “from eye to hand and from hand to eye,” and to use for model a live specimen of another orchid that had a brown wrinkled pouch and purple sepals; but after a while she gave in cheerfully and set aside the crystal vaselet holding the Lady’s Slipper she had picked. Casually, lightly, she went on to explain how the organs of orchids work—but all Lucette wanted to know, after her whimsical fashion, was: could a boy bee impregnate a girl flower through something, through his gaiters or woolies or whatever he wore?

  (288–89)

  As if Ada imitating mirror of Venus and Veen orchids, and Van imitating the insects that copulate with them, and Lucette in 1888 imitating Ada in 1884 were not enough, the discussion segues into Lucette’s innocent but troubled reaction to her sitting atop Van on the way back from the picnic on Ada’s 1888 birthday, itself the most remarkable imitation of the past, of Ada on Van’s lap on the way back from the birthday picnic in 1884, in a novel saturated with such repetitions. Notice that the plant Lucette traces is an orchid peculiar to the Ladoga bogs and, as “a red-bearded pogonia, with indecent details of structure,” calls to mind Lucette’s red pubic hair, glimpsed and fondled by Van five years later in the disturbing débauche à trois scene.