Stalking Nabokov (66 page)

Eric Veen’s grandfather, David van Veen, an architect, proceeds to realize his late grandson’s “Organized Dream” (348) by designing and building “parodies of paradise” that include “imitating … the great-necessity houses of Dudok in Friesland,” the province to the west of Drenthe. David van Veen’s nephew and heir, “Velvet Veen,” “an honest but astoundingly stuffy clothier” (350)
⁵
who takes over the final realization of the project, hails from a town in Drenthe located in the middle of a triangle formed by Wapserveen, Hoogeveen, and Kolderveen and bearing the suggestive name of Ruinen.
⁶

The idea of decay here in “Ruinen” (plural of German
Ruine
, “ruin”) becomes hauntingly dominant in the Villa Venus chapter, where Van even plays pointedly on the name’s spelling “ruin,”
⁷
and echoes the theme in Latin, in Seneca’s
subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt
.
⁸

Already by the time Nabokov wrote down the first rush of the novel— “Juan and beloved young whore … in a corner of a decrepit, once palatial whorehouse, Villa Venus”—he seems to have picked up a number of hints from Freeling’s
Double-Barrel
and a map of its locale:
Veen
as a surname, to echo Venus (and probably already
Van Veen
, to suggest a Don Juan or Don Giovanni), Erica among Drenthe’s -
veens
as a reminder of Venus Erycina, Ruinen as an index of decay. He seems already focused, in other words, on images and myths of sexual love that he aims also to question or complicate, in the Villa Venus case, perhaps by a sense of excess, exhaustion, destruction, and decay.

If the “Veen” Nabokov found in Freeling suggested characters who evoke Venus, did the Dutch sense of
veen
as “peat, bog, marsh” that Nabokov found there also form part of his emerging sense of the story? The evidence suggests it does, and that indeed Nabokov saw as a central metaphor of the novel a garden of love that in places sinks into a bog.

Nabokov was well aware of the Western medieval tradition of the garden of love, especially from the
Roman de la Rose
, which he had studied at Cambridge, and as his play on the name of “Ardis Park” suggests, he also knew of the derivation of the word “paradise” from Greek
paradeisos
, “park,” “paradise,” itself derived from Persian. The most famous artistic play on the ambiguity of a garden of love that seems from one side paradisal, from another hellish, and centrally almost irresolvably ambiguous, is of course Hieronymus Bosch’s
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. As many have felt, from even before Bobbie Ann Mason’s
Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to Ada
(especially her appendix 1), Bosch’s great triptych serves as a kind of parallel parody of paradise throughout
Ada
; it is explicitly introduced into the novel just at the point where a stern father figure is about to expel Ada and Van from their recreated paradise in Manhattan; and it is mentioned in a way that stresses Bosch’s Dutch origins—his unfamiliar birth name, Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Äken (438), which reflects the family’s origins in Aachen—and plays on the Dutch meaning of the place-name that provided Bosch with his new name as an artist, that of his hometown, ’s-Hertogenbosch (familiarly, Den Bosch), which in its full form means “the woods of the duke,” or as Demon phrases it, “ducal bosquet”:
⁹

“If I could write,” mused Demon, “I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously—
c’est le mot—
art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it—a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower—mark the ‘as if,’ for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the
wrong
side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect.”

(436–37)

Nabokov had himself identified Bosch’s Meadow Brown in a letter to
Life
magazine in 1949 (
SL
93–94) and at the beginning of 1964 had replied to an approach from a publisher, asking would he have an idea for a lavishly illustrated book, that he would indeed like to compile a book on butterflies in art (
VNAY
481–82). He may not have known Bosch’s birth name until seeing it on the first page of Mario Bussagli’s
Bosch
(1966),
¹⁰
from which he quotes at the end of this chapter of
Ada
, and he may not have thought about the Dutch sense of ’s-Hertogenbosch until Nicolas Freeling had introduced him to the sense of
veen
in Dutch place-names, but he had of course known Bosch’s painting a long time, and the way the two naked figures of Adam and Eve in the Edenic left panel multiply into crowds of naked revelers courting and cavorting in the formal garden of the central panel, only to reach a hell on earth in the right panel.

Nabokov remarks that his first foreglimpse of
Ada
“differs in coloration and lighting” (
SO
310) from much of the finished novel, where Van invites us to join his long celebration of his love for Ada. As I observe elsewhere, years later, “Van still rejoices in the happiness of his and Ada’s special destiny at Ardis: they had seemed charmed there, privileged to reenact not only myths of Edenic or Arcadian innocence but also—and only increasing the paradisal joy—myths of sexual experience, of Venus, Cupid, or Eros” (
NAPC
153). It is as if, in evoking Ardis, Van pretends to paint only two panels of Bosch’s triptych, the left-hand panel, pure paradise, and the central panel as an exuberant comic expansion of the first, although in fact, as we discover, he knows better: he knows and remembers the hellish implied
in
Ardis (the central panel as ominous) and following on
from
Ardis (the hell realized in the right panel). As the dark hues and shades of his initial vision of the novel indicate, Nabokov himself saw from the first the hell that complicates the heaven of love, the bog encircling the garden.

But just how does Bosch’s ironic image of the Garden of Earthly Delights relate to the decrepit Villa Venus in Nabokov’s first flash of
Ada
, and how does
Ada’
s garden of love subside into a bog?

Again, Freeling’s novel may have lightly suggested the main ways
Ada
complicates and questions myths of love. As Siccama and Van der Weide note, Freeling’s Van der Valk observes that in Drente “the locals had ludicrous names. Ook and Goop and Unk. Surnames as bad, and clans of course—generations of intermarriage no doubt” (
DB
20–21). Despite the veneer of Dutch Reformed Church respectability and restraint, Van der Valk finds in the police files “a lot of immorality—a bit too much. I had the file on the past year’s police court cases behind-locked-doors. Incest, mm; never quite unknown in these ingrown inter-married districts” (
DB
23). These brief early allusions (there are no more) to incest and intermarriage in a region of
veens
appear to have triggered Nabokov’s imagination to parody myths of Venus and Eros through an incestuous family of Veens, whom he situates at Ardis (from Greek “point of an arrow” [
Ada
225], and reminiscent of the arrows fired by Venus’s son, Cupid) in the marshy Ladore region.
¹¹
But it is not incest per se that complicates Van and Ada Veen’s revisions of Venus.

Freeling’s detective finds “a lot of immorality—a bit too much” in the police files of Drente because the neighbors eavesdrop and spy on one another inordinately. Van der Valk’s French wife fulminates against the local “house-wives’ snooping—incredible. If I lived here I’d turn into a window-peeper too” (
DB
83). Van der Valk has been sent to Drente to discover a blackmailer, and in the course of his enquiries he interviews the director of a small electronics enterprise: “Your firm produces sensitive listening gadgets for various purposes. There’s a lot of mention in the police reports of one that might have been useful in a blackmailer’s hands” (
DB
57). Van der Valksets his wife to spying on the neighborhood, to testing the local networks of gossip, and later discovers that she herself in an amorous mood has been spied on by the blackmailer, whom he in turn spies on in a compromising situation—only to be caught himself in this act of tom-peeping.

The theme of multiple eavesdropping and spying (and as a minor variation, blackmail) also pervades
Ada
. In part it is a parody of eavesdropping as an immemorial device of narrative in general and of the novel in particular, an aspect of
Ada’
s general parody of the history of the novel.
¹²
But the spying on Van and Ada at their ardors in arbors at Ardis in a region of “lovely rich marshes” seems likely to have been triggered in part by Freeling’s
Double-Barrel
and its eavesdropping, tom-peeping, and blackmail.
¹³

Nabokov turns it, though, to a very different use. He establishes Van and Ada Veen as “children of Venus” (410), but their idyll at Ardis, which Van would like to present as “dream-bright… pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence” (588), is complicated by two persistent eavesdroppers or spies: Blanche and Lucette (as well as the blackmailer Kim Beauharnais). At first, the complications seem merely comic; both Blanche and Lucette introduce one or more tragic or hellish notes; and each time, Nabokov signals that the garden of love, the paradise of love, can also be a moral quagmire.

Blanche and Lucette are paired as spies on Van and Ada almost as soon as these young “cousins” have something to hide, as their feelings for each other catch fire even before their “first free and frantic caresses” (97). Both Van and Ada keep diaries, and at one point just after the Shattal Tree incident, both rush back separately

to the house to hide their diaries which both thought they had left lying open in their respective rooms. Ada, who feared the curiosity of Lucette and Blanche (the governess presented no threat, being pathologically unobservant), found out she was wrong—she had put away the album with its latest entry. Van, who knew that Ada was a little “snoopy,” discovered Blanche in his room feigning to make the made bed, with the unlocked diary lying on the stool beside it. He slapped her lightly on the behind and removed the shagreen-bound book to a safer place.

(96)

The “
shagreen
-bound book” puns on
chagrin
(Van imagines that Blanche goes off somewhere to weep in her bower) and on
green with envy
, a color associated insistently with Lucette both because she wears green to tone with her red coloring, and because she herself is often green with envy as she watches Van and Ada (who, for instance, “frantically made love, while the child knocked and called and kicked until the key fell out and the keyhole turned an angry green” [213]). And just as Blanche here feigns to be making the bed she has already made, although she has in fact learned from the diary all she needs to know of Van’s feelings for Ada and his first intimate contact with her, so Lucette, after being tied up by Van and Ada when they rush off to make love for the first time in her proximity, unties herself, spies on them, rushes back, and has almost retied herself when they return, although to them “writhing Lucette had somehow torn off one of the red knobbed grips of the rope and seemed to have almost disentangled herself when dragon and knight, prancing, returned” (143).

BLANCHE

Awed by what she has read of Van’s feelings for Ada in the diary, and soon an eager witness of their activities, Blanche circulates exalted reports of their love. Ada in 1892 declares she had never realized

that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids, whose reading consisted of
Gwen de Vere
and
Klara Mertvago
, adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis’s ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle), added freshly composed lines—naïve, lackey-daisical, but heartfelt—to cyclic folk songs. Eccentric police officers grew enamored with the glamour of incest. Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love. Nightwatchmen fought insomnia and the fire of the clap with the weapons of
Vaniada’s Adventures
… . Virgin châtelaines in marble-floored manors fondled their lone flames fanned by Van’s romance.

(409)

It is no accident that the series of those affected by the “sacred secret and creed” begins with “romantically inclined handmaids,” for handmaid Blanche is reading
Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago
when Van first arrives at Ardis; or that the list continues with “swains” and “nightwatchmen,” for Blanche observes Van and Ada on her way to her own trysts with swains who include the nightwatchman, Sore, to whom she passes on her own clap, as she also passes on romantic secrets to others, to her sister, the handmaid Madelon (another romantically inclined handmaid who passes the “secret” of Van and Ada on to Percy de Prey), and to Van himself (the secret of Ada’s love affairs with Rack and de Prey); or that the series ends with “virgin châtelaines,” in mocking echo of Blanche’s presenting herself to Van on his last night at Ardis as a kind of châtelaine (“
C’est ma dernière nuit au château
… ’Tis my last night with thee” [292]), only for her non-virginality to be stressed once again (“quite aside from the fear of infection (Bout had hinted at some of the poor girl’s troubles)” [293]).