Stalking Nabokov (68 page)

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 mimic” (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.

(Notice, too, that the plant Ada wants Lucette to copy, a Lady’s Slipper that is all she has collected while out ostensibly “botanizing” but in fact seeing Percy de Prey for the last time, is an orchid of the
Cypripedium
genus, probably the type species,
Cypripedium calceolus
, a bog orchid, and that Cypripedium derives from Greek
Cypros
for the island sacred to Venus, and means “Venus’s slipper.” As Liana Ashenden comments, “The veins, ripples, shape and color of the labellum of Ada’s wilted specimen imitate the male scrotum in an outrageous parody of sexual symbolism as Van describes the orchid’s ‘brown wrinkled pouch and purple sepals’ (289), when thinking about Percy de Prey.”
²⁰
The garden of Venus becomes a bog because of sexual jealousy, as well as because of the other damage it causes.)

Lucette in Paris steps suddenly into a picture as she seems to reenact a Toulouse-Lautrec poster and a Barton and Guestier photograph. On board the
Tobakoff
five days later, she has all but seduced Van when Ada herself steps into the picture, into the movie
Don Juan’s Last Fling
. As soon as she recognizes Ada on screen, Lucette, so near success, tries to tear Van away from the ship’s cinema and the image of Ada:

“Let’s go, please, let’s go. You must not see her
debasing
herself. She’s terribly made up, every gesture is childish and wrong—”

“Just another minute,” said Van.

Terrible? Wrong? She was absolutely perfect, and strange, and poignantly familiar. By some stroke of art, by some enchantment of chance, the few brief scenes she was given formed a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892 looks.

The
gitanilla
bends her head over the live table of Leporello’s servile back to trace on a scrap of parchment a rough map of the way to the castle. Her neck shows white through her long black hair separated by the motion of her shoulder. It is no longer another man’s Dolores, but a little girl twisting an aquarelle brush in the paint of Van’s blood, and Donna Anna’s castle is now a
bog
flower.

(489; last italics added)

Reminded so vividly and poignantly of Ada, Van realizes he cannot allow himself to make love even once to Lucette and as a precautionary measure rushes off to masturbate, for the first time in seventeen years—since, in fact, the time that he last masturbated over the image of Ada painting her blend of the mirror of Venus and
Ophrys veenae
orchids: “And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush” (490).

The orchid and bog theme, then, indicates Lucette’s doomed attempts to imitate or match or replace her sister and the fact that despite her being locked into the pattern of Ada and Van’s avid sexuality, she will die a virgin. The only way she will be deflowered is like the unhappy marsh marigold in Fowlie’s translation, by being eliminated, by being turned into nothing more than the care of the water.

The theme of imitation, doubling, and repetition, so striking in the advertisement that echoes Toulouse-Lautrec, in Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights
, in Van and Ada Veen’s ardors at Ardis, and in Lucette’s involvement in their fate, is signaled from Van’s first approach to Ardis. It seems in one light that Ardis will be a Garden of Eden, a paradise of sexuality, and in Ardis the Second a paradise regained, but as Van drives for the first time from the train station to the manor of the Veens, he passes through “Torf- yanka, a dreamy hamlet,” then “Gamlet, a half-Russian village” (35). In both, the driver waves to someone; “Hamlet” (the prince or the play) is in Russian “Gamlet,” and Torfyanka, we discover later, is half-Russian, half-French (it is also called Tourbière), so that the two villages seem to overlap in time as much as they succeed one another in space.
²¹
The odd repetition prefigures the doubling of the 1884 and 1888 picnic rides and Lucette’s involvement in the pattern of Van and Ada’s repetition since on both rides they pass through Gamlet.
²²
But the prominence of Torfyanka here, which we do not pass through again until Van leaves Blanche there after she has told him about Ada’s infidelities at the end of Ardis the Second, serves as a first “portent and prophecy” of the end of Ardis and shows how carefully Nabokov already integrates the “peat-bog-marsh” sense of
veen
as qualifications of the themes and myths of love even as he drives his hero for the first time to the Veen manor.