Stalking Nabokov (69 page)

Paris

But if the imitation and repetition pattern that Nabokov chose to amplify from the Barton and Guestier advertisement affects the “
veen”
he discovered in Freeling,
veen
as “bog” also affects the treatment of Paris in the scene that imitates the advertisement that imitates Toulouse-Lautrec. After Van describes in minute detail the scene of Lucette standing at the bar, as if in imitation of the Barton and Guestier advertisement, speech is turned on:

“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 [the]
Queen Guinevere
), and changed the subject.

(461)

Notice Lucette’s question: “How long will you be in old Lute?” She means Paris, but on Antiterra characters sometimes refer to Paris as Lute. Why? From behind his Vivian Darkbloom mask, Nabokov explained the name “Lute” as “from ‘Lutèce,’ ancient name of Paris.”

Why
does Nabokov intermittently (six times out of twenty) rename Paris “Lute”? On Antiterra New York is
always
slightly defocalized as Manhattan, but that reflects the fact that for most people outside the city, right here on Terra, Manhattan is easily the city’s most famous borough. But no one now thinks of Paris in terms of Lutèce. Why then does Nabokov?

There are two closely related answers. One is that the French name Lutèce derives from Latin Lutetia, which in turn derives from Latin
lutum
, “mud,” because in Roman times Paris was “a collection of mud hovels” that Caesar called Lutetia Parisiorum (“mud town of the Parisii”) (
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
). It is no accident that another place-name in
Ada
has the sense of what Freeling, glossing
veen
, calls “wet, black, stinking ground.” And it is no accident that the name Nabokov cites as Darkbloom is the French version, Lutèce, for that almost spells “Lucette,” and by far the most important scene in Paris in the novel is this scene where Lucette learns that Van will sail on the
Tobakoff
, which soon leads to her taking her own life when she fails in her last effort to seduce him on the ship.

Why does Nabokov not simply rename Antiterra’s Paris “Lute” and leave it at that, as he renames New York “Manhattan” or Canada “Canady”? Why does he also call the city Paris?

After failing to entice Van to her Japanese divan in old Lute, Lucette proposes to him that since Ada is already married, he should marry
her
and get Ardis, too (left to Lucette by Marina), and they could then invite Ada there. “While she’s there, I go to Aspen or Gstaad, or Schittau, and you live with her in solid crystal with snow falling as if forever all around
pendant que je shee
in Aspenis. Then I come back like a shot, but she can stay on, she’s welcome, I’ll hang around in case you two want me. And then she goes back to her husband for a couple of dreary months, see?” (466). When Van dismisses the idea, Lucette says she has “an important, important telephone call to make”: she quietly phones Cordula to arrange a suite on the
Tobakoff
(Cordula’s husband owns the liner) for her last attempt to win Van over.

It can be no accident that it is in Paris that Lucette makes her proposal that Van should marry her, despite her knowing Van’s heart will always be Ada’s, for two of the central stories of love in Western culture feature a “Paris” who loves someone already married. In the Trojan story, Priam’s son Paris, after judging Aphrodite (Venus) as the fairest of the goddesses, is rewarded by Aphrodite with the fairest of mortal women, Helen, although Helen is already married to Menelaus and Paris’s abducting her will give rise to the Trojan war.
²³
In
Romeo and Juliet
, Count Paris arranges with Capulet to have Juliet’s hand, although we know she is already married to Romeo.
²⁴
Although Ada is officially married to Andrey Vinelander, both Lucette and Van regard her as Van’s for life when Lucette proposes to Van that he should now marry
her
.
²⁵

He does not, and the next decision Lucette takes in Paris—to attempt a last amorous assault on Van aboard the
Tobakoff
and, failing that, to jumpto her death and leave Van to read the letter she sends him from Paris “on June 2, 1901, ‘just in case’ ” (146)—clinches the tragic ironies of love that surrounds “all three Veens, the children of Venus” (410). The irony of the “veen” or “peat, bog, marsh” in their name becomes the irony of Lucette, the marsh marigold missing from “Mémoire” and now forever the “care of the water.”

And as if to indicate the irony, without losing the “Paris” allusions, Nabokov partially renames the city where she makes her fatal resolve “Lute,” in echo of “Lutèce,” in tribute to Lucette, “
mon enfant favori”
(as he called her in his 1975 television interview with Bernard Pivot),
²⁶
and in anticipation of the “mud” on which she would rest.

If Nabokov names Paris “Lute” because of Lucette, it is in accord with many other patterns in the novel, established long before Lucette’s death but in fact proving to be related to her: the water pattern (Aqua and Marina and much, much more), the electricity-and-water pattern (the banning of electricity caused by the “L disaster”), the flower pattern, the mistranslation theme, and more. Bobbie Ann Mason was the first to suggest a Lucettocentric reading of
Ada
; I have taken it much further in
Nabokov’s
Ada
: The Place of Consciousness
and the ongoing “Annotations to
Ada”
/
Ada
Online.

Nabokov himself was one of the first promoters of such a reading, writing to Mason in the early 1970s identifying the Barton and Guestier advertisement and adding that it “should be looked up by all admirers of Lucette,”
²⁷
or referring in 1975 to Lucette as his favorite child. But he had made such a reading possible from the first, and the evidence of sources such as Fowlie’s mistranslation of Rimbaud’s
souci d’eau
, noted by Nabokov in 1960 or soon after; the Barton and Guestier ad, noted in 1963; the sense of
veen
as “peat, bog, marsh”; and the pattern of eavesdropping, in Freeling’s 1964
Double-Barrel
, suggest that Nabokov conceived her role as central to the novel from the start. From the first he linked the Veens with Venus and anticipated a decrepit Villa Venus, and from the first he seems to have sought a way of linking “marsh marigold” to the Veens to show the boggy substratum of their garden of Edenic love.

Nabokov always liked an element of wit and surprise in the overall design of his fiction. In his first novel, the twist is that
Mary
, the heroine of the novel, although fervently expected, never actually steps onto the novel’s stage. In the novel before
Ada
,
Pale Fire
, the central irony, as I now read it, is that although Hazel is at the center of her father’s poem, Kinbote wrenches the text and commentary out of the family’s control to place himself at the center of the story, only for that very act itself to be under the deeper guidance of the dead Hazel (see
NPMAD
). And in
Ada
, the central irony of the novel is that the character who is relegated to the periphery by the intense ardor of the two older Veen children and our eagerness to watch their amours is actually the covert center, source, and standard of the novel.

CODA: REPLAYING LOVE

I may here have sometimes seemed to repeat what I have written elsewhere about
Ada
, but let me repeat myself again in order to say something new. I wrote above that “doubling and imitation pervade
Ada”—
referring especially to the fatal doubling of Ada’s love for Van in Lucette’s and the way this complicates the novel’s myths of love. But there is another private myth of love that I think Nabokov also incorporates into
Ada
and its Boschean revision of Venus.

The replaying of a former love, whether in glory or despair, may be Nabokov’s central myth, from the 1920s to the 1970s, from Chorb hopelessly and absurdly replaying his love for his dead bride in one of Nabokov’s first fully mature stories or Ganin replaying his love for Mary in his first novel all the way to
Transparent Things
and
Look at the Harlequins!
. In Nabokov’s second to last novel, Hugh Person woefully attempts to reenact his love for Armande by revisiting Switzerland, a reenactment that in the retelling also encompasses the replay of a Russian writer’s prostitute in the same room as Hugh’s, or Julia Moore recalling her former lover in the same room where she and Hugh make love, or R. recycling his former loves into his fiction. In his last finished novel,
Look at the Harlequins!
, Nabokov treats the myth most parodically, in the former wives that lead up to the You of the final section of the novel, thereby revisiting the myth he treated most personally and pointedly in the former loves that lead up to the You in the closing movement of
Speak, Memory
.

Nabokov, of course, reworks the myth most famously in Humbert’s re-embodying “Annabel Leigh” in
Lolita
. But he reworks it most rapturously and expansively—and complicatedly—in Van and Ada replaying the paradise of their Ardis the First love in Ardis the Second. For Van’s celebration of their love at Ardis the Second already incorporates pangs of jealousy, anxiety, awkwardness, and regret, like the ambiguity of Bosch’s central panel, with its lavish fruits that suggest an orgy of succulent ripeness and sweet delight but also endless reenactments of the forbidden fruit—and the implicit fatal follow-on—of the Fall. Ardis the Second explodes into a hell of despair when Blanche, herself a celebrant and an unwitting underminer of Ardis as a paradise of love, discloses Ada’s infidelity and Van flees Ardis’s garden via the bog beyond Blanche’s Tourbière:

“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.

(299)

And Nabokov reworks his myth of love’s repetition most helplessly in Lucette’s trying to reenact Ada in order to have a share of Van but ending in her hell of emptiness. Standing on the platform of the Maidenhair station, self-consciously thinking of Anna Karenin’s end, Van feels suicidal:

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. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish.
N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or
, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her “botanical” voice fall at
biloba
, “sorry, my Latin is showing.”
Ginkgo
, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor
Salisburia
: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness,
marée noire
by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!

(299–300)

Although Van thinks of Ada and the hell of never seeing or hearing her again, “Maidenhair,” mistranslation, leavesdropping, the é
cus d’or
, and especially the “sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness,
marée noire
by now” all point to Lucette and her virginal status, the “marsh marigold” or
souci d’eau
(the “forged
louis d’or
in that collection of fouled French” [64]), the closing lines of Rimbaud’s “Mémoire,” and Lucette’s sinking beneath the “black… waters” of the Atlantic after a brief passage (493) of stream of consciousness (see also
NAPC
149–52, 156–57). And the
marée noire
(black tide) here is surely a pun on
marais noir
(black bog) at the very moment Van expels himself from Ardis forever.

For Nabokov the tension between the singularity and the multiplicity of love is a central mystery: the singularity of love, love at its best, the passionate conviction that no one else will do, and the multiplicity of love, its repeatability with the same person or others. A single overwhelming love allows Van and Ada to transcend the isolation of their selves, and the rampant repeatability of the act of love only adds to the enchantment. Yet because we and others are ultimately on our own, we and they can wish to overcome our solitude: we can be aroused by many, as Van and Ada certainly are, in ways that cause each other intense pain, or as Blanche is, in an unintended ironic chorus. Or, conversely, Lucette, unable to have the one love she yearns for, despite her repeated lovemaking with Ada, feels only her ultimate emptiness. In the shift from the paradise of the left panel, two lovers in a world of bliss, to the crowded recapitulations and complicated ambiguities of the central panel and the torments of the right panel of Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights
, Nabokov found the richest straw for the boggy paradise of the Veens’ venereal delights, and his most complex image of the triumphs and torments of love’s singularity and repetitions.

26. A Book Burner Recants

The Original of Laura

The Original of Laura
, as some reviewers observed, was the most eagerly awaited new novel of the twenty-first century. It disappointed me when I first read it, in 1987, as it disappointed many reviewers, and often for the same reasons. On the eve of publication, at the Poetry Center in New York’s 92nd Street Y, I could not resist explaining why I first thought the book should not have been preserved, let alone published, and then why I had come around to being delighted by the publication of the index cards I had first reacted to so badly.