Describing Ada's dramatic career, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mimics a mad prompter (‘Finestra, sestra'):
The beginning of Ada’s limelife in 1891 happened to coincide with the end of her mother’s twenty-five-year-long career. What is more, both appeared in Chekhov’s Four Sisters. Ada played Irina on the modest stage of the Yakima Academy of Drama in a somewhat abridged version which, for example, kept only the references to Sister Varvara, the garrulous originalka (‘odd female’ — as Marsha calls her) but eliminated her actual scenes, so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters, as indeed it appeared in the wittier of the local notices. It was the (somewhat expanded) part of the nun that Marina acted in an elaborate film version of the play; and the picture and she received a goodly amount of undeserved praise.
‘Ever since I planned to go on the stage,’ said Ada (we are using her notes), ‘I was haunted by Marina’s mediocrity, au dire de la critique, which either ignored her or lumped her in the common grave with other "adequate sustainers"; or, if the role had sufficient magnitude, the gamut went from "wooden " to "sensitive" (the highest compliment her accomplishments had ever received). And here she was, at the most delicate moment of my career, multiplying and sending out to friends and foes such exasperating comments as "Durmanova is superb as the neurotic nun, having transferred an essentially static and episodical part into et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
‘Of course, the cinema has no language problems,’ continued Ada (while Van swallowed, rather than stifled, a yawn). ‘Marina and three of the men did not need the excellent dubbing which the other members of the cast, who lacked the lingo, were provided with; but our wretched Yakima production could rely on only two Russians, Stan’s protégé Altshuler in the role of Baron Nikolay Lvovich Tuzenbach-Krone-Altschauer, and myself as Irina, la pauvre et noble enfant, who is a telegraph operator in one act, a town-council employee in another, and a schoolteacher in the end. All the rest had a macedoine of accents — English, French, Italian — by the way what’s the Italian for "window"?’
‘Finestra, sestra,’ said Van, mimicking a mad prompter.
‘Irina (sobbing): "Where, where has it all gone? Oh, dear, oh, dear! All is forgotten, forgotten, muddled up in my head — I don’t remember the Italian for ‘ceiling’ or, say, ‘window.’"’
‘No, "window" comes first in that speech,’ said Van, ‘because she looks around, and then up; in the natural movement of thought.’
‘Yes, of course: still wrestling with "window," she looks up and is confronted by the equally enigmatic "ceiling." In fact, I’m sure I played it your psychological way, but what does it matter, what did it matter? — the performance was perfectly odious, my baron kept fluffing every other line — but Marina, Marina was marvelous in her world of shadows! "Ten years and one have gone by-abye since I left Moscow"’ — (Ada, now playing Varvara, copied the nun’s ‘singsongy devotional tone’ (pevuchiy ton bogomolki, as indicated by Chekhov and as rendered so irritatingly well by Marina). ‘"Nowadays, Old Basmannaya Street, where you (turning to Irina) were born a score of yearkins (godkov) ago, is Busman Road, lined on both sides with workshops and garages (Irina tries to control her tears). Why, then, should you want to go back, Arinushka? (Irina sobs in reply)." Naturally, as would-every fine player, mother improvised quite a bit, bless her soul. And moreover her voice — in young tuneful Russian! — is substituted for Lenore’s corny brogue.’
Van had seen the picture and had liked it. An Irish girl, the infinitely graceful and melancholy Lenore Colline —
Oh! qui me rendra ma colline
Et le grand chêne and my colleen!
— harrowingly resembled Ada Ardis as photographed with her mother in Belladonna, a movie magazine which Greg Erminin had sent him, thinking it would delight him to see aunt and cousin, together, on a California patio just before the film was released. Varvara, the late General Sergey Prozorov’s eldest daughter, comes in Act One from her remote nunnery, Tsitsikar Convent, to Perm (also called Permwail), in the backwoods of Akimsk Bay, North Canady, to have tea with Olga, Marsha, and Irina on the latter’s name day. Much to the nun’s dismay, her three sisters dream only of one thing — leaving cool, damp, mosquito-infested but otherwise nice and peaceful ‘Permanent’ as Irina mockingly dubs it, for high life in remote and sinful Moscow, Id., the former capital of Estotiland. In the first edition of his play, which never quite manages to heave the soft sigh of a masterpiece, Tchechoff (as he spelled his name when living that year at the execrable Pension Russe, 9, rue Gounod, Nice) crammed into the two pages of a ludicrous expository scene all the information he wished to get rid of, great lumps of recollections and calendar dates — an impossible burden to place on the fragile shoulders of three unhappy Estotiwomen. Later he redistributed that information through a considerably longer scene in which the arrival of the monashka Varvara provides all the speeches needed to satisfy the restless curiosity of the audience. This was a neat stroke of stagecraft, but unfortunately (as so often occurs in the case of characters brought in for disingenuous purposes) the nun stayed on, and not until the third, penultimate, act was the author able to bundle her off, back to her convent. (2.9)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): au dire etc.: according to the reviewers.
finestra, sestra: Ital., window, sister.
Arinushka: Russ., folksy diminutive of ‘Irina’.
oh qui me rendra etc.: Oh, who’ll give me back
my hill and the big oak.
Sestra (accented on the ultima) is sister in Russian (the Italian word for sister is sorella). Finestra is window in Italian. "Finestra, sestra" makes one think of Clytemnestra, the half-sister of Helen of Sparta (who is also known as Helen of Troy). In Aeschylus' Oresteia (a trilogy of Greek tragedies written in the 5th century BC) Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon (king of Mycanae) and the Trojan Princess Cassandra (whom Agamemnon had taken as a war prize following the sack of Troy). In his essay The Tragedy of Tragedy (1941) VN mentions the Agamemnon of Aeschylus:
Better scholars than I have discussed the influence of Greek tragedy on Shakespeare. In my time I have read the Greeks in English translation and found them very much weaker than Shakespeare though disclosing his influence here and there. The relays of fire in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus o'erleaping the plain, flashing across the lake, rambling up the mountainside, or Iphigenia shedding her crocus-tinctured tunic--these excite me because they remind me of Shakespeare. But I refuse to be touched by the abstract passions and vague emotions of those characters, as eyeless and as armless as that statue which for some reason or other is considered ideally beautiful; and moreover I do not quite see how a direct contact with our emotion can be established by Aeschylus when the profoundest scholars themselves cannot say for sure in what way this or that context points, what exactly we are to guess here and what there, and then wind up saying that the removal of the article from this or that word obscures and has in fact made unintelligible the connection and construction of the sentence. Indeed, the main drama seems to take place in these minute and copious footnotes. However, the excitements of inspired grammar are not exactly the emotions which the theatre can greet, and on the other hand what passes muster as Greek tragedy on our stage is so far removed from the original, so influenced by this or that stage version and stage invention, and these in turn are so influenced by the secondary conventions which the primary ones of Greek tragedy had engendered, that it is hard to say what we mean when we praise Aeschylus.
In his essay VN mentions O'Neill's play Mourning Becomes Electra (1931):
Among modern tragedies there is one that ought to be studied particularly closely by anyone wishing to find all the disastrous results of cause and effect, neatly grouped together in one play. This is O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. Just as the weather changed according to human moods and moves in Ibsen's play, here, in Mourning Becomes Electra, we observe the curious phenomenon of a young woman who is flat-chested in the first act, becomes a full-bosomed beautiful creature after a trip to the South Islands, then, a couple of days later, reverts to the original flat-chested, sharp-elbowed type. We have a couple of suicides of the wildest sort, and the positive-finality trick is supplied by the heroine's telling us just before the play ends that she will not commit suicide, but will go on living in the dismal house, etc., though there is nothing to prevent her changing her mind, and using the same old army pistol so conveniently supplied to the other patients of the play. Then there is the element of Fate, Fate whom the author leads by one hand, and the late professor Freud by the other. There are portraits on the wall, dumb creatures, which are used for the purpose of monologue under the queer misconception that a monologue becomes a dialogue if the portrait of another person is addressed. There are many such interesting things in this play. But perhaps the most remarkable thing, one that throws direct light on the inevitable artificial side of tragedies based on the logic of fate, is the difficulties the author experiences in keeping this or that character on the stage when he is especially required, but when some pathetic flaw in the machinery suggests that the really natural thing would be a hasty retreat. For instance: the old gentleman of tragedy is expected to return from the war tomorrow or possibly after tomorrow, which means that he arrives almost immediately after the beginning of the act with the usual explanation about trains. It is late in the evening. The evening is cold. The only place to sit is the steps of the porch. The old gentleman is tired, hungry, has not been home for ages and moreover suffers from acute heart trouble--a pain like a knife, he says, which is meant to prepare his death in another act. Now the horrible job with which the author is faced is to make that poor old man remain in the bleak garden, on the damp steps, for a good talk with his daughter and his wife--especially with his wife. The casual reasons for his not going into the house, which are inserted here and there in the talk, keep excluding one another in a most fascinating way--and the tragedy of the act is not the tragedy of the old man's relations with his wife, but the tragedy of an honest, tired, hungry, helpless human being, grimly held by the author who, until the act is over, keeps him away from bath, slippers and supper.
Telling Van about Uncle Dan's odd Boschean death, Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) says that Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming:
‘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. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice — but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast! A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’
Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette —
‘— no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is — I mean, Vinelander is — the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols — or whoever they were — who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders — before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.’
‘I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,’ said Van, ‘what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.’
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’
Volatina, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether. Please, please, please go.
‘My gloves! Cloak! Thank you. Can I use your W.C.? No? All right. I’ll find one elsewhere. Come over as soon as you can, and we’ll meet Marina at the airport around four and then whizz to the wake, and —’
And here Ada entered. Not naked — oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio — comfortably combing her hair, sweet and sleepy. She made the mistake of crying out ‘Bozhe moy!’ and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second.
‘Or better — come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.’ He spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now — when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter. (2.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): R4: ‘rook four’, a chess indication of position (pun on the woman’s name).
c’est le mot: that’s the right word.
pleureuses: widow’s weeds.
Bozhe moy: Russ., good Heavens.
An ancient Greek playwright, Aeschylus was killed at the age of 67, when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head. The eagle is said to have mistaken his baldness for a rock and tried to use it to crack the shell of its prey.