A character in VN's novel Transparent Things (1972), Mister R. (an American writer whom Hugh Person visits in Switzerland) has a long German name, in two installments, with a nobiliary particle between castle and crag:
During the ten years that were to elapse between Hugh Person's first and second visits to Switzerland he earned his living in the various dull ways that fall to the lot of brilliant young people who lack any special gift or ambition and get accustomed to applying only a small part of their wits to humdrum or charlatan tasks. What they do with the other, much greater, portion, how and where their real fancies and feelings are housed, is not exactly a mystery – there are no mysteries now – but would entail explications and revelations too sad, too frightful, to face. Only experts, for experts, should probe a mind's misery.
He could multiply eight-digit numbers in his head, and lost that capacity in the course of a few gray diminishing nights during hospitalization with a virus infection at twenty-five. He had published a poem in a college magazine, a long rambling piece that began rather auspiciously:
Blest are suspension dots... The sun was setting
a heavenly example to the lake...
He was the author of a letter to the London Times which was reproduced a few years later in the anthology To the Editor: Sir, and a passage of which read:
Anacreon died at eighty-five choked by "wine's skeleton" (as another Ionian put it), and a gypsy predicted to the chessplayer Alyokhin that he would be killed in Spain by a dead bull.
For seven years after graduating from the university he had been the secretary and anonymous associate of a notorious fraud, the late symbolist Atman, and was wholly responsible for such footnotes as:
The cromlech (associated with mleko, milch, milk) is obviously a symbol of the Great Mother, just as the menhir ("mein Herr") is as obviously masculine.
He had been in the stationery business for another spell and a fountain pen he had promoted bore his name: The Person Pen. But that remained his greatest achievement.
As a sulky person of twenty-nine he joined a great publishing firm, where he worked in various capacities – research assistant, scout, associate editor, copy editor, proofreader, flatterer of our authors. A sullen slave, he was placed at the disposal of Mrs. Flankard, an exuberant and pretentious lady with a florid face and octopus eyes whose enormous romance The Stag had been accepted for publication on condition that it be drastically revised, ruthlessly cut, and partly rewritten. The rewritten bits, consisting of a few pages here and there, were supposed to bridge the black bleeding gaps of generously deleted matter between the retained chapters. That job had been performed by one of Hugh's colleagues, a pretty ponytail who had since left the firm. As a novelist she possessed even less talent than Mrs. Flankard, and Hugh was now cursed with the task of healing not only the wounds she had inflicted but the warts she had left intact. He had tea several times with Mrs. Flankard in her charming suburban house decorated almost exclusively with her late husband's oils, early spring in the parlor, surnmertime in the dining room, all the glory of New England in the library, and winter in the bedchamber. Hugh did not linger in that particular room, for he had the uncanny feeling that Mrs. Flankard was planning to be raped beneath Mr. Flankard's mauve snowflakes. Like many overripe and still handsome lady artists, she seemed to be quite unaware that a big bust, a wrinkled neck, and the smell of stale femininity on an eau de Cologne base might repel a nervous male. He uttered a grunt of relief when "our" book finally got published.
Mr. R. was a touchy, unpleasant, and rude correspondent. Hugh's dealings with him across the ocean – Mr. R. lived mostly in Switzerland or France – lacked the hearty glow of the Flankard ordeal; but Mr. R., though perhaps not a master of the very first rank, was at least a true artist who fought on his own ground with his own weapons for the right to use an unorthodox punctuation corresponding to singular thought. A paperback edition of one of his earlier works was painlessly steered into production by our accommodating Person; but then began a long wait for the new novel which R. had promised to deliver before the end of that spring. Spring passed without any result – and Hugh flew over to Switzerland for a personal interview with the sluggish author. This was the second of his four European trips. (Chapter 8)
Hugh Person's first name makes one think of Wystan Hugh Auden (a British-American poet, 1907-73). In the first stanza of his poem The Riddle W. H. Auden mentions the single stag banished to a lonely crag:
Underneath the leaves of life,
Green on the prodigious tree,
In a trance of grief
Stand the fallen man and wife:
Far away the single stag
Banished to a lonely crag
Gazes placid out to sea,
And from thickets round about
Breeding animals look in
On Duality,
And the birds fly in and out
Of the world of man.
A trance of grief brings to mind one fifth of Person's life, engrained by grief:
As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted "Peterson" and pronounced "Parson" by some) extricated his angular bulk from the taxi that had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort from Trux, and while his head was still lowered in an opening meant for emerging dwarfs, his eyes went up – not to acknowledge the helpful gesture sketched by the driver who had opened the door for him but to check the aspect of the Ascot Hotel (Ascot!) against an eight-year-old recollection, one fifth of his life, engrained by grief. A dreadful building of gray stone and brown wood, it sported cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut) which by some mnemoptical trick he remembered as apple green. The steps of the porch were flanked with electrified carriage lamps on a pair of iron posts. Down those steps an aproned valet came tripping to take the two bags, and (under one arm) the shoebox, all of which the driver had alertly re-moved from the yawning boot. Person pays alert driver.(Chapter 2)
According to Hugh Person, the cromlech (associated with mleko, milch, milk) is obviously a symbol of the Great Mother, just as the menhir ("mein Herr") is as obviously masculine. Auden's Riddle ends in the lines "Every living creature is / Woman, Man, and Child:"
Nowhere else could I have known
Than, beloved, in your eyes
What we have to learn,
That we love ourselves alone:
All our terrors burned away
We can learn at last to say:
"All our knowledge comes to this,
That existence is enough,
That in savage solitude
Or the play of love
Every living creature is
Woman, Man, and Child."
In the first stanza of his poem Spain 1937 W. H. Auden mentions the cromlech:
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
In the poem's penultimate stanza Auden mentions the masculine jokes (cf. "menhir is as obviously masculine;" btw., a menhir indeed looks rather phallic):
To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candle-lit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon.
The poem's last two lines bring to mind Professor Pardon (American History), a character in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) who participates in a conversation at the faculty club:
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla" [sarcastically stressing the "Nova'"].
"Didn't you tell me, Charles, that kinbote means regicide in your language?" asked my dear Shade.
"Yes, a king's destroyer," I said (longing to explain that a king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is in a sense just that).
Shade [addressing the German visitor]: "Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. I believe [to me] there exists an English translation?"
"Oxford, 1956," I replied.
"You do know Russian, though?" said Pardon. "I think I heard you, the other day, talking to - what's his name - oh, my goodness" [laboriously composing his lips].
Shade: "Sir, we all find it difficult to attack that name" [laughing].
Professor Hurley: "Think of the French word for 'tire': punoo."
Shade: "Why, Sir, I am afraid you have only punctured the difficulty" [laughing uproariously]. (Kinbote's note to Line 894)
In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in Pale Fire) calls his last poem "this transparent thingum:"
Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) (ll. 957-62)
Mrs. Flankard's enormous romance The Stag makes one think of "Enhance your personality / With a Romance, with two" (the lines in W. H. Auden's poem Song of the Devil, 1938):
Ever since observation taught me temptation
Is a matter of timing, I’ve tried
To clothe my fiction in up-to-date diction,
The contemporary jargon of Pride.
I can recall when, to win the more
Obstinate round,
The best bet was to say to them: ‘Sin the more
That Grace may abound.’
Since Social Psychology replaced Theology
The process goes twice as quick,
If a conscience is tender and loth to surrender
I have only to whisper: ‘You’re sick!
Puritanical morality
Is madly Non-U:
Enhance your personality
With a Romance, with two.
‘If you pass up a dame, you’ve yourself to blame,
For shame is neurotic, so snatch!
All rules are too formal, in fact they’re abnormal,
For any desire is natch.
So take your proper share, man, of
Dope and drink:
Aren’t you the Chairman of
Ego, Inc.?
‘Free-Will is a mystical myth as statistical
Methods have objectively shown,
A fad of the Churches: since the latest researches
Into Motivation it’s known
That Honor is hypocrisy,
Honesty a joke.
You live in a Democracy:
Lie like other folk.
‘Since men are like goods, what are shouldn’ts or shoulds
When you are the Leading Brand?
Let them all drop dead, you’re way ahead,
Beat them up if they dare to demand
What may your intention be,
Or what might ensue:
There’s a difference of dimension be-
– tween the rest and you.
‘If in the scrimmage of business your image
Should ever tarnish or stale,
Public Relations can take it and make it
Shine like a Knight of the Grail.
You can mark up the price that you sell at, if
Your package has glamour and show:
Values are relative.
Dough is dough.
‘So let each while you may think you’re more O.K.,
More yourself than anyone else,
Till you find that you’re hooked, your goose is cooked,
And you’re only a cipher of Hell’s.
Believe while you can that I’m proud of you,
Enjoy your dream:
I’m so bored with the whole fucking crowd of you
I could scream!’
'You live in a Democracy' (a line in H. W. Auden's poem) brings to mind a democracy of ghosts in which Pnin (the title character of a 1957 novel by VN) believes:
Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick. (Chapter Five, 6)
The preceding line of Auden's poem, 'Honesty a joke,' makes one think of "The john is a joke" (Julia Moore's words to Armande):
Now we have to bring into focus the main street of Witt as it was on Thursday, the day after her telephone call. It teems with transparent people and processes, into which and through which we might sink with an angel's or author's delight, but we have to single out for this report only one Person. Not an extensive hiker, he limited his loafing to a tedious survey of the village. A grim stream of cars rolled and rolled, some seeking with the unwieldy wariness of reluctant machinery a place to park, others coming from, or heading for, the much more fashionable resort of Thur, twenty miles north. He passed several times by the old fountain dribbling through the geranium-lined trough of a hollowed log; he examined the post office and the bank, the church and the tourist agency, and a famous black hovel that was still allowed to survive with its cabbage patch and scarecrow crucifix between a boarding-house and a laundry.
He drank beer in two different taverns. He lingered before a sports shop; relingered – and bought a nice gray turtleneck sweater with a tiny and very pretty American flag embroidered over the heart. "Made in Turkey," whispered its label. He decided it was time for some more refreshments – and saw her sitting at a sidewalk cafe. You swerved toward her, thinking she was alone; then noticed, too late, a second handbag on the opposite chair. Simultaneously her companion came out of the tea shop and, resuming her seat, said in that lovely New York voice, with that harlot dash he would have recognized even in heaven:
"The john is a joke."
Meanwhile Hugh Person, unable to shed the mask of an affable grin, had come up and was invited to join them. (Chapter 13)
The invisible narrators (including Mr. R.) in Transparent Things seem to be the devils. Mr. R.'s full name seems to be Baron Rausch von Traubenberg. Weintrauben is German for 'grapes;' Berg means 'mountain.' Shade's murderer, Gradus contended that the real origin of his name the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making it Vinogradus.
Btw., Mrs. Flankard's The Stag makes one think of a book that Halkett (a young talented man) wrote for John Burke (the traveler) in G. K. Chesterton's story The Face in the Target:
The man they had passed looked after them in rather a suspicious fashion, but Fisher continued serenely on his way along the straight road that ran past the gates of the great estate.
“That’s John Burke, the traveler,” he condescended to explain. “I expect you’ve heard of him; shoots big game and all that. Sorry I couldn’t stop to introduce you, but I dare say you’ll meet him later on.”
“I know his book, of course,” said March, with renewed interest. “That is certainly a fine piece of description, about their being only conscious of the closeness of the elephant when the colossal head blocked out the moon.”
“Yes, young Halkett writes jolly well, I think. What? Didn’t you know Halkett wrote Burke’s book for him? Burke can’t use anything except a gun; and you can’t write with that. Oh, he’s genuine enough in his way, you know, as brave as a lion, or a good deal braver by all accounts.”
“You seem to know all about him,” observed March, with a rather bewildered laugh, “and about a good many other people.”
Fisher’s bald brow became abruptly corrugated, and a curious expression came into his eyes.
“I know too much,” he said. “That’s what’s the matter with me. That’s what’s the matter with all of us, and the whole show; we know too much. Too much about one another; too much about ourselves. That’s why I’m really interested, just now, about one thing that I don’t know.”
“And that is?” inquired the other.
“Why that poor fellow is dead.”
In his sonnet The Traveler (the fourth poem in The Quest) W. H. Auden mentions the castle where his Greater Hallows are interned:
No window in his suburb lights that bedroom where
A little fever heard large afternoons at play:
His meadows multiply; that mill, though, is not there
Which went on grinding at the back of love all day.
Nor all his weeping ways through weary wastes have found
The castle where his Greater Hallows are interned;
For broken bridges halt him, and dark thickets round
Some ruin where an evil heritage was burned.
Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
And institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
He'd tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,
That everywhere on his horizon, all the sky,
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). The Double Man (1941) is a book of poems by W. H. Auden. It includes the sonnet sequence The Quest.
Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. The surname Flankard is of French origin. Flankard (obs.) is a piece of armour to protect the thighs or the horse's flanks. In G. K. Chesterton's story The Worst Crime in the World Captain James Musgrave murders his father, Sir John Musgrave, and conceals the body inside the medieval armor in the hall of Sir John's castle. The murderer (a dead spit of his father) then impersonates his victim. Kinbote's Zembla is a land of reflections, of "resemblers." Gradus' father had been a Protestant minister in Riga. In Chesterton's story, Sir John (impersonated by the killer) tells Father Brown (a Catholic Priest and amateur detective) that his son is living in the Poste Restante, Riga:
“If you are still interested in my son,” he said, using the term with an icy indifference, “you will not see very much of him. He has just left the country. Between ourselves, I might say fled the country.”
“Indeed,” said Father Brown with a grave stare.
“Some people I never heard of called Grunov, have been pestering me, of all people, about his whereabouts,” said Sir John; “and I've just come in to send off a wire to tell them that, so far as I know, he's living in the Poste Restante, Riga. Even that has been a nuisance. I came in yesterday to do it, but was five minutes too late for the post office. Are you staying long? I hope you will pay me another visit.”
G. K. Chesterton is the author of The Man who was Thursday (1908). It seems that Hugh Person first meets Armande on Thursday, July 29, 1965:
He made Armande's acquaintance in a Swiss railway carriage one dazzling afternoon between Thur and Versex on the eve of his meeting with Mr. R. He had boarded a slow train by mistake; she had chosen one that would stop at the small station from which a bus line went up to Witt, where her mother owned a chalet. Armande and Hugh had simultaneously settled in two window seats facing each other on the lake side of the coach. An American family occupied the corresponding four-seat side across the aisle. Hugh unfolded the Journal de Genève.
Oh, she was pretty and would have been exquisitely so had her lips been fuller. She had dark eyes, fair hair, a honey-hued skin. Twin dimples of the crescentic type came down her tanned cheeks on the sides of her mournful mouth. She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse. A book lay in her lap under her black-gloved hands. He thought, he recognized that flame-and-soot paperback. The mechanism of their first acquaintance was ideally banal.
They exchanged a glance of urbane disapproval as the three American kids began pulling sweaters and pants out of a suitcase in savage search for something stupidly left behind (a heap of comics - by now taken care of, with the used towels, by a brisk hotel maid). One of the two adults, catching Armande's cold eye, responded with a look of good-natured helplessness. The conductor came for the tickets.
Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he had been right: it was indeed the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden Window.
"One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.
She considered the book in her lap as if seeking in it some explanation of his remark. Her skirt was very short.
"I mean," he said, "I work for that particular publisher. For the American publisher of the hard-cover edition. Do you like it?"
She answered in fluent but artificial English that she detested surrealistic novels of the poetic sort. She demanded hard realistic stuff reflecting our age. She liked books about Violence and Oriental Wisdom. Did it get better farther on?
"Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa, when the little girl, the narrator's daughter - "
"June."
"Yes. June sets her new dollhouse on fire and the whole villa burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it is all rather symbolic, in the grand manner, and, well, curiously tender at the same time, as the blurb says, or at least said, in our first edition. That cover is by the famous Paul Plam."
She would finish it, of course, no matter how boring, because every task in life should be brought to an end like completing that road above Witt, where they had a house, a chalet de luxe, but had to trudge up to the Drakonita cableway until that new road had been finished. The Burning Window or whatever it was called had been given her only the day before, on her twenty-third birthday, by the author's stepdaughter whom he probably -
"Julia."
Yes. Julia and she had both taught in the winter at a school for foreign young ladies in the Tessin. Julia's stepfather had just divorced her mother whom he had treated in an abominable fashion. What had they taught? Oh, posture, rhythmics - things like that.
Hugh and the new, irresistible person had by now switched to French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English. Asked to guess her nationality he suggested Danish or Dutch. No, her father's family came from Belgium, he was an architect who got killed last summer while supervising the demolition of a famous hotel in a defunct spa; and her mother was born in Russia, in a very noble milieu, but of course completely ruined by the revolution. Did he like his job? Would he mind pulling that dark blind down a little? The low sun's funeral. Was that a proverb, she queried? No, he had just made it up. (Chapter 9)
The previous day, August 28, 1965, was Armande’s twenty-third birthday. On August 4 Armande telephones Hugh Person during his visit to her mother's Villa Nastia. On the next Thursday (August 5) Hugh Person meets Armande and Julia Moore (Mr. R.'s former step-daughter) in Witt. "The low sun's funeral" brings to mind W. H. Auden's poem Funeral Blues which first appeared in the 1936 play (written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood) The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.