Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Lord Byron’s Hock:
‘Tell me, Bouteillan,’ asked Marina, ‘what other good white wine do we have — what can you recommend?’ The butler smiled and whispered a fabulous name.
‘Yes, oh, yes,’ said Demon. ‘Ah, my dear, you should not think up dinners all by yourself. Now about rowing — you mentioned rowing… Do you know that moi, qui vous parle, was a Rowing Blue in 1858? Van prefers football, but he’s only a College Blue, aren’t you Van? I’m also better than he at tennis — not lawn tennis, of course, a game for parsons, but "court tennis" as they say in Manhattan. What else, Van?’
‘You still beat me at fencing, but I’m the better shot. That’s not real sudak, papa, though it’s tops, I assure you.’
(Marina, having failed to obtain the European product in time for the dinner, had chosen the nearest thing, wall-eyed pike, or ‘dory,’ with Tartar sauce and boiled young potatoes.)
‘Ah!’ said Demon, tasting Lord Byron’s Hock. ‘This redeems Our Lady’s Tears.’ (1.38)
When Van takes one last dip in the swimming pool, Bouteillan (the French butler at Ardis) wonders, if he has not just seen a tadpole:
One common orchid, a Lady’s Slipper, was all that wilted in the satchel which she had left on a garden table and now dragged upstairs. Marina and the mirror had gone. He peeled off his training togs and took one last dip in the pool over which the butler stood, looking meditatively into the false-blue water with his hands behind his back.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if I haven’t just seen a tadpole.’
The novelistic theme of written communications has now really got into its stride. When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: ‘One must not berne you.’ Only a French-speaking person would use that word for ‘dupe.’ Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction — descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. To interview them all — torture the males, rape the females — would be, of course, absurd and degrading. With a puerile wrench he broke his best black butterfly on the wheel of his exasperation. The pain from the fang bite was now reaching his heart. He found another tie, finished dressing and went to look for Ada. (1.40).
In "Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine No XXIV, August 1819" Byron calls Keats "a tadpole of the Lakes:"
The writer of this is a tadpole of the lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learnt to write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He says “Easy was the task” of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him – I presume; I recommend him to try, before he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have then written, and what he has now written with the humblest and earliest compositions of Pope – produced in years still more youthful than those of Mr Keats when he invented his new Essay on Criticism, entitled Sleep and Poetry (an ominous title), from whence the above canons are taken. Pope’s was written at nineteen and published at twenty-two. (The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, London, 1833, by Thomas Moore, Esq., in 17 vols., Vol. XV, p. 94).
In the same article Byron (who had an affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and who had a daughter named Ada) mentions a League of Incest:
One of “these lofty minded and virtuous men”, in the words of the Edinburgh Magazine, made, I understand, about this time or soon after, a tour in Switzerland. On his return to England, he circulated, and for anything I know invented, a report – that the gentleman to whom I have alluded and myself were living in promiscuous intercourse with two sisters, “having formed a League of Incest” (I quote the words as they were stated to me), and indulged himself in the natural comments upon such a conjunction – which are said to have been repeated publicly with great complacency by another of that poetical fraternity, of whom I shall say only that even had the story been true he should not have repeated it as far as it regarded myself – except in sorrow. The tale itself requires but a word in answer – the ladies were not sisters – nor in any degree connected except by the second marriage of their respective parents – a widower with a widow – both being the offspring of former marriages. Neither of them were, in 1816, nineteen years old. “Promiscuous intercourse” could hardly have disgusted the great patron of Pantisocracy (does Mr Southey remember such a scheme?), but there was none.*
*B. first heard of the rumour (which was spread by Southey, Landor, Brougham, Lady Shelley and others), from John Hanson in November 1818. He does not deny “intercourse”, but denies that it was “promiscuous”. The gentleman to whom B. has alluded seems to be John Pollidori (1795-1821), B.'s doctor.
Byron is the author of The Prisoner of Chillon (1816). Describing his meetings with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in Mont Roux in October 1905, Van mentions Château de Byron (or 'She Yawns Castle'):
A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a ‘Lebanese cedar’ — if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where a princely paulownia (‘mulberry tree!’ snorted Ada), standing in state on its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk. A ginkgo (of a much more luminous greenish gold than its neighbor, a dingily yellowing local birch) marked the corner of a cobbled lane leading down to the quay. They followed southward the famous Fillietaz Promenade which went along the Swiss side of the lake from Valvey to the Château de Byron (or ‘She Yawns Castle’). The fashionable season had ended, and wintering birds, as well as a number of knickerbockered Central Europeans, had replaced the English families as well as the Russian noblemen from Nipissing and Nipigon. (3.8)
Lakes Nipissing and Nipigon bring to mind the Lake Poets whom Byron attacks in his article: Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
When Ada refuses to leave her sick husband, Van compares Andrey Vinelander to Keats:
She led him around the hotel to an ugly rotunda, out of the miserable drizzle, and there she attempted to embrace him but he evaded her lips. She was leaving in a few minutes. Heroic, helpless Andrey had been brought back to the hotel in an ambulance. Dorothy had managed to obtain three seats on the Geneva-Phoenix plane. The two cars were taking him, her and the heroic sister straight to the helpless airport.
She asked for a handkerchief, and he pulled out a blue one from his windjacket pocket, but her tears had started to roll and she shaded her eyes, while he stood before her with outstretched hand.
‘Part of the act?’ he inquired coldly.
She shook her head, took the handkerchief with a childish ‘merci,’ blew her nose and gasped, and swallowed, and spoke, and next moment all, all was lost.
She could not tell her husband while he was ill. Van would have to wait until Andrey was sufficiently well to bear the news and that might take some time. Of course, she would have to do everything to have him completely cured, there was a wondermaker in Arizona —
‘Sort of patching up a bloke before hanging him,’ said Van.
‘And to think,’ cried Ada with a kind of square shake of stiff hands as if dropping a lid or a tray, ‘to think that he dutifully concealed everything! Oh, of course, I can’t leave him now!’
‘Yes, the old story — the flute player whose impotence has to be treated, the reckless ensign who may never return from a distant war!’
‘Ne ricane pas!’ exclaimed Ada. ‘The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?’
As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.
‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’
‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’
‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet —’
‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).
‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène —’
‘Ach, perestagne!’
‘— et le phalène.’
‘Je t’emplie ("prie" and "supplie"), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘But, but, but’ — (slapping every time his forehead) — ‘to be on the very brink of, of, of — and then have that idiot turn Keats!’
‘Bozhe moy, I must be going. Say something to me, my darling, my only one, something that might help!’
There was a narrow chasm of silence broken only by the rain drumming on the eaves.
‘Stay with me, girl,’ said Van, forgetting everything — pride, rage, the convention of everyday pity.
For an instant she seemed to waver — or at least to consider wavering; but a resonant voice reached them from the drive and there stood Dorothy, gray-caped and mannish-hatted, energetically beckoning with her unfurled umbrella.
‘I can’t, I can’t, I’ll write you,’ murmured my poor love in tears.
Van kissed her leaf-cold hand and, letting the Bellevue worry about his car, letting all Swans worry about his effects and Mme Scarlet worry about Eveline’s skin trouble, he walked some ten kilometers along soggy roads to Rennaz and thence flew to Nice, Biskra, the Cape, Nairobi, the Basset range —
And o'er the summits of the Basset —
Would she write? Oh, she did! Oh, every old thing turned out superfine! Fancy raced fact in never-ending rivalry and girl giggles. Andrey lived only a few months longer, po pal’tzam (finger counting) one, two, three, four — say, five. Andrey was doing fine by the spring of nineteen six or seven, with a comfortably collapsed lung and a straw-colored beard (nothing like facial vegetation to keep a patient busy). Life forked and reforked. Yes, she told him. He insulted Van on the mauve-painted porch of a Douglas hotel where van was awaiting his Ada in a final version of Les Enfants Maudits. Monsieur de Tobak (an earlier cuckold) and Lord Erminin (a second-time second) witnessed the duel in the company of a few tall yuccas and short cactuses. Vinelander wore a cutaway (he would); Van, a white suit. Neither man wished to take any chances, and both fired simultaneously. Both fell. Mr Cutaway’s bullet struck the outsole of Van’s left shoe (white, black-heeled), tripping him and causing a slight fourmillement (excited ants) in his foot — that was all. Van got his adversary plunk in the underbelly — a serious wound from which he recovered in due time, if at all (here the forking swims in the mist). Actually it was all much duller.
So she did write as she had promised? Oh, yes, yes! In seventeen years he received from her around a hundred brief notes, each containing around one hundred words, making around thirty printed pages of insignificant stuff — mainly about her husband’s health and the local fauna. After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada’s choosing the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband’s endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin’s select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the ‘Lyaskan Herculanum’); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another question.
Steadily but very slowly Andrey’s condition kept deteriorating. During his last two or three years of idle existence on various articulated couches, whose every plane could be altered in hundreds of ways, he lost the power of speech, though still able to nod or shake his head, frown in concentration, or faintly smile when inhaling the smell of food (the origin, indeed, of our first beatitudes). He died one spring night, alone in a hospital room, and that same summer (1922) his widow donated her collections to a National Park museum and traveled by air to Switzerland for an ‘exploratory interview’ with fifty-two-year-old Van Veen. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): phalène: moth (see also p.111).
tu sais etc.: you know it will kill me.
Bozhe moy: Russ., oh, my God.
In 1821-22 Zhukovski translated Byron's Prisoner of Chillon into Russian as Shil'yonskiy uznik. Pushkin's poem K Vyazemskomu ("To Vyazemski," 1826) ends in the lines Na vsekh stikhiyakh chelovek - / Tiran, predatel' ili uznik (Upon all elements man is a tyrant, / a traitor or a prisoner):
Так море, древний душегубец,
Воспламеняет гений твой?
Ты славишь лирой золотой
Нептуна грозного трезубец.
Не славь его. В наш гнусный век
Седой Нептун земли союзник.
На всех стихиях человек ―
Тиран, предатель или узник.
So ’tis the sea, the ancient assassin
that kindles into flame your genius?
You glorify with golden lyre
Neptune's dread trident?
No, praise him not! In our vile age
gray Neptune is the Earth's ally.
Upon all elements man is a tyrant,
a traitor or a prisoner.
(VN’s translation)
In his Eugene Onegin Commentary (vol. III, p. 358) VN points out that Pushkin’s “epigram on Neptune” was prompted by rumors (which later proved false) to the effect that Great Britain had surrendered the political émigré, Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev, to the Russian government. Like Byron, Nikolay Turgenev (1789-1871) was lame.
Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroy Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother), Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) and Demon (Van's and Ada's father):
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited.
Btw., the Russian word for tadpole, golovastik comes from golova (head).