Stalking Nabokov (65 page)

The last paragraph comes closest of all to the present moment and, despite its seeming casualness, to the kind of pattern that makes Shade “reasonably sure” that his darling Hazel “somewhere is alive.” Thinking first of Sybil, he asks “Where are you?” and answers himself:

In the garden. I can see

990  Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree…

………………………………………

A dark Vanessa with a crimson band

Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand

And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.

(
PF
69)

Although Shade responds to chance circumstances around him, he also knows the pattern of his recent summer evenings and has presumably witnessed the recurrence of this
Vanessa atalanta
, a member of a sportive butterfly species, individuals of which fly most vigorously at dusk and may repeatedly frequent the same spot and engage with the same people at the same time day after day.
¹⁴
Shade, in other words, being a close observer of nature, could have expected he might end the poem this way, even as he looks out at his unplanned present: life, watched acutely, cooperates in the pattern of his art. And he knows that he can echo the unstated but implied pattern of bright red on the wing of the waxwing that starts his poem through the “dark Vanessa with the crimson
band”
settling here on the
sand—
the last of the pattern of rhymes in
ain
-
ane
and their congeners. For Shade, the Vanessa wheeling in the low sun also recalls the “nymph” who “came pirouetting” in the beauty-product advertisement on television the night Hazel dies, for lepidopterologically a
nymph
is any species of the subfamily
Nymphalinae
, especially of the genus
Vanessa
. The “nymph” in the beauty ad seems a sadly ironic counterpart to Hazel: Shade recoils from the television after seeing it, just at the time Hazel’s blind date recoils from her, but the Vanessa in the poem’s last paragraph seems almost Shade’s evocation of or tribute to his daughter.

Sybil “In the garden” at this sunset hour and “near the shagbark tree” and the dark Vanessa evoke and conclude a series of patterns running through the poem and directed at memories of Hazel and at hopes of meeting her again: the shagbark Shade describes at sunset and the white butterflies that “turn lavender as they / Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway / The
phantom
of my little daughter’s swing”; Shade’s direct address to Sybil, in canto 2, “Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed, / My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest / My Admirable butterfly,” and his “I love you when you’re standing on the lawn / Peering at something in a tree,” an insect or small bird, and his “I love you most / When with a pensive nod you greet her
ghost”
; the echo of
peer
,
tree
, and
ghost
here in Shade’s last description of Hazel’s action before she steps off the bank into the lake: “
she peered
/
At ghostly trees”
; and the conclusion Shade draws from the folly of his experience at I.P.H.:

I learnt what to ignore in my survey

Of death’s abyss. And when we lost our child

I knew there would be nothing:

…………………………………

Rise gracefully to welcome you and me

In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree.

(
PF
57)

In the final mention of the shagbark and the Vanessa, Shade resolves a pattern that, after his declaring his new confidence in pattern and in his darling Hazel’s being “somewhere… alive,” seems almost to rebut this “no phantom.” Hazel, appropriately enough given her name, has been at the center of a pattern of trees, including the
shagbark
, the
cedars
that the patrol-car headlights illuminate just before her parents hear of her death (which, via the cedar waxwing, link to the poem’s beginning), the
yew
at the start of the second half of the poem, and the
pine
with the cicada case that prompted Shade to declare: “Lafontaine was wrong: / Dead is the mandible, alive the song.”

Shade seems to have made the Vanessa passing by Sybil’s shadow near the shagbark tree just before his poem’s end as close as he can get, in the texture and plexed artistry of his poem, to evoking Hazel herself as present with him and Sybil: the Vanessa, whose crimson stripe echoes the waxwing that killed itself in the poem’s opening but that also, through Shade’s imagination, “lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky”; the pattern of birds and insects, including Hazel associated with the shy butterfly, the Toothwort White,
¹⁵
or the “dingy cygnet” who never turned into a wood duck;
¹⁶
the pattern of trees, phantoms or ghosts associated with trees, and a cicada that has flown free of its case stuck to a pine’s bark; the rhyme patterns, like the “band” and “sand” describing the final appearance of the Vanessa, that link the poem’s opening and close and Shade’s affirmation of his confidence in the implications of his patterned life and art. Shade has said he would like to try out the role of those “Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns.” He seems to have promoted Hazel from dingy cygnet to wood duck, from drab Toothwort White to splendid Sibylesque Red Admiral, from dull hazel grouse to the “torquated beauty” of the ring-necked pheasant.

Of course, Shade knows that his confidence and his command of pattern prove nothing. He knows that he will not know for sure until death writes the last line of his life. He pointedly evokes his own childhood foretastes of death—his fits at the age of eleven, the first as he lay on the floor watching “a clockwork toy—/ A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy”—in the chance circumstances of the poem’s close, as he winds his alarm clock, then, immediately after the Vanessa, notices

    through the flowing shade and ebbing light

A man, unheedful of the butterfly—

Some neighbor’s gardener, I guess—goes by

Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.

But by leaving his own last couplet incomplete here, Shade both affirms that there can be no closure, no end
within
life, and that nevertheless the poem of his life may somehow return, in a way consonant with the rhyme pattern, to the start. No one has seen such still untapped possibilities in the closed couplet, yet no one has waged the twentieth-century war against poetic closure so pointedly as Shade, when he insists that the pattern of his life and his poem cannot be completed until the unknown last line of death.

25.
Ada:
The Bog and the Garden

Or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in
Ada

In November 2009, on the eve of publication of
The Original of Laura
, I spoke with Martin Amis at a Nabokov celebration at the Poetry Center in New York. Beforehand, I asked Martin about his review of
The Original of Laura
, which I had read just that day, where he confessed that despite his deep love of Nabokov he had tried to read
Ada
half a dozen times, unsuccessfully, before at last forcing himself through it earlier that year. He made it clear to me that he thought Nabokov not in control in
Ada
either ethically or aesthetically. I have written hundreds of pages on the precision of Nabokov’s allusions and patterns in
Ada
, and the penetration of their ethical, psychological, and epistemological implications. This essay offers just one of many possible angles on
Ada
. I would be pleased if it converted anybody to an appreciation of a novel even some Nabokov admirers dislike but others recognize as his richest.

Nabokov confessed that “
Ada
caused me more trouble than all my other novels” (
SO
138). At the time he was
most
troubled, in the second third of the 1960s, when plans for works tentatively entitled
Letters from
(or
to
)
Terra
and
The Texture of Time
seemed bogged down, he explained to an interviewer the process of preparing for a new novel: “At a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles” (
SO
31). This is already a kind of inspiration, he notes, but in his essay “Inspiration” he describes the forefeeling of a novel’s approach, then a sudden flash, “a shimmer of exact details … a tumble of merging words” that the “experienced writer immediately takes … down” (
SO
309). He cites the first surge of
Ada
, at the end of 1965:

Sea crashing, retreating with shuffle of pebbles, Juan and beloved young whore—is her name, as they say, Adora? is she Italian, Roumanian, Irish?—asleep on his lap, his opera cloak pulled over her … in a corner of a decrepit, once palatial whorehouse, Villa Venus.

(
SO
310)

Nabokov comments on the contrast between the coloration of this passage and the finished
Ada
but draws attention to the “pleasing neatness” of the fact that it “now exists as an inset scene right in the middle of the novel (which was entitled at first
Villa Venus
, then
The Veens
, then
Ardor
, and finally
Ada
)” (
SO
310). He had settled on the name
Ada
by February 1966, and over the next few months was astonished at the speed of the novel’s compositional flow.

Ada
has many obvious sources: personal, like Nabokov’s memories of Russia, Vyra, and first love, and impersonal, like Chateaubriand, Tolstoy, Proust, and the history of the novel. I want to focus on three unlikely pieces of fluff and straw, whose appeal lay partly in their unlikeliness and whose dates belong to the years immediately before Nabokov began writing
Ada
.

VEEN, BOG, VENUS

As Paul H. Fry first noted in 1985 and Wilma Siccama and Jack Van der Weide discussed again in 1995,
¹
Nabokov discovered the Dutch meaning of “
veen”
and rediscovered the Dutch surnames Veen and Van Veen in a detective novel published in 1964 by Nicolas Freeling,
Double-Barrel
.
²
Freeling, who died in 2003, was “credited with elevating the crime genre by creating probing examinations of complex personalities,”
³
but Nabokov had little interest in crime fiction except for the purposes of parody, in
Despair
,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, and
Lolita
. Freeling’s novel presumably came to Nabokov’s attention because at one point the detective and narrator, Van der Valk, sifting through criminal records in a dreary little town in Drente, the province in the north of the Netherlands to which he has been sent from Amsterdam, notes: “The State Recherche—very very thorough indeed—had even unearthed the fact that the burgomaster, earlier in his career, had once been thought rather too fond of sitting little girls on his lap. Charming; Burgomaster Humbert N. Petit of Larousse, Ill.” (
DB
25).

The nod to
Lolita
and even to Quilty’s alias in the cryptogrammic paper chase (
Lolita
250) follows a few pages after this:

The keyword in this north-eastern corner of Holland is ‘Veen.’ It occurs as a suffix in place-names. Over to the west are Hoogeveen and Heerenveen—larger towns these, around the twenty thousand mark. To the south, Klazinaveen, Vriezeveen—smaller, hardly more than villages… . ‘Veen’ means turf: the boggy peaty moorland that was cut for fuel in the depression days, before the oil pipelines and the natural gas.

(
DB
17)

On first being assigned to Drente, Van der Valk remarks: “All I know about Drente is that it is up in the north-east corner of Holland… . A poor province; the ground is not much good for agriculture. Wet, peaty sort of moorland. What in Ireland is called ‘the bog’ ” (
DB
12). Two pages after commenting on “
veen”
in Drente place-names, Freeling returns again to the “boggy peaty moorland” theme: “The local people, and with them a swelling tide of strangers from congested metropolitan Holland, took with enthusiasm to easy work in sunny, canteen-and-canned-music factories. Pleasant change from trying to dig a living out of wet, black, stinking ground” (
DB
19). Freeling seems less interested in the mystery story than in a sociological evocation of stifling provincialism and provincial resentment at the new influx from the cities: “None of this told me much about the people who lived there. Were they too just like the ones in metroland? Had a thousand years in the ‘Veen’ ground produced a local type? There were local names—I saw several ‘Van Veen’ and ‘Van der Veen’ nameplates on doors” (
DB
20). As if in reply to Freeling,
Ada
stresses the Veens, inhabitants at Ardis of the Ladore region of “lovely rich marshes” (
Ada
108) and “Ladoga bogs” (288), not as a “local type” but as a unique “happy famil[y] more or less dissimilar” (3) to any other on earth or Antiterra.
⁴

Never one not to do his homework, Nabokov appears to have followed up Freeling’s hint by consulting a map of the Netherlands. Freeling sets his novel in the province of Drenthe (as my atlas spells it), and there the concentration of
veen
towns common throughout the country—from Anerveen through Veendal, Veendijk, and Veenwouden to Witteveen—reaches its highest. Although Freeling’s stress is on the province as a whole, he locates the action in the real town of Zwinderen and specifically mentions as an example of the
veen
towns the nearby Klazinaveen (Klazienaveen according to my atlas: the Dutch continually reform their spelling). Between the two, five kilometers from Klazienaveen by road, lies another village called Erica. When Nabokov saw, as he surely did, the town of Erica in Drenthe nestled among other places named
veen
, he must have thought of Venus Erycina, the temple to Venus as the goddess of prostitutes in the Sicilian town of Eryx, now Erice, and from that have developed Eric Veen, the boy “of Flemish extraction” (
Ada
347) who dreams up a chain of palatial whorehouses, the Villa Venuses.