Chapter 38b

Part Two, Chapter 11

Afternote

Structure: Union and Separation

The rhythm and tempo of Van and Ada’s unions and separations shape the entire structure of Ada. Pt. 2 Ch. 11 triggers their third and by far their longest separation to date.

Because Ardis the Second seems an at times miraculous retrieval of Ardis the First, it belongs within Part One, only to lead to a decisive break in its final chapters, when Van discovers Ada’s infidelity and flees Ardis in rage and despair. The second half of Part Two, Van and Ada together in Manhattan, seems in some ways a recapitulation of Ardis, from Lucette’s espying Van and Ada making love for the first time since Ardis, to the album of photographs that constitutes a replay of Ardis the First, then Ada’s invocation of the “sacred secret and creed” (409) that romantic housemaids had made of Van and Ada in the summer of 1884. But their Manhattan idyll leads from the furtive lovemaking of Ardis to a new adult freedom and privacy that allows them to spend day and night together. Until, that is, their privacy is shattered by Demon’s discovering them living as a couple. There will be no retrieval, no second Manhattan.

Motivation?

While the architectural rationale for Ada’s union-and-separation structure underpins the whole feel and flow of the novel, is the twelve-year separation that begins at the end of Part Two well enough motivated psychologically? Ada’s infidelities and Van’s furious jealousy easily explain the gap between Ardis the Second and Manhattan, between Part One and Part Two. But what of the gap between Manhattan and Mont Roux, between Part Two and Part Three? Does Nabokov convince us that the fiercely independent Van would accept his father’s injunction to terminate his affair with his sister—of whom he has told Demon “She is my whole life” (440)?

Van feels little for his mother, Marina (“a long story of unconcern, amused scorn, physical repulsion, and habitual dismissal,” 452), but he dotes on his father and takes his cue from him in many things: in his attitudes to sex and society, wealth, style and indulgence, masculinity and especially male personal honor.

Nevertheless, Pt. 2 Ch. 11 shows Van resisting Demon’s admonitions. To his father he coolly stresses the length of his affair with Ada and the frequency of their lovemaking. Demon imparts what he assumes will be two decisive surprises: that he is Ada’s father and that Marina is Van’s mother. But Van remains unmoved, explaining how he and Ada have known almost from the first that they are full brother and sister, and have never cared. He also points out that he is sterile, removing the danger of offspring and inbreeding that in part underpins the incest taboo. In frustration, Demon shouts that “It is not too late to stop that ignoble affair—.” Van retorts: “No shouting and no philistine epithets.” Demon withdraws the “ignoble,” but asks: “Is it too late to prevent your affair with your sister from wrecking her life?” (442)

He then elaborates:
How did Van imagine his sister’s pursuing a scenic career? Would he admit it would be wrecked if they
persisted in their relationship? Did he envisage a life of concealment in luxurious exile? Was he ready to
deprive her of normal interests and a normal marriage? Children? Normal amusements?

Van remains unswayed:
“Don’t forget ‘normal adultery,’” remarked Van.
“How much better that would be!” said grim Demon. (442)


For all his dissoluteness, Demon also has a wide streak of the conventional: “The awfulness of the situation is an abyss that grows deeper the more I think of it. You force me to bring up the tritest terms such as ‘family,’ ‘honor,’ ‘set,’ ‘law.’ . . . All right, I have bribed many officials in my wild life but neither you nor I can bribe a whole culture, a whole country. And the emotional impact of learning that for almost ten years you and that charming child have been deceiving their parents—” (443).

Nabokov takes care to remove the kinds of arguments and pressures that might be expected in such a situation: the appeal to the parents’ probity (Demon has had to admit his and Marina’s connivance in the substitution of Van for Aqua’s stillborn son, a deed dark enough for Demon to pay blackmail to keep the matter hushed); the effect on his mother (“Here Van expected his father to take the ‘it-would-kill-your-mother’ line, but Demon was wise enough to keep clear of it. Nothing could ‘kill’ Marina. If any rumors of incest did come her way, concern with her ‘inner peace’ would help her to ignore them—or at least romanticize them out of reality’s reach”); the threat of disinheritance (“I cannot disinherit you: Aqua left you enough ‘ridge’ and real estate to annul the conventional punishment”); or the appeal to the law (“I cannot denounce you to the authorities without involving my daughter, whom I mean to protect at all cost,” (443).

The strongest arguments left are the effect on Ada and Demon himself—who breaks into a sob that shakes “his entire frame” and releases “a deluge of tears” (443). Van remains unbudging if not unmoved: “His own marble calm did not surprise Van. The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion” (444). No wave of sweeping sentiment here.

Demon issues one final plea:
“I believe in you and your common sense. You must not allow an old debaucher to disown an
only son. If you love her, you wish her to be happy, and she will not be as happy as she could
be once you gave her up. You may go. Tell her to come here on your way down.” (444)

And at that, something snaps in Van, without any sign of the prolonged ethical self-reflections surrounding major decisions that we might expect in Henry James or even Jane Austen. “Down. My first is a vehicle that twists dead daisies around its spokes; my second is Oldmanhattan slang for ‘money’; and my whole makes a hole” (444): in other words, as Van goes down to the floor where Ada is waiting for Demon’s summons, he also plunges down emotionally. He has suddenly accepted the force of Demon’s “If you love her, you wish her to be happy, and she will not be as happy as she could be once you gave her up” (444), and he decides on ending his life with Ada and promptly taking his own life by firing a cartridge through his skull.

He leaves a note for Ada to “Do what he tells you” (444) and while admitting that he thinks Demon’s “Victorian” logic preposterous, adds that “I suddenly realized he was right” (445): that Ada deserves another chance of happiness than the compromised life she would have to have with him. He reaches for his pistol, loads it with the fatal cartridge—then realizes after all that he wants to live.

Pt. 2 Ch. 10 had been full of a sense of inevitability, featuring even a capitalized Fate (434), as Demon’s discovery of Van and Ada cohabiting as lovers becomes more and more impossible to avert. A momentous event can indeed seem fated in retrospect, but Pt. 2 Ch. 11 stresses the converse: for all the reasons, all the pressures on Van that Nabokov removes or that Van resists, Van suddenly comes to a free recognition of the value of Demon’s request, in terms of a different chance of happiness for Ada. He will accept that, and therewith renounce his own life. But then he makes another free decision: he will live after all, even if without Ada.

Nabokov does not want to motivate the apparently final separation of Van and Ada in such a way as to make it seem a necessary consequence of the pressure Demon has applied. On the contrary, he makes it Van’s free decision, and followed soon enough by another free decision: not, after all, to take his own life. And only then does it become clear, within a paragraph, that not only does Van not kill himself, but that he and Ada in time will find themselves together again, with Ada declaring “I would have killed myself too, had I found Rose wailing over your corpse” (445). His thinking of Ada’s chance of happiness in a life without him would have only led to her too taking her own life.

In The Texture of Time, Van asserts that “the future . . . is not an item of Time. . . . The future is but a quack at the court of Chronos. . . . the future remains aloof from our fancies and feelings. At every moment it is an infinity of branching possibilities” (560-61). So it is to Van, first in resisting Demon, then in suddenly accepting the force of what his father says, and finally in suddenly abandoning his intent to kill himself, so that the automatic pistol he raises to his head becomes “a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples” (445). After the sense of inexorably approaching fate in Pt. 2 Ch. 10, Pt. 2 Ch. 11 affirms both the freedom of the will and the openness of time.

Structures and Spikes

P t. 2 Ch. 11 constitutes a major turning point in the saga of Van and Ada’s lives, a decisive part of the pattern of union and separation that shapes their lives and love. Yet it is also surprisingly spiky, not least in that sudden shift forward at the end in the foreglimpse of Van and Ada somehow together again, even after a lapse long enough to have turned Van’s hair gray.

Spikiest of all within the chapter is the theme of blackmail interwoven into and obtruding upon the theme of separation. Just as Demon is about to explain what makes Marina, not Aqu a, Van’s mother, he muses: “Some other time I’ll tell you about the Black Miller; not now; too trivial” (440). But Van breaks off this dramatic moment not only to tell the comically colorful story of Norbert von Miller’s love life and crimes and his successfully blackmailing Demon for twenty years, but to continue, in a tonally jarring shift:
We may add, to complete this useful parenthesis, that in early February, 1893, . . . two other less successful blackmailers were
waiting in the wings: Kim who would have bothered Ada again had he not been carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging
on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood; and the son of one of the former employees of the famous clandestine-message
agency after it had been closed by the U.S. Government in 1928, when the past had ceased to matter, and nothing but the straw of
a prison cell could reward the optimism of second-generation rogues. (441)

At this point on a first reading we are thoroughly unprepared for Kim Beauharnais and cannot quite make out how this ghastly fate has befallen him, the task being made all the more difficult by the distracting introduction of a perplexing third blackmailer, the son of a Very Private Letters courier, who somehow (how?) unsuccessfully attempts to blackmail Van, presumably, at a time at least thirty-five years hence and somehow (how?) ends up occasioning only his own imprisonment.

The parenthesis closes, and we return to the drama of Van’s face-off with his father. That in turn ends, with Van’s “cartridge” riddle announcing his decision to accept Demon’s decree and take his own life, his “Do what he tells you” note to Ada (444), with its strange incidental observation about the man painting in the skyscraper across the lane, his picking up his pistol, a narrative reflection on the perhaps spurious continuity of a human life, the metamorphosis of his gun into a comb that he passes through his temples, and a leap forward to Ada talking to him in some future time when Van’s hair has already gone gray. She declares she would have taken her life had she found him dead, she answers his note about the painter, and she adds:
“But, you know, there’s one thing I regret,” she added: “Your use of an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury—not yours, not my
Van’s. I should never have told you about the Ladore policeman. You should never have taken him into your confidence, never
connived with him to burn those files—and most of Kalugano’s pine forest. Eto unizitel’no (it is humiliating).”
            “Amends have been made,” replied fat Van with a fat man’s chuckle. “I’m keeping Kim safe and snug in a nice Home for
Disabled Professional People, where he gets from me loads of nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography.”
            There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do. (445-46)

Suddenly the blackmail theme has returned, and Ada’s reproach illuminates what has happened to Kim: the “red thread” hangs on to an eye gouged out by Van’s alpenstock. Van has ensured that Kim can never blackmail them again, can never photograph them again or identify his positive prints or develop from his negatives. The emotional spike at the repugnant inference compounds itself with the tonal spikes at Ada’s Veenishly inappropriate “Eto unizitel’no” and Van’s Vanishly repellent “Amends have been made,” his “fat man’s chuckle,” the ghoulishly macabre irony of Kim’s being “safe and snug” in a nice home for the blind, the nicely brailled books on chromophotography.

How does all this fit into the heart-stirring contours of Van and Ada’s present separation and future reunion?

The End of Part Two and the Start of Part One

For all its centrality in the rhythms of their love, Pt. 2 Ch. 11 plays many other roles in the novel’s structure.

The chapter harks back to the beginning of the novel, to the story of Demon and Marina’s torrid affair and the consequences that their son and daughter discover in the Ardis attic. Demon, who knows his side of the story, has no inkling that his children could know it too. Nabokov avoids retelling those events, alluding to them as briefly as possible, as in Van’s self-questioning (“Tell him about the herbarium in the attic? About the indiscretions of (anonymous) servants? About a forged wedding date? About everything that two bright children had so gaily gleaned? I will. He did,” 442). Before that, Demon merely supplies an abstract of what he will say (“The second fact may horrify you even more than the first. I know it caused me much deeper worry—moral of course, not monetary—than Ada’s case. . . . Some other time I’ll tell you about the Black Miller; not now; too trivial,” 440), but that provides Van with an occasion for the long parenthesis on the blackmail of Norbert von Miller.

This parenthesis, in its own fresh melodrama (“Dr. Lapiner’s wife, born Countess Alp, not only left him, in 1871, to live with Norbert von Miller . . . ,” 440) recalls the crucial scene of the child substitution, as revealed and obscured in Aqua’s uncertainties (“At other moments she felt convinced that the child was her sister’s, born out of wedlock, during an exhausting, yet highly romantic blizzard, in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge, where a Dr. Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover, sat providentially waiting near a rude red stove for his boots to dry. Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 . . . ),” 25-26). Demon and Marina’s passionate on-and-off relationship prefigures the passionate on-and-off of Van and Ada, as the fatal entanglement of Aqua in the parents’ relationship prefigures the fatal entanglement of Lucette in their children’s relationship (see Boyd 1979 and Pt. 2 Ch. 3 Afternote), and now the new story of Demon’s being blackmailed for his and Marina’s subterfuge offers an additional link to the next generation, to the blackmail of Kim Beauharnais, introduced into the same looping parenthesis that recounts the “Black Miller’s” importunities.


Ardis and Manhattan: Rhymed Endings

Van’s severing himself from Ada at the end of Part Two echoes in certain ways his bitter and furious departure from Ardis at the end of Part One. Both seem at the time final partings from Ada.

In both cases, Van in his despair at a life without Ada thinks of suicide. As he approaches Maidenhair station, on his flight from Ardis, Van’s thoughts flow in a stream of despairing consciousness that explicitly evokes Anna Karenin before she throws herself under a train: “She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue. . . . 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” (299-300). And on the eve of his duel with Captain Tapper Van writes a letter to his father in case of his death: “the manner of my end can be regarded as a kind of easy suicide” (309), just before he discloses: “In 1884, during my first summer at Ardis, I seduced your daughter, who was then twelve” (309). In Pt. 2 Ch. 11 Van tells his father “I seduced her in the summer of eighteen eighty-four” (440) shortly before he descends, after the interview with his father, full of resolve to commit suicide.

In neither case does he in fact take his own life; but in both he vents his anger on others.

Pointedly, to make a macabre pun, Van’s rage on those whom he cannot duel reverberates from 1888 to 1893. As he leaves Ardis he fixates on Rack: “The code, he reflected, did not allow to challenge a person who was not born a gentleman but exceptions might be made for artists, pianists, flutists, and if a coward refused, you could make his gums bleed with repeated slaps or, still better, thrash him with a strong cane—must not forget to choose one in the vestibule closet before leaving forever, forever” (294). But he has to buy a “second walking stick: the Ardis Hall silver-knobbed one he had left behind in the Maidenhair station café. This was a rude, stout article with a convenient grip and an alpenstockish point capable of gouging out translucent bulging eyes” (305).

Rack proves too close to death for Van to feel he needs to assault him. But not Kim Beauharnais. In Pt. 2 Ch. 11 we learn, in the paragraph that begins by explaining how blackmailer “Black Miller” came to learn of the substitution of Van for Aqua’s still-born son, about the “less successful” blackmailer Kim and his “one eye hanging on a red thread” (442). At the end of the chapter we hear Ada’s reproach to Van when they reunite in 1905, her regret at his “use of an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury” (445). Note that both the unused alpenstock of 1888 and the one actually deployed in 1893 were intended for a victim in Kalugano.

At the Kalugano station at the end of Part One, Van in his rage had slapped the officer who complained at Van’s crashing into him as he rushed off the train (304), thereby provoking the duel he admits to his father “can be regarded as a kind of easy suicide” (309). Despite venting his anger in that way, he still feels he has to vent more on the unduelable Philip Rack. He therefore acquires his “second walking stick . . . with . . . an alpenstockish point capable of gouging out translucent bulging eyes” (305). Meanwhile Captain Tapper’s conspicuous homosexuality vividly emphasizes his utter irrelevance to the sexual jealousy that impels Van to pursue Rack and de Prey.

At the end of Part Two, Van feels a different kind of emotional turmoil as he faces, once again, but for a very different reason, the prospect of a life without Ada. Again, he thinks of suicide, and again instead vents his frustration on someone who has nothing whatever to do with his decision to accept Demon’s admonition. Alert to his bristling violence, Ada had already expressed her apprehension when Van, leafing with her through Kim Beauharnais’s blackmail album, had wondered about Kim’s exact address: “You shall not slaughter him” (406). When she happens to mention that their former footman Jones “is now a prominent policeman in Lower Ladore” (407) we can see that Van, intent on neutralizing Kim’s threat, coolly stores that information away in order to help him track Kim down in Kalugano (see 407.29n and Pt. 2 Ch. 7 Afternote). Van and Ada’s greatest reason for keeping their ardor secret has been the possible effect on the two parents who know their true relationship, and on their own continuing love. But by the time Van hounds down Kim, Demon knows of Van and Ada’s love and Van himself has been prompted to renounce a future with her. His reasons for attacking Kim, therefore, are much less strong than when he first saw the album and first thought, as Ada intuited, of somehow disabling him. But just as in the case of the duel with the irrelevant Tapper, and the continued intention of assaulting Rack, Van persists, to ensure that Kim can never blackmail them again: he blinds him with the alpenstock and burns his photographic files.

Demon

Van’s way of coping with blackmail is far starker than his father’s. Yet there is good reason that the end of Part Two recalls the melodrama involving Demon, Marina, and Aqua at the beginning of Part One. Demon’s passion, recklessness, irresponsibility, and quick anger have helped shape Van and partially explain the bizarre and gruesome details of his alpenstock attack on Kim.

After fleeing Ardis in 1888, Van thinks ahead to Rack and de Prey: “Aqua used to say that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be happy on Demonia, our splendid planet. Van felt that for him to survive on this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born, he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men. He had to find them immediately; delay itself might impair his power of survival” (301). It is no accident that it is Aqua, Demon’s most unfortunate victim, who first thinks of the planet, in the midst of her unhappiness, as “Demonia” rather than the usual Antiterra, and no accident that Van in precisely this post-Ardis situation and this vengeful mood thinks of Aqua evoking the fierce unhappiness of “Demonia.”

A generation earlier Demon, as soon as he learns of Marina’s infidelity, soars across the Atlantic in pursuit of his rival, d’Onsky, “whom I would have dispatched, had I not been overeager to castrate him” (16). But the resulting “sting in the groin” (15) does lead to d’Onsky’s death. After Ardis the Second, knowing that he has no enduring reason for hostility to Captain Tapper, Van nevertheless refuses to avert the encounter by apologizing for his outburst of wrath, and, like his father, plans something in the duel fancier than a body blow:

At first he toyed with the idea of killing his adversary: quantitively, it would afford him the greatest sense of release; qualitatively, it suggested all sorts of moral and legal complications. Inflicting a wound seemed an inept half-measure. He decided to do something artistic and tricky, such as shooting the pistol out of the fellow’s hand, or parting for him his thick brushy hair in the middle. (308)

Of course he never gets the chance.
            In Manhattan in 1893 Van resists his father’s pleas, even after Demon threatens to disown him and never see him
again, then erupts with irrepressible—or is it carefully staged?—grief:
Van . . . now heard with horror the sob that shook Demon’s entire frame, and then saw a deluge of tears flowing down those
hollow tanned cheeks. In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris
Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total
surrender to gravity. Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? (443)

Since 1974 commentators have remarked on the irony in this context of Boris Godunov’s last words to his son in Pushkin’s play: “You are a man and a tsar; love your sister, / You alone are her protector now” (see Proffer 276, Babikov 2022: 767). But a far deeper irony pervades.

As he dies, Boris, aware of his guilt for killing Ivan the Terrible’s son Dmitri (in Pushkin’s telling of the story; historians are less sure), nevertheless invokes God (“O God, God! / I shall appear before Thee now”) and gives his son political and moral advice:
Be merciful, accessible to foreigners,

Accept their service trustingly.

Keep strictly to the Church’s precepts; be reticent;

The tsar’s voice should not vanish in the air

For nothing; like the ringing of a sacred bell,

It should proclaim only great grief or great festivity.

O my dear son, you’re drawing near the age

When a woman’s face stirs up a man’s blood.

Keep, keep the holy purity

Of innocence and of proud modesty.

(Boris Godunov . . . , trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 101-03)

Although Demon, sobbing before his son, brings to Van’s mind his father’s role as the dying Boris Godunov, and although Demon then asks Van to give up his sister, Demon never passes on the sort of paternal advice that Nabokov invokes with unusual directness in answer to an interviewer’s question about “responsibility”: “I prefer to use the term ‘responsibility,’ in its proper sense, linked with moral tradition, with principles of decency and personal honor deliberately passed from father to son” (TWS 419).

Nabokov tellingly invokes Boris Godunov’s dying speech at the moment when, after a “wild life” (443), the “old debaucher” (444) Demon applies the utmost moral pressure on his son. Demon has given Van a massive sense of entitlement and a touchy sense of male personal honor, but in ethical terms little else.

Note that in playing the dying Boris Godunov Demon enacts precisely “death’s total surrender to gravity” (443). Demon—who in some senses seems to sport wings and fly, like Lermontov’s and Vrubel’s Demon (he “had dyed his hair a blacker black. He wore a diamond ring blazing like a Caucasian ridge. His long, black, blue-ocellated wings trailed and quivered in the ocean breeze,” 180; see 180.15-22n for the allusions to Lermontov and Vrubel’)—will himself surrender to gravity in his death, when the plane in which he is flying over the Pacific disintegrates at fifteen thousand feet (504). Gravity, in fact, provides a curiously clear lens for examining what the winged Demon does and does not pass on to his son.

When Van as narrator explains the background to his display of handwalking at Ada’s twelfth birthday picnic, he cannot help evoking the sense of “tradition . . . deliberately passed from father to son”:

Two years earlier, when about to begin his first prison term at the fashionable and brutal boarding school, to which other Veens had gone before him . . . , Van had resolved to study some striking stunt that would give him an immediate and brilliant ascendancy. Accordingly, after a conference with Demon, King Wing, the latter’s wrestling master, taught the strong lad to walk on his hands by means of a special play of the shoulder muscles. . . . Even more extraordinary than the variety and velocity of the movements he made in imitation of animal hind legs was the effortlessness of his stance; King Wing warned him that Vekchelo, a Yukon professional, lost it by the time he was twenty-two; but that summer afternoon, on the silky ground of the pineglade, in the magical heart of Ardis, under Lady Erminin’s blue eye, fourteen-year-old Van treated us to the greatest performance we have ever seen a brachiambulant give (81-82).

That skill develops to the point where Van can earn fame as Mascodagama, a role introduced one page after Demon’s “long, black, blue-ocellated wings”: “Neither a miraculous catch on the cricket field, nor a glorious goal slammed in at soccer . . . , nor earlier physical successes, such as his knocking out the biggest bully on his first day at Riverlane School, had ever given Van the satisfaction Mascodagama experienced. . . . the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation” (184-85; italics added). Demon sobbing in 1893 recalls, for Van, Demon playing the Boris Godunov who “shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity” (443); Van, playing Mascodagama, is also associated with blackness, strangeness, fear:

something swept out of the wings, enormous and black . . . in the dark of sobbing insomnias, in the glare of violent
nightmares, nervous little boys and girls relived, with private accretions, something similar to the “primordial qualm,”
a shapeless nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings . . . A voluminous, black shaggy cloak. . . . A black mask covered
the upper part of his heavily bearded face. . . . (183)


When drunken Percy de Prey at Ada’s sixteenth birthday picnic jostles and challenges Van, Van, following the lessons he has learned from his father’s wrestling master, easily overpowers him:
Almost at once the Count’s bursting face was trapped in the crook of Van’s arm. The grunting Count toured the turf in
a hunched-up stagger. He freed one scarlet ear, was re-trapped, was tripped and collapsed under Van, who instantly put
him “on his omoplates,” na lopatki, as King Wing used to say in his carpet jargon. Percy lay panting like a dying
gladiator, both shoulder blades pressed to the ground by his tormentor, whose thumbs now started to manipulate horribly
that heaving thorax. Percy with a sudden bellow of pain intimated he had had enough. Van requested a more articulate
expression of surrender, and got it. (275)

Van recounts Percy’s uninvited participation in Ada’s birthday picnic with a seething hostility that offers some retrospective compensation for the fact that he never had the chance to duel him after finding out about his affair with Ada:

Percy, you were to die very soon—and not from that pellet in your fat leg, on the turf of a Crimean ravine, but a couple of
minutes later when you opened your eyes and felt relieved and secure in the shelter of the macchie; you were to die very
soon, Percy; but that July day in Ladore County, lolling under the pines, royally drunk after some earlier festivity, with lust
in your heart and a sticky glass in your strong blond-haired hand, listening to a literary bore, chatting with an aging actress
and ogling her sullen daughter, you reveled in the spicy situation, old sport, chin-chin, and no wonder. Burly, handsome,
indolent and ferocious, a crack Rugger player, a cracker of country girls, you combined the charm of the off-duty athlete
with the engaging drawl of a fashionable ass. I think what I hated most about your handsome moon face was that baby
complexion. . . . (273)

The next day Van turns down Percy’s not-quite-challenge to a duel, because he does not yet know that Ada has so fully responded to Percy’s obvious interest in her. Frustrated another two days later, when he discovers Ada’s affair, that Percy has escaped his revenge by heading for the Crimean theater of war, he takes out his anger on the incidental Captain Tapper and enjoys anticipating the thrashing he can give Ada’s other lover, Rack. When Tapper’s seconds come to arrange the duel, Van’s rage impels him to disregard Demon’s advice (“‘Ne grubit’ sekundantam’ (never be rude to seconds), said Demon’s voice in his mind,” 306). That is the kind of principle this father has passed to his son.

Despite his determination to proceed with the duel and demonstrate something fancy, following in this his father’s manner,
his opponent proves an ace shot, whose bullet rips into Van’s left side. Weeks later, on the terrace of Cordula’s apartment,
Van attempted for the first time after a month’s abstinence to walk on his hands. He felt strong, and fit, and blithely turned
over to the “first position” in the middle of the sun-drenched terrace. Next moment he was sprawling on his back. He tried
again and lost his balance at once. He had the terrifying, albeit illusionary, feeling that his left arm was now shorter than his
right, and Van wondered wrily if he ever would be able to dance on his hands again. King Wing had warned him that two or
three months without practice might result in an irretrievable loss of the rare art. (323)


In short, a complex pattern associates on the one hand Demon’s Lermontovian wings and his wrestling master King Wing and his duelling advice, and on the other Van’s brachiambulation and Mascodagama role, his seething anger, his fighting, his duels, his male-male competition, and his vengeful infliction of pain. In Manhattan in 1893, playing the role of distraught father, the “old debaucher” (444) asks Van to break off his relationship with Ada, but Demon has done very little to pass on what Nabokov defines as “moral tradition, . . . principles of decency,” even if he has passed on narrow “principles of . . . personal honor” (TWS 419).

An interviewer who quotes to Nabokov his statement “I loathe Van Veen” (SO 120) asks him: “What do you hate most about him?” Nabokov answers: “The demonic strain in him” (TWS 431). That, at least, Demon has passed on.


Colors

The last two chapters of Part Two feature a complex and subtle play of colors. Demon, arriving to inform Van of Uncle Dan’s death, is “clothed entirely in black, black-spatted, black-scarved, his monocle on a broader black ribbon than usual” (435). Thus far, he is conventional in his mourning attire, even outdoing convention. But this morning the old sensualist is also high on an artificial stimulant, and hyper-alert to color. He enters the lobby of the building that he knows has a penthouse that Van and Cordula have shared, “With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute, multicolored optical sparks) . . . ” (434). He gives a start when he sees Van in “a strawberry-red terry-cloth robe” (434), because it calls to mind Dan’s death in a recurrent daymare from Bosch’s Last Judgement, in which Dan crawls “into the brown shrubbery of Ardis . . . naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump” (435). Still high on his drug, Demon gushes about Bosch, and, as the celebrant of sensuality, he insists that in the painter’s “tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights . . . what we have to study . . . is the joy of the eye, the feel and the taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him” (436-37).

But when Ada emerges from the bedroom, Demon’s mood crashes, his funeral attire matters no more (“‘Or better—come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now,” 438). Pt. 2 Ch. 11 starts: “The dragon drug had worn off: its aftereffects are not pleasant, combining as they do physical fatigue with a certain starkness of thought as if all color were drained from the mind. Now clad in a gray dressing gown, Demon lay on a gray couch in his third-floor study” (439). At the peak of his clash with his son, Demon emits a sob and a deluge of tears:

In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed
strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity.
Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? (443)

Demon, aka Raven Veen, has for many years dyed his hair—indeed, in 1886 he “had dyed his hair a blacker black” (180) in the scene where he appears with “long, black, blue-ocellated wings,” or in 1888, “dyed a raven black” (238), becoming, as he puts it, “an aging man with shoeshined hair” (240). Van as Mascodagama, emphatically black, finds the thrill of his role as “a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation” (185). His father has his own way of attempting to triumph “over the ardis of time” or over gravity: not his new intense and demonstrative interest in his daughter, but his pursuit of ever younger girls:

The bizarre enthusiast had developed the same tendresse for her as he had always had for Van. Its new expression in regard to
Ada looked sufficiently fervid to make watchful fools suspect that old Demon “slept with his niece” (actually, he was getting
more and more occupied with Spanish girls who were getting more and more youthful every year until by the end of the
century, when he was sixty, with hair dyed a midnight blue, his flame had become a difficult nymphet of ten). (391-92)

Very shortly after Demon finally succumbs to “death’s total surrender to gravity” (443), plunging fifteen thousand feet into the Pacific, the Vinelanders, in the last throb of the blackmail theme, encounter, in Ada’s report,

“ . . . sudden visitors at the ranch—an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in
black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums—which Demon, she said, had not had time to
pay, for ‘popping the hymen’—whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.” (523)

Blackmail (perhaps a false attempted extortion this time?) here compounds with black attire and Demon’s sexually demonic behavior. Back in his Manhattan study, in 1893, Demon’s dark tears recall for Van his father’s playing Boris Godunov and imparting no morals but exuding blackness, as he sheds those “strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity.” Van asks: “Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows?” (443), in some weird over-blackening of himself, a bizarre excess in his funeral attire, an overstated attempt to hold off his graying hair?

Van leaves his father’s Park Lane palazzo, resolved on suicide, and heads briskly back to his Alexis Avenue apartment: “He was coatless, tieless, hatless; a strong sharp wind dimmed his sight with salty frost and played Medusaean havoc with his black locks” (444). Wind-swept Medusaean black locks call to mind, for anyone who has seen them, Vrubel’’s striking images of Lermontov’s Demon, in paintings, drawings and sculpture, staring at the viewer from beneath his disheveled locks. Never has the blackness, indeed the Demonic blackness, of Van’s hair been so vividly evoked. But when he reaches his penthouse he does not commit suicide after all: he raises the pistol to his temple, but after some kind of fork in time and mind “what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples. It was to gray by the time that Ada, then in her thirties,” declares she would have killed herself too had she found him dead (445). In other words Van does not, as he ages, dye his hair ever blacker like his father, or pursue ever-younger girls—yet he is very much his father’s son.

And one color image leaps out from the grays and blacks dominating Pt. 2 Ch. 11. The previous chapter had foregrounded strawberry-red among the colors of Demon’s excited imagination. Now in Pt. 2 Ch. 11, just one bright hue stands out: Kim being “carried out of his carriage with one eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood” (441). The blackmail theme that runs from Van’s birth to Demon’s death looms here at its starkest. The harrowing unconcern Demon feels toward Aqua or toward the girls he obtains or the rival he duels appears in his son who blinds his blackmailer and mockingly compensates him with “nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography” (446), in a final foul irony of color.

Part Two, Fore and Aft

Pt. 2 Ch. 11 not only links with the start and the end of Part One, with heedless Demon and furious Van; it also links in non-obvious ways with the start of Part Two. For all the surface differences—Pt. 2 Ch. 1 begins in airport where Van receives his first VPL letter from Ada, its middle reproduces the entire text of her five secret letters, its end sums up Van’s mental and physical storage of the letters—Nabokov sets up resonant connections.

Both chapters feature conversations between Van and Demon. In both, Demon disapproves of and tries to intervene in Van’s choice of partner, the woman he has been living with in the Alexis Avenue penthouse. In the earlier case, he declares: “I saw you enlaced with your little Countess near the parking lot. If you marry her I will disinherit you. They’re quite a notch below our set,” to which Van replies “‘In a couple of years . . . I’ll slide into my own little millions’ (meaning the fortune Aqua had left him). ‘But you needn’t worry, sir, we have interrupted our affair for the time being’” (330). In the latter case Demon has far more reason for objecting to the woman with whom his son now shares the penthouse apartment, but acknowledges that disinheriting Van would have no effect, as he has since come into Aqua’s millions; but he could disown him (444).

The Very Private Letters that Ada uses to send Van her desperate pleas insure “an absoluteness of secrecy which neither torture nor mesmerism had been able to break down in the evil days of 1859” (329). This introduces at the start of Part Two the emphasis on secrecy—further stressed in “the phenomenally discreet, and in fact rather creepy, infallibility of the VPL organization” (329)—that will persist through this Part, in the threat posed by Kim Beauharnais’s blackmail album, in the “sacred secret and creed” launched by “romantically inclined handmaids” like Blanche (409), in the “thousand eyes” following the young Veens in Manhattan (411), and in Demon’s stumbling on their privacy at the end of Part Two. Ironically when Pt. 2 Ch. 11 discloses the blackmail Demon has had to pay, Van mentions “two other less successful blackmailers”: not only Kim, blinded, but also “the son of one of the former employees of the famous clandestine-message agency after it had been closed by the U.S. Government in 1928” (441).

The end of both chapters makes a feature of Demon’s pretty Park Lane house (149) between two skyscrapers: in Pt. 2 Ch. 1, “the irreplaceable little palazzo” (336) in which Van stores Ada’s sixth and only non-VPL letter, “the innocent sixth letter (Dreams of Drama) of 1891,” only for this and her coded notes of 1884-1888 to be incinerated when the palazzo is burned down, perhaps by “city fathers . . who could no longer endure their craving for the space that the solid dwarf occupied between two alabaster colossi” (336); and in Pt. 2 Ch. 11, “the meek little palazzo standing between its two giant guards” (445) that both Van and Ada see an aproned artist across the lane painting a picture of at the end of the chapter.

Ada writes Van letters in the opening chapter of Part Two but receives no reply from obdurate Van, determined that he and Ada can never again be together. In a multiple reversal, Van writes Ada a note in the closing chapter of Part Two asking her to “Do what he tells you,” to accept Demon’s ruling that they should remain apart. He intends immediately to shoot himself, but abandons that plan, as we see in the next paragraph, which segues into Ada in the course of their next reunion responding in person to Van’s note. Van had written, expecting they would be his last words to her or anyone: “In the last window we shared we both saw a man painting [us?] but your second-floor level of vision probably prevented your seeing that he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared. Good-bye girl” (445); unlike Van not replying to Ada at the start of Part Two, or thinking he has uttered his last words at the end of Part Two, Ada replies to his note face to face, when they meet in 1905: “As to the apron, you are quite right. And what you did not make out was that the artist had about finished a large picture of your meek little palazzo standing between its two giant guards. Perhaps for the cover of a magazine, which rejected that picture” (445).

Lucette Fore and Aft in Part Two

But perhaps the crucial link between the first and the last chapter of Part Two is the role of Lucette. She does not feature at all in Pt. 2 Ch. 11, yet Nabokov implies her in telling ways.

The little palazzo in which the action of Pt. 2 Ch. 11 occurs not only burns down much later, in 1919, “but instead of selling them the blackened area as expected, Van gleefully erected there his famous Lucinda Villa, a miniature museum just two stories high,”—I belatedly notice that Van has built back at least a story lower, to thumb his nose at those who craved to erect there something much higher—“with a still growing collection of microphotographed paintings from all public and private galleries in the world (not excluding Tartary) on one floor and a honeycomb of projection cells on the other” (336). At this point on a first reading we know neither of Lucette’s suicide nor of her becoming a scholar of art history and especially of painting. The “little palazzo” (336) of Pt. 2 Ch. 1 is replaced some time after 1919 by a memorial to Lucette and her love of painting; the “little palazzo” (445) of Pt. 2 Ch. 11, in 1893, is the subject of a painting, as Van and Ada can see all through the chapter. The little palazzo burns down with all Ada’s coded notes to Van between 1884 and 1888 that he has stored there, as well as “the innocent sixth letter (Dreams of Drama)” (336) that she sends him after her five VPL letters: in other words, with material that could have compromised the secret of Van and Ada’s love, had it been decodable, just as Kim’s files are also deliberately burnt down, by Van, in this case precisely because of the compromising photographic files Kim has stored there.

Kim becomes a professional visual artist, who lectures “on the Art of Shooting Life at the School of Photography in Kalugano” (397); Van, in his first attempt to seek a way of tracking him down, half-asks Ada, as they leaf through the blackmail album: “I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais’s exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts” (406) (it is to this probe that Ada retorts: “You shall not slaughter him”). Lucette too works in the visual arts, and it is to commemorate this aspect of her life that Van erects “the Lucinda Villa . . . a most appetizing little memorial of Parian marble” (336-37)—the marble most prized for Athenian sculptures. In the Lucinda Villa, the paintings selected in tribute to her passion and profession are all “microphotographed” (336); Kim receives his contrastingly poor compensation for his blinding at Van’s hand through brailled books on “chromophotography” (446). Those polysyllabic photographic compounds are not paired at either end of Part Two by accident.

Nabokov has gone to some trouble to link Lucette to a chapter in which she does not appear. Why? The emphasis on the draining of color for Demon, on black and gray throughout, and blind hands reading a braille book on chromophotography, throw into relief the one marked hue in the chapter: the unforgettable red of Kim being “carried out of his cottage with one hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood” (441). Throughout Ada, red is the identifying color of Lucette, even more than the green (or black) she tends to wear to complement the hair color she inherits from Red Veen.

Deflower and Cartridge

Lucette will dive to her death, as we have often seen, as a consequence of her too-early initiation into sex, of the tragic irony that she is sexually initiated too early by Van and Ada yet will never be deflowered by him as she obsessively hopes: a motif that is associated with deflowering right from that discussion of the near-anagram of “suicide,” the souci d’eau, a poem “deflowered” in a translation, in Pt. 1 Ch. 10 (see Boyd 1985/2001: 51-57 and Pt. 1 Ch. 10 Afternote).
The two terms of Van’s Pt. 2 Ch. 11 riddle indicating that he will shoot himself with a cartridge (444) both point, via the deflowering theme, to the novel’s central suicide and sacrifice.

Ada herself has most likely been “deflowered” (129) on the day after the Night of the Burning Barn, when she has asked Van to meet her, after her French lesson, at the Baguenaudier Bower, from whence they proceed to the safely remote larch plantation. Van heads out early and eagerly: “Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, ‘like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy’ (Floeberg’s Ursula)” (128). That passage cannot help coming to the good rereader’s mind when Van decides in Pt. 2 Ch. 11 on suicide rather than a life without Ada: “Down. My first is a vehicle that twists dead daisies around its spokes” (444): cart, a cart having the same effect as the buggy in the earlier Flaubert parody, winding dead daisies around its spokes, but in a rather less pretty image than the “poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels”—although Flaubert’s heroine, too, commits suicide.

The second syllable in Van’s riddle, prompted by Demon’s recent use of the word in the Oldmanhattan slang sense, is ridge, to form the cartridge which he has just resolved to shoot himself with, and which he loads into his automatic on the next page. But the larch plantation to which Van and Ada retreat, and where she is probably deflowered, stands on a ridge. In showing new visitor Van the wonders of Ardis Manor, Ada takes him even up to the roof:

Owing to a mixture of overlapping styles and tiles (not easily explainable in non-technical terms to non-roof-lovers), as well as to a haphazard continuum, so to speak, of renovations, the roof of Ardis Manor presented an indescribable confusion of angles and levels, of tin-green and fin-gray surfaces, of scenic ridges and wind-proof nooks. You could clip and kiss, and survey in between, the reservoir, the groves, the meadows, even the inkline of larches that marked the boundary of the nearest estate miles away. (45: italics added).

The ridge location is confirmed on the probable day of the defloration:

He had resolved to deal first of all with her legs which he felt he had not feted enough the previous night; to sheathe
them in kisses from the A of arched instep to the V of velvet; and this Van accomplished as soon as Ada and he got
sufficiently deep in the larchwood which closed the park on the steep side of the rocky rise between Ardis and Ladore. (129)

And once more: in Ardis the Second Van thinks his reading “as dull as the rain that could be discerned slanting in parallel pencil lines against the darker background of a larch plantation, borrowed, Ada contended, from Mansfield Park” (231). Note, as we have in the Afternote to Pt. 2 Ch. 10, the family fear of impermissible cousinage in Austen’s novel (with its “faint flavor of incest throughout,” as Nabokov noted in his copy), and the stern father Sir Thomas Bertram who underlies the ironic image of Demon as stern father.

When Demon as stern father at last persuades Van to allow Ada to find another happiness without him, Van immediately thinks of suicide, but in terms—cart and ridge—that Nabokov brings to bear on the deflower motif that marks the tragic irony of Lucette’s fate: she is initiated too early into sex, but unlike Ada, she will never be deflowered by Van. In Manhattan in 1893 Van, thinking he will never more make love to Ada, at once heads downwards, and thinks of the cartridge that will kill him. Aboard the Tobakoff in 1901 Lucette, realising she will never make love to Van, never lose what remains of her virginity to him, dives down to her death—and unlike Van, she has no second thoughts.

But we started with Kim Beauharnais’s blinding: that red thread by which his eye hangs, and which nevertheless seems to lead to Lucette and her suicide. Once again Nabokov interrelates Van’s most cruel and vicious single deed, his taking an alpenstock to Kim, to the even worse tragedy he causes over time for Lucette, by dint of his and Ada’s initiating her into sex, in the thoughtless frenzy of their desire, and through the long process of emotional entanglement that Van amplifies by exploiting her attachment. To reiterate an earlier way I followed Nabokov’s links between Kim and Lucette, in this case as eyewitnesses:

Most momentous of all is the connection between Kim’s ultimate fate and Lucette’s: he is blinded, she, Lucette, has her “little light,” her life, extinguished. . . . As eyewitnesses, Lucette and Kim could not be more different: she comically involved, or so it had appeared, emotionally and intellectually curious, not seeking her own advantage; Kim apparently comically detached, inconsequential, and indiscriminate, but in fact coolly pursuing only his own gain. In terms of Van’s treatment of them they are equally far apart: Van’s raw brutality to Kim, versus his killing Lucette, as it were, almost with kindness, playing on her affection and admiration, then finding her older self attractive and even tempting but withholding himself in order to spare her, when it is already too late to do so. (Afternote to Pt. 2 Ch. 7)

Part of the tragedy of Lucette’s death is that Van does try to spare her, unlike his father who never spares Aqua or anyone else who comes within the range of his desire. No wonder, then, that that final note of blackmail in Ada occurs just after Demon’s death, his “total surrender to gravity” (443), when a “black-veiled” eight-year-old moppet is brought forward by her duenna to extract “fantastic sums” from Demon’s family “for ‘popping the hymen’” (523). (Remember that the key lines of the souci d’eau-deflower theme play on popping the hymen: “the transformation of souci d’eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine ‘care of the water’—although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, marybud, maybubble” (64-65) and the comment in Boyd 1985/2001: 53: “the suggestion of popping in ‘maybubble’ combines with ‘mollyblob’ to point unmistakably to Molly Bloom’s famous musing on the blob of a ruptured hymen”).

When Van first sees Lucette at Ardis, at eight, the year she will start to lose her sexual innocence, he thinks she is Ada—whose hymen Van will indeed “pop” before the summer is out. It is surely no accident that Lucette, like the much later eight-year-old moppet perhaps preyed on by Demon, is introduced as “veiled”: “Actually it was Lucette, the younger one, a neutral child of eight, with a fringe of shiny reddish-blond hair and a freckled button for nose: she had had pneumonia in spring and was still veiled by an odd air of remoteness that children, especially impish children, retain for some time after brushing through death” (36). Van’s disabling and punishment of Kim is worse than anything Demon does to his first blackmailer, even though it nevertheless reflects his demonic strain; but the final blackmail demand in Ada shows a strain in Demon far darker even than Van’s.

Ends: Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

So far we have explored the relationships between the end of Part Two, Pt. 2 Ch. 11, and (1) the start of Part One (the melodrama among the older Veens), (2) the end of Part One (Van’s fury on parting from Ada, as he thinks, forever), and (3) the start of Part Two (Demon’s threat to disinherit Van, Ada’s desperate but unanswered letters to Van, the “irreplaceable little palazzo” that will be the locus of Pt. 2 Ch. 11). But the structural role of Pt. 2 Ch. 11 extends still further beyond the rhythm of union and separation it at first seems mainly to mark.

There are numerous similarities between the end of Part Two, Pt. 2 Ch. 11, and the end of Part Three, Pt. 3 Ch. 8. In both, a new parting looms for Van and Ada, twelve years long in the earlier case, until 1905, seventeen in the second case, until 1922. In each chapter the hero or the heroine comes to a free decision that greatly surprises us: not to ignore the rest of the world for the sake of each other. In both cases, time seems at the very end to slip and fork in narratively bewildering ways, to toy with violence and its retraction, and to lead to the prospect of Van and Ada’s next reunion.

In Pt. 2 Ch. 11 Van’s “destiny simply forked” (445) as his suicide pistol metamorphoses into the pocket comb which he runs through his temples, gone “gray by the time that Ada, then in her thirties” (445) tells Van both that she would have committed suicide had she found he had killed himself, and that he should never have attacked and blinded Kim. To the latter Van answers with a fat man’s chuckle that amends have been made, that he is keeping Kim safe and snug in a Home for the Blind with brailled books on chromophotography. The chapter, and Part Two, concludes, riddlingly, “There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do” (446).
In Pt 3 Ch. 8 Van parts bitterly from Ada, after fruitlessly imploring her to stay with him, but she promises to write.

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 re-forked. 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.

Again, (a) the explicit forking of time, (b) Van and violence, (c) a dreamy or misty sense of the future, and the prospect, this time, of Ada’s getting together “for an ‘exploratory interview’ with fifty-two-year-old Van Veen” (532): again, the text (d) specifies the age of the partner who had not initiated the “voluntary separation” (445).

But there are other highly specific links between these two closing chapters of the two central parts of the novel. In the earlier chapter, Demon wants to know at the start
how long this—how long this has been . . .” (‘going on,’ one presumes, or something equally banal, but then all ends are
banal—hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid’s iron sting, shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital,
mistaking a drop of thirty thousand feet for the airplane’s washroom, being poisoned by one’s wife, expecting a bit of
Crimean hospitality, congratulating Mr. and Mrs. Vinelander—) (439-40).

In one of those weirdly obtruded but opaque repetitions characteristic of Ada, exciting to notice for the first time but then niggling and apparently unwarranted for long after, Van describes the hotel space he shares with Ada in Mont Roux, including “the convex sliding doors of the huge white ‘Nuremberg Virgin’-like closet in the hallway of their suite” (521). (Hint: Lucette is associated with a “virgin and martyr” pattern (418, 464; Boyd 1985/2001: 56-57, 122-23, 129-30, 182-83).) Van and Ada share that hotel suite for the “complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age” of “their twenty-one-year-old love” (521), under Ada’s sister-in-law Dorothy Vinelander’s suspicious but unseeing gaze. Lucette categorizes “Daryushka” (a highly ironic endearment) as “a born blackmailer” (466); “Dear Dasha’s type,” confirms Ada’s coded and caustic irony in a warning letter to Van, is exactly that of “pretty Miss ‘Kim’ Blackrent” (503)—in other words she is as much a blackmailer by nature as Kim Beauharnais.

But where Demon at the end of Part Two stumbles in on his son and daughter sharing an apartment, Dorothy Vinelander at the end of Part Three can find out nothing about sister-in-law Ada and the lover she is sure Van is somehow helping her to meet. One family member, with no thought of Ada in any sexual kind of connection with Van, just happens to discover them as lovers, and drives them apart. Another family member by marriage, desperate to see what secret love trysts Van is somehow planning for Ada, learns nothing at all and has nothing to do with their parting once more.

Separation and Union

But there is a still more central connection than this final contrast of the pervasive theme of privacy preserved or violated, of eavesdroppers, eyewitnesses, and blackmailers.

Van and Ada’s separations and unions form the very structure of Ada, but Nabokov undergirds it with a submerged story far deeper than the vibrant surface.

In the first chapter of Part Two, with Van and Ada parted after Ardis the second, Demon the stern father threatens to split up, to disinherit, Van and Cordula. In the last chapter of Part Two, with Van and Ada reunited, he does split them up, in the longest scene to take place in his “meek little palazzo” on Park Lane. At the end of the first chapter of Part Two, Van describes the “irreplaceable little palazzo” as a small building between two skyscrapers, the very image foregrounded early and late in the scene of Demon’s separating his children in the last chapter of Part Two. In Pt. 2 Ch. 1 Van also emphasizes that after the palazzo burns down he erects on it the memorial Lucinda Villa, and then goes on at the end of the chapter to anticipate the key role Lucette plays in bringing Van and Ada together after their separation at the end of Ardis the Second, when Lucette herself, rather than one of the VPL agents focused on at the start of the chapter, hand-delivers Van a letter from Ada. Van unfolds the full story in Pt. 2 Ch. 5, the Kingston chapter: Lucette, for all her desperate love for Van, brings him a letter from Ada, warning that she is on the verge of marriage if Van does not see her again—a letter that generous Lucette knows will be highly likely to thwart her own love for Van, however much she might play up to, rouse and charm him at Kingston, but that she brings on her sister’s behalf regardless.

But the evidence also shows, as I argue elsewhere (and as other Nabokovians of note, Stephen Blackwell and Paul Grant, had begun to see and may still develop), that in 1905, after the death of Demon, the cause of that much longer separation between Van and Ada, Lucette, although now dead herself, somehow plays a guiding role in bringing Van and Ada together once more, in Mont Roux. I refer readers to “Lucette Late in Ada” (Nabokov Studies 17, 2021, 12-35, doi: 10.1353/nab.2020.0010); and I hope to write more eventually in an Afternote to Pt. 3 Ch. 8.

Part Four takes the pattern still further. At the end of Pt. 2 Ch. 11, Van, on the third floor of his father’s palazzo, accepts his father’s plea to leave Ada her own life, decides to end his own, descends to have a footman give Ada, waiting a floor below, Demon’s instruction for her to come up, returns to his apartment, writes his “Do what he tells you” note to Ada, and adds what promises to be their last shared thought or experience (“In the last window we shared we both saw a man painting [us?] but your second-floor level of vision probably prevented your seeing that he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared,” 445), loads his pistol, puts it to his head, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened—or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. Anyway, what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples. It was to gray by the time that Ada, then in her thirties, said, when they spoke of their voluntary separation:

“I would have killed myself too, had I found Rose wailing over your corpse.” (445)

At the end of Part Four, Van and Ada’s “exploratory interview” (532) in Mont Roux in 1922 seems to have gone disastrously wrong. Excited by a phone call from Ada, just arrived below, to his room above in Les Trois Cygnes, Van feels they have been as if miraculously connected to each other and their past (555). But when they meet at dinner, despite these high new hopes, the conversation falls so utterly flat that Ada concocts a flimsy excuse for having to return to Geneva. Despondent, Van returns upstairs, and puts the final touches to his The Texture of Time manuscript until his sleeping pill takes effect. He wakes up with a start:

At daybreak he sat up with an abrupt moan, and trembling: if he did not act now, he would lose her forever! He decided to drive at once to the Manhattan in Geneva.

Van

. . . shaved, bathed, rapidly dressed. Was it too early to order breakfast? Should he ring up her hotel before starting? Should
he rent a plane? Or might it, perhaps, be simpler—

The door-folds of his drawing room balcony stood wide open. Banks of mist still crossed the blue of the mountains beyond
the lake, but here and there a peak was tipped with ocher under the cloudless turquoise of the sky. Four tremendous trucks
thundered by one after another. He went up to the rail of the balcony and wondered if he had ever satisfied the familiar whim
by going platch—had he? had he? You could never know, really. One floor below, and somewhat adjacently, stood Ada
engrossed in the view.

He saw her bronze bob, her white neck and arms, the pale flowers on her flimsy peignoir, her bare legs, her high-heeled
silver slippers. Pensively, youngly, voluptuously, she was scratching her thigh at the rise of the right buttock: Ladore’s pink
signature on vellum at mosquito dusk. Would she look up? All her flowers turned up to him, beaming, and she made the
royal-grant gesture of lifting and offering him the mountains, the mist and the lake with three swans.

He left the balcony and ran down a short spiral staircase to the fourth floor. In the pit of his stomach there sat the suspicion
that it might not be room 410, as he conjectured, but 412 or even 414. What would happen if she had not understood, was
not on the lookout? She had, she was.

When, “a little later,” Van, kneeling and clearing his throat, was kissing her dear cold hands, gratefully, gratefully,
in full defiance of death, with bad fate routed and her dreamy afterglow bending over him, she asked:
            “Did you really think I had gone?”
            “Obmanshchitsa (deceiver), obmanshchitsa,” Van kept repeating with the fervor and gloat of blissful satiety.
            “I told him to turn,” she said, “somewhere near Morzhey (“morses” or “walruses,” a Russian pun on “Morges”
—maybe a mermaid’s message). And you slept, you could sleep!” (561-62)

Van first thinks of driving in pursuit of Ada, then momentarily muses should he simply jump down to his death rather than face a life forever without her (“Or might it, perhaps, be simpler—“), steps to the balcony, “and wondered if he had ever satisfied the familiar whim by going platch—had he? had he? You could never know, really.” At that very moment he catches sight of Ada below, not in Geneva or still further from him, and engrossed in the view, then turning to him with “the royal-grant gesture of lifting and offering him the mountains, the mist and the lake with three swans.” He runs down to where he guesses her room must be, finds her waiting for him, and they make love, their lives and love restored for almost another half-century.

As readers of my Nabokov’s ‘Ada’ will know, Ada’s text offers indications that Lucette’s spirit has somehow prompted her sister to second thoughts, on her route away from Van, to rethink her abandoning the chance to resume their love (Boyd 1985/2001: 202-06). Ada has taken the decision to return, and the way Van wakes up and discovers her there, and the full resumption of their old love, proves a magic morning whose details reenact the best and rebut the worst mornings of their lives together, at Ardis the First, at Ardis the Second, at the end of their Manhattan sojourn, and in their first rendezvous in Mont Roux (Boyd 1985/2001: 191-200, 205-06; Boyd 2021: 122-26; 128-35).

Morning: Part Two and Part Four

What I had not realized until now is how some details in the morning scene at the end of Part Two tellingly recur in the morning scene ending Part Four.

The transition between suicide and survival, between cessation and continuation, echoes resoundingly from Part Two to Part Four. In 1893 when Van seems to pull the trigger “Nothing happened—or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind” (445; italics added). That sequence of suicidal thought and apparent intention, and a conundrum about the continuity of our existence, recurs in condensed form in the 1922 scene, when Van, in great desolation, jumps out of a strange bed, thinks “Or might it, perhaps, be simpler— . . . He went up to the rail of the balcony and wondered if he had ever satisfied the familiar whim by going platch—had he? had he? You could never know, really” (561)—and soon finds himself in a stage of great happiness, on what a great deal of evidence shows to be a very neatly prepared morning indeed (again, see the “morning” pattern discussed in Boyd 1985/2001: 191-200, 205-06; Boyd 2021: 122-26; 128-35).

In Manhattan in 1893, Van is a floor above Ada when Demon’s final words make him decide to end his life with Ada, and indeed simply to end his life; he descends, passing on Demon’s instruction to send Ada to a footman, because he dares not talk to her again lest he break his new resolve. He writes to Ada asking her to follow Demon’s plea, and points out the view they shared from Demon’s palazzo, the last experience they ever seem likely to share, even a floor apart. But he does not commit suicide, and, reunited in Mont Roux in 1905, Ada returns to his comment, in what was to be his last note, about the view they both looked out at: “what you did not make out was that the artist had about finished a large picture of your meek little palazzo standing between its two giant guards” (445).

In Mont Roux in 1922, Van, though he does not yet know it, is a floor above Ada, wakes up thinking he should drive after her to the tellingly named hotel “Manhattan” in Geneva, but steps out on to his balcony, half-thinking he might jump to his death, only to see the radiant scene—the previous day he has thought it like a painting (555)—and Ada a floor below, “engrossed in the view” (561). This time, instead of descending, full of suicidal intent, and avoiding Ada, he rushes down in joy to find her waiting there for him.

Notice that the comment Ada makes during their first Mont Roux reunion, but recorded in the account of their Manhattan separation, draws attention to “your meek little palazzo standing before its two giant guards,” in other words to the building that would be resurrected as the Lucinda Villa—and, as I have intimated and argued (Boyd 2021), Lucinda Veen’s presence somehow hovers over their first Mont Roux reunion, as it does even more decisively over their second.

And the end of Pt. 2 Ch. 1, to return there in more detail, segues between the “irreplaceable little palazzo” (336) that becomes the Lucinda Villa, and then a foreglimpse of Van’s Texture of Time, and lastly Lucette’s key role in bringing Van and Ada together in Manhattan, by the letter she brings from Ada to Van at Kingston. In Part Four Lucette’s spirit seems to be present in their lives as Van completes his Texture of Time more or less simultaneously with Ada’s being turned back to Van as her driver takes her somewhere near Morges. Just before he begins his concluding summary of the argument of The Texture of Time, Van writes:

Does the ravage and outrage of age deplored by poets tell the naturalist of Time anything about Time’s essence? Very little.
Only a novelist’s fancy could be caught by this small oval box, once containing Duvet de Ninon (a face powder, with a bird
of paradise on the lid), which has been forgotten in a not-quite-closed drawer of the bureau’s arc of triumph—not, however,
triumph over Time. The blue-green-orange thing looked as if he were meant to be deceived into thinking it had been waiting
there seventeen years for the bemused, smiling finder’s dream-slow hand: a shabby trick of feigned restitution, a planted
coincidence—and a bad blunder, since it had been Lucette, now a mermaid in the groves of Atlantis (and not Ada, now a
stranger somewhere near Morges in a black limousine) who had favored that powder. Throw it away lest it mislead a weaker
philosopher; what I am concerned with is the delicate texture of Time, void of all embroidered events.

Let us recapitulate. (559)

And there begins Van’s summary of The Texture of Time, that difficult text whose composition he has been grappling with thus far through Part Four, but that now seems to flow in effortless and orderly fashion. But the mention of Lucette’s face powder, and the “bird of paradise,” three times strongly associated with her (387, 410, 421, including in the chapter where she brings Ada’s last letter to Kingston, and in Van’s last letter to her), and “Lucette, now a mermaid in the groves of Atlantis (and not Ada, now a stranger somewhere near Morges in a black limousine)” at the very moment Ada feels she wants to turn back to Van, “somewhere near Morzhey (‘morses’ or ‘walruses,’ a Russian pun on ‘Morges’—maybe a mermaid’s message)” (562), seem a very clear pointer to dead Lucette’s somehow having helped Van resolve his ideas and his text, at almost the very same time as she helps Ada change her mind about abandoning the chance of a life with Van.

Bookends

The last chapter of Part Two retrospectively clarifies important aspects of the structure of the first chapter of Part Two—and about the role of Lucette rather than Demon in Van and Ada’s lives—that could not be seen until now.

Pt. 2 Ch. 1 starts off with Demon, and the Very Private Letters Ada sends Van, and continues by quoting Ada’s letters, but ends with the “irreplaceable little palazzo” between two giant skyscraper guards, anticipating not just the scene of the 1893 parting but the reference to the painter whom Van mentions in what he expects to be his last note, before he commits suicide, in order to share with Ada as the last experience they will ever have in common. From there Pt. 2 Ch. 1 segues on to the Lucinda Villa that Van erected on the blackened lot after the palazzo burns down, then to the first explicit and the only protracted discussion of The Texture of Time before Part Four itself, thence to Lucette’s role in bringing Van and Ada together in Manhattan by dint of her bringing Ada’s letter to Kingston.

To highlight the details differently: Part Two starts off with Demon threatening to part Van from the woman with whom he has been living in the Alexis Avenue penthouse, and it ends with Demon actually parting the decidedly different woman with whom Van is now living in that penthouse. But that chapter starting Part Two also ends with the foreglimpse of the palazzo where the scene of the 1893 parting will take place, and its successor as a posthumous memorial to Lucette, and the apparent anticipation of Lucette’s role in clinching for Van the writing of The Texture of Time, and in clinching for Van and Ada their first coming together after a painful parting, in Manhattan in November 1892, but also her role in bringing them together at the end of Van’s treatise, in a scene that not only redeems other decisive mornings in their lives, but especially redeems what had seemed to loom as their last morning ever together, in Manhattan in 1893. Demon and an anticipation of Van and Ada’s parting dominate the opening of Pt. 2 Ch. 1, Lucette and an anticipation of Van and Ada’s reunions dominate the chapter’s close. Lucette’s spirit, the chapter and the whole structure of the novel’s unions and separations seem to suggest, will triumph over Demon’s.

To return from the first chapter of Part Two to the last, and its anticipation of Part Four. Far from the 1893 view from a palazzo in Manhattan being the final experience Van and Ada will ever share, the shared view in 1922 from their hotel in Mont Roux—a toponym that itself seems to incorporate Lucette’s very name (“Ardis, Manhattan, Mont Roux, our little rousse is dead,” 509)—becomes the start of a new and serene life together, with no one’s happiness now compromised by their remaining decades of love.

Which of course could hardly be more different from the gruesome end of Part Two.

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