Part 2 Chapter 11

Forenote
           
Ending Part Two of the novel, Pt. 2 Ch. 11 seems to separate Van and Ada for their foreseeable future, as the close of Part One had seemed to mark a final separation after Ardis the Second.
           
A sense of the danger of the discovery of their affair had gathered during the second phase of Part Two, when for the first time Van and Ada were cohabiting: from the comic reprise of Ardis, in Lucette’s stumbling on Van and Ada making love for the first time in four years, to Kim Beauharnais’ blackmailing photograph album that Ada shows Van, and the reports she passes on to him about the “sacred secret and creed” (409) their love had spawned in and around Ardis, to the myriad eyes of Manhattan when they venture out together in public.
           
Now, the one parent whom Van and Ada respect and revere has discovered them as undeniably lovers and summoned them to his home. Seeing Van first, Demon explains that he is Ada’s father and Marina, Van’s mother, only to find Van and Ada have been aware of this almost from the start and remain unperturbed by their consanguinity. Demon, no champion of conventional morality, especially in sexual licence, is nevertheless deeply conventional in others: “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” (443). 

All seems to militate against Van’s accepting Demon’s admonition: Van and Ada’s having almost always known and not cared that they are brother and sister; their discovery of Van’s sterility, so that “We can afford to be careless in every sense of the word” (442); Van’s financial independence, having inherited from Aqua, so that Demon cannot use the threat of material disinheritance; Marina’s psychological immunity, given her focus on her “inner peace” (443) and “the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism” (451); Demon’s inability to denounce Van to the authorities, without harming the daughter he wants to protect and disclosing the past melodrama of the child substitution; and Van’s resisting even Demon’s urging him to think of Ada’s future: 

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?

“Don’t forget ‘normal adultery,’” remarked Van. (442)

So independent spiritually and financially, even of the man he admires above all others, Van nevertheless finds himself moved at the last moment by Demon’s final words: 

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) 

Nabokov has avoided Dostoevskyan histrionics (although not raised voices and rhetorical thrust and counterthrust) and he now avoids protracted Jamesian inner rumination. In the moment he is dismissed, Van heads downstairs, with a sudden resolve: he will let Ada have her own life but will take his own. Unable to bear talking to her, he passes on Demon’s summons via a footman. Returning to his apartment, he writes her a distraught note (“Do what he tells you,” 444), and reaches for the pistol in his drawer—only to change his mind again and reach for a comb instead.

Suddenly the story leaps to a remote but indefinite time ahead—Van’s hair has already grayed—and Ada saying “I would have killed myself too, had I found Rose wailing over your corpse” (445). From the start of Ada, we have glimpsed Van and Ada writing and revising their family chronicle together in old age. They will be sundered for many years, we realize as Part Two ends, but they will come together somehow with their love intact.

Just as Demon broaches the subject of the substitution of Marina’s infant Van for Aqua’s stillborn son, a digressive parenthesis introduces three blackmailers—one who targets Demon for that child-swap, two targeting Van and Ada—and describes Kim Beauharnais in riddling terms (“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,” 441). In the chapter close’s sudden narrative shift to Ada and Van at their eventual reunion, Ada fills in enough detail to make it plain that Van has attacked Kim to ensure he can never blackmail them again. Just as Van stormed away from Ada in vengeful pursuit of Philip Rack in Kalugano at the end of Part One, so it appears at the end of Part Two that he has stormed away from Demon and Ada to vent his fury and frustration on Kim Beauharnais, also now based in Kalugano. The facts are stark, the contexts and tone unsettling as we adjust to Van and Ada parted and eventually, in some distant year, reunited. What can we make of this? What next? Can we be sure, even, of what happened, when the chapter ends: “There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do” (446)?

Annotations

439.01: The dragon drug had worn off: Demon’s drug, stimulating him so wildly in the previous chapter (see 438.07 dragonara and n). Akiko Nakata, in her Nabokv-L notes to Transparent Things, explains that “‘Draconite,’ a stimulant no longer in production” (TT 94:15-16) “is of course from Draconita as well as Dragon + knight/night” (Nabokv-L, December 8 2004). Don Barton Johnson notes (Nabokv-L, December 9 2004) that “Draconite” combines Russian drak[on] (dragon) and aconite, which is “one of the four classic poisons, along with Deadly Nightshade, Hemlock, and Hellebore” and is conventionally emblematized in terms of “misanthropy, treachery, deceit, a deadly foe is near, chivalry, knight-errantry.”

439.02-04: 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: As opposed to Demon’s hyper-stimulation in the preceding chapter, and his heightened registering there of scintillant air and vibrant color, including Van’s “strawberry-red terry-cloth robe” (434.28-29) and Ada’s “pink peignoir” (438.13).

439.05: his third-floor study: In Demon’s “pretty house, in Florentine style,” still “between two vacant lots (5 Park Lane in Manhattan)” in 1884; “two giant guards were soon to rise on both sides of it, ready to frog-march it away” (149.24-28).

439.05-06: stood at the window with his back to the silence: With his back to silent Demon, while he faces the presumably noisier Manhattan street.

439.06-07: In a damask-padded room on the second floor, immediately below the study, waited Ada: She is “at the oval window in the boudoir” (444.16), “with her back to him” (444.15-16) as Van here stands “with his back to” the ominous silence and Demon. 

439.08-11: In the skyscraper across the lane a window was open exactly opposite the study and an aproned man stood there setting up an easel and cocking his head in search of the right angle: As Van will learn from Ada many years later, she is also looking intently not only at the painter but at the painting: see 445.26-30.

439.10: an aproned man . . . setting up an easel: Cf. 445.04-07: “a man painting . . . he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared.” Ada, in 1905: “As to the apron, you are quite right” (445.27-28). 

439.14-16: Van realized that the fateful conversation must have already started in his father’s brain, for the admonishment had the ring of a self-interruption, and with a slight bow he took a seat: VN deprecated too much dialogue in fiction (e.g. NG 133: “the humblest reader (who likes books in dialogue form  . . . )”; SO 43: “I check first of all how much dialogue there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang and ban it from my bed”) or too much stream-of-consciousness (e.g. LL 363: “Readers are unduly impressed by the stream-of-thought device. I want to submit the following considerations. . . . the stream of consciousness is a stylistic convention because obviously we do not think continuously in words—we think also in images”). Here’s an example of summarizing commentary that could not be inferred from just one line of speech and would not naturally form part of the listener’s inner speech. 

439.17: those two facts: Confirms Van’s hunch that the conversation has already started in his father’s brain. “Those two facts” are: that Ada is Demon’s daughter, not Dan’s, and that Van is Marina’s son, not Aqua’s.

439.18-440.01: to know 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 . . . : Demon begins in self-interruption and ends in incompletion—with Van in turn as narrator interrupting the exchange. His sentiments here resemble his outburst that he recollects in describing his turning away from Ada for the last time at Ardis: “You know I abhor churchyards, I despise, I denounce death, dead bodies are burlesque, I refuse to stare at a stone under which a roly-poly old Pole is rotting, let him feed his maggots in peace, the entomologies of death leave me cold, I detest, I despise—” (297.28-32).

439.19-440.05: 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—): Neither hangings nor a death by the Nuremberg Virgin occurs in Ada, but the other events do, or almost do: Van’s shooting himself, or thinking of doing it, after this scene (444.11-13 and 445.10-13), and Johnny Starling’s shooting himself “on a beach at high tide” (381.25-26); Dan’s last words, “he expired in Nikulin’s clinic, raving about that detail of” Bosch’s Last Judgement (436.20-21), or to be even more precise, “when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinanti of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr. Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia” (438.23-26); the “gigantic flying machine” carrying Demon that in 1905 “had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific” (504.31-32) and Lucette’s dive into the Atlantic (“The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter,” 494.03-05); being poisoned by one’s wife, as Rack is (313.16-23, 317.16-17); Percy de Prey momentarily expects a bit of Crimean hospitality but instead is shot (320.01-16); and Van never congratulates Mr. and Mrs. Vinelander but does have to hear about the wedding ceremony from Lucette (480-81) and to meet them in person in 1905 (512-13), and to endure the pain of Ada’s decision to remain with Andrey Vinelander until he recovers from his tuberculosis crisis, to which Van’s response is “Sort of patching up a bloke before hanging him” (529.32). Van thinks of these “ends” as all banal, although many are extreme and bizarre, and while he thinks of “congratulating Mr. and Mrs. Vinelander” as an end, so long as Demon’s edict lasts, it proves not to be (see Pt. 3 Ch. 8 and Part Four).
           
MOTIF: memory test


439.20-440.01: the Nuremberg Old Maid’s iron sting: A medieval torture device, the Nuremberg Virgin or the Iron Maiden (but not the Old Maid!), a closet in which a person would be confined, to be pierced by iron spikes extending from the curved doors as they closed. Apparently now considered a nineteenth-century myth, but commonly and graphically accepted as fact at the time Nabokov was writing Ada and Glory (Glory 134: “the Iron Maiden, that instrument of strong and hard torture”). The Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its famous 11th ed. (1910-11, 19:913), described Nuremberg’s “old burg, or castle (Kaiserschloss) . . . picturesquely placed on a rock on the north side of the town. . . . Other parts of the castle are the pentagonal tower, the oldest building in the town, wherein are preserved the famous ‘iron virgin of Nuremberg,’ and other instruments of torture.” John Swain, in The Pleasure of the Torture Chamber (London: Noel Douglas, 1931), writes: “The instrument of torture about which most has been written, and which is generally the best known, is the Eiserne Jungfrau of Nuremberg. Some writers have translated this as the ‘Iron Virgin,’ others as the ‘Iron Maiden.’ . . . The Iron Maiden was a terror-inspiring instrument of torture, and was made of strong wood, bound with iron bands. The front consisted of two doors which opened to allow the prisoner to be placed inside. The whole interior was fitted with long, sharp, iron spikes, so that, when the doors were closed, these sharp prongs forced their way into various portions of the victim’s body. Two entered his eyes, others pierced his back, his chest, and, in fact, impaled him alive in such a manner that he lingered in the most agonizing torture. When death relieved the poor wretch from his agonies, perhaps after days, a trapdoor in the base was pulled open and the body was allowed to fall into the water below. // Death by the Iron Maiden was inflicted for various offences civil and ecclesiastical, but chiefly for major offences, such as plots against the State, parricide or religious unbelief. // The Rev. Dr. Wylie visited Nuremberg, and in his History of Protestantism he describes the Iron Maiden as follows: ‘The person who has passed through the terrible ordeal of the Question Chamber, but has made no recantation, would be led . . . [to] the iron virgin. He would be bidden to stand right in front of the image. The spring would be touched by the executioner—the Virgin would fling open her arms, and the wretched victim would straightway be forced within them. Another spring was then touched—the Virgin closed upon her victim.’ . . . Mr. Walter Besant treats the subject of the Iron Maiden in a more humorous light. . . . ‘they should have closed the door slowly—slowly, so that every spike would produce its own agony. They slammed the door. The hundred and fifty spikes all went through me. And in an instant I was as dead as a door nail’” (139-41). For the modern debunking, see Wolfgang Schild, Die eiserne Jungfrau: Dichtung und Wahrheit, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, 2000, and Wikipedia, Iron Maiden, accessed September 26, 2023.
           
Cf. the suite where Ada, now Mrs. Vinelander, joins Van for ten days in Mont Roux in 1905: “the convex sliding doors of the huge white ‘Nuremberg-Virgin’-like closet in the hallway of their suite” (521.22-23).
           
MOTIF: torture

440.06: It will be nine years soon: Van answers the question Demon left unfinished. It will be nine years in July or August 1893; this is February. Van is boldly emphasizing rather than diminishing their love and its duration.

440.06-07: I seduced her in the summer of eighteen eighty-four: In the letter Van writes to Demon on the eve of his 1888 duel, on the night after he has left Ardis, he declares: “In 1884, during my first summer at Ardis, I seduced your daughter, who was then twelve” (309.04-05). But he tears up the letter and writes a much shorter one with no such declaration—like many events evoked in this current chapter with alternative outcomes.

440.07-08: Except for a single occasion, we did not make love again: The Forest Fork rendezvous on July 25, 1886, Pt. 1 Ch. 29. The “did . . .  again” here refers of course to the next love-making not just after the initial seduction on the Night of the Burning Barn but after the whole seductive summer of 1884. 

440.10-11: All in all, I suppose I have had her about a thousand times: By this date they have spent about 140 days together as lovers—a month in Ardis the First, about six weeks in Ardis the Second, and perhaps seventy days in Van’s Manhattan penthouse—at an average seven couplings per day. Diana Makhaldiani suggests (email to BB, October 31, 2023) that this “seven” may hint that in the closing exchange of Pt. 1 Ch. 24 (“‘I wonder,’ asked Marina, ‘how many miles you rode to have our athlete drained so thoroughly.’ ‘Only seven,’ replied Ada with a munch smile,’ 155.23-25) Ada’s numeral refer to copulations as well as miles ridden.

440.12-13: A longish pause not unlike a fellow actor’s dry-up, came in response to his well-rehearsed speech: Demon is a fellow actor in the sense that he too has rehearsed what he will say in the role of Stern Father, as Van has rehearsed his role as Unabashed Son.

440.14-16: 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: The second and more complicated fact he planned to divulge, albeit the first chronologically: the substitution of Demon and Marina’s son Van for Demon and Aqua’s stillborn son, 25.25-32.

440.15-21: caused me much deeper worry—moral of course, not monetary. . . . Some other time I’ll tell you about the Black Miller; not now; too trivial: As the parenthesis that follows explains, Demon has had to pay blackmail to Norbert von Miller, who has learned about the substitution of the infant Van through his mistress, “Dr. Lapiner’s wife, born Countess Alp” (440.22), who had heard it from Dr. Lapiner, the doctor attendant on Marina in her pregnancy (8.05-18, 25.25-26.04).

440.17-18: so that in a sense—: Perhaps Demon was going to say that after Dan had been informed about Ada’s paternity, “in a sense we no longer needed to worry more in that case”?

440. 19: Pause, with an underground trickle: A continuation of the metaphor of “A longish pause not unlike a fellow actor’s dry-up” (440.12), but now, Diana Makhaldiani wonders (email to BB, October 31, 2023), with a trickle of thought or memory of Aqua, in the sense of “water” (and Aqua is implied in “The second fact,” 440.14), seeping beneath the surface? 

440.20-441.27: Black Miller . . . . second-generation rogues: MOTIF: blackmail

440.20-441.17: Black Miller . . . Norbert von Miller, amateur poet, Russian translator at the Italian Consulate in Geneva, and professional smuggler of neonegrine . . . stove is big and wants more wood: Cf. Marina’s confusion of Norbert von Miller with the lawyer Miller, who cannot make it to Ardis on the night of the July 1888 dinner for Demon: “‘how I dread meeting again, after all those years, that dislikable Norbert von Miller, who has probably become even more arrogant and obsequious, and moreover does not realize, I’m sure, that Dan’s wife is me. He’s a Baltic Russian’ (turning to Van) ‘but really echt deutsch, though his mother was born Ivanov or Romanov, or something, who owned a calico factory in Finland or Denmark. I can’t imagine how he got his barony; when I knew him twenty years ago he was plain Mr. Miller.’ ‘He is still that,’ said Demon drily, ‘because you’ve got two Millers mixed up. The lawyer who works for Dan is my old friend Norman Miller of the Fainley, Fehler and Miller law firm and physically bears a striking resemblance to Wilfrid Laurier. Norbert, on the other hand, has, I remember, a head like a kegelkugel, lives in Switzerland, knows perfectly well whom you married and is an unmentionable blackguard’” (261.14-29).
           
The confusion of the Veen family lawyer Norman Miller and the law-flouter Norbert von Miller matches the confusion between the writers Henry Miller (who had “a head like a kegelkugel”) and Norman Mailer in the name of Norbert von Miller: see 261.16-29n, and notes up to 261.29n.
           
MOTIF: Black Miller

440.22-23: Dr. Lapiner’s wife, born Countess Alp, not only left him, in 1871: The gentian-lover Dr. Lapiner is the real name of Marina’s doctor during her pregnancy (8.05-06); it seems only part of Aqua’s confusion that she understands the name as Dr. Alpiner: “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” (25.32-26.04)—the confusion belatedly explained by the overlap of the names Dr. Lapiner and Countess Alp, as well as by the alpine setting. Van is born on January 1, 1870, so Countess Alp leaves her husband the year after the dangerous substitution of Van for Aqua’s still-born son.

440.22: Countess Alp: Her title is just possibly an echo of Countess Marie Larisch, said to be the speaker of the lines in Eliot’s The Waste Land, ll. 12-17: 

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. 
In the mountains, there you feel free.

See 261.16-22n for the reasons for suspecting an allusion to these lines of The Waste Land in conjunction with Norbert von Miller.

440.23-441.17: Norbert von Miller, amateur poet . . . and professional smuggler . . . . Her stove is big and wants more wood: Baron von Miller, although an amateur poet—and given the comic sample at 441.14-17, one can see why he remains an amateur—seems to be a professional blackmailer as well as a “professional smuggler” and uses his verselets as thinly veiled blackmail demands.

440.23-24: Russian translator at the Italian Consulate in Geneva: As a Baltic baron and echt Deutsch and the son of a woman born Ivanov or Romanov (261.18-20), he can presumably translate from Russian into German or English. But why would the Italian consulate in French-speaking Geneva need his services? Note that Italy is among Miller’s smuggling destinations or sources (440.24-25, 441.05-06).

440.24-25: professional smuggler of neonegrine—found only in the Valais: Negrine (W2) means “Of or like black people,” but neonegrine is invented (in A1 VN marks it as a translating problem), presumably a drug, on the -ine (as a chemical suffix) model of cocaine, mescaline, morphine, and the like.
           
The “black” sense in neonegrine of course links with Miller’s blackmailing activities and his nickname of “Black Miller” (perhaps his smuggling specialty, rather than his blackmail, explains his nickname, unless it is his being generally “an unmentionable blackguard,” 261.29) and with the emphatic blackness of blackmailed Demon’s hair, make-up, and attire: cf., later in the chapter, “his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears. . . . Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows?” (443.28-33).

In view of the decided blackness of Demon in the role of the lead in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, indeed, we might wonder whether there is anagrammatic hint of the poet’s Eugene Onegin in the word “neonegrine.” It was during a stage travesty of Eugene Onegin, after all, that Demon’s desire for Marina, the female lead in the play, is first roused and first satisfied, thereby starting the melodrama of their romance that provides the occasion for Miller’s blackmail. This might be all the more likely since neonegrine is “found only in the Valais”: the Swiss canton of Valais is the scene of Marina’s retreat to “Ex, a mountain resort” (7.09) and Aqua’s “sanatorium near it” (7.14), where both sisters are pregnant to Demon and where Marina collects flowers for her herbarium that to Van and Ada’s penetrating eyes discloses the “regular little melodrama” (7.20) of Marina’s giving birth to Van, Aqua’s giving birth to her still-born son, and the substitution of Van for Aqua’s lost child. Van and Ada promptly decide to “destroy and forget” (9.11) “this album” (9.10), lest it be used against either them or their parents, anticipating that other album that Kim Beauharnais brings to Ada and asks her “to keep (or destroy and forget, so as not to hurt anybody)” in exchange for the “thousand-dollar note” she gives “the grinning blackmailer” (397.02-07).

Alexey Sklyarenko, in view perhaps of the “Italian Consulate” and her notable first name, suggests a “hint at Ada Negri (1870-1945), an Italian poet and writer. Twenty-five poems of Ada Negri were translated into Russian by Innokentiy Annenski. . . . Blackmailerish Norbert von Miller seems to hint at Norman Mailer (1923-2007), the author of an essay entitled ‘The White Negro’ (1957)” (Black Miller & Neogrine in Ada, thenabokovian, May 10, 2023). (For Miller, see above, 440.20-441.17n, and its cross-references to 261.16-29n, and notes to 261.29n.) Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” published in Dissent in 1957 and separately that year by City Lights, received widespread attention and criticism; it advocated individual violence and rebelliousness rather than conformity, and was written (although Nabokov may not have known this) after Mailer’s experimentation with marijuana (Wikipedia, The White Negro, accessed September 27, 2023). Critic Wayne C. Booth, in his The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) defines readers’ image of “‘Norman Mailer,’ [as] the most honest naughty boy who ever lived” (151).

In Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), Bk. 2,  Ch. 1, “Fellow Travelers,” the action takes place in “vintage time in the valleys on the Swiss side of the Pass of the Great Saint Bernard, and along the banks of the Lake of Geneva” (ed. John Holloway [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971], p. 482)—in other words, especially, in the Valais, through which the newly wealthy Dorrit family travels on its way to Italy. Up in the convent of the Great Saint Bernard, they meet murderer, blackmailer and would-be gentleman Rigaud (alias Blandois), who coldly inquires “Don’t you know . . . that none but smugglers come this way in the winter or can have any possible business this way?” (p. 492). The theme of social snobbery throughout this chapter matches the characterization of smuggler and blackmailer Norbert von Miller: see 440.30-33. And the mountain refuge in which this scene in Dickens takes place may have a link with the scene of Van’s birth: “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 . . . ” (25.32-26.02).

MOTIF: black; Valais

440.26-28: had imparted to her lover the melodramatic details of the subterfuge which the kindhearted physician had considered would prove a boon to one lady and a blessing to the other: Introducing the entries in the herbarium in the attic, Van writes: “the middle part, with a conspicuous decrease in number of specimens, proved to be a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers” (7.18-21). It records the gentian given to Marina by Dr. Lapiner from his gentiarium, and, as inferred by young Van and Ada, the details of Marina’s giving birth, while still unmarried, to Demon’s son, and the stillbirth of Aqua’s son by Demon. More of the melodrama, including Dr. Lapiner’s hand in substituting Van for Aqua’s dead son, can be seen through the prism of Aqua’s confusion at 25.25-26.04. Presumably the substitution is “a boon to” Marina (since she no longer needs appear as an unmarried mother) and “a blessing to” Aqua (since she seems, at least some of the time, to have a live son). The digression on Norbert von Miller adds another layer of melodrama and its placement here revives the story and its relevance to Demon, Van, and Ada, now that Demon has discovered his children’s ardent love affair.

440.29: Versatile Norbert spoke English with an extravagant accent: Cf. another blackmailer, Kim Beauharnais, who speaks in a thick Creole while presenting his photograph album to Ada: “He had been hoping the good old days would resume their course, but since he understood that mossio votre cossin (he spoke a thick Creole thinking that its use in solemn circumstances would be more proper than his everyday Ladore English) was not expected to revisit the castle soon—and thus help bring the album up to date . . . ” (396.14-19).

440.30-33: hugely admired wealthy people and, when name-dropping, always qualified such a person as “enawmously rich” with awed amorous gusto, throwing himself back in his chair and spreading tensely curved arms to enfold an invisible fortune: The echo of the distortion in “enawmously” in “awed” somehow makes the behavior even more fawning.  Cf. Marina’s comment that he “has probably become even more arrogant and obsequious . . . but really echt deutsch, though his mother was born Ivanov or Romanov, or something, who owned a calico factory in Finland or Denmark. I can’t imagine how he got his barony” (261.16-21).

440.33-34: a round head bare as a knee: Cf. Demon’s description of him as having “a head like a kegelkugel” (261.27-28), and for the resemblance here to novelist Henry Miller, see 261.16-29n and 261.27-28n.

440.34: a corpse’s button nose: A wonderful detail, but puzzling. Are Van and VN thinking of the short nose (because mostly hole, after the cartilage has decayed) of a skull, rather than a recent corpse? 

440.34-441.01: very white, very limp, very damp hands adorned with rutilant gems: Rutilant (W2): “Having a reddish glow; shining.” Cf. the “banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author” (505.34), “Mr. Sween, a greedy practitioner, with flashy rings on fat fingers” (506.20-21).

441.02: Dr. Lapiner died in 1872: Note that after his death in 1869 Eric Veen becomes “a skeleton in the most expensive corner of the Ex cemetery  . . . , between an anonymous alpinist and my stillborn double” (354.32-355.02). Dr. Lapiner is misremembered by Aqua as Dr. Alpiner, and although he may or may not be an alpinist, he certainly attends to Marina as she gives birth “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” (25.33-26. 04), and before and after she gives birth bestows flowers on her at her mountain resort of Ex en Valais (7.23-26: “Ex en Valais . . . . Ex, ex Dr Lapiner’s walled alpine garden”; 8.03).

441.04-12: began to blackmail Demon Veen . . . “Black Miller’s” quatrains: Since dashing and wild Demon is repeatedly associated with “black,” “dark,” “raven,” he seems a natural target for blackmail. MOTIF: black; blackmail

441.04-05: went on for almost twenty years, until aging Miller was shot dead: Rather recently, then, if the blackmail started in 1872 and this is 1893, as is confirmed at 441.18-19: “in early February, 1893, not long after the poet’s death.”

441.05: until: emended by Dmitri Nabokov from Ada 1969, “when.”

441.07-08: Out of sheer kindness, or habit: Demon shows little if any “sheer kindness” elsewhere. Cf. the equally oddly matched alternatives of Van’s accepting the Rattner Chair of Philosophy at Kingston “in a spirit of good-natured perversity or perverse gratitude” (507.02-03).

441.08-11: Demon bade his lawyer continue to send Miller’s widow—who mistook it naively for insurance money—the trimestrial sum which had been swelling with each pregnancy of the robust Swissess: A near-pun on “trimester”: this payment is made every three months, but “trimester” is especially used of the three trimesters of human gestation, and the different stages of swelling of the mother’s belly in each trimester. The rare word “Swissess,” especially after “robust,” seems to have a swollen sound in itself. And it seems hard to read this without imagining Miller’s wife herself swelling more with each pregnancy. 

441.12: “Black Miller’s” quatrains: For an oddly similar combination of blackmail and art, see Ada’s comment to Van on Kim Beauharnais and his photograph album: “You shall not slaughter him. . . . He is subnormal, he is, perhaps, blackmailerish, but in his sordidity there is an istoshnïy ston (‘visceral moan’) of crippled art” (406.09-11). Kim will recur shortly, within this parenthesis about “Black Miller,” at 441.20-23.
        
“Black Miller’s’” becomes in French “Chanteur de Mille Airs” (Pléiade 807): “singer (or blackmailer) of a thousand songs.” 

441.13: verselets: MOTIF: -let

441.15: bambino: Miller is a translator at the Italian consulate and smuggles across the Italian border.

441.16: You must be good like I am good: “You must pay and I will say nothing”: VN’s starkness in verse has never been more parodically plodding.

441.17: Her stove is big and wants more wood: Pléiade 1484 suggests a play on the slang to have a bun in the oven, meaning “to be pregnant.” Perhaps, although the banality of the image seems sufficient: the gaping cavity that needs more fuel. 

441.19-23: 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: The first partial disclosure of the attack on Kim Beauharnais arranged and in part executed by Van, its horrible effect reduced (1) by being placed within a digressive parenthesis, (2) by its occurring in the midst of a scene that could not be more consequential for Van’s relationship with Ada, (3) by coming between two other blackmailers, one an attention diverter by being so vividly introduced (Miller) and the other diverting attention by being so riddlingly announced (the son of the VPL agent), (4) by forming one section between two others in a three-part sentence, and (5) by its passive construction and its after-the-fact timing. “One eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood” is horribly graphic, yet the cause that produces this effect has been suppressed. Even Van as narrator seems queasy enough to minimize what has been done, although this will become clear enough at 445.31-446.07 and has been prepared for by Ada’s comment as she and Van leaf through the album: “You shall not slaughter him” (406.09).

441.23-27: 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: This seems to mean that the son of a VPL agent, perhaps the “James Jones” (330.01) who brings the first three letters from desperate Ada to unforgiving Van, or the “elderly gent in a bowler” (331.27-28) who brings her last two passionate and private messages. (For the agency itself, see 329.07-21.) Does this son take the opportunity in 1928 or thereafter, when the agency no longer exists and its secrecy to its clients no longer constitutes its raison d’être, of attempting to blackmail Van and Ada over their relationship, as indicated by the letters Ada wrote Van between 1888 and 1890? (How would the agent’s son, let alone the agent, have access to the texts of these letters?) The past “had ceased to matter” for Van and Ada by then, in that their present was secure, their relatives all dead, and proofs of their being full brother and sister available to no one else—and not even evident in the letters, the last of which only perhaps indicates (but really only to someone already in the know) that they may be more than cousins (335.26-33). And does “the straw of a prison cell” mean that this second-generation rogue actually did try to blackmail Van and Ada Veen, and was charged, sentenced, and imprisoned for his attempt? This confluence of narrative riddles certainly exhausts the attention that readers might have been inclined to expend on Kim being “carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging on a red thread.” 

441.28-30: The most protracted of the several pauses having run its dark course, Demon’s voice emerged to say, with a vigor that it had lacked before: Another narrative expansion on the explicit dialogue, seeming to suggest that Van is as far away in thought from the Demon before him, perhaps in recalling the melodrama in the herbarium, as we have just been. Cf. the pauses marked at 440.12-14 and 440.19.

442.02-03: as unruffled as if we were discussing your gaming debts or the demands of a wench knocked up in a ditch: Echoes of the nineteenth-century novel that Ada sometimes feigns to be.

442.04-07: Tell him about . . . ? I will. He did: another narratorial variation on the presentation, amplification and condensation of dialogue: Van’s subvocal speech (and its memory tests for readers) and the flip from succinct first-person resolution about the future (“I will”) to equally succinct third-person report on the past (“He did”).

442.04: the herbarium in the attic: Not labeled thus in its first presentation, 7.06-9.12, but referred back to in this way in Van and Ada’s discussion of their family and amatory relationships, late in Ardis the First: “Another time, on a bicycle ride (with several pauses) along wood trails and country roads, soon after the night of the Burning Barn, but before they had come across the herbarium in the attic, and found confirmation of something both had forefelt in an obscure, amusing, bodily rather than moral way, Van casually mentioned he was born in Switzerland” (148.32-149.03). Van and Ada correctly deduce from the herbarium, soon after (as the sentence just quoted shows) they first make love, that Marina is Van’s mother.
           
MOTIF: -arium

442.04-05: About the indiscretions of (anonymous) servants?: Blanche is the servant who tells Ada that she is Demon’s daughter, as Ada discloses to Van in that attic scene: “your father who, according to Blanche, is also mine” (8.32); presumably she has heard it from Bouteillan, who “had once been the valet of Van’s father” (35.34-36.01) and at this early stage of Ardis the First is Blanche’s lover. In reporting his sources to Demon, Van protectively anonymizes them.

442.05-06: About a forged wedding date?: As Van and Ada discover in the cockloft just before finding the herbarium: “According to the Sunday supplement of a newspaper . . .  that had survived with other old papers in the cockloft of Ardis Hall, the Veen-Durmanov wedding took place on St. Adelaida’s Day, 1871. Twelve years and some eight months later, two naked children, . . . happened to collate that date (December 16, 1871) with another (August 16, same year) anachronistically scrawled in Marina’s hand across the corner of a professional photograph (in a raspberry-plush frame on her husband’s kneehole library table) identical in every detail” (5.34-6.14). This fudged date strongly confirms for Ada the likelihood that Blanche’s disclosure about Demon’s being her father is correct. The microfilm showing Dan’s absence from America at the time when Marina becomes pregnant, which they discover between the newspaper and the herbarium (6.21-7.05), along with Ada’s coloration (as opposed to Lucette’s) in echo of Demon but not Dan, clinches the case.

442.08-09: She was twelve . . . and I was a male primatal of fourteen and a half: Both echoes and then obscures Poe’s “She was a child and I was a child,” l. 7 of “Annabel Lee” (1849), which Humbert Humbert so frequently echoes in the texture and structure of the start of his narration in Lolita (9, 12, 13, 39, 53). VN evokes Poe here to mark the partial similarity at this early stage between Van and Ada’s early passion and the first love of Humbert Humbert and Annabel Leigh, in their adolescent age, their strong sexual desire, even if without Van and Ada’s opportunities (“these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cool blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief,” Lolita I.3, 12) and their mental kinship: (“The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!”: Lolita I.4, 14).         

MOTIF: Lolita

442.08: a male primatal: Primatal is in neither W2 nor W3, but OED glosses this “rare” zoological term as “Of or pertaining to the order Primates” or “An animal of this order.” Why such an odd word choice, when Ada, not Van, is the biologist? Especially given the consonance and assonance and near-rhyme of “male primatal.” It seems to stop familiarity and Father in their tracks, before flowing on defiantly to “and we just did not care.” 

442.09: and we just did not care: As comically indicated in Ada’s implicit “let’s make love once more,” after they realize in the attic that they are full brother and sister: “‘Right,’ answered Ada, ‘Destroy [the album] and forget. But we still have an hour before tea’” (9.11-12).

442.12-13: Nature, as I informed you once, has been kind to me: In that he is sterile, despite his amatory virility, as he informs Ada after their first lovemaking in the Manhattan penthouse (393.28-394.06). There has been no previous mention of Van’s informing Demon about this.

442.13-14: We can afford to be careless in every sense of the word: Extending the “we just did not care” of 442.09. Van implies that the fear of producing offspring, especially genetically defective offspring, a major reason for incest taboos, is irrelevant in their case. See 133.19-135.12, and 133.23-26n, 133.31-33n, 134.02-05n, 134.13-135.12n, 135.04-07n.

442.20-21: Is it too late to prevent your affair with your sister from wrecking her life?: Cf. Van’s ruminations shortly before he tells Lucette aboard the Tobakoff  that he is not alone, which prompts her to jump to her death: “on the morrow (which was at least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl’s brother, that he knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work, and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a brief affair” (491.11-18, italics added).

442.20-21: your sister: The first time Demon has identified her as someone other than Van’s “cousin” or his own “niece.” MOTIF: family relationship

442.22-23: Van knew this was coming. He knew, he said, this was coming: Another striking instance of Nabokovian interplay between thought, dialogue and report.

442.27-28: How did Van imagine his sister’s pursuing a scenic career?: Ironically, in the throes of recovered passion Demon asks Marina to end her stage career: “He wished to marry her very much—on the condition she dropped her theatrical ‘career’ at once” (15.25-27).
           
MOTIF: family relationship

443.04-05: You force me to bring up the tritest terms such as ‘family,’ ‘honor,’ ‘set,’ law’: Cf. “They’re quite a notch below our set” (330.22); “economic disasters (beyond the financial or philosophical ken of invulnerable Van and Demon but affecting many persons of their set)” (356.19-21); “‘Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?’ ‘I have no set, I’m a loner’” (464.13-14). Cf. SO 25: “in that set, in those times.”

443.05-06: I have bribed many officials in my wild life: In the first detailed scene starring Demon, after placing a bet (another of his characteristic behaviors) with his orchestra-seat neighbor that he can possess Marina before the play is finished, he “bribed a series of green-room attendants, and then, in a cabinet reculé . . . proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel)” (10.15-11.01), thereby also winning his bet. His most recent bribe was of the waiter Valerio, an hour or so ago (434.19-22).

443.07-16: And the emotional impact . . . the “it-would-kill-your-mother” line . . . a facile fade-out: Since Austen’s Mansfield Park has a recurring relevance to Ada, it may be worth noting the argument in favor of putting on a play at Mansfield Park in the absence of their father that Tom Bertram makes to his younger and more scrupulous brother Edmund. Edmund knows their stern father will object to the activity, as inflaming the emotions of the young men and women involved and as disrupting the space and decorum of the manor. Tom responds to Edmund’s argument that their father’s absence is a reason for not staging a play:

“And as to my father’s being absent, it is so far from an objection, that I consider it rather as a motive; for
the expectation of his return must be a very anxious period to my mother; and if we can be the means of
amusing that anxiety, and keeping up her spirits for the next few weeks, I shall think our time very well
spent, and so, I am sure, will he. –It is a very anxious period for her.” 

As he said this, each looked towards their mother. Lady Bertram, sunk back in one corner of the sofa, the
picture of health, wealth, ease, and tranquillity, was just falling into a gentle doze, while Fanny was getting
through the few difficulties of her work for her. 

Edmund smiled and shook his head. 

“By Jove! this won’t do,”—cried Tom, throwing himself into a chair with a hearty laugh.
“To be sure, my dear mother, your anxiety—I was unlucky there.” 

(Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley (1814; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), vol. I ch. xiii, pp. 113-14).

443.08-09: you and that charming child have been deceiving their parents: “Their” instead of “your”: pronouns, like relationships, are awkward in this scene.

443.12: Nothing could “kill” Marina: Shortly before Marina’s death, Van has a premonitory dream: “Two formless fat transparent creatures were engaged in some discussion, one repeating ‘I can’t!’ (meaning ‘can’t die’—a difficult procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or the bowl), and the other affirming ‘You can, sir!’ She died a fortnight later, and her body was burnt, according to her instructions” (451.20-25).

443.12-14: 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: Marina was concerned about the possibility of Van’s and Ada’s falling in love on Van’s first night at Ardis:

“‘Why do stairs creak so desperately, when two children go upstairs,’ she thought, looking up at the balustrade
along which two left hands progressed with strikingly similar flips and glides like siblings taking their first
dancing lesson. ‘After all, we were twin sisters; everybody knows that.’ The same slow heave, she in front, he
behind, took them over the last two steps, and the staircase was silent again. ‘Old-fashioned qualms,’ said Marina”
(39.32-40.06).

And recalling the melodrama of her affairs with Demon, she half-remembers this 1884 scene on the
night of the dinner she gives Demon in 1888:

“And the shadow of retribution on the backwall (with ridiculous legal innuendoes). All this was mere scenery,
easily packed, labeled ‘Hell’ and freighted away; and only very infrequently some reminder would come—say,
in the trick-work closeup of two left hands belonging to different sexes—doing what? Marina could no longer
recall (though only four years had elapsed!)—playing à quatre mains?—no, neither took piano lessons—casting
bunny-shadows on a wall?—closer, warmer, but still wrong; measuring something? But what? Climbing a tree?
The polished trunk of a tree? But where, when? Someday, she mused, one’s past must be put in order” (253.21-31).

443.13: concern with her “inner peace”: Cf. Marina in response to a mention of Judaism: “‘It’s not a very old religion, anyway, as religions go, is it?’ said Marina (turning to Van and vaguely planning to steer the chat to India where she had been a dancing girl long before Moses or anybody was born in the lotus swamp)” (90.31-34); “She confessed with an enigmatic and rather smug smile that much as she liked the rhythmic blue puffs of incense, and the dyakon’s rich growl on the ambon, and the oily-brown ikon coped in protective filigree to receive the worshipper’s kiss, her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism” (451.09-15). 

On her meeting Van in 1905, Dorothy (Dasha) Vinelander cannot refrain from disclosing that Marina as she died
was not filled with an “inner peace” that precluded concern about Van and Ada’s relations: “Incidentally, in her
deathbed delirium—you don’t mind, Ada, if I divulge to him ces potins de famille?—our splendid Marina was
obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other—that you were married to Ada and that you and
she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does
your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?” (519.12-19).

443.16: a facile fade-out: Appropriate to this movie star, even if she was never of the first magnitude. Other film imagery recurs more grimly in the account of Marina’s fatal final illness: “none suspected what pain in her bleeding bowels she was trying to allay by incantations, and ‘self-focusing’ or its opposite device, ‘self-dissolving’” (451.07-09).

443.17-19: Demon spoke on: “I cannot disinherit you: Aqua left you enough ‘ridge’ and real estate to annul the conventional punishment: In the first chapter of Part Two, Demon, after seeing Van’s farewell clinch with Cordula, warns: “‘If you marry her I will disinherit you. They’re quite a notch below our set.’ ‘In a couple of years,’ said Van, ‘I’ll slide into my own little millions’ (meaning the fortune Aqua had left him)” (330.21-24). In the interim Van, now 23, has come into Aqua’s fortune.

443.18: ‘ridge’: Darkbloom: “money.” W2: “Gold. Old Slang.” Rivers and Walker 292: “‘Ridge’ is an English cant term of obscure origin, apparently obsolete since the end of the nineteenth century, with the general meaning of ‘gold’ or ‘gold coin’ and the specific meaning of ‘a guinea.’ It appears to have been used mostly by criminals, or in reference to criminal activities, and it is therefore an appropriate word for Demon to employ while upbraiding Van for Van’s incestuous relationship with Ada.”
           
MOTIF: gold dollars; riches

443.20: my daughter, whom I mean to protect at all cost: The first time Demon has referred to Ada as other than his “niece.” Cf., at the beginning of the Manhattan reunion: “Ada’s bobrï (princely plural of bobr) were a gift from Demon, who as we know, had lately seen in the Western states considerably more of her than he had in Eastern Estotiland when she was a child. 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’” (391.27-33). MOTIF: family relationship

443.28-31: 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: Near the end of Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov (1824-1825), in the antepenultimate scene, Boris says to his son, as he is dying:

“Tï muzh i tsar’; lyubi svoyu sestru,
Tï ey odin khranitel’ ostayosh’sya”

(“You are a man and a tsar’; love your sister,
You alone are her protector now”)

Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others: The Complete Plays, trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky, New York: Vintage Books, 2023, p. 103.

443.29: jet-black tears: MOTIF: black 

443.30-31: death’s total surrender to gravity: Demon, who in some senses seems to have the power of personal flight, like his namesake in Lermontov, will die in a plane that “inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific” (504.31-32).
           
MOTIF: gravity

443.31-33: Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows?: MOTIF: black; Demon’s dye

443.33: The funest gamester: Funest (W2): “Bringing or portending death or evil; fatal; dire; doleful.” Cf. in Letters from Terra: “Flora, initially an ivory-pale, dark-haired funest beauty, whom the author transformed just in time into a third bromidic dummy with a dun bun” (340.21-23). For “gamester,” cf. “Baron ‘Demon’ Veen, that memorable Manhattan and Reno figure” (588.11-12). The strikingly odd combination of words might almost seem to contain a play on “fun and games,” if one could see a reason. 

443.33-34: the pale fatal girl, in another well-known melodrama. . . . In this one: In this one, Ada, “his pale fatal sister” (307.11); for her “fatality,” cf. “Because that was really not bad: bringing down three in as many years—besides winging a fourth. Jolly good shot—Adiana! Wonder whom she’ll bag next” (381.34-382.02). 

Does “another well-known melodrama” refer to Aqua’s melodramatic involvement with Demon, or to Ada’s role in Don Juan’s Last Fling, or to one of many possible heroines in many familiar stories? 

444.02-03: The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion: Despite Van’s “being apt to suffer uncurbable blubbering fits (rising at times to an epileptic-like pitch, with sudden howls that shook his body, and inexhaustible fluids that stuffed his nose) ever since his break with Ada” (390.01-04).

444.09-20: Tell her to come here on your way down.” 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. . . . My second is also the meeting place of two steep slopes: Van’s silent repetition of Demon’s “down” and his “My first is a vehicle . . . ” seems to make “Down” not just a description of his direction of movement and his emotional plummet but also an instruction first in a crossword puzzle, and then in a riddling clue within it.
          
The riddler’s first syllable is “a vehicle that twists dead daisies around the spokes”: cart. The image evokes the description of Van’s rendezvous with Ada the morning after the Night of the Burning Barn: “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)” (128.21-25). The mood has changed from “twinkle-twining” to “twists dead daisies.” And Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, of course, ends in the suicide of its heroine.

444.12: my second is Oldmanhattan slang for “money”: See 443.18 and n. Van picks up on the slang his father has used, and his “Oldmanhattan” plays with the slang term “(my) old man” for “(my) father”—his father’s slang term, therefore—and with the gap between New York and Oldmanhattan. Van’s father of course is first introduced as, and is well known as, “a Manhattan banker” (4.16). Despite Don Barton Johnson’s claim (Worlds in Regression 67) that “‘ridge’ actually is an old Manhattan (Dutch) word for money,” there seems to be no reason to associate the slang term with the US, or with New York, or with the Dutch who founded what in the seventeenth century was called New Amsterdam. 

According to Partridge (8th ed.) the term, introduced about 1660, was obsolete by 1840, and dead in Britain by 1900, although revived in Australia around 1940.

MOTIF: Manhattan

444.13: my whole makes a hole: An ominous prolepsis: Van seems about to shoot himself with a pistol and put a cartridge through his head—as becomes explicit on the next page (445.08-12).

444.15: Ada in her black dress: She often wears black, but this morning she has pointedly changed out of her pink peignoir for this funereal occasion.
          
MOTIF: black 

444.16-17: He told a footman to convey her father’s message to her: Van, having just decided, despite his steady resistance to Demon’s injunction, that his father is “right. Yes, right here and there” (445.01-02), finds the thought of speaking to Ada in person too much to bear.

444.20-21: My second is also the meeting place of two steep slopes. Right-hand lower drawer of my practically unused new desk: “Ridge” again, in other words. Like Anna Karenin in her stream of consciousness before her suicide (cf. 299.31-300.08, 299.34-300.01n, 300.01-02n, 300.02n, 300.07nn) Van mulls over the riddle as he foresees his destination, the desk in his penthouse suite where he will find the pistol to end his despair.

444.21-29: which is quite as big as Dad’s with Sig’s compliments . . . that really magnificent desk: “Sig” is Sigmund Freud, on Antiterra represented by Dr. Sig Heiler (28.14), dreamt of by his patients “as a ‘papa Fig’” (28.14), and derided in Van’s lectures on dreams along with all “the Signy-Mondieu analysts” (363.28). “Penis envy” in Freud is a young girl’s supposed anxiety, on seeing a naked male, that she has lost the penis she sees on the male (Wikipedia, Penis envy, accessed September 28, 2023). But Nabokov also links Freud and castration anxiety (Wikipedia) with the male’s checking his own penis at a urinal, as in Lolita: “I drifted to the Men’s Room. There, a person in clerical black—a ‘hearty party’ comme on dit—checking with the assistance of Vienna, if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk, and looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy” (Lolita I.28, 125).
           
MOTIF: Sig

444.23-24: at this hour of the day: Apparently around 10 a.m.

444.25: the ten blocks to Alex Avenue: “Alexis Avenue” when first mentioned at 322.02 (and again at 389.29, 433.28, and 457.28), but “Alex Avenue” on the next mention, 382.23. A rare inadvertent but inconsequential inconsistency?

444.26: a strong sharp wind dimmed his sight with salty frost: It is February 5.

444.29-445.12: he forthwith sat down at that really magnificent desk and wrote the following note: . . . Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized . . .  and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger: Cf. Eye 17: “Before committing suicide I wanted to write a few traditional letters.” 
           
Before his duel with Captain Tapper, Van writes two notes to his father in case of his death, the first of which, before declaring that he has “seduced your daughter,” notes that “the manner of my end can be regarded as a kind of easy suicide” (309.01-05).
           
MOTIF: letters

444.31-32: His logic sounds preposterous, prepsupposing [sic]: Van, writing in haste, mistakenly carries over the “prep” of “preposterous” into “presupposing.” Unlike distraught and rushed Van, cool VN seems to be playing a lexicologist’s game in this preposterous error, in which a prepositional prefix (and “preposterous” largely consists of two prefixes, pre- and post-) adds the start of “post” into the gerund for “presupposition” to arrive at a postprefixual or postprepositional p.
           
MOTIF: Composition—Editor 

444.32-33: a vague kind of “Victorian” era, as they have on Terra according to ‘my mad’ [?]: According to the conventional notion of the prudishness of the Victorian era (1837-1903) in Great Britain and its colonies, or in the entire Western world. VN happened to disagree with this, as he wrote in a 1966 interview (while he was composing Ada) with Alberto Ongaro:

“But the nineteenth century was so different, so puritanical. Couldn’t that be the reference point? I think
it’s a commonplace to say that the nineteenth century was a puritanical age. To take just one example,
adultery in the nineteenth century was a kind of sacred institution. The Paris feuilletons were full of
adulteries in high society. And don’t forget the married couples unfaithful to each other by mutual consent.
And incest was very frequent, if not usual, in the Russian countryside and in the rest of Europe. In Pushkin’s
time unspeakable things went on. No, I do not believe that the nineteenth century was a particularly puritanical
age. As I don’t believe the eighteenth century was more libertine, or that the era in which we live is particularly
libertine. I do not believe such labels. They seem arbitrary and unfounded. In my view, forms of puritanism
and freedom have coexisted simultaneously in every era” (TWS 345-46).

445.01: paroxysm of [illegible]: MOTIF: Composition-Editor

445.02: Yes, right, here and there: Perhaps “here” (for us) and “there” (from society’s perspective)?

445.02: not neither here, nor there: Marina uses the expression “neither here nor there” (232.28-29) in the midst of her admonition to Van to beware how he handled his cousin, after Mlle Larivière has cited to her “the cousinage-dangereux-voisinage adage—I mean ‘adage,’ I always fluff that word—and complained qu’on s’embrassait dans tous les coins” (232.15-17).

Guilty Van assumes the reference is to him and Ada, but Marina clarifies: “‘I do not mean Ada, silly,’ said Marina with a slight snort, as she fussed over the teapot. ‘Azov, a Russian humorist, derives erunda from the German hier und da, which is neither here nor there. Ada is a big girl, and big girls, alas, have their own worries. Mlle Larivière meant Lucette, of course’” (232.26-30). 

445.03-04: In the last window we shared we both saw a man painting: Van thinks back perhaps to the window they shared on the momentous Night of the Burning Barn. This time, in Demon’s apartment, they share not the window they look out of—Van has seen Ada “at the oval window in the boudoir” (444.16) on the second floor, while he has been looking out the third-floor window in Demon’s study (439.05)—but the open window they look towards, behind which stands a painter with his easel, looking at them.
           
Or does he also think back to the first ever window he shared with Ada, on his first day at Ardis? Ada, standing at a window of Ardis’s central hall while they have tea with Marina, tells Van he can catch a glint of the Tarn “‘from here too,’ . . . introducing the view to Van who put his cup down, wiped his mouth with a tiny embroidered napkin, and stuffing it into his trouser pocket, went up to the dark-haired, pale-armed girl. As he bent toward her . . . , she moved her head to make him move his to the required angle and her hair touched his neck. In his first dreams of her this re-enacted contact, so light, so brief, invariably proved to be beyond the dreamer’s endurance and like a lifted sword signaled fire and violent release” (39.18-29).

445.04-07: a man painting . . . he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared: Van, in grim mood, evokes a grim image. 

445.04-05: a man painting [us?]: MOTIF: Composition-Editor

445.08-09: found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized: Cf. 444.21. 

445.09-10: introduced one cartridge into the magazine: In case a first-time reader has not yet solved the riddle, the word “cartridge” now provides the solution.

445.11-12: at the point of the pterion: Pterion (W2): “Craniol. The suture of the frontal, parietal, and temporal bones with the great wing of the sphenoid”—or, in layman’s language, just above and to the front of the front and top of the ear. Nabokov likes introducing arcane physiological terms at moments of dramatic intensity, as when Humbert, masturbating under Lolita on the davenport, reports: “The nerves of pleasure had been laid bare. The corpuscles of Krause were entering the phase of frenzy. The least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose” (Lolita I.13, 60).

445.12-20: 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: Anticipates also Van “in a strange bed” in Mont Roux in 1922, when he wakes up “in great desolation,” with Ada gone, and wonders whether he should throw himself off his balcony (561.24-32).         

Cf. BS 83-84: “Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth. . . . The same might be true of one's personal existence as perceived in retrospect upon waking up: the retrospective effect itself is a fairly simple illusion, not unlike the pictorial values of depth and remoteness produced by a paintbrush on a flat surface; but it takes something better than a paintbrush to create the sense of compact reality backed by a plausible past, of logical continuity, of picking up the thread of life at the exact point where it was dropped. The subtlety of the trick is nothing short of marvellous, considering the immense number of details to be taken into account, arranged in such a way as to suggest the action of memory.”

MOTIF: [false fork]

445.21-23: 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: Ada will be 33 at the time of this 1905 reunion, in Mont Roux, and Van only 35. The radical narrative transition both confirms the long separation and promises an eventual loving reunion.

445.24-26: had I found Rose wailing over your corpse. ‘Secondes pensées sont les bonnes,’ as your other, white, bonne used to say in her pretty patois: Darkbloom: “second thoughts are the good ones” and “bonne: housemaid.” Rose is “the sportive Negro maid whom [Van] shared in more ways than one with the famous, recently decorated cryptogrammatist, Mr. Dean, a perfect gentleman, dwelling on the floor below” (390.15-17). “Your other, white, bonne” refers to Blanche, the Ardis housemaid, in several senses: her very name means “white” in French; she tells Van, in her first words to him, on his first morning at Ardis, that she has “the whites” (49.21), and Van wisely has second thoughts—he is “strangely put off”—about pursuing this maid with the “strange, tragic tone” (49.26-27); she tells him, on her last night and his at Ardis, that she is “yours”: “Je suis à toi, c’est bientôt l’aube, your dream has come true” (293.14-15). And “her pretty patois” reflects the fact that by the time of his return to Ardis in 1888, when she interrupts him and Ada making love on their first night back together, “she had become wonderfully pretty” (191.10-11). From first to last, too, she uses her Canady French, her pretty patois.
           
Edelnant 164 notes: “Black Miller, the black costumed Demon, Kim the Blackmailer, and the black maid all play their parts in this, the third separation of Van and Ada.”

445.24: Rose: MOTIF: rose

445.26: pretty Patois: MOTIF: patois

445.26-27: As to the apron, you are quite right: Quite right both in that Ada had not been able to see the apron from her second floor, as Van had inferred, but also that she had seen it when she ascended to the third floor, and could therefore confirm his description. 

445.27-29: 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: The “meek little palazzo” is Demon’s home on 5 Park Lane: “Before his boarding-school days started, his father’s pretty house, in Florentine style, between two vacant lots (5 Park Lane in Manhattan), had been Van’s winter home (two giant guards were soon to rise on both sides of it, ready to frog-march it away)” (149.24-28). The “two giant guards,” two new skyscrapers, have, some time between 1884 and 1893, filled those vacant lots on each side. 

In an aside about his using the little palazzo as a repository for Ada’s letters to him, Van has earlier taken the story still further into the future: “the irreplaceable little palazzo burnt down in 1919. Rumor attributed the bright deed to the city fathers (three bearded elders and a blue-eyed young Mayor with a fabulous amount of front teeth), who could no longer endure their craving for the space that the solid dwarf occupied between two alabaster colossi; 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, with a still growing collection of microphotographed paintings from all public and private galleries in the world” (336.23-32).
           
MOTIF: little palazzo

445.29-30: Perhaps for the cover of a magazine, which rejected that picture: A clear allusion to the New Yorker, whose covers regularly feature drawn or painted, more or less cartoony, scenes of New York, including its architecture. The irony of a tiny but elegant older building between two more modern skyscrapers sounds like a perfect New Yorker cover concept, although no real cover of such a view has been identified (but then, we are told, the magazine “rejected that picture”). Zimmer 2010: 1022 suggests the work of Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), who provided some memorable New Yorker covers and whose work Nabokov greatly admired (see Boyd 1991: 511-12). Certainly Steinberg was fascinated by the contrasts of scale and style this cover would have featured. Zimmer also suggests Arthur Getz (1913-1996), another New Yorker contributor, as a possibility. 

In Ada, as elsewhere in Nabokov, the New Yorker becomes The Beau and the Butterfly (see 344.05n and 425.12-13n for the reason); the day after Van and Ada track down and watch the film of Les Enfants Maudits, now transformed into The Young and the Doomed, which Ada acted in as an extra only to be edited out on the cutting-room floor, the scene outside the Alexis Avenue penthouse matches the current issue of the magazine: “Next day, in their little drawing room, with its black divan, yellow cushions, and draftproof bay whose new window seemed to magnify the slow steady straight-falling snowflakes (coincidentally stylized on the cover of the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly which lay on the window ledge), Ada discussed her ‘dramatic career’” (425.09-14).

Stephen Blackwell (email to BB, November 6, 2023) wonders whether there could also be an allusion to the classic illustrated children’s story The Little House (1942), by Virginia Lee Burton (1909-1968), in which a one-story house on a small hill in the country gradually finds roads, houses, and urbanization encroaching, until at last it sits flanked by two apartment blocks (only four stories high, but looking intimidatingly taller). The story won the 1943 Caldecott Medal (for children’s illustrator Ralph Caldecott, see eventually 588.01-04n.) and would likely have been at the right level for the then eight-year-old Dmitri Nabokov to read.

445.31-446.03: there’s one thing I regret. . . . 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: The somewhat opaque reference to Kim among the blackmailers mentioned earlier in the chapter (“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,” 441.20-23; see also 441.19-23n) now becomes clear.

But other things may also have just become opaque for a first-time reader. Van has evidently taken an alpenstock to Kim Beauharnais’s eyes, to ensure he cannot redevelop the photographs of Van and Ada to blackmail them again. The “Ladore policeman,” and Ada’s having told Van about him, will likely be a riddle and an obscuring distraction to first-time readers, but the good rereader will note the earlier exchange between Van and Ada as they leaf through Kim’s blackmail photograph album:

“‘Isn’t that wheezy Jones in the second row? I always liked the old fellow.’ ‘No,’ answered Ada ,
‘that’s Price. Jones came four years later. He is now a prominent policeman in Lower Ladore.
Well, that’s all.’ Nonchalantly, Van went back to the willows” (407.24-29).

Ada has identified where Jones now works, and Van—who a page earlier had commented in “an equally causal tone of voice” “I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais’s exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts,” to which Ada had replied “You shall not slaughter him” (406.05-09), and who has, we can infer, been thinking of ways to reach and neutralize Kim—now has his lead, despite his show of nonchalance: Jones as policeman. Ada’s lament at Mont Roux in 1905, “I should never have told you about the Ladore policeman. You should never have taken him into your confidence” now completes the picture. Presumably the burning down of most of Kalugano’s pine forest has been an inadvertent consequence of Van’s and Jones’s collaborating to burn Kim’s files.

445.31-32: Your use of an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury: Cf. Van’s plans to meet and take out his vengeance on Rack: “On the way there he acquired his 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” (305.25-30); “his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic” (311.32-34).
      
On August 20, 1940, on Stalin’s instructions, the revolutionary Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was famously murdered in his study in Mexico City when an assailant, who had gone by the name of Frank Jacson, smashed through his cranium with the blunt side of an alpenstock. Trotsky died the next day. The assassin, in fact Ramón Mercader (1913-1978), was sentenced to twenty years in prison and lived out the remainder of his life in Cuba, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. See Wikipedia, Ramón Mercader, accessed September 28, 2023. This historical reprise (if not a chance connection) has not been noted even in Andrea Pitzer’s The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Pegasus, 2013), despite her focus on echoes of contemporary history, especially Russian and Soviet history, in Nabokov’s works.
           
MOTIF: cane

445.32: the Ladore policeman: Van will support Jones and his family, as he tells Cordula in Paris in 1901: “I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I’ve had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years—the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan’s place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore. I want to relinquish that flat” (457.28-33).

445.33-446.03: You should never have . . . connived with him to burn those files—and most of Kalugano’s pine forest: In The Texture of Time, Van writes of the past as “a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall, summoned on this summer morning in 1922, can pick anything he pleases: . . . the awful pain striking him in the side while two children with a basket of mushrooms looked on in the merrily burning pine forest” (545.27-546.05). The two children picking mushrooms are present in fact as Captain Tapper’s bullet rips into Van’s torso in 1888 (310.31-311.03): the “merrily burning pine forest” conflates Van’s burning pain here with his 1893 burning of the pine forest in the over-zealous destruction of Kim’s files. 

446.02-03: Kalugano’s pine forest: Cf. our and Van’s first glimpse of it as his train arrives in Kalugano: “A pine forest fizzled out” (304.07). Later his duel will take place there: “At the moment his foot touched the pine-needle strewn earth of the forest road, a transparent white butterfly floated past, and with utter certainty Van knew that he had only a few minutes to live” (310.16-19).

446.03: Eto unizitel’no (it is humiliating): A perversely, Veenishly inadequate epithet for what Van has done to Kim Beauharnais. Ada feels humiliated, but Kim is blinded. Yet she is happily back with the person who has “release[d] a brute’s fury.” “Not yours, not my Van’s,” she says. But it is.

446.04-05: replied fat Van with a fat man’s chuckle: This is the first we hear of Van’s getting heavier as he ages: in 1905, when this exchange takes place, Van tells Ada “I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time,” and she replies: “Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight—there’s more of you” (522.30-33). 
Cf. “Certain caged birds, say Chinese amateurs shaking with fatman mirth, knock themselves out against the bars (and lie unconscious for a few minutes) every blessed morning” (124.13-15). 

446.05: I’m keeping Kim safe and snug: Evokes but pointedly avoids the idiom “safe and sound”: Kim is now decidedly unsound.

446.05-07: nice Home . . . nicely brailled books: The repeated “nice” from someone with Van’s extensive lexicon emphasizes the jarring tone of his answer, and the non-niceness of Kim Beauharnais’s plight in the wake of Van’s attack.

446.05-06: nice Home for Disabled Professional People: Kim has become a professional: he “lectures, if you please, on the Art of Shooting Life at the School of Photography in Kalugano” (397.32-34), and is mockingly referred to by Van as “Professor Beauharnais” (406.07). 

MOTIF: Home for . . . 

446.07: nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography: Cf. “Braille Club in Raduga” (131.34), which also juxtaposes blindness and color (raduga is Russian for “rainbow”), and “Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle” (468.07-09), who presents “a singular case of chromesthesia”: he seems to be able to discriminate by touch the colors of unsharpened pencils in a colored-pencil box. 

446.07: chromophotography: W2: “Color photography.” But the term as used in the nineteenth century referred to a number of different processes, as Diana Makhaldiani notes (email to BB, April 28, 2022): see Wikipedia, Chromophotography, accessed September 28, 2023: “Chromophotography is a technique, somewhere between painting and photography, which evolved in the second half of the 19th century. Firstly, two prints of the photograph were made. One was hand-painted with very bright colours; the other was painted in paler colours, and then made translucent by applying wax to the paper. The second picture was then superimposed over the first, with a small air gap in between, resulting in a three-dimensional effect. This technique was used by only a very few photographers, mostly in Central Europe. // However, the word chromophotography was used in several different ways during the 19th century and it cannot be assumed that a reference automatically refers to the technique described here. . . . In 1882 and 1883 adverts appeared in the press where shops specialising in drawing and painting materials referred to materials for ‘Chromo-photography’ but there is nothing in the advertisements to suggest that this involved anything more than the commonplace tinting of photographs.”

446.08-09: There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do: Seems to undercut in uncertain ways the reality of this chapter-end: of, perhaps, the nightmare of Kim’s blinding and Van’s entitled response; or of Van’s suicidal resolve and his taking only a comb and not a pistol to his temple; or, for a first-time reader, perhaps the “continuation” of Ada’s talking to Van, and still in love with him, after he has turned grey and fat. 
           
Cf. the equally self-undermining ending of Part Three:

“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. . . . Life forked and re-forked. Yes, she told him. He insulted Van on the mauve-painted
porch of a Douglas hotel. . . . 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! . . . ” (531.11-31).

Afternote to Part Two, Chapter 11