Describing the beginning of his lifelong romance with Ada, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Ada's drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, and her natures mortes:
Two other phenomena that she had observed even earlier proved ridiculously misleading. She must have been about nine when that elderly gentleman, an eminent painter whom she could not and would not name, came several times to dinner at Ardis Hall. Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind — fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts —
‘I know exactly,’ interrupted Van angrily, ‘whom you mean, and would like to place on record that even if his delicious talent is in disfavor today, Paul J. Gigment had every right to paint schoolgirls and poolgirls from any side he pleased. Proceed.’
Every time (said unruffled Ada) Pig Pigment came, she cowered when hearing him trudge and snort and pant upstairs, ever nearer like the Marmoreal Guest, that immemorial ghost, seeking her, crying for her in a thin, querulous voice not in keeping with marble.
‘Poor old chap,’ murmured Van.
His method of contact, she said, ‘puisqu’on aborde ce thème-là, and I’m certainly not making offensive comparisons,’ was to insist, with maniacal force, that he help her reach for something — anything, a little gift he had brought, bonbons, or simply some old toy that he’d picked up from the floor of the nursery and hung up high on the wall, or a pink candle burning blue that he commanded her to blowout on an arbre de Noël, and despite her gentle protests he would raise the child by her elbows, taking his time, pushing, grunting, saying: ah, how heavy and pretty she was — this went on and on until the dinner gong boomed or Nurse entered with a glass of fruit juice and what a relief it was, for everybody concerned, when in the course of that fraudulent ascension her poor little bottom made it at last to the crackling snow of his shirtfront, and he dropped her, and buttoned his dinner jacket. And she remembered —
‘Stupidly exaggerated,’ commented Van. ‘Also, I suppose, artificially recolored in the lamplight of later events as revealed still later.’
And she remembered blushing painfully when somebody said poor Pig had a very sick mind and ‘a hardening of the artery,’ that is how she heard it, or perhaps ‘heartery’; but she also knew, even then, that the artery could become awfully long, for she had seen Drongo, a black horse, looking, she must confess, most dejected and embarrassed by what was happening to it right in the middle of a rough field with all the daisies watching. She thought, arch Ada said (how truthfully, was another question), that a foal was dangling, with one black rubber leg free, out of Drongo’s belly because she did not understand that Drongo was not a mare at all and had not got a pouch as the kangaroo had in an illustration she worshipped, but then her English nurse explained that Drongo was a very sick horse and everything fell into place.
‘Fine,’ said Van, ‘that’s certainly fascinating; but I was thinking of the first time you might have suspected I was also a sick pig or horse. I am recalling,’ he continued, ‘the round table in the round rosy glow and you kneeling next to me on a chair. I was perched on the chair’s swelling arm and you were building a house of cards, and your every movement was magnified, of course, as in a trance, dream-slow but also tremendously vigilant, and I positively reveled in the girl odor of your bare arm and in that of your hair which now is murdered by some popular perfume. I date the event around June 10 — a rainy evening less than a week after my first arrival at Ardis.’
‘I remember the cards,’ she said, ‘and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover — but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies.’
‘Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. Badly bitten nails, my sweet. Forgive these notes, I cannot really express the discomfort of bulky, sticky desire. You see I was hoping that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand.’
‘It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa’s old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?’
‘On my open palm, darling. A pucker of paradise. You remained still for a moment, fitting my cup. Then you rearranged your limbs and reknelt.’
‘Quick, quick, quick, collecting the flat shining cards again to build again, again slowly? We were abominably depraved, weren’t we?’
‘All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect —’
‘Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then — zdravstvuyte: apofeoz, the Night of the Burning Barn!’ (1.18)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): puisqu’on etc.: since we broach this subject.
hument: inhale.
tout le reste: all the rest.
zdravstvuyte etc.: Russ., lo and behold: the apotheosis.
In Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 (1961), ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen initiates a panic among Rome's officers by repeatedly calling them and simply stating the name of the famous poet, "T. S. Eliot". In his essay Richard Aldington: An Englishman (1931) Thomas McGreevy (an Irish poet, 1893-1967) says that T. S. Eliot was painting verbal natures mortes:
Eliot was painting verbal natures mortes. Joyce and Picasso were, it goes without saying, men of much greater range than Eliot, but to men haunted by the necessity of expressing the always living realities and consequences of the war, much of what they were expressing could not, however lovely, seem of much more importance than natures mortes. Aldington and Lurçat wanted, in the end, to paint only natures vivantes. (III)
In 1936, Jean Lurçat (a French artist noted for his role in the revival of contemporary tapestry, 1892-1966) exhibited in London and released his first tapestry, made at La Manufacture des Gobelins (The Gobelins Tapestry Manufactory, Paris), Les Illusions d'Icare ("The Illusions of Icarus"). In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete. According to Ada, her husband called Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father, the son of Dedalus Veen and Irina Garin) Dementiy Labirintovich:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had 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.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles? (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.
chiens etc.: dogs not allowed.
After a long separation, Van and Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) meet in Mont Roux in October 1905. Half a year earlier, in March 1905, Demon Veen perished in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Van does not realize that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. Describing the last occasion on which he saw his father, Van mentions old Milton Eliot, the real-estate magnate:
The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon’s new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith. The poem was but the twinkle in an owl’s eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced ‘seminal’ by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 (‘Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,’ ‘Sween as poet and person,’ ‘Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography’) both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman’s control of background adjustment — or Demon’s edict.
The table talk dealt mainly with business matters. Demon had recently bought a small, perfectly round Pacific island, with a pink house on a green bluff and a sand beach like a frill (as seen from the air), and now wished to sell the precious little palazzo in East Manhattan that Van did not want. Mr Sween, a greedy practitioner with flashy rings on fat fingers, said he might buy it if some of the pictures were thrown in. The deal did not come off. (3.7)
Kithar Sween's The Waistline clearly hints at T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922). T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) is the author of Sweeney Agonistes (1932). Kithar Sween and Sweeney Agonistes bring to mind Pig Pigment.
According to Heller, his novel Catch-22 was influenced by Céline (the author of Journey to the End of the Night, 1932), Evelyn Waugh and Nabokov. On October 22, 1905, Van travels to to Sorcière, in the Valais:
On Wednesday, October 22, in the early afternoon, Dorothy, ‘frantically’ trying to ‘locate’ Ada (who after her usual visit to the Three Swans was spending a couple of profitable hours at Paphia’s ‘Hair and Beauty’ Salon) left a message for Van, who got it only late at night when he returned from a trip to Sorcière, in the Valais, about one hundred miles east, where he bought a villa for himself et ma cousine, and had supper with the former owner, a banker’s widow, amiable Mme Scarlet and her blond, pimply but pretty, daughter Eveline, both of whom seemed erotically moved by the rapidity of the deal.
He was still calm and confident; after carefully studying Dorothy’s hysterical report, he still believed that nothing threatened their destiny; that at best Andrey would die right now, sparing Ada the bother of a divorce; and that at worst the man would be packed off to a mountain sanatorium in a novel to linger there through a few last pages of epilogical mopping up far away from the reality of their united lives. Friday morning, at nine o’clock — as bespoken on the eve — he drove over to the Bellevue, with the pleasant plan of motoring to Sorcière to show her the house.
At night a thunderstorm had rather patly broken the back of the miraculous summer. Even more patly the sudden onset of her flow had curtailed yesterday’s caresses. It was raining when he slammed the door of his car, hitched up his velveteen slacks, and, stepping across puddles, passed between an ambulance and a large black Yak, waiting one behind the other before the hotel. All the wings of the Yak were spread open, two bellboys had started to pile in luggage under the chauffeur’s supervision, and various parts of the old hackney car were responding with discreet creaks to the grunts of the loaders.
He suddenly became aware of the rain’s reptile cold on his balding head and was about to enter the glass revolvo, when it produced Ada, somewhat in the manner of those carved-wood barometers whose doors yield either a male puppet or a female one. Her attire — that mackintosh over a high-necked dress, the fichu on her upswept hair, the crocodile bag slung across her shoulder — formed a faintly old-fashioned and even provincial ensemble. ‘On her there was no face,’ as Russians say to describe an expression of utter dejection.
She led him around the hotel to an ugly rotunda, out of the miserable drizzle, and there she attempted to embrace him but he evaded her lips. She was leaving in a few minutes. Heroic, helpless Andrey had been brought back to the hotel in an ambulance. Dorothy had managed to obtain three seats on the Geneva-Phoenix plane. The two cars were taking him, her and the heroic sister straight to the helpless airport. (3.8)
The action in Ada takes place on Demonia, Earth’s twin planet also known as Antiterra. In our world, October 22, 1905, was Sunday. June 22, 1941 (the day on which Nazi Germany, led by Hitler, invaded Soviet Russia), was Sunday. Heller's Catch-22 is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944.