Describing his final reunion with Ada in July 1922, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the huge memorable oil in the lounge of Les Trois Cygnes (Van's hotel in Mont Roux) — three ample-haunched Ledas swapping lacustrine impressions — that had been replaced by a neoprimitive masterpiece showing three yellow eggs and a pair of plumber’s gloves on what looked like wet bathroom tiling:
The Three Swans where he had reserved rooms 508-509-510 had undergone certain changes since 1905. A portly, plum-nosed Lucien did not recognize him at once — and then remarked that Monsieur was certainly not ‘deperishing’ — although actually Van had almost reverted to his weight of seventeen years earlier, having shed several kilos in the Balkans rock-climbing with crazy little Acrazia (now dumped in a fashionable boarding school near Florence). No, Madame Vinn Landère had not called. Yes, the hall had been renovated. Swiss-German Louis Wicht now managed the hotel instead of his late father-in-law Luigi Fantini. In the lounge, as seen through its entrance, the huge memorable oil — three ample-haunched Ledas swapping lacustrine impressions — had been replaced by a neoprimitive masterpiece showing three yellow eggs and a pair of plumber’s gloves on what looked like wet bathroom tiling. As Van stepped into the ‘elevator’ followed by a black-coated receptionist, it acknowledged his footfall with a hollow clank and then, upon moving, feverishly began transmitting a fragmentary report on some competition — possibly a tricycle race. Van could not help feeling sorry that this blind functional box (even smaller than the slop-pail lift he had formerly used at the back) now substituted for the luxurious affair of yore — an ascentive hall of mirrors — whose famous operator (white whiskers, eight languages) had become a button. (Part Four)
Leda and the Swan is a poem by W. B. Yeats:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
In her story Snow Blitz (1963) Sylvia Plath (who committed suicide on Feb. 11, 1963, by asphyxiating herself with natural gas from a kitchen oven) says that her London flat was once the home of W.B. Yeats:
In London, the day after Christmas (Boxing Day) – it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years I had been tactfully asking ‘Do you ever have snow at all?’ as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid grey that make up an English winter. ‘Ooo I do remember snow,’ was the usual reply, ‘when I were a lad.’ Whereupon I would enthusiastically recall the huge falls of crisp and spectacular white I snowballed, tunnelled in and sledded on in the States when I was young. Now I felt the same sweet chill of anticipation at my London window, watching the pieces of darkness incandesce and they drove through the glow of the streetlight. Since my flat (once the home of W.B. Yeats and so market on a round, blue plaque) has no central heating, my chill was not metaphorical but very real.
In her poem Winter Trees Sylvia Plath mentions otherwordliness and Ledas:
The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing.
Memories growing, ring on ring,
A series of weddings.
Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,
Truer than women,
They seed so effortlessly!
Tasting the winds, that are footless,
Waist-deep in history.
Full of wings, otherworldliness.
In this, they are Ledas.
O mother of leaves and sweetness
Who are these pietas?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but chasing nothing.
A botanical drawing brings to mind Ada's 'botanical' voice:
‘The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?’
‘I’ll take you five versts across the bog,’ said Trofim, ‘the nearest is Volosyanka.’
His vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.
Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!
‘Barin, a barin,’ said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his passenger.
‘Da?’
‘Dazhe skvoz’ kozhanïy fartuk ne stal-bï ya trogat’ etu frantsuzskuyu devku.’
Barin: master. Dázhe skvoz’ kózhanïy fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bï ya trógat’: I would not think of touching. Étu: this (that). Frantsúzskuyu: French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. Úzhas, otcháyanie: horror, despair. Zhálost’: pity, Kóncheno, zagázheno, rastérzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds. (1.41)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): marais noir: black tide.
Describing his meetings with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in Mont Roux in October 1905, Van mentions a ginkgo tree:
A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a ‘Lebanese cedar’ — if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where a princely paulownia (‘mulberry tree!’ snorted Ada), standing in state on its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk. A ginkgo (of a much more luminous greenish gold than its neighbor, a dingily yellowing local birch) marked the corner of a cobbled lane leading down to the quay. They followed southward the famous Fillietaz Promenade which went along the Swiss side of the lake from Valvey to the Château de Byron (or ‘She Yawns Castle’). The fashionable season had ended, and wintering birds, as well as a number of knickerbockered Central Europeans, had replaced the English families as well as the Russian noblemen from Nipissing and Nipigon. (3.8)