Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

When the latter arrived, Muldoon had not quite come out of a state of stupor more protracted than any preceding one. Van, hoping to examine him on the morrow, spent a delightful day conferring with a bunch of eager psychologists and was interested to spot among the nurses the familiar squint of Elsie Langford, a gaunt girl with a feverish flush and protruding teeth, who had been obscurely involved in a ‘poltergeist’ affair at another medical institution. He had dinner with old Paar in his rooms at Chose and told him he would like to have the poor fellow transferred to Kingston, with Miss Langford, as soon as he was fit to travel. The poor fellow died that night in his sleep, leaving the entire incident suspended in midair within a nimbus of bright irrelevancy.

Van, in whom the pink-blooming chestnuts of Chose always induced an amorous mood, decided to squander the sudden bounty of time before his voyage to America on a twenty-four-hour course of treatment at the most fashionable and efficient of all the Venus Villas in Europe; but during the longish trip in the ancient, plushy, faintly perfumed (musk? Turkish tobacco?) limousine which he usually got from the Albania, his London hotel, for travels in England, other restless feelings joined, without dispelling it, his sullen lust. Rocking along softly, his slippered foot on a footrest, his arm in an armloop, he recalled his first railway journey to Ardis and tried — what he sometimes advised a patient doing in order to exercise the ‘muscles of consciousness’ — namely putting oneself back not merely into the frame of mind that had preceded a radical change in one’s life, but into a state of complete ignorance regarding that change. He knew it could not be done, that not the achievement, but the obstinate attempt was possible, because he would not have remembered the preface to Ada had not life turned the next page, causing now its radiant text to flash through all the tenses of the mind. He wondered if he would remember the present commonplace trip. An English late spring with literary associations lingered in the evening air. The built-in ‘canoreo’ (an old-fashioned musical gadget which a joint Anglo-American Commission had only recently unbanned) transmitted a heart-wounding Italian song. What was he? Who was he? Why was he? He thought of his slackness, clumsiness, dereliction of spirit. He thought of his loneliness, of its passions and dangers. He saw through the glass partition the fat, healthy, reliable folds of his driver’s neck. Idle images queued by — Edmund, Edmond, simple Cordula, fantastically intricate Lucette, and, by further mechanical association, a depraved little girl called Lisette, in Cannes, with breasts like lovely abscesses, whose frail favors were handled by a smelly big brother in an old bathing machine.

He turned off the canoreo and helped himself to the brandy stored behind a sliding panel, drinking from the bottle, because all three glasses were filthy. He felt surrounded by crashing great trees, and the monstrous beasts of unachieved, perhaps unachievable tasks. One such task was Ada whom he knew he would never give up; to her he would surrender the remnants of his self at the first trumpet blast of destiny. Another was his philosophic work, so oddly impeded by its own virtue — by that originality of literary style which constitutes the only real honesty of a writer. He had to do it his own way, but the cognac was frightful, and the history of thought bristled with clichés, and it was that history he had to surmount.

He knew he was not quite a savant, but completely an artist. Paradoxically and unnecessarily it had been in his ‘academic career,’ in his nonchalent and arrogant lectures, in his conduct of seminars, in his published reports on sick minds, that, starting as something of a prodigy before he was twenty, he had gained by the age of thirty-one ‘honors’ and a ‘position’ that many unbelievably laborious men do not reach at fifty. In his sadder moments, as now, he attributed at least part of his ‘success’ to his rank, to his wealth, to the numerous donations, which (in a kind of extension of his overtipping the haggard beggars who cleaned rooms, manned lifts, smiled in hotel corridors) he kept showering upon worthwhile institutions and students. Maybe Van Veen did not err too widely in his wry conjecture; for on our Antiterra (and on Terra as well, according to his own writings) a powerfully plodding Administration prefers, unless moved by the sudden erection of a new building or the thunder of torrential funds, the safe drabness of an academic mediocrity to the suspect sparkle of a V.V.