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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
Sir Philip Sidney in the description of his mistresse excellently well handled this figure of resemblaunce by imagerie, as ye may see in his booke of Archadia.
(George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589))
The portrait photograph Nabokov originally chose for the cover of his novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle shows him pulling an 'impishly quizzical' face. (1) It was taken as one of a series by Philippe Halsman in October 1968, preparatory to the publication of the book in 1969. Nabokov apparently declared that the mischievous expression would be just right for Ada; but though it was used for the cover of the English edition, another one, more seriouslooking, was chosen for the American edition. (2)
Nabokov must have continued to smile that 'impish' smile for the next eight or nine years, until his death. For had he not got away with a big secret in the writing of Ada? And got away with it in his favourite mode--by planting all the clues in the forefront and on the surface of the text so obviously that they were somehow invisible? That is the argument of this paper.
Critics have noticed that Ada is an Arcadian tale. It is so overtly in the long 'Ardis' section of the book, which relates the idyllic, Edenic love of the two charmed protagonists Van and Ada Veen during their childhood summers at Ardis Manor. The two are no older than eleven-turning-twelve (Ada) and fourteen (Van) when they first meet, first suspect that they are not cousins, but brother and sister, first show off their amazing Veen wit, first make love. In this sense, the first summer is an Arcadia of childhood. Their second summer of 'ardisaical' love, four years later, is tinged with the poison of the serpent of jealousy, yet still prelapsarian inasmuch as it subsists in some realm before the Fall into nationalities and even genders. For Ardis is neither quite American nor Russian, and if the latter, neither quite pre- nor post-Revolutionary. And the protagonists are somewhat like one hermaphroditic individual cast as twins: they have corresponding mirror-image birthmarks; they are soulmates.
Critics have also remarked Ada's self-consciousness--the way it reflects on, evokes, parodies its own predecessors, chiefly by allusion to cases of sibling incest in the 'decadent' poetry and novels of the past. The unspoken pun is: 'This is an incestuous novel.' It is about incest; and it has an incestuous relationship to its own genre, as Neil Cornwell has remarked. (3)
Put these two features, the Arcadian, and the literary-historical, together. It is surely impossible that Nabokov, with his extraordinarily wide reading in Elizabethan literature, should not have known of the existence of the first English Arcadia--Sir Philip Sidney's. (4) First published in 1590, that book is a prose narrative about pastoral love, interspersed with blocks of pastoral verse in various forms. My novel claim is not only that Nabokov deliberately echoes Sidney's Arcadia and his sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591), but also that Philip Sidney's whole life and oeuvre constituted for Nabokov a secret core of his own literary life and work.
Critics have not noticed that Nabokov makes something of a secret of 'Arcadia'. He wants it to be both an overt and a covert motif. Similarly, though they have traced Ada's 'incestuous' and 'prelapsarian bliss' avatars back through three literatures--English, Russian, and French--literary sleuths have come to a stop at Andrew Marvell ('The Garden'). This is tantalizingly close, but just misses the avatars. It is tantalizing to see Robert Alter touch on the Elizabethan connection with his observation that Nabokov's title for the book adverts to those sixteenth-century sonnet cycles named after the poet's mistress--the Delias, Dianas, Phyllises, Celias, and so on. (5) But not 'so on': one waits for the word 'Stella' in vain. It is tantalizing to watch Brian Boyd wonder whether the 'stellas', the handful of coins tossed by Van to the groom as he leaves Ardis for the first time, are a sly allusion to Astrophel and Stella--and decide they are not. (6) As for the echoes of The Countess of Pembrooke's Arcadia (the full title of Sidney's original romance, named after his sister Mary), they will be catalogued at length below. It will be seen that they are too numerous to be taken for coincidence. As Nabokov himself said, 'Some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth.' (7)
The two blind spots of commentary--ignoring the particular Sidneian references and calling a halt to the historical affiliation process just before it reaches the avatar--are interconnected precisely through the key term 'Arcadia'. My Arcadian detective work is not merely an exercise in grubbing for sources. It will involve a recognition that Nabokov is our sole reader of Sidney's Arcadia in the Nabokovian sense of 'reader'. For though it is possible to deduce from the writings of some contemporaries and near-contemporaries of Sidney that they were perfectly aware of the incestuous subject matter (see Puttenham's allusion to Sidney's mistress, not heroine, in the epigraph to this paper), no one since has shown awareness of this fact--except Nabokov. (8)
Sixteenth-Century Arcadians
Philip Sidney, born in 1553, had 'great expectations'. (9) He was nephew to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who made him his heir. Dudley wielded immense power under Elizabeth I, and came close to marrying her in the 1560s and again in the second half of the 1570s. This put Philip practically in the position of crown prince. (It was unlikely that Elizabeth would bear children, at this date.) The fact that his father, Henry Sidney, was viceroy of Ireland helped to enhance the quasi-regal aura that hung over him. But it was his Dudley connections he most stressed when arguing that his family should take pride of place in England. Indeed, they had actually occupied the place of supreme power for nine days, on the death of Edward VI. They had put Lady Jane Grey on the throne, arguing her claim through the female line from Henry VII, having previously arranged her marriage to young Guilford Dudley, another uncle of Philip's.
The Dudleys had come to grief on that occasion. But two sons, Robert and Ambrose, rose again under Elizabeth, and a sister Mary married Henry Sidney. The clan and their allies exerted all their power to prevent the Queen from marrying elsewhere, if she was not to marry Robert Dudley. At a critical point in her plans to marry the Duc d'Alencon, a Catholic prince of France, in 1579, Philip was deputed to write to the Queen arguing strenuously against the proposal. The Protestant lords had met in urgent conference at Baynards Castle, the London seat of the Earl of Pembroke, who had strengthened their alliance by marrying the younger Mary Sidney, Philip's talented sister.
Red-haired like him, a poet like him but also a scientist with her own 'laborator', like him often addressed as a 'heavenly twin' (he was 'Apollo', she was 'Artemis' or 'Diana' or 'Delia'--the Delian one) and as a 'Phoenix', Mary was extremely close to Philip. When he was killed in 1586, at Zutphen in the Netherlands, fighting with Dudley's Protestant army against the Catholic continental powers, Mary was devastated. In the many poetic tributes to Philip, she was mentioned as the bereaved party to a greater extent than Philip's wife was. Mary wrote her own translation of Petrarch's Triumph of Death to mourn her brother, and continued their joint translation of the Psalms, adding a very warm poem of dedication to him. Commentators are somewhat embarrassed by its passion, and the debate started by John Aubrey in his biographical sketches Brief Lives has, after centuries of firm quashing, restarted. (10) How did Mary...
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