Nabokov's Butterflies - Meanderings (III)

Naval butterfly given command but not yet an admiral? (7 letters)

*

There is nothing at all like reading Nabokov. Nor is there anything like attempting to read Nabokov. And certainly not when your mind isn't occupying the right space. In fact, it is futile to pursue his dazzling and inventive and often fiendishly cryptic prose if your concentration is not absolute. Yet fifteen years ago, I did just that, embarking upon what is widely considered to be his most difficult novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. The words swam before my eyes - albeit in glorious asynchronicity - and after ten or so pages, vowing to return, I put the book down and gave in to the humdrum immediacy of the wider world and its lesser writers. 

Ada, or Ardor - not a novel for the pudibund

During the summer, the space and solitude of the pandemic caused me to pick up the book again. And this time I persevered, discovering that once I'd negotiated the three opening chapters, the book morphed into a more typical and relaxed Nabokovian beauty. Indeed, allowing for the time to look up a word after every few paragraphs - 'granoblastically' was the first - I found myself breezing through ten to twenty pages a day. Which is less a flippant comment on my reading speed or the difficulty of the novel, but rather - and here I'm risking a cliché that Nabokov would abhor - an indication that this is prose that, like fine wine, should be savoured. Which, of course, flags up a further warning note, in that it quickly becomes apparent that writing about Nabokov makes you want to write better. Alas, you only become more aware of the gaping abyss of talent that lies between yourself and him. 

Early difficulties in coping with Ada, or Ardor lie in its complicated family dynamic. The novel is the life-story of Van Veen and an incestuous love affair that he conducts with his sister Ada. Initially believing they are mere cousins, they nevertheless embark upon an adolescent sexual relationship. A few years later they make the discovery that Van's mother isn't his mother and that Ada's father isn't her father, but rather - take a deep breath and concentrate - that Van's 'aunt' and Ada's 'uncle' are actually their parents. However, this does nothing to dampen the fervor of the relationship. 

Further difficulties are revealed by the fact, that although the world that the novel is set in is very similar to our world, it isn't quite a facsimile. Indeed, the Earth that we know occupies a mythological status in the world of the novel. By now you might be thinking, 'why bother?' Yet trust me, those difficulties are worth it, and are in fact apertures to dazzling scenes awash with brilliant wordplay, explosive ironies and magical set-pieces, all of which are related in a peerless, never-to-be-matched prose. 

Hopefully, the above persuades at least one Nabokov-virgin to give the writer a go (although I would caution against starting with Ada, or Ardor). What I really want to talk about, though, are the other joys, incidental ones, that you come across when reading Nabokov. One above all, enriched my strange summer of confinement. Butterflies! And, in case I forget, moths and caterpillars.      

Nabokov was an excellent amateur lepidopterist and his descriptions of these insects, appearing frequently in his work, are exquisite. And less we take it for granted, one of the joys of the 21st century, is to compare those descriptions against a search-engine image. The prose, blazing already, burns even brighter. Here is Ada's diary of the Puss Moth Caterpillar followed by an image of the larva.   

The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth belong to a most uncaterpillarish caterpillar, with front segments shaped like bellows and a face resembling the lens of a folding camera. If you gently stroke its bloated smooth body, the sensation is quite silky and pleasant - until the irritated creature ungratefully squirts at you an acrid fluid from a slit in its throat.

The Puss Moth Caterpillar - straight out of 1970s Doctor Who

I adore this passage, embarking on its journey with the dry objectivity of an encyclopedia as it reaches for that dusty adjective 'retractile', and then - slipping the shackles of science - spectacularly drawing our attention to those 'diabolical anal appendages'. Bellows and camera lenses are thrown into the mix, the creature's mood is anthropomorphised, and an image of this 'most uncaterpillarish caterpillar' is inscribed onto your retina forever.   

That description alone would have been enough for me to up my game whenever a butterfly danced into view. I found myself paying attention to this year's Big Butterfly Count and doing my utmost to learn the markings of the nineteen most common British butterflies. I'm now confident that I can swiftly identify those tricky Whites; I have a deep longing to encounter a Holly Blue; and have developed a fondness for the Large Skipper, a fuzzy bodied ubiquity at the end of my lunchtime run.   

The Large Skipper

It is, of course, always a thrill to see a Red Admiral. This was Nabokov's favourite butterfly, with the writer noting that Russians named it the 'Butterfly of Doom' because it was first observed in that country in the year of Tsar Alexander II's assassination. Pondering on the English name, and half-trusting one of Nabokov's least honest characters - Pale Fire's John Shade who tells us that the butterfly was once known as the Red Admirable - I'm firmer in my suspicion that it became the Red Admiral because of the vivid white wing markings which bear a resemblance to the rings of a senior naval officer. Perhaps a lovely bit of lexical serendipity resulted in its promotion?

The Red Admiral

Back in the world - almost our world, remember - of Ada, and Ardor, we find two British butterflies cropping up in an Hieronymus Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. The context of the following passage is too knotty to explain, suffice to say just enjoy the analysis of a few details in the painting and Demon's - Van and Ada's father - relating of them.  

'If I could write,' mused Demon, 'I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously - c'est le mot - art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it - a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower - mark the "as if," for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don't give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I'm allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice ....'

Come the end of the pandemic, Madrid and the Prado are high on my list of places to visit. I will, optic net at the ready, head straight to The Garden of Earthly Delights and get a close up of those two butterflies. 

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1500)

Then again, why wait, as this glorious interactive link to the painting provides a great opportunity for some bug-hunting. It's worth zooming in just to see the bruised blue thistle that the dressed-in-the-dark-Tortoiseshell has alighted on.

And if Van's sister is compelled to complain about the Tortoiseshell and its back-to-front wings, you would think that she might have a little more to say about the Meadow Brown. The wings, although rather monochromatic - everything is monochromatic in the hellish right hand panel - are very correct, but the body bursts straight out of the devilish crucible of Bosch's mind. Not the kind of creature you would want to encounter in a dark alley, and certainly not if you are completely in the buff. That said, our deformed Meadow Brown seems to be holding a measured conversation with a naked sinner, the butterfly waylaid from the business of pursuing a man -  making his escape up a ladder - with an arrow inserted into his anal orifice.  

Demon is taking his daughter's anatomical exactness to task and insisting that it's all about the 'joy of the eye', and he's beautifully correct about that woman-sized strawberry. However, you do suspect tension on Nabokov's part with this argument. He is prepared to playfully skew things in his not-quite-a-mirror-image version of Earth, but there is no way that he's going to tinker with Lepidoptera evolution. And so Bosch is pulled into his office and given an oblique dressing down about the Tortoiseshell. 

Although I have seen a few previously, there were no Tortoiseshells for me this year. But included in my own garden count - although I'm stretching the bounds of the garden here - was a garish Peacock butterfly nonchalantly skimming along a Tottenham backstreet. Not quite as exotic as the gardens of the Montreux Palace Hotel, the location for this film that features Nabokov netting a Peacock butterfly. And despite not taking my butterfly hunting out of London, it did in the end - certainly with a Brimstone on Hampstead Heath - all feel rather exciting. Perhaps next year, I should aim higher - or lower as it were - and enter the realm of the caterpillar. Zooming in on the glorious collection of species that Van lists in the following passage reveals a world that almost seems like science fiction.  

Many decades later Van remembered having much admired the lovely, naked, shiny, gaudily spotted and streaked sharkmoth caterpillars, as poisonous as the mullein flowers clustering around them, and the flat larva of a local catocalid whose gray knobs and lilac plaques mimicked the knots and lichens of the twig to which it clung so closely as to practically lock with it, and, of course, the little Vaporer fellow, its black coat enlivened all along the back with painted tufts, red, blue, yellow, of unequal length, like those of a fancy toothbrush treated with certified colors. 

The Vapourer Moth Caterpillar

Looking at these incredible caterpillars and comparing them to the moths that they birth, I wonder if there's an aesthetic inversion of the lave to butterfly journey? And the Vapourer Moth Caterpillar's comparison to a 'fancy toothbrush' also makes me recall that the writer actually ate some butterflies when he was young, and lived to tell the tale. You become what you eat? Absolutely, if we are to compare his prose to a living creature.

As I said, there's nothing at all like reading Nabokov. And there are certainly few other writers who are able to spark a new hobby. They may well bring something new and fascinating into your ken, but to infuse you with the bug, to send you scrambling through the undergrowth desperate to work out if that's a Ringlet or a Gatekeeper, or perhaps - wishful thinking - to strive towards an encounter with something that isn't on my Big Butterfly Count chart - say the High Brown Fritillary - that takes the most spectacular kind of talent.