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VIADIMIR
NABOKOV
The Annotated
[DLITA
Edited, with
preface, introduction and notes by
ALFRED APPEL, JR.
McGraw-Hill Book Company ■ New York • Toronto
LOLITA
Copyright © by Vladimir Nabokov 1955.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-10755
This edition copyright © 1970 by McGraw-Hill, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-95819
07-045729-8
07-045730-1
12 KPKP 898
-A,;
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following for permission to quote: Vladimir
Nabokov and The New Yorker, in whose pages the poems first ap-
peared, for “A Discovery” and “Ode to a Model,” Copyright © 19435
1955 by Vladimir Nabokov; G.P. Putnam’s Sons for passages from
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, Copyright © 1962 by G.P. Putnam’s
Sons; G.P. Putnam’s Sons for passages from The Gift by Vladimir
Nabokov, Copyright © 1963 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons; New Directions,
for passages from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir
Nabokov, Copyright by New Directions, 1941; and Little, Brown and
Co., for passages from Nabokov: His Life in Art by Andrew Field,
Copyright © 1967 by Andrew Field. Part II of my own article,
“Nabokov’s Puppet Show,” is reprinted by permission of The New
Republic, Copyright © 1967 by Harrison-Blaine of New Jersey, Inc.
The University of Wisconsin Press has kindly allowed me to reprint
portions of my article, “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wiscon-
sin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII (Spring 1967), and pas-
sages from “An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov,” ibid. (© 1967 by
the Regents of the University of Wisconsin). I also wish to acknowl-
edge the assistance of Karen Appel, Frank Cady, Eli Cohen, Patricia
McKea, Raymond Nelson, Professor Fred C. Robinson, and Bruce
Sattler.
—A. A.
PREFACE
In the decade since its American publication (in 1958), Vladimir
Nabokov’s Lolita has emerged as a classic of contemporary litera-
ture. This annotated edition is designed for the general reader and
particularly for use in college literature courses. It has developed
out of my own experiences in teaching and writing about Lolita,
which have demonstrated that many readers are more troubled by
Humbert Humbert’s use of language and lore than by his abuse of
Lolita and law. Their sense of intimidation is not unwarranted;
Lolita is surely the most allusive and linguistically playful novel in
English since Ulysses (1922) and Linnegans Wake (1939), and, if
its involuted and constantly evolving means bring to mind any pre-
vious novel, it should be that most elusive of works. The Confi-
dence-Man (1857) by Herman Melville. As with Joyce and Mel-
ville, the reader of Lolita attempts to arrive at some sense of its
overall “meaning,” while at the same time having to struggle, often
page by page, with the difficulties posed by the recondite materials
and rich, elaborate verbal textures. The main purpose of this edi-
tion is to solve such local problems and to show how they contrib-
ute to the total design of the novel. Neither the Introduction nor
the Notes attempts a total interpretation of Lolita.
The annotations keep in mind the specific needs of college stu-
dents. Many kinds of allusions are identified: literary, historical,
[ ix ]
mythological, Biblical, anatomical, zoological, botanical, and geo-
graphical. Writers and artists long out of fashion (e.g., Maeter-
linck) receive fuller treatment than more familiar names. Selective
cross references to identical or related allusions in other Nabokov
works will help to place Lolita in a wider context and, one hopes,
may be of some assistance to future critics of Nabokov. Many of
the novel’s most important motifs are limned by brief cross-refer-
ences. Humbert’s vocabulary is extraordinary, its range enlarged
by the many portmanteau words he creates. Puns, coinages, and
comic etymologies, as well as foreign, archaic, rare, or unusual
words are defined. Although some of the “unusual” words are in
collegiate dictionaries, they are nevertheless annotated as a matter
of convenience. Not every neologism is identified (e.g., “truck-
ster”), but many that should be obvious enough are noted, because
the rapidly moving eye may well miss the vowel on which such a
pun depends (speed-readers of the world, beware! Lolita is not the
book for you). Because many American students have little or no
French, virtually all the interpolations in French are translated. In a
few instances, readers may feel an annotation belabors the obvious;
I well remember my own resentment, as a college sophomore,
when a textbook reference to Douglas MacArthur was garnished
by the footnote “Famous American general (1880- ).” Yet
the commonplace may turn out to be obscure. For instance, early
in Lolita Humbert mentions that his first wife Valeria was “deep
in Paris-Soir” (p. 28). When I asked a Stanford University class of
some eighty students if they knew what Paris-Soir was, sixty of
them had no idea, twenty reasonably guessed it to be a magazine or
newspaper, but no one knew specifically that it was a newspaper
which featured lurid reportage, and that the detail formulates Va-
leria’s puerility and Humbert’s contempt for her. Several notes are
thus predicated on the premise that one epoch’s “popular culture”
may be another’s esoterica (see Notes 150/1 and 256/6).
Most of the Introduction is drawn from parts of my previously
published articles in The Neiv Republic (“Nabokov’s Puppet
Show — Part II,” CL VI [January 21, 1967], 25-32), Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature (1967), The Denver Quar-
terly (1968), and Tri Quarterly (1970). Many Notes are adapted
[ X ]
from the two middle articles and my interview with Nabokov in
Wisconsin Studies (see bibliography for full entries). This edition
was completed more than two years ago, save for eleventh-hour al-
lusions to Ada, but the vagaries and vagrancies of publishing de-
layed its appearance. In the meantime, Carl R. Proffer’s excellent
Keys to Lolita was published (1968). Two enchanted hunters
(see Note 110/2) working independently of each other, Mr.
Proffer and I arrived at many similar identifications, and, excepting
those which are readily apparent, I have tried to indicate where he
has anticipated me.
The text is that of the 1958 Putnam’s edition. Nabokov and the
editor have made many corrections in the text, all identified
in the Notes. Like the 1958 edition, this variorum edition concludes
with Nabokov’s Afterword, which, along with its Notes, should be
read in conjunction with the Introduction (where the reader will
be offered exact instructions as to this procedure).
Given the length of the Notes and the fact that they are at the
back of the book, the reader would do well to consider the ques-
tion of how best to use these annotations. An old reader familiar
with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the
perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text
to Notes risks vertigo. A more balanced method is to read through
a chapter and then read its annotations, or vice versa. Each reader,
however, has to decide for himself which is the most comfortable
procedure. In a more perfect world, this edition would be in two
volumes, text in one. Notes in the other; placed adjacent to one an-
other, they could be read concurrently. Charles Kinbote in his
Foreword to Pale Fire (1962) suggests a solution that closely ap-
proximates this arrangement, and the reader is directed to his sensi-
ble remarks, which serve this edition in place of a note on the text.
Although there are almost nine hundred notes to this text, the in-
itial annotated edition of a work should never be offered as “defini-
tive” and that claim will not be made here. As it is, The Annotated
Lolita is the first annotated edition of a modern novel to have been
published during its author’s lifetime — A Tale of a Tub for our
time. Vladimir Nabokov has occasionally been consulted and, in
some cases, has commented on the annotations. In such instances his
[ xi ]
contribution is acknowledged. He wants me to mention that in
several instances his interpretation of Lolita does not necessarily
coincide with mine, and I have tried to point out such cases; the
literary allusions, however, have been deemed accurate.
This edition, then, is analogous to what Pale Fire might have
been like if poor John Shade had been given the opportunity to
comment on Charles Kinbote’s Commentary. Of course, the anno-
tator and editor of a novel written by the creator of Kinbote and
John Ray, Jr., runs the real risk of being mistaken for another fic-
tion, when at most he resembles those gentlemen only figuratively.
But the annotator exists; he is a veteran and a father, a teacher and
taxpayer, and has not been invented by Vladimir Nabokov.
[ xii ]
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction xv
Selected Bibliography
1. Checklist of Nabokov’s writing Ixxii
2. Criticism of Lolita Ixxiv
In Place of a Note on the Text — from Pale Fire i
Lolita
Foreword 5
Part One 9
Part Two 145
Vladimir Nabokov: On a Book
Entitled Lolita 3 1 3
Notes
321
INTRODUCTION
/. NABOKOVAS PUPPET SHOW
I have tried my best to show the workings of the book, at least
some of its workings. Its charm, humour and pathos can only be
appreciated by direct reading. But for enhghtenment of those
who felt baffled by its habit of metamorphosis, or merely dis-
gusted at finding something incompatible with the idea of a
“nice book” in the discovery of a book’s being an utterly new
one, I should like to point out that The Prismatic Bezel can be
thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the
book are what can be loosely called “methods of composition.”
It is as if a painter said: look, here I’m going to show you not
the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of
painting a certain landscape, and I trust their harmonious fusion
will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it.
Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight ^
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in
St. Petersburg, Russia. The rich and aristocratic Nabokovs were
not the “White Russian” stock figures of Western liberal demonol-
ogy — all monocles, Faberge snuffboxes, and reactionary opinions
— but rather a family with a long tradition of high culture and pub-
iNew York, 1941, p. 95. Henceforth, page references will be placed in paren-
theses in the text, and pertain to the hardcover editions of Nabokov’s books.
[ XV ]
lie service. Nabokov’s grandfather was Minister of Justice under
two tsars and implemented the court reforms, while Nabokov’s
father was a distinguished jurist, a foe of anti-Semitism, a prolific
journalist and scholar, a leader of the opposition party (the Ka-
dets), and a member of the first parliament (Duma). In 1919 he
took his family into exile, co-editing a liberal emigre daily in Ber-
lin until his death in 1922 (at age fifty-two), at a political meeting,
where he was shot while trying to shield the speaker from two
monarchist assassins. Young Nabokov went to Trinity College,
Cambridge, in 1922 taking an honors degree in Slavic and Ro-
mance Languages. For the next eighteen years he lived in Germany
and France, writing prolifically in Russian. The spectral emigre
communities of Europe were not large enough to sustain a writer,
and Nabokov supported himself through translations, public read-
ings of his works, lessons in English and tennis, and, fittingly, the
first Russian crossword puzzles, which he composed for a daily
emigre paper. In 1940 he and his wife and son moved to the
United States, and Nabokov began to write in English. The fre-
quently made comparison with Joseph Conrad denies Nabokov his
signal achievement; for the Polish-born author was thirty when he
started to write in English, and, unlike the middle-aged Nabokov,
he had not written anything in his native language, let alone nine
novels.
In America, Nabokov lectured on Russian literature at Wellesley
(1941-1948) and Cornell (1948-1958), where his Masterpieces
of European Eiction course proved immensely popular. While at
Wellesley he also worked on Lepidoptera in the Museum of
Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Nabokov’s several books in Eng-
lish had meanwhile earned him the quiet respect of discerning read-
ers, but Lolita was the first to attract wide attention. Its best-seller-
dom and film sale in 1958 enabled Nabokov to resign his teaching
position and devote himself to his writing. Since i960 he has lived
in Montreux, Switzerland, where he is now working on a new
novel (entitled Transparent Things) and a history of the butterfly
in Western art, and planning for the future publication of several
works, including his Cornell lectures, his screenplay of Lolita
(only parts of which were used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film),
[ xvi ]
and a selection of his Russian poems, translated by Nabokov and
to be published together with his chess problems.
Lolita made Lolita famous, rather than Nabokov. Although
praised by influential critics, Lolita was treated as a kind of miracle
of spontaneous generation, for Nabokov’s oeuvre was like an ice-
berg, the massive body of his Russian novels, stories, plays, and
poems remaining untranslated and out of sight, lurking beneath the
visible peaks of Lolita and Pnm (1957). But in the eleven years
since Putnam’s published Lolita, twenty-one Nabokov titles have
appeared, including seven works translated from the Russian, three
out-of-print novels, two collections of stories. Pale Fire (1962), the
monumental four -volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin
(1964), Speak, Memory: Ayi Autobiography Revisited (1966) — a
considerably revised and expanded version of the memoir first is-
sued in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence — and Ada (1969), his fif-
teenth novel, whose publication celebrated his seventieth birthday.
The publication of Mashenka (1926) and The Exploit (1931),
now being Englished by his son Dmitri, will complete the transla-
tion of his Russian novels.
This extraordinary outburst of Nabokoviana highlights the reso-
lute and indomitable spirit of the man who pubhshed his master-
pieces, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, at the ages of fifty -six, sixty- three,
and seventy, respectively. Nabokov endured the exigencies of
being an emigre writer when the Western world seemed inter-
ested only in his inferior Soviet contemporaries, and has emerged
not only as a major Russian writer, but as the most important living
American novelist. No doubt some academic pigeonholers still
worry about Nabokov’s nationality and where to “place” him, but
John Updike solved this synthetic problem when he described Na-
bokov as “the best writer of English prose at present holding
American citizenship.” ^ Not since Henry James, an emigre in his
own right, has an American citizen created so formidable a corpus
of work.
Nabokov’s pronounced antipathy to Freud and the novel of so-
ciety will continue to alienate some critics, but there is a reason for
1 John Updike, “Grandmaster Nabokov,” Neiv Republic, CLI (September 26,
1964), 15. Reprinted in Updike’s Assorted Prose (New York, 1965).
[ xvii ]
the delay in achieving his proper status more basic than the unavail-
ability of his books or his failure to conform to some accepted
school or Zeitgeist pattern: readers trained on the tenets of formal-
ist criticism have simply not known what to make of works which
resist the search for ordered mythic and symbolic “levels of mean-
ing” and depart completely from post-Jamesian requisites for the
“realistic” or “impressionistic” novel — that a fiction be the imper-
sonal product of a pure aesthetic impulse, a self-contained illusion
of reality rendered from a consistently held point of view and
through a central intelligence from which all authorial comment
has been exorcised. Quite the opposite happens in Nabokov’s fic-
tion: his art is artifice or nothing; and the fantastic, a-realistic, and
involuted forms toward which even his earliest fictions evolve
make it clear that Nabokov has always gone his own way, and it
has not been the way of the novel’s Great Tradition according to
F. R. Leavis. But Nabokov’s present eminence signals a radical shift
in opinions about the novel and the novelist’s ethical responsibilities.
A future historian of the novel may one day claim that it was Na-
bokov, more than any novelist now living, who kept alive an ex-
hausted art form not only by demonstrating new possibilities for it,
but by reminding us, through his example, of the variegated aes-
thetic resources of his great forebears, such as Sterne and the Joyce
who was a parodist rather than a symbolist.
In addition to its qualities as a memoir. Speak, Memory serves,
along with Chapter Five in Gogol (1944), as the ideal introduction
to Nabokov’s art, for some of the most lucid criticism of Nabokov
is found in his own books. His most overtly parodic novels spiral
in upon themselves and provide their own commentary; sections of
The Gift (1937-1938) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941) limpidly describe the narrative strategies of later novels.
Nabokov’s preoccupations are perhaps best projected by bringing
together the opening and closing sentences of Speak, Metnory: “The
cradle rocks above an aby.ss, and common sense tells us that our ex-
istence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of dark-
ness.” At the end of the book he describes how he and his wife first
perceived, through the stratagems thrown up to confound the eye,
the ocean liner waiting to take them and their son to America: “It
[ xviii ]
was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs
and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothes-
line as something in a scrambled picture — Find What the Sailor Has
Hidden — that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” The
Eye (1930) is well titled; the apprehension of “reality” (a word
that Nabokov says must always have quotes around it) is first of all
a miracle of vision, and our existence is a sequence of attempts to
unscramble the “pictures” glimpsed in that “brief crack of light.”
Both art and nature are to Nabokov “a game of intricate enchant-
ment and deception,” and the process of reading and rereading his
novels is a game of perception, like those E. H. Gombrich writes
about in Art and lllnsio?! — everything is there, in sight (no symbols
lurking in murky depths), but one must penetrate the trompe-V oeil,
which eventually reveals something totally different from what one
had expected. This is how Nabokov seems to envision the game of
life and the effect of his novels: each time a “scrambled picture”
has been discerned “the finder cannot unsee” it; consciousness has
been expanded or created.
The word “game” commonly denotes frivolity and an escape
from the exigencies of the world, but Nabokov confronts the void
by virtue of his play-concept. His “game of worlds” (to quote
John Shade in Fale Fire) proceeds within the terrifyingly immuta-
ble limits defined by the “two eternities of darkness” and is a
search for order — for “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the
game” — which demands the full consciousness of its players. The
author and the reader are the “players,” and when in Speak, Mem-
ory Nabokov describes the composition of chess problems he is also
telescoping his fictional practices. If one responds to the author’s
“false scents” and “specious lines of play,” best effected by parody,
and believes, say, that Humbert’s confession is “sincere” and that
he exorcises his guilt, or that the narrator of Fnin is really per-
plexed by Pnin’s animosity toward him, or that a Nabokov book is
an illusion of a reality proceeding under the natural laws of our
world — then one has not only lost the game to the author, but most
likely is not faring too well in the “game of worlds,” one’s own un-
scrambling of pictures.
Speak, Memory rehearses the major themes of Nabokov’s fic-
[ xix ]
tion: the confrontation of death; the withstanding of exile; the na-
ture of the creative process; the search for complete consciousness
and the “free world of timelessness.” In the first chapter he writes,
“I have journeyed back in thought— with thought hopelessly taper-
ing off as I went — to remote regions where I groped for some se-
cret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and
without exits.” Nabokov’s protagonists live in claustrophobic, cell-
like rooms; and Humbert, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading
(1936), and Krug in Be 7 id Sinister (1947) are all indeed impris-
oned. The struggle to escape from this spherical prison (Krug is
Russian for “circle”) assumes many forms throughout Nabokov;
and his own desperate and sometimes ludicrous attempts, as de-
scribed in Speak, Memory , are variously parodied in the poltergeist
machinations of The Eye, in Hazel Shade’s involvement with “a
domestic ghost” and her spirit-writing in the haunted barn in Bale
Fire, and in “The Vane Sisters” (in Nabokov’’ s Quartet [1966]),
where an acrostic in the final paragraph reveals that two vivid im-
ages from the story’s opening paragraphs were dictated by the dead
Vane sisters.
Although Speak, Memory clearly illuminates the self-parodic
content of Nabokov’s fiction, no one has fully recognized the aes-
thetic implications of these transmutations or the extent to which
Nabokov has consciously projected his own life in his fiction. To
be sure, this is dangerous talk, easily misunderstood. Of course Na-
bokov does not write the kind of thinly disguised transcription of
personal experience which too often passes for fiction. But it is cru-
cial to an understanding of his art to realize how often his novels
are improvisations on an autobiographic theme, and in Speak, Mem-
ory Nabokov good-naturedly anticipates his critics; “The future
specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to col-
late a protagonist’s experience in my novel The Gift with the origi-
nal event.” Further on he comments on his habit of bestowing
“treasured items” from his past on his characters. But it is more
than mere “items” that Nabokov has transmogrified in the
“artificial world” of his novels, as a dull specialist discovers by
comparing Chapters Eleven and Thirteen of Speak, Memory with
The Gift, or, since it is Nabokov’s overriding subject, by compar-
[ XX ]
ing the attitudes toward exile expressed in Speak, Memory with the
treatment it is given in his fiction. The reader of his memoir learns
that Nabokov’s great-grandfather explored and mapped Nova Zem-
bla (where Nabokov’s River is named after him), and in Vale Fire
Kinbote believes himself to be the exiled king of Zambia. His is
both a fantastic vision of Nabokov’s opulent past as entertained by
a madman, and the vision of a poet’s irreparable loss, expressed oth-
erwise by Nabokov in 1945: “Beyond the seas where I have lost a
sceptre, / I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns” (“An Evening
of Russian Poetry”). Nabokov’s avatars do not grieve for “lost
banknotes.” Their circumstances, though exacerbated by adversity,
are not exclusive to the emigre. Exile is a correlative for all human
loss, and Nabokov records with infinite tenderness the constrictions
the heart must suffer; even in his most parodic novels, such as Lo-
lita, he makes audible through all the playfulness a cry of pain.
“Pity,” says John Shade, “is the password.” Nabokov’s are emo-
tional and spiritual exiles, turned back upon themselves, trapped by
their obsessive memories and desires in a solipsistic “prison of mir-
rors” where they cannot distinguish the glass from themselves (to
use another prison trope, drawn from the story “The Assistant
Producer” Nabokov’s Dozen [1958]).^
'^The transcendence of solipsism is a central concern in Nabokov.
He recommends no escape, and there is an unmistakable moral res-
onance in his treatment of the theme: it is only at the outset of
Lolita that Humbert can say that he had Lolita “safely solipsized.”
The coldly unromantic scrutiny which his exiles endure is often
overlooked by critics. In Pnin the gentle, addlepated professor is
seen in a new and harsh light in the final chapter, when the narrator
assumes control and makes it clear that he is inheriting Pnin’s job
but not, he would hope, his existence. John Shade asks us to pity
“the exile, the old man / Dying in a motel,” and we do; but in the
Commentary, Kinbote says that a “king who sinks his identity in
the mirror of exile is guilty of [a regicide].” “The past [is] the
past,” Lolita tells Humbert toward the end of that novel (p. 274),
when he asks her to relive what had always been inexorably lost.
As a book about the spell exerted by the past, Lolita is Nabokov’s
own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of Speak,
[ xxi ]
Memory. Mnemosyne is now seen as a black muse, nostalgia as a
grotesque cul-de-sac. Lolita is the last book one would offer as “au-
tobiographical,” but even in its totally created form it connects
with the deepest reaches of Nabokov’s soul. Like the poet Fyodor
in The Gift, Nabokov could say that while he keeps everything
“on the very brink of parody . . . there must be on the other hand
an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow
ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it” (p. 212).
An autobiographic theme submitted to the imagination thus takes
on a new life: frozen in art, halted in space, now timeless, it can be
lived with. When the clownish Gradus assassinates John Shade by
mistake, in a novel published forty years after Nabokov’s father
was similarly murdered, one may remember the butterfly which
the seven-year-old Nabokov caught and then lost, but which was
“finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an im-
migrant dandelion ... near Boulder” {Speak, Memory, p. 120).
One recognizes how art makes life possible for Nabokov, and why
he calls Invitation to a Beheading a “violin in a void.” His art re-
cords a constant process of becoming — the evolution of the artist’s
self through artistic creation — and the cycle of insect metamorpho-
sis is Nabokov’s controlling metaphor for the process, provided by
a lifetime of biological investigations which established in his mind
“links between butterflies and the central problems of nature.” Sig-
nificantly, a butterfly or moth will often appear at the end of a Na-
bokov novel, when the artistic “cycle” of that book is complete.
Speak, Memory only reinforces what is suggested by Nabokov’s
visibly active participation in the life of his fiction, as in Invitation
to a Beheading when Cincinnatus strains to look out of his barred
window and sees on the prison wall the telling, half-erased inscrip-
tion, “You cannot see anything. I tried it too” (p. 29), written in
the neat, recognizable hand of the “prison director” — that is, the
author — whose intrusions involute the book and deny it any reality
except that of “book.” The word “involution” may trouble some
readers, but one has only to extend the dictionary definition. An in-
voluted work turns in upon itself, is self-referential, conscious of its
status as a fiction, and “allegorique de lui-meme " — allegorical
of itself, to use Mallarme’s description of one of his own poems.
[ xxii ]
An ideally involuted sentence would simply read, “I am a sen-
tence,” and John Barth’s recent short stories “Title,” “Life-Story,”
and “iVIenelaiad” (in Lost in the Fimhouse, 1968) come as close to
this dubious ideal as any fiction possibly can. The components of
“Title,” for example, sustain a miraculous discussion among them-
selves, sometimes even addressing the author: “Once upon a time
you were satisfied with incidental felicities and niceties of tech-
nique.”
Characters in involuted works often recognize that their authen-
ticity is more than suspect. In Raymond Queneau’s Les En^ants du
Limon (1938), Chambernac is a lycee headmaster who has been
collecting material for a monumental work on “literary madmen,”
L’ Encyclopedic des sciences inexactes. By the last chapter he has
abandoned hope of getting it published, but he then is approached
in a cafe by “z/w type’’’’ (Queneau, as it turns out, who identifies
himself by name) and offers to turn the manuscript over for use in
a novel Queneau is writing, one of whose characters is a headmas-
ter, and so forth. A similar infinite regress exists in Chapter Four of
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Lookmg-Glass (1872), the creator’s
(and Creator’s) role now played by the sleeping Red King. When
Alice moves to waken the King, Tweedledee stops her:
“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you
think he’s dreaming about?”
Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about your Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands
triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do
you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be
nowhere. Why you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d
go out — bang! — just like a candle!”
“I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if Vm
only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to
know?”
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
“Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush!
You’ll be waking him. I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”
[ xxiii ]
“Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Twee-
dledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You
know very well you’re not real.”
“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
A similar discussion occurs in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957).
“What is there to keep me here?” asks Clov. “The dialogue,” an-
swers Hamm. More like the Tweedles than Alice are the three
aging characters in Queneau’s he Chiendent (1933). Having sur-
vived the long destructive Franco-Etruscan war, by the final pages
they are ready for anything. When the queen is complimented, she
says, “It wasn’t I who said that. . . , It’s in the book.” Asked
“What book?,” she replies, “Well, this one. The one we’re in now,
which repeats what we say as we say it and which follows us and
tells about us, a genuine blotter which has been stuck on our
lives.” ^ They then discuss the novel of which they are a part and
agree to try to annihilate time and begin all over again. They go
back to Paris, back in time. The last two sentences of the book are
the first two sentences.
Although the philosophical implications are somewhat less inter-
esting, the most patent examples of involution are found in comic
books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. The creatures in car-
toons used to be brought to life before one’s eyes; first, the tabula
rasa of an empty screen, which is then seen to be a drawing board,
over which the artist’s brush sweeps, a few strokes creating the
characters, who only then begin to move. Or the convention of the
magical ink bottle, framing the action fore and aft. The characters
are sucked back into the bottle at the end, just as they had spilled
out of it at the start. These devices describe the process of Le Chien-
dent, where one sees a silhouette from the first page fleshed-out
more and more as the novel progresses, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s
Dans le labyrinthe (In the Labyrinth, 1959), where in the stillness
of his room the narrator contemplates several objects, including a
steel engraving, which is then “animated,” a fiction spinning out of
it. “We create ourselves in time,” says one of the characters at the
1 Raymond Queneau, Le Chiendent (Paris, 1933), p. 294. The above transla-
tions are mine — A.A.
[ xxiv ]
end of Le Chiendent, “and the old book snatches us up right away
with its funny httle scrawl [handwriting].” ^
In involuted works, characters readily communicate with their
creators, though the relationship is not always ideal. One may re-
call an early Bugs Bimny animated cartoon (c. 1943) in which
there is a wild running battle between the rabbit and the artist,
whose visible hand alternately wields an eraser and a drawing pen-
cil, terrible weapons which at one moment remove the rabbit’s feet
so that he cannot escape, and at another give him a duck’s bill so
that he cannot talk back, not unlike the lot of the characters in In-
vitation to a Beheading, who are taken apart, rearranged, and reas-
sembled at will. But characters are not always as uncomplaining as
Cincinnatus. In the next-to-last box of a 1936 daily strip, Chester
Gould pictured his hero trapped horribly in a mine shaft, its en-
trance blocked by a huge boulder. The balloon above Dick Tracy’s
stricken face said, “Gould, you have gone too far.” The concluding
box was to have shown a kindly eraser-bearing hand, descend-
ing to remove the boulder; but The Chicago Tribune's Captain
Patterson, no doubt a disciple of Dr. Leavis, thought Gould had in-
deed gone too far, and rejected that strip. Considerably less desper-
ate is Shakespeare’s direct address to Joyce in Nighttown: “How
my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun,” that moment being
Bloomsday, this book, and Joyce’s stab at greatness.^ “O Jamesy let
me up out of this,” pleads Molly Bloom to Joyce,^ and in the halluci-
nated Nighttown section the shade of Virag says, “That suits your
book, eh?” WTien in acknowledgment his throat is made to twitch,
Virag says, “Slapbang! There he goes again.” ^ Virag is quite right
to speak directly to Joyce, because the phantasmagoria of Night-
town are the artist’s. \^irag accepts the truth that he is another’s
creation, and does so far more gracefully than Alice or poor Krug
in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, who is instantaneously rendered insane
by the realization. On the other hand, this perception steels Cincin-
1 ibid.
2 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1961), p. 567.
2 ibid., p. 769.
^ibid., p. 513.
[ XXV ]
natus, who is waiting to be beheaded, since it means he cannot
really “die.”
Nabokov’s remarks on Gogol help to underscore this analogical
definition of involution. “All reality is a mask,” he writes (p. 148),
and Nabokov’s narratives are masques, stagings of his own inven-
tions rather than re-creations of the naturalistic world. But, since
the latter is what most readers expect and demand of fiction, many
still do not understand what Nabokov is doing. They are not accus-
tomed to “the allusions to something else behind the crudely
painted screens” (p. 142), where the “real plots behind the obvious
ones are taking place.” There are thus at least two “plots” in all of
Nabokov’s fiction: the characters in the book, and the conscious-
ness of the creator above it — the “real plot” which is visible in the
“gaps” and “holes” in the narrative. These are best described in
Chapter Fourteen of Speak, Memory, when Nabokov discusses
“the loneliest and most arrogant” of the emigre writers, Sirin (his
emigre pen name): “The real life of his books flowed in his fig-
ures of speech, which one critic [Nabokov?] has compared to win-
dows giving upon a contiguous world ... a rolling corollary, the
shadow of a train of thought.” The contiguous world is the mind
and spirit of the author, whose identity, psychic survival, and
“manifold awareness” are ultimately both the subject and the prod-
uct of the book. In whatever way they are opened, the “windows”
always reveal that “the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca,
N.Y.) is the nucleus” of everything.
From its birth in King, Queen, Knave (1928), to its full matura-
tion in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), to its apotheosis in the
“involute abode” of Pale Fire (1962), the strategy of involution
has determined the structure and meaning of Nabokov’s novels.
One must always be aware of the imprint of “that master thumb,”
to quote Frank Lane in Pale Fire, “that made the whole involuted
boggling thing one beautiful straight line,” for only then does it be-
come possible to see how the “obvious plots” spiral in and out of
the “real” ones. Although other writers have created involuted
works, Nabokov’s self-consciousness is supreme; and the range and
scale of his effects, his mastery and control, make him unique. Not
including autobiographic themes, the involution is achieved in six
[ xxvi ]
basic ways, all closely interrelated, but schematized here for the
sake of clarity:
Parody. As willful artifice, parody provides the main basis for Na-
bokov’s involution, the “springboard for leaping into the highest re-
gion of serious emotion,” as the narrator of The Real Life of Se-
bastian Knight says of Knight’s novels. Because its referents are ei-
ther other works of art or itself, parody denies the possibility of a
naturalistic fiction. Only an authorial sensibility can be responsible
for the texture of parody and self-parody; it is a verbal vaudeville,
a series of literary impersonations performed by the author. When
Nabokov calls a character or even a window shade “a parody,” it is
in the sense that his creation can possess no other “reality.” In a
novel such as Lolita, which has the fewest “gaps” of any novel
after Despair (1934), and is seemingly his most realistic, the involu-
tion is sustained by the parody and the verbal patterning.
Coincidence. Speak, Memory is filled with examples of Nabokov’s
love of coincidence. Because they are drawn from his life, these in-
cidents demonstrate how Nabokov’s imagination responds to coin-
cidence, using it in his fiction to trace the pattern of a life’s design,
to achieve shattering interpenetrations of space and time. “Some
law of logic,” writes Nabokov in Ada (1969), “should fix the num-
ber of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to
be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new
truth”(p. 368). Humbert goes to live in Charlotte Haze’s house at
342 Lawn Street; he and Lolita inaugurate their illicit cross-coun-
try tour in room 342 of The Enchanted Hunters hotel; and in one
year on the road they register in 342 motels and hotels. Given the
endless mathematical combinations possible, the numbers seem to
signal his entrapment by McFate (to use Humbert’s personifica-
tion). But they are also a patent, purposeful contrivance, like the
copy of the 1946 Who's Who in the Limelight which Humbert
would have us believe he found in the prison library on the night
previous to his writing the chapter we are now reading. The year-
book not only prefigures the novel’s action, but under Lolita’s
mock-entry of “Dolores Quine” we are informed that she “Made
[ xxvii ]
New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers'’’ — and in the
closing paragraph of the novel, almost three hundred pages later,
Humbert advises the absent Lolita, “Do not talk to strangers,” a
detail that exhibits extraordinary narrative control for an allegedly
unrevised, first-draft confessional, written during fifty-six chaotic
days. Clearly, “Someone else is in the know,” to quote a mysterious
voice that interrupts the narration of Bend Sinister. It is no coinci-
dence when coincidences extend from book to book. Creations
from one “reality” continually turn up in another; the imaginary
writer Pierre Delalande is quoted in The Gift and provides the epi-
graph for Inv'itat'ion to a Beheading (inadvertently omitted from
the paperback edition); Pnin and another character mention “Vlad-
imir Vladimirovich” and dismiss his entomology as an affectation;
“Hurricane Lolita” is mentioned in Pale Fire, and Pnin is glimpsed
in the university library. Mythic or prosaic names and certain fa-
tidic numbers recur with slight variation in many books, carrying
no burden of meaning whatsoever other than the fact that some-
one beyond the work is repeating them, that they are all part of
one master pattern.
Patterning. Nabokov’s passion for chess, language, and lepidop-
tery has inspired the most elaborately involuted patterning in his
work. Like the games implemented by parody, the puns, anagrams,
and spoonerisms all reveal the controlling hand of the logomachist;
thematically, they are appropriate to the prison of mirrors. Chess
motifs are woven into several narratives, and even in The Defense
(1930), a most naturalistically ordered early novel, the chess pat-
terning points to forces beyond Grandmaster Luzhin’s comprehen-
sion (“Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move
is made by me in a corner of the board,” writes Nabokov in the
Foreword). The importance of the lepidopteral motif has already
been suggested, and it spirals freely in and out of Nabokov’s
books: in Invitation to a Beheading, just before he is scheduled to
die, Cincinnatus gently strokes a giant moth; in Pale Fire a butter-
fly alights on John Shade’s arm the minute before he is killed; in
Ada, when Van Veen arrives for a duel, a transparent white butter-
fly floats past and Van is certain he has only minutes to live; in the
[ xxviii ]
final chapter of Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls seeing in Paris,
just before the war, a live butterfly being promenaded on a leash of
thread; at the end of Bend Sinister the masked author intrudes and
suspends the “obvious plot,” and as the book closes he looks out of
the window and decides, as a moth twangs against the screen, that
it is “A good night for mothing.” Be?id Sinister was published in
1947, and it is no accident that in Nabokov’s next novel (1955)
Humbert meets Lolita back in 1947, thus sustaining the author’s
“fictive time” without interruption and enabling him to pursue that
moth’s lovely diurnal Double through the substratum of the new
novel in the most fantastic butterfly hunt of his career. “I confess I
do not believe in time,” writes Nabokov at the end of the ecstatic
butterfly chapter in Speak, Memory . “I like to fold my magic car-
pet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pat-
tern upon another.”
The Work-Within-the-Work. The self-referential devices in
Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles, are
clearly of the author’s making, since no point of view within the fic-
tion could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they create.
The course of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which purports
to be an attempt to gather material for a proposed literary biogra-
phy of the narrator’s half brother but ends by obfuscating even the
narrator’s identity, is refracted in Knight’s first novel. The Pris-
matic Bezel, “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale.”
Like an Elizabethan play-within-a-play, Quilty’s play within Lo-
lita, The Enchatited Hmiters, offers a “message” that can be taken
seriously as a commentary on the progression of the entire novel;
and Who^s Who in the Limelight and the class list of the Ramsdale
school magically mirror the action taking place around them, in-
cluding, by implication, the writing of Lolita. The a-novelistic
components of Pale Fire — Foreword, Poem, Commentary, and In-
dex — create a mirror-lined labyrinth of involuted cross references,
a closed cosmos that can only be of the author’s making, rather
than the product of an “unreliable” narrator. Pale Fire realizes the
ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twen-
ty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the
[ xxix ]
fourth chapter of The Gift. If it is disturbing to discover that the
characters in The Gift are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is
because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within
Hamlet, “that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers
or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” ^
The Staging of the Novel. Nabokov wrote the screenplay of
Lolita, as well as nine plays in Russian, including one of his several
forays into science fiction. The Waltz Invention (1938), which
was translated and published in 1966. It is not surprising, then, that
his novels should proliferate with “theatrical” effects that serve his
play-spirit exceedingly well. Problems of identity can be investi-
gated poetically by trying on and discarding a series of masks.
And, too, what better way to demonstrate that everything in a
book is being manipulated than by seeming to stage it? In Invitation
to a Beheading, “A Summer thunderstorm, simply yet tastefully
staged, was performed outside.” When Quilty finally dies in Lo-
lita, Humbert says, “This was the end of the ingenious play staged
for me by Quilty”; and in Laughter in the Dark (1932), “The
stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, tri-
ple, self-reflecting Proteus.” Nabokov the protean impersonator is
always a masked presence in his fiction; as impresario, scenarist,
director, warden, dictator, landlord, and even as bit player (the
seventh Hunter in Quilty ’s play within Lolita, a Young Poet who
insists that everything in the play is his invention) — to name only a
few of the disguises he has donned as a secret agent who moves
among his own creations like Prospero in The Tempest. Shake-
speare is very much an ancestor (he and Nabokov even share a
birthday), and the creaking, splintering noise made by the stage
setting as it disintegrates at the end of Invitation to a Beheading is
Nabokov’s version of the snapping of Prospero’s wand and his
speech to the players (“Our revels now are ended. These our
actors, /As I foretold you, were all spirits and /Are melted into
air, into thin air”; IV. i).
1 J. L. Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote^ in Labyrinths (New York, 1964),
p. 196.
[ XXX ]
Authorial Voice. All the involuted effects spiral into the au-
thorial voice — “an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me,”
Nabokov calls it — which intrudes continually in all of his novels
after Despair, most strikingly at the end, when it completely takes
over the book {Lolita is a notable exception). It is this “deity”
who is responsible for everything: who begins a narrative only to
stop and retell the passage differently; halts a scene to “rerun” it on
the chapter’s screen, or turns a reversed lantern slide around to pro-
ject it properly; intrudes to give stage directions, to compliment or
exhort the actors, to have a prop moved; who reveals that the char-
acters have “cotton-padded bodies” and are the author’s puppets,
that all is a fiction; and who widens the “gaps” and “holes” in the
narrative until it breaks apart at “the end,” when the vectors are re-
moved, the cast of characters is dismissed, and even the fiction
fades away — at most leaving behind an imprint on space in the
form of a precis of “an old-fashioned [stage] melodrama” the
“deity” may one day write, and which describes (as in the case of
Pale Fire) the book we’ve just finished reading.
The vertiginous conclusion of a Nabokov novel calls for a com-
plicated response which many readers, after a lifetime of realistic
novels, are incapable of making. Children, however, are aware of
other possibilities, as their art reveals. My own children, then three
and six years old, reminded me of this two summers ago when they
inadvertently demonstrated that, unless they change, they will be
among Nabokov’s ideal readers. One afternoon my wife and I built
them a puppet theater. After propping the theater on the top edge
of the living room couch, I crouched down behind it and began
manipulating the two hand puppets in the stage above me. The
couch and the theater’s scenery provided good cover, enabling me
to peer over the edge and watch the children immediately become
engrossed in the show, and then virtually mesmerized by my im-
provised little story that ended with a patient father spanking an
impossible child. But the puppeteer, carried away by his story’s vio-
lent climax, knocked over the entire theater, which clattered onto
the floor, collapsing into a heap of cardboard, wood, and cloth —
leaving me crouched, peeking out at the room, my head now visi-
[ xxxi ]
ble over the couch’s rim, my puppeted hands, with their naked
wrists, poised in mid-air. For several moments my children re-
mained in their open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at
the space where the theater had been, not seeing me at all. Then
they did the kind of double take that a comedian might take a life-
time to perfect, and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had
never seen before — and not so much at my clumsiness, which was
nothing new, but rather at those moments of total involvement in a
nonexistent world, and at what its collapse implied to them about
the authenticity of the larger world, and about their daily efforts to
order it and their own fabricated illusions. They were laughing,
too, over their sense of what the vigorous performance had meant
to me; but they saw how easily they could be tricked and their
trust belied, and the shrillness of their laughter finally suggested
that they recognized the frightening implications of what had hap-
pened, and that only laughter could steel them in their new aware-
ness.
When in 1966 I visited Vladimir Nabokov for four days in Mon-
treux, to interview him for Wisconsm Studies and in regard to my
critical study of his work, I told him about this incident, and how
for me it defined literary involution and the response which he
hoped to elicit from his readers at “the end” of a novel. “Exactly,
exactly,” he said as I finished. “You must put that in your book.”
In parodying the reader’s complete, self-indulgent identification
with a character, which in its mindlessness limits consciousness, Na-
bokov is able to create the detachment necessary for a multiform,
spatial view of his novels. The “two plots” in Nabokov’s puppet
show are thus made plainly visible as a description of the total de-
sign of his work, which reveals that in novel after novel his charac-
ters try to escape from Nabokov’s prison of mirrors, struggling to-
ward a self-awareness that only their creator has achieved by creat-
ing them — an involuted process which connects Nabokov’s art
with his life, and clearly indicates that the author himself is not in
this prison. He is its creator, and is above it, in control of a book, as
in one of those Saul Steinberg drawings (greatly admired by Nabo-
kov) that show a man drawing the very line that gives him “life,”
in the fullest sense. But the process of Nabokov’s involution, the
[ xxxii ]
global perspective which he invites us to share with him, is best de-
scribed in Speak, Memory, Chapter Fifteen, when he comments on
the disinclination of
. . . physicists to discuss the outside of the inside, the where-
abouts of the curvature; for every dimension presupposes a me-
dium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding
of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in
its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, an-
other dimension follows — a special Space maybe, not the old one,
we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again.
The ultimate detachment of an “outside” view of a novel inspires
our wonder and enlarges our potential for compassion because, “in
the spiral unwinding of things,” such compassion is extended to in-
clude the mind of an author whose deeply humanistic art affirms
man’s ability to confront and order chaos.
2. BACKGROUNDS OF LOLITA
Critics too often treat Nabokov’s twelfth novel as a special case
quite apart from the rest of his work, when actually it concerns,
profoundly and in their darkest and yet most comic form, the
themes which have always occupied him. Although Lolita may still
be a shocking novel to several aging non-readers, the exact cir-
cumstances of its troubled publication and reception may not be fa-
miliar to younger readers. After four American publishers refused
it, Madame Ergaz, of Bureau Litteraire Clairouin, Paris, submitted
Lolita to Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris. ^ Although
Girodias must be credited with the publication of several estimable
if controversial works by writers such as Jean Genet, his main fare
was the infamous Travellers Companion series, the green-backed
books once so familiar and dear to the eagle-eyed inspectors of
the U.S. Customs. But Nabokov did not know this and, because
of one of Girodias’ previous publishing ventures, the “Editions du
Chene,” thought him a publisher of “fine editions.” Cast in two
1 See Nabokov’s article “Lolita and Mr. Girodias,” Evergreen Review, XI (Feb-
ruary 1967), 37-41.
[ xxxiii ]
volumes and bound in the requisite green, Lolita was quietly pub-
lished in Paris in September 1955.
Because it seemed to confirm the judgment of those nervous
American publishers, the Girodias imprimatur became one more
obstacle for Lolita to overcome, though the problem of its alleged
pornography indeed seems remote today, and was definitively set-
tled in France not long after its publication. I was Nabokov’s stu-
dent at Cornell in 1953-1954, at a time when most undergraduates
did not know he was a writer. Drafted into the army a year later, I
was sent overseas to France. On my first pass to Paris I naturally
went browsing in a Left Bank bookstore. An array of Olympia
Press books, daringly displayed above the counter, seemed most in-
viting — and there, between copies of Until She Screams and The
Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe^ I found Lolita. Although I
thought I knew all of Nabokov’s works in English (and had
searched through out-of-print stores to buy each of them), this
title was new to me; and its context and format were more than
surprising, even if in those innocent pre-Grove Press days the
semi-literate wags on fraternity row had dubbed Nabokov’s Litera-
ture 3 1 1-3 1 2 lecture course “Dirty Lit” because of such readings
as Ulysses and Madame Bovary (the keenest campus wits invaria-
bly dropped the B when mentioning the latter). I brought Lolita
back to my base, which was situated out in the woods. Passes were
hard to get and new Olympia titles were always in demand in the
barracks. The appearance of a new girl in town thus caused a
minor clamor. “Hey, lemme read your dirty book, man!” insisted
“Stockade Clyde” Carr, who had justly earned his sobriquet, and
to whose request I acceded at once. “Read it aloud. Stockade,”
someone called, and skipping the Foreword, Stockade Clyde began
to make his remedial way through the opening paragraph. “ ‘Lo
. . . lira, light ... of my life, fire of my . . . loins. My sin, my soul
. . . Lo-lee-ta: The ... tip of the . . . tongue . . . taking ... a trip . . .’
— Damnr yelled Stockade, throwing the book against the wall,
“/t’r God-damn LitachureH" Thus the Instant Pornography Test,
known in psychological-testing circles as the “IPT.” Although in-
fallible, it has never to my knowledge been used in any court case.
At a double remove from the usual review media, Lolita went
[ xxxiv ]
generally unnoticed during its first six months. But in the winter of
1956 Graham Greene in England recommended Lolita as one of
the best books of 1955, incurring the immediate wrath of a colum-
nist in the Sunday Express, which moved Greene to respond in The
Spectator. Under the heading of “Albion” (suggesting a quaint
tempest in an old teapot), The New York Times Book Review of
February 26, 1956, alluded briefly to this exchange, calling Lolita
“a long French novel” and not mentioning Nabokov by name.
Two weeks later, noting “that our mention of it created a flurry of
mail,” The Times devoted two-thirds of a column to the subject,
quoting Greene at some length. Thus began the underground exist-
ence of Lolita, which became public in the summer of 1957 when
the Anchor Review in New York devoted 1 1 2 of its pages to Na-
bokov. Included were an excellent introduction by F. W. Dupee, a
long excerpt from the novel, and Nabokov’s Afterword, “On a
Book Entitled Lolita.'' When Putnam’s brought out the American
edition in 1958 they were able to dignify their full-page advertise-
ments with an array of statements by respectable and even distin-
guished literary names, though Lolita's fast climb to the top of the
best-seller list was not exclusively the result of their endorsements
or the novel’s artistry. “Hurricane / Folita swept from Florida to
Maine” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire [ 1 . 680]), also creating
storms in England and Italy, and in France, where it was banned
on three separate occasions. Although it never ran afoul of the law
in this country, there were predictably some outraged protests, in-
cluding an editorial in The New Republic; but, since these at best
belong to social rather than literary history, they need not be de-
tailed here, with one exception. Orville Prescott’s review in the
daily New York Times of August 18, 1958, has a charm that
should be preserved: “ ‘Lolita,’ then, is undeniably news in the
world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two
equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s atten-
tion. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and
archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.” ^ Pres-
1 In a manner similar to Joyce’s, Nabokov four years later paid his respects to
Prescott, though not by name, by having the assassin Gradus carefully read The
New York Times: “A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his
[ XXXV ]
cott’s remarks complement those of an anonymous reviewer in The
Southern Quarterly Review (January 1852), who found an earlier,
somewhat different treatment of the quest theme no less intolera-
ble: “The book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Mel-
ville’s Quakers are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his
Mad Captain, who pursues his personal revenges against the fish
who has taken off his leg, at the expense of ship, crew and owners,
is a monstrous bore. . . .”
Not surprisingly, Humbert Humbert’s obsession has moved com-
mentators to search for equivalent situations in Nabokov’s earlier
work, and they have not been disappointed. In The Gift (written
between 1935 and 1937), some manuscript pages on the desk of the
young poet Fyodor move a character to say:
“Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From
real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog — but still in his
prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness — gets to know a widow, and
she has a daughter, still quite a little girl — you know what I mean
— when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walk-
ing that drives you out of your mind — A slip of a girl, very fair,
f )ale, with blue under the eyes — and of course she doesn’t even
00k at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he
ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of
them. Here you can go on indefinitely — the temptation, the eter-
nal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot — a miscal-
culation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out — and not a
sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt.
Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story,
you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in
fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul. . . .’’ (pp.
198-199)
Although the passage ^ seems to anticipate Lolita (“It’s queer, I seem
to remember my future works,” says Fyodor [p. 206]), Laugh-
ter in the Dark (1932) is mentioned most often in this regard, since
Albinus Kretschmar sacrifices everything, including his eyesight,
own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his)
description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers” (Pale Fire, p. 275). This
was actually culled from the newspaper.
1 Also pointed out by Andrew Field, in Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston,
1967), p. 325, and Carl R. Proffer, Keys to Lolita (Bloomington, 1968), p. 3.
[ xxxvi ]
for a girl, and loses her to a hack artist, Axel Rex. “Yes,” agrees
Nabokov, “some affinities between Rex and Quilty exist, as they do
benv^een Margot and Lo. Actually, of course, Margot was a com-
mon young whore, not an unfortunate little Lolita [and, techni-
cally speaking, no nymphet at all — A. A. ] . Anyway I do not think
that those recurrent sexual oddities and morbidities are of much in-
terest or importance. My Lolita has been compared to Emmie in
Invitation, to Mariette in Betid Sinister, and even Colette in Speak,
Memory...” (Wisconsin Studies interview, see Bibliography).
Nabokov is justly impatient with those who hunt for Ur-Lolitas,
for a preoccupation with specific “sexual morbidities” obscures the
more general context in which these oddities should be seen, and
his Afterword offers an urgent corrective. The reader of this Intro-
duction should turn to that Afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lo-
lita,” but not before placing a bookmark here, one substantial
enough to remind him to return — a brightly colored piece of cloth-
ing would be suitable (the Notes to page 318 are particularly rec-
ommended). Now please turn to page 313.
Having just completed the Afterword, the serious reader is fa-
mihar with Nabokov’s account of Lolita's origins. That “initial
shiver of inspiration” resulted in a short story, “The Magician”
(“Volshebnik”), written in Russian in 1939, but never published.
Nabokov excerpted two passages for Andrew Field’s critical
study.^ In the first, the magician sees the young girl for the first
time in the Tuileries Gardens:
A girl of twelve (he determined age with an unerring eye),
dressed in a violet frock, was moving step by step her roller
skates, which did not work on the gravel — lifting each in turn
and bringing it down with a crunch — as she advanced at a kind
of Japanese tread, through the striped rapture of the sun, toward
his bench. Later (as long as that “later” endured) it would seem
to him that right then, at one glance he had taken her measure
from head to foot: the animation of her reddish-brown curls
which had been recently trimmed, the lightness of her large va-
cant eyes which somehow brought to mind a semi-translucent
gooseberry, the gay warm color of her face, her pink mouth,
just barely open so that her two large front teeth were resting
1 Quoted by Field, op. cit., pp. 328-329.
[ xxxvii ]
lightly on the cushion of her lower lip, the summer tan of her
bare arms with sleek fox-like little hairs running along the fore-
arms, the vague tenderness of her still narrow but already not at
all flat chest, the movement of the folds in her skirt, their short
sweep and light fall back into place, the slenderness and glow of
her careless legs, the sturdy straps of her roller skates. She stopped
in front of the amiable woman sitting beside him who, turning to
rummage in something which she had by her right hand side,
found and held out to the little girl a piece of chocolate on a
piece of bread. Chewing rapidly, she undid the straps with her
free hand, shook off all the heaviness of steel soles on solid wheels
— and, descending to us on earth, having straightened up with a
sudden sensation of heavenly nakedness which took a moment to
grow aware of being shaped by shoes and socks, she rushed off.
According to Field, Arthur makes no sexual advances until almost
the final page, soon after the girl’s mother has died:
“Is this where I sleep?” the little girl asked indifferently, and
when, struggling with the shutters so as to further close the slits
between them, he answered, yes, she looked at her cap which she
was holding in her hand and limply tossed it onto the broad bed.
“Well,” he said after the old porter who had lugged in their
suitcases had left, and there remained only the beating of his heart
and the distant shiver of the night, “Well . . . Now to bed.”
Unsteady in her drowsiness, she stumbled against the edge of
the armchair, and, then, simultaneously sitting down, he drew her
to him by encircling her hip; she, arching her body, grew up like
an angel, strained all her muscles for a moment, took still another
half-step, and then lightly sank down in his lap. “My darling, my
poor little girl,” he murmured in a sort of general mist of pity,
tenderness, and desire, observing her sleepiness, fuzziness, her wan
smile, fondling her through her dark dress, feeling the stripe of the
orphan’s garter through its thin wool, thinking about her defense-
lessness, her state of abandonment, her warmth, enjoying the ani-
mated weight of her legs which sprawled loose and then again,
with an ever so light bodily rustle, hunched themselves up higher
— and she slowly wound one dreamy tight-sleeved arm around the
back of his neck, immersing him in the chestnut odor of her soft
hair.
But Arthur fails as both a magician and lover, and soon afterwards
dies in a manner which Nabokov will transfer to Charlotte Haze.
While the scene clearly foreshadows the first night at The En-
[ xxxviii ]
chanted Hunters hotel, its straightforward action and solemn tone
are quite different, and it compresses into a few paragraphs what
will later occupy almost two chapters (pp. 1 21-135). Arthur’s en-
joyment of the girl’s “animated weight” suggests the considerably
more combustible lap scene in Lolita (pp. 60-63), perhaps the
most erotic interlude in the novel- — but it only suggests it. Aside
from such echoes, one must assume, on the evidence of these two
long passages, that little beyond the basic idea of the tale subsists in
Lolita; and the telling is quite literally a world apart.
“The Magician” went unpublished not because of the forbidding
subject matter, but rather, says Nabokov, because the girl possessed
httle “semblance of reality,” ^ In 1949, after moving from Welles-
ley to Cornell, he became involved in a “new treatment of the
theme, this time in English.” Although Lolita “developed slowly,”
taking five years to complete, Nabokov had everything in mind
quite early. As is customary with him, however, he did not write it
in exact chronological sequence. Humbert’s confessional diary was
composed at the outset of this “new treatment,” followed by Hum-
bert and Lohta’s first journey westward, and the climactic scene in
which Quilty is killed (“His death had to be clear in my mind in
order to control his earlier appearances,” says Nabokov). Nabo-
kov next filled in the gaps of Humbert’s early life, and then pro-
ceeded ahead with the rest of the action, more or less in chronolog-
ical order. Humbert’s final interview with Lolita was composed at
the very end, in 1954, followed only by John Ray’s Foreword.
Especially new in this treatment was the shift from the third per-
son to the first person, which created- — obviously — the always for-
midable narrative problem of having an obsessed and even mad
character meaningfully relate his own experience, a problem com-
pounded in this specific instance by the understandable element of
1 One should remember that the story would have been read by a Russian
emigre audience, notes Andrew Field. Strongly erotic (as opposed to porno-
graphic) themes have been used “seriously” far more frequently by Russian
writers than by their English and American counterparts. Field points to Dos-
toevsky (the suppressed chapter of The Possessed), Leskov, Sologub, Kuzmin,
Rozanov, Kuprin, Pilnyak, Babel, and Bunin {ibid., p. 332). Field also sum-
marizes the plots of two early, untranslated Nabokov stories which treat sexual
themes, “A Fauytale” (1926) and “A Dashing Fellow” (c. 1936); {ibid., pp. 333-
334 )-
[ xxxix ]
self-justification which his perversion would necessarily occasion,
and by the fact that Humbert is a dying man. One wonders
whether Thomas Mann would have been able to make Death in
Ve7iice an allegory about art and the artist if Aschenbach had been
its narrator. While many of Nabokov’s other principal characters
are victims (Luzhin, Pnin, Albinus), none of them tells his own
story; and it is only Humbert who is both victim and victimizer,
thus making him unique among Nabokov’s first-person narrators
(discounting Hermann, the mad and murderous narrator of De-
spair, who is too patently criminal to qualify properly as victim).
By having Humbert tell the tale, Nabokov created for himself the
kind of challenge best described in Chapter Fourteen of Speak,
Memory when, in a passage written concurrently with the early
stages of Lolita, he compares the composition of a chess problem
to “the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author,
in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he
observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the
zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredi-
ents — rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings.” ^
In addition to such obstacles, the novel also developed slowly be-
cause of an abundance of materials as unfamiliar as they were un-
likely. It had been difficult enough to “invent Russia and Western
Europe,” let alone America, and at the age of fifty Nabokov now
had to set about obtaining “such local ingredients as would allow
me to inject a modicum of average ‘reality’ (one of the few words
which mean nothing without quotes) into the brew of individual
fancy.” “What was most difficult,” he recently told an interviewer,
“was putting myself ... I am a normal man, you see.” ^ Research
was thus called for, and in scholarly fashion Nabokov followed
newspaper stories involving pedophilia (incorporating some into
the novel), read case studies, and, like Margaret Mead coming
home to roost, even did research in the field: “I travelled in school
buses to listen to the talk of schoolgirls. I went to school, on the
1 And speaking specifically of the writing of Lolita, he says, “She was like the
composition of a beautiful puzzle — its composition and its solution at the same
time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.”
2 Penelope Gilliatt, “Nabokov,” Vogue, No. 2170 (December 1966), p. 280.
[ xl ]
pretext of placing our daughter. We have no daughter. For Lolita,
I took one arm of a little girl who used to come to see Dmitri [his
son], one kneecap of another,” ^ and thus a nymphet was born.
Perspicacious “research” aside, it was a remarkable imaginative
feat for a European emigre to have re-created America so bril-
liantly, and in so doing to have become an American writer. Of
course, those critics and readers who marvel at Nabokov’s accom-
plishment may not realize that he physically knows America better
than most of them. As he says in Speak, Memory, his adventures as
a “lepist” carried him through two hundred motel rooms in forty-
six states, that is, along all the roads traveled by Humbert and Lo-
lita. Yet of all of Nabokov’s novels, Lolita is the most unlikely one
for him to have written, given his background and the rarefied na-
ture of his art and avocations. “It was hardly foreseeable,” writes
Anthony Burgess, “that so exquisite and scholarly an artist should
become America’s greatest literary glory, but now it seems wholly
just and inevitable.” ^ It was even less foreseeable that Nabokov
would realize better than any contemporary the hopes expressed by
Constance Rourke in American Hwnor (1931) for a literature that
would achieve an instinctive alliance between native materials and
old world traditions, though the literal alliance in Lolita is perhaps
more intimate than even Miss Rourke might have wished. But to
know Nabokov at all personally is first to be impressed by his in-
tense and immense curiosity, his uninhibited and imaginative re-
sponse to everything around him. To paraphrase Henry James’s fa-
mous definition of the artist, Nabokov is truly a man on whom
nothing is lost — except that in Nabokov’s instance it is true,
whereas James and many American literary intellectuals after him
have been so self-conscious in their mandarin “seriousness” and
consequently so narrow in the range of their responses that they
have often overlooked the sometimes extraordinarily uncommon
qualities of the commonplace.
Nabokov’s responsiveness is characterized for me by the last eve-
ning of my first visit to Montreux in September 1966. During my
1 Ibid.
2 Anthony Burgess, “Poet and Pedant,” The Spectator, March 24, 1967, p. 336.
Reprinted in Urgent Copy (New York, 1969).
[ xli ]
two hours of conversation with the Nabokovs in their suite after
dinner, Nabokov tried to imagine what the history of painting
might have been like if photography had been invented in the Mid-
dle Ages; spoke about science fiction; asked me if I had noticed
what was happening in Li7 Abner and then compared it, in
learned fashion, with an analogous episode of a dozen years back;
noted that a deodorant stick had been found among the many days’
siege provisions which the Texas sniper had with him on the tower;
discoursed on a monstrous howler in the translation of Bely’s St.
Petersburg; showed me a beautifully illustrated book on humming-
birds, and then discussed the birdlife of Lake Geneva; talked ad-
miringly and often wittily of the work of Borges, Updike, Salin-
ger, Genet, Andrei Sinyavsky (“Abram Tertz”), Burgess, and
Graham Greene, always making precise critical discriminations; re-
called his experiences in Hollywood while working on the screen-
play of Lolita, and his having met Marilyn Monroe at a party (“A
delightful actress. Delightful,” he said. “Which is your favorite
Monroe film.^”) ; talked of the Soviet writers he admired, summariz-
ing their stratagems for survival; and defined for me exactly what
kind of beetle Kafka’s Gregor Samsa was in The Metamorphosis
(“It was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths, and
neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was
being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have
flown out and escaped and joined the other happy dung beetles
rolling the dung balls on rural paths”). And did I know how a
dung beetle laid its eggs? Since I did not, Nabokov rose and imi-
tated the process, bending his head toward his waist as he walked
slowly across the room, making a dung-rolling motion with his
hands until his head was buried in them and the eggs were laid.
When Lenny Bruce’s name somehow came up, both Nabokov and
his wife commented on how sad they had been to hear of Bruce’s
death; he had been a favorite of theirs. But they disagreed about
where it was that they had last seen Bruce; Mrs. Nabokov thought
it had been on Jack Paar’s television show, while her husband — the
scientist, linguist, and author of fifteen novels, who has written and
published in three languages, and whose vast erudition is most
clearly evidenced by the four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eu-
[ xlii ]
gene Onegin, with its two volumes of annotations and one-
hundred-page “Note on Prosody”- — held out for the Ed Sullivan
show.
Not only is nothing lost on Nabokov, but, like the title character
in Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” he seems to remember ev-
erything. At dinner the first evening of my 1966 visit, we remi-
nisced about Cornell and his courses there, which were extraordi-
nary and thoroughly Nabokovian, even in the smallest ways (wit-
ness the “bonus system” employed in examinations, allowing stu-
dents two extra points per effort whenever they could garnish an
answer with a substantial and accurate quotation [“a gem”] drawn
from the text in question) . Skeptically enough, I asked Nabokov if
he remembered my wife, Nina, who had taken his Literature 3 1 2
course in 1955, and I mentioned that she had received a grade of
96. Indeed he did, since he had always asked to meet the students
who performed well, and he described her accurately (seeing her
in person in 1968, he remembered where she had sat in the lecture
hall). On the night of my departure I asked Nabokov to inscribe
my Olympia Press first edition of Lolita. With great rapidity he
not only signed and dated it, but added two elegant drawings of
recently discovered butterflies, one identified as ‘‘‘‘Llammea palida"
(“Pale Fire”) and, below it, a considerably smaller species, labeled
“Bonus bonus.” ^ Delighted but in part mystified, I inquired,
“Why ‘Bonus bonus’.?” Wrinkling his brow and peering over his
eyeglasses, a parody of a professor, Nabokov replied in a mock-
stentorian voice, “Now your wife has 100!” After four days and
some twelve hours of conversation, and within an instant of my
seemingly unrelated request, my prideful but passing comment had
come leaping out of storage. So too has Nabokov’s memory been
able to draw on a lifetime of reading — a lifetime in the most literal
sense.
When asked what he had read as a boy, Nabokov replied: “Be-
tween the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have
read more fiction and poetry — English, Russian, and French — than
in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the
works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rim-
lA photograph of these drawings appears in Time, May 23, 1969, p. 83.
[ xliii ]
baud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level,
my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock
Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child
in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Cambridge,
England, between the ages of twenty and twenty-three, my favor-
ites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin.
Of these top favorites, several — Poe, Verlaine, Jules Verne, Em-
muska Orczy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke — have faded
away, have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others
remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I
am concerned” {Flay boy interview). The Notes to this edition
will demonstrate that Nabokov has managed to invoke in his
fiction the most distant of enthusiasms: a detective story read in
early youth, a line from Verlaine, a tennis match seen at Wimble-
don forty years before. All are clear in his mind, and, recorded in
Lolita, memory negates time.
When queried about Nabokov, friends and former colleagues at
Cornell invariably comment on the seemingly paradoxical manner
in which the encyclopedic Nabokov mind could be enthralled by
the trivial as well as the serious. One professor, at least twenty
years Nabokov’s junior and an instructor when he was there, re-
members how Nabokov once asked him if he had ever watched a
certain soap opera on television. Soap operas are of course ulti-
mately comic if not fantastic in the way they characterize the life
of the typical middle-class housewife as an uninterrupted series of
crises and disasters; but missing the point altogether, suspecting a
deadly leg-pull and supposing that with either answer he would
lose (one making him a fool, the other a snob), Nabokov’s young
colleague had been reduced to a fit of wordless throat-clearing. Re-
calling it ten years later, he seemed disarmed all over again. On eas-
ier terms with Nabokov was Professor M. H. Abrams, who
warmly recalls how Nabokov came into a living room where a fac-
ulty child was absorbed in a television western. Immediately en-
gaged by the program, Nabokov was soon quaking with laughter
over the furiously climactic fight scene. Just such idle moments, if
not literally this one, inform the hilarious burlesque of the compa-
rable “obligatory scene” in Lolita, the tussle of Humbert and
[ xliv ]
Quilty which leaves them “panting as the cowman and the sheep-
man never do after their battle” (p. 301).
Even though he had academic tenure at Cornell, the Nabokovs
never owned a house, and instead always rented, moving from year
to year, a mobility he bestowed on refugee Humbert. “The main
reason [for never settling anywhere permanently], the background
reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my child-
hood surroundings would' have satisfied me,” says Nabokov. “I
would never manage to match my memories correctly — so why
trouble with hopeless approximations? Then there are some special
considerations: for instance, the question of impetus, the habit of
impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with such
indignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since.
True, I have lived to become that appetizing thing, a ‘full profes-
sor,’ but at heart I have always remained a lean ‘visiting lecturer.’
The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot
for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the
thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places
which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular
nook of the earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for
tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things — perhaps because
in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused con-
tempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why
I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished
that wealth” (Playboy interview).
Professor Morris Bishop, Nabokov’s best friend at Cornell, who
was responsible for his shift from Wellesley to Ithaca, recalls visit-
ing the Nabokovs just after they had moved into the appallingly
vulgar and garish home of an absented professor of Agriculture. “I
couldn’t have lived in a place like that,” says Bishop, “but it de-
lighted him. He seemed to relish every awful detail.” Although
Bishop didn’t realize it then, Nabokov was learning about Charlotte
Haze by renting her house, so to speak, by reading her books and
hving with her pictures and “wooden thingamabob[s] of commer-
cial Mexican origin.” These annual moves, however dismal their cir-
cumstances, constituted a field trip enabling entomologist Nabokov
to study the natural habitat of Humbert’s prey. Bishop also remem-
[ xlv ]
bers that Nabokov read the New York Daily News for its crime
stories/ and, for an even more concentrated dose of bizarrerie,
Father Divine’s newspaper, New Day — all of which should recall
James Joyce, with whom Nabokov has so much else in common.
Joyce regularly read The Police Gazette, the shoddy magazine Tit-
bits (as does Bloom), and all the Dublin newspapers; attended bur-
lesque shows, knew by heart most of the vulgar and comically ob-
scene songs of the day, and was almost as familiar with the work of
the execrable lady lending-library novelists of the fin de siecle as
he was with the classics; and when he was living in Trieste and
Paris and writing Ulysses, relied on his Aunt Josephine to keep him
supplied with the necessary sub-literary materials. Of course,
Joyce’s art depends far more than Nabokov’s on the vast residue of
erudition and trivia which Joyce’s insatiable and equally ency-
clopedic mind was able to store.
Nabokov is very selective, whereas Joyce collected almost at ran-
dom and then ordered in art the flotsam and jetsam of everyday
life. That Nabokov does not equal the older writer in this respect
surely points to a conscious choice on Nabokov’s part, as his Cor-
nell lectures on Ulysses suggest.^ In singling out the flaws in what
is to him the greatest novel of the century, Nabokov stressed the
“needless obscurities baffling to the less-than-brilliant reader,” such
as “local idiosyncrasies” and “untraceable references.” Yet Nabo-
kov has also practiced the art of assemblage, incorporating in the
rich textures of Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada a most
“Joycean” profusion of rags, tags, and oddments, both high and
low, culled from books or drawn from “real life.” Whatever the
respective scales of their efforts in this direction, Nabokov and
Joyce are (with Queneau and Borges) among the few modern fic-
tion writers who have made aesthetic capital out of their learning.
1 In Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote spies John Shade seated in his car, “reading a
tabloid newspaper which I had thought no poet would deign to touch” (p. 22).
2 The course in question is Literature 31 1-3 12, “Masterpieces of European Fic-
tion,” MWF, 12 (first term: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Gogol’s Dead Souls,
Dickens’ Bleak House, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Tolstoy’s The Death of
Ivan Ilyich; second term: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde, Gogol’s The Overcoat, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Proust’s Swann’s
fVay, and Ulysses, in that order). The quotations are from the annotator’s class
notes of 1953-1954.
[ xlvi ]
Both include in their novels the compendious stuff one associates
with the bedside library, the great literary anatomies such as Bur-
ton’s Anatomy of Mela?icholy or Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary ^ or
those unclassifiable masterpieces such as Moby -Dick, Tristram
Shandy, and Gargantua and Panta gruel, in which the writer makes
fictive use of all kinds of learning, and exercises the anatomist’s
penchant for collage effected out of verbal trash and bizarre juxta-
positions — for the digression, the catalogue, the puzzle, pun, and
parody, the gratuitous bit of lore included for the pleasure it can
evoke, and for the quirky detail that does not contribute to the
book’s verisimilar design but nevertheless communicates vividly a
sense of what it was like to be alive at a given moment in time. A
hostile review of Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin offered as typical of
the Commentary’s absurdities its mention of the fact that France
exported to Russia some 150,000 bottles of champagne per annum;
but the detail happens to telescope brilliantly the Francophilia of
early nineteenth-century Russia, and is an excellent example of the
anatomist’s imaginative absorption of significant trivia and a justifi-
cation of his methods. M. H. Abrams recalls how early one Mon-
day morning he met Nabokov entering the Cornell Library, stag-
gering beneath a run of The Edinburgh Review, which Nabokov
had pored over all weekend in Pushkin’s behalf. “Marvelous ads! ”
explained Nabokov, “simply marvelous!” It was this spirit that ena-
bled Nabokov to create in the two volumes of Onegin Commen-
tary a marvelous literary anatomy in the tradition of Johnson,
Sterne, and Joyce — an insomniac’s delight, a monumental, wildly
inclusive, yet somehow elegantly ordered ragbag of humane dis-
course, in its own right a transcending work of imagination.
Nabokov was making expressive use of unlikely bits and pieces
in his novels as early as The Defense (1930), as when Luzhin’s
means of suicide is suggested by a movie still, lying on The Veritas
film company’s display table, showing “a white-faced man with his
lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his hands
from the ledge of a skyscraper — just about to fall off into the
abyss” — a famous scene from Harold Lloyd’s 1923 silent film.
Safety Last. Although present throughout his work of the ’thirties,
and culminating logically in The Gift, his last novel in Russian,
[ xivii ]
Nabokov’s penchant for literary anatomy was not fully realized
until after he had been exposed to the polar extremes of American
culture and American university libraries. Thus the richly varie-
gated but sometimes crowded texture of Bend Sinister (1947), Na-
bokov’s first truly “American” novel/ looks forward to Lolita, his
next novel. Bend Sinister'' s literary pastiche is by turns broad and
hermetic. Titles by Remarque and Sholokov are combined to pro-
duce All Quiet on the Don, and Chapter Twelve offers this “fa-
mous American poem”:
A curious sight — these bashful bears,
These timid warrior whalemen
And now the time of tide has come;
The ship casts off her cables
It is not shown on any map;
True places never are
This lovely light, it lights not me;
All loveliness is anguish —
No poem at all, it is formed, says Nabokov, by random “iambic in-
cidents culled from the prose of Moby-DickA Such effects receive
their fullest orchestration in Lolita, as the Notes to this volume
will suggest.
If the Onegin Commentary (1964) is the culmination, then Lo-
lita represents the apogee in fiction of Nabokov’s proclivities as ana-
tomist, and as such is a further reminder that the novel extends and
develops themes and methods present in his work all along. Rang-
ing from Dante to Dick Tracy, the allusions, puns, parodies, and
pastiches in Lolita are controlled with a mastery unequaled by any
writer since Joyce (who died in 1941). Readers should not be dis-
armed by the presence of so many kinds of “real” materials in a
novel by a writer who believes so passionately in the primacy of
the imagination; as Kinbote says in Pale Fire, “ ‘reality’ is neither
the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special
1 Although published in New York in 1941, a year after Nabokov’s emigration,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was in fact written in Paris in 1938 (in Eng-
lish). Students of chronology should also note that Lolita precedes Pnin (1957).
The date of the former’s American publication (1958) has proved misleading.
[ xlviii ]
reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by
the communal eye” (p. 130).
By his example, Nabokov has reminded younger American writ-
ers of the fictional nature of reality. When Terry Southern in The
Magic Christian (i960) lampoons the myth of American masculin-
ity and its attendant deification of the athlete by having his multi-
millionaire trickster, Guy Grand, fix the heavyweight championship
fight so that the boxers grotesquely enact in the ring a prancing
and mincing charade of homosexuality, causing considerable
psychic injury to the audience, his art, such as it is, is quite late in
imitating life. A famous athlete of the ’twenties was well-known as
an invert, and Humbert mentions him twice, never by his real
name, though he does call him “Ned Litam” (p. 234) — a simple
anagram of “Ma Tilden” — which turns out to be one of the actual
pseudonyms chosen by Tilden himself, under which he wrote sto-
ries and articles. Like the literary anatomists who have preceded
him, Nabokov knows that what is so extraordinary about “reality”
is that too often even the blackest of imaginations could not have
invented it; and by taking advantage of this fact in Lolita he has,
along with Nathanael West, defined with absolute authority the in-
evitable mode, the dominant dark tonalities — if not the contents —
of the American comic novel.
Although Humbert clearly delights in many of the absurdities
around him, the anatomist’s characteristic vivacity is gone from the
pages which concern Charlotte Haze, and not only because she is
repugnant to Humbert in terms of the “plot,” but rather because to
Nabokov she is the definitive artsy-craftsy suburban lady — the cul-
ture-vulture, that travesty of Woman, Love, and Sexuality. In
short, she is the essence of American poshlust, to use the “one piti-
less [Russian] word” which, writes Nabokov in Gogol, is able to
express “the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the
other three European languages I happen to know possess no spe-
cial term.” Poshlust: “the sound of the ‘o’ is as big as the plop of an
elephant falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a
bathing beauty on a German picture postcard” (p. 63). More pre-
cisely, it “is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely im-
portant, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attrac-
[ xlix ]
five” (p. 70).^ It is an amalgam of pretentiousness and philistine
vulgarity. In the spirit of Mark Twain describing the contents of
the Grangerford household in Huckleberry Finn (earlier American
poshlust), Humbert eviscerates the muddlecrass (to wax Joycean)
world of Charlotte and her friends, reminding us that Humbert’s
long view of America is not an altogether genial one.
In the course of showing us our landscape in all its natural
beauty, Humbert satirizes American songs, ads, movies, magazines,
brand names, tourist attractions, summer camps, Dude Ranches, ho-
tels, and motels, as well as the Good-Housekeeping Syndrome
(Your Home Is You is one of Charlotte Haze’s essential volumes)
and the cant of progressive educationists and child-guidance
pontificators.^ Nabokov offers us a grotesque parody of a “good
relationship,” for Humbert and Lo are “pals” with a vengeance;
Know Your Own Daughter is one of the books which Humbert
consults (the title exists). Yet Humbert’s terrible demands notwith-
standing, she is as insensitive as children are to their parents; sexual-
ity aside, she demands anxious parental placation in a too typically
American way, and, since it is Lolita “to whom ads were dedi-
cated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul pos-
ter” (p. 150), she affords Nabokov an ideal opportunity to com-
ment on the Teen and Sub-teen Tyranny. “Tristram in Movie-
love,” remarks Humbert, and Nabokov has responded to those var-
ious travesties of behavior which too many Americans recognize as
tenable examples of reality. A gloss on this aspect of Lolita is pro-
vided by “Ode to a Model,” a poem which Nabokov published the
same year as the Olympia Press edition of Lolita (1955):
I have followed you, model,
in magazine ads through all seasons,
from dead leaf on the sod
to red leaf on the breeze,
1 For Nabokov’s most recent description of poshlost (as he now transliterates
it), see his interview, Paris Review, No. 41 (Sommer-Fall 1967), 103-104. ,
2 Satirized too is the romantic myth of the child, extending from Wordsworth
to Salinger. “The McCoo girl?” responds Lolita kindly. “Ginny McCoo? Oh,
she’s a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio.” If the origin of mod-
ern sentimentality about the child’s innocence can be dated at 1760, with the pub-
lication of Mother Goose's Melodies, then surely Lolita marks its death in 1955.
[ 1 ]
from your lily-white armpit
to the tip of your butterfly eyelash,
charming and pitiful,
silly and stylish.
Or in kneesocks and tartan
standing there like some fabulous symbol,
parted feet pointed outward
— pedal form of akimbo.
On a lawn, in a parody
of Spring and its cherry-tree,
near a vase and a parapet,
virgin practising archery.
Ballerina, black-masked,
near a parapet of alabaster.
“Can one” — somebody asked —
“rhyme ‘star’ and ‘disaster’?”
Can one picture a blackbird
as the negative of a small firebird?
Can a record, run backward,
turn ‘repaid’ into ‘diaper’?
Can one marry a model?
Kill your past, make you real, raise a family,
by removing you bodily
from back numbers of Sham?
Although Nabokov has called attention to the elements of parody
in his work, he has repeatedly denied the relevance of satire. One
can understand why he says, “I have neither the intent nor the tem-
perament of a moral or social satirist” (Playboy interview), for
he eschews the overtly moral stance of the satirist who offers
“to mend the world.” Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected
with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,”
but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov has
said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” More-
over, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to
distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, real and
imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite
functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s
[ li ]
total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each in his way,
are captives of the other, imprisoned together in a succession of
bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can
share nothing of what they see — making Humbert seem as alone
during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has
left him and the car is an empty cell.
Nabokov’s denials notwithstanding, many of Humbert’s observa-
tions of American morals and mores are satirical, the product of his
maker’s moral sensibility; but the novel’s greatness does not depend
on the profundity or extent of its “satire,” which is over-empha-
sized by readers who fail to recognize the extent of the parody, its
full implications, or the operative distinction made by Nabokov;
“satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Like Joyce, Nabokov has
shown how parody may inform a high literary art, and parody fig-
ures in the design of each of his novels. The Eye parodies the nine-
teenth-century Romantic tale, such as V. F. Odoevsky’s “The
Brigadier” (1844), which is narrated by a ghost who has awakened
after death to view his old life with new clarity, while Laughter in
the Dark is a mercilessly cold mocking of the convention of the
love triangle; Despair is cast as the kind of “cheap mystery” story
the narrator’s banal wife reads, though it evolves into something
quite different; and The Gift parodies the major nineteenth-cen-
tury Russian writers. Invitation to a Beheading is cast as a mock
anti-utopian novel, as though Zamiatin’s We (1920) had been re-
staged by the Marx Brothers. Pnm masquerades as an “academic
novel” and turns out to parody the possibility of a novel’s having a
“reliable” narrator. Pnin’s departure at the end mimics Chichikov’s
orbital exit from Dead Souls (1842), just as the last paragraph of
The Gift conceals a parody of a Pushkin stanza. The texture of
Nabokov’s parody is unique because, in addition to being a master
parodist of literary styles, he is able to make brief references to an-
other writer’s themes or devices which are so telling in effect that
Nabokov need not burlesque that writer’s style. He not only paro-
dies narrative cliches and outworn subject matter, but genres and
prototypes of the novel; Ada parodically surveys nothing less than
the novel’s evolution. Because Chapter Four of The Gift is a mock
literary biography, it anticipates the themes of Nabokov’s major
[ lii ]
achievements, for he is continuously parodying the search for a
verifiable truth — the autobiography, the biography, the exegesis,
the detective story — and these generic “quests” will coalesce in
one work, especially when the entire novel is conceptually a par-
ody, as in Lolita and Pale Fire.
In form. Pale Fire is a grotesque scholarly edition, while Lolita is
a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Ro-
mantic novel that chronicles the effects of a debilitating love, the
Doppelganger tale, and, in parts, a Duncan Hines tour of America
conducted by a guide with a black imagination, a parodic case
study, and, as the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
says of his half brother’s first novel. The Prismatic Bezel, “It is also
a wicked imitation of many other . . . literary habit [s].” Knight’s
procedures summarize Nabokov’s:
As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a
kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious
emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings,
an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems
to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of
the literary trade. The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With some-
thing akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting
out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which
were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead
things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be ac-
cepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, (p. 91)
“But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard”
(p. 92), says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for al-
though Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary bur-
lesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that
the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the
reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas
Garland (1912) does not. The description of The Prismatic Bezel
and the remainder of Chapter Ten in The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and,
like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.”
There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most au-
dacious parodies: Lolita makes fun of Dostoevsky’s Notes from
[ liii ]
Underground (1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from
underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody
of the Double as a convention of modern fiction, and a Double
who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life.
With the possible exception of Joyce, Nabokov is alone among
modern writers in his ability to make parody and pathos converge
and sometimes coincide. Joyce comes closest to this in Ulysses
(1922), not in the coldly brilliant “Oxen of the Sun” section, but
in the “Cyclops” episode in Barney Kiernan’s pub, which oscil-
lates between parodic passages and a straightforward rendering of
the dialogue and action; in the “Nausicaa” episode on the beach,
which first projects Gerty MacDowell’s point of view in a style
parodying sentimental ladies’ magazine fiction, and midway shifts
to Bloom’s non-parodic stream-of-consciousness; and in parts of the
“Hades” Nighttown section, especially the closing apparition of
Bloom’s dead son, Rudy. Nabokov has gone beyond Joyce in de-
veloping parody as a novelistic form, for in Lolita and Pale Fire,
which are totally parodic in form and may be the finest comic nov-
els since Ulysses, the parody and pathos are always congruent,
rather than adjacent to one another — -as though the entire “Naus-
icaa” or “Cyclops” episodes were cast as parody, without in any
way diminishing our sense of Bloom’s suffering, or that Joyce had
been able to express something of the humanity of Bloom or Mrs.
Purefoy in the “Oxen of the Sun” tour de force. Nabokov has sum-
marized in a phrase his triumph in Lolita and Pale Fire. Just before
Humbert takes Lolita into their room at The Enchanted Hunters
hotel in what is to be the most crucial event in his life, Humbert
comments, “Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and
death” (p. 121). To paraphrase Marianne Moore’s well-known line
that poetry is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Nabo-
kov’s “poem” is a parody of death with real suffering in it. With
characteristic self-awareness, Nabokov defines in The Gift the es-
sence of his own art: “The spirit of parody always goes along with
genuine poetry.”
This spirit in Nabokov represents not merely a set of techniques,
bur, as suggested above, an attitude toward experience, a means of
discovering the nature of experience. The Prismatic Bezel is aptly
[ liv ]
titled: a “bezel” is the sloping edge on a cutting tool or the oblique
side of a gem, and the luminous bezel of Nabokov’s parody can cut
in any direction, often turning in upon itself as self-parody.
To stress the satiric (rather than parodic) elements of Lolita
above all others is as limited a response as to stop short with its sex-
ual content. “Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a
problem, sex as a platitude — all this is something I find too tedious
for words,” Nabokov told an interviewer from Playboy, and his
Cornell lectures on Joyce further indicate that he is not interested
in sexual oddities for their own sake. On May lo, 1954, in his open-
ing lecture on Ulysses (delivered, as it turns out, at the time he was
completing Lolita), Nabokov said of Leopold Bloom, “Joyce in-
tended the portrait of an ordinary person. [His] sexual deportment
[is] extremely perverse . . . Bloom indulges in acts and dreams sub-
normal in an evolutionary sense, affecting both individual and spe-
cies. ... In Bloom’s (and Joyce’s) mind, the theme of sex is mixed
with theme of latrine. Supposed to be ordinary citizen: mind of or-
dinary citizen does not dwell where Bloom’s does. Sexual affairs
heap indecency upon indecency . . .” Coming from the creator of
Humbert Humbert, the fervent tone and the rather old-fashioned
sense of normalcy may seem unexpected. On May 2 8, the last class
of the term and concluding lecture on Joyce, he discussed the fl^ws
in Ulysses, complaining that there is an “Obnoxious, overdone
preoccupation with sex organs, as illustrated in Molly’s stream-of-
consciousness. Perverse attitudes exhibited.” ^ In spite of the tran-
scriptions in notebookese, one gets a firm idea of Nabokov’s atti-
tude toward the explicit detailing of sexuality, and his remarks
imply a good deal about his intentions in Lolita. The “nerves of
the novel” revealed in the Afterword underscore these intentions
by generalizing Humbert’s passion (p. 318). That the seemingly in-
scrutable Nabokov would even write this essay, let alone reprint it
in magazines and append it to the twenty-five translations of Lo-
lita, surely suggests the dismay he must have felt to see how many
readers, including some old friends, had taken the book solely on
an erotic level. Those exposed “nerves” should make it clear that
insofar as it has a definable subject, Lolita is not merely about pe-
iprom the annotator’s class notes, 1953-1954.
[ Iv ]
dophilia. As Humbert says, rather than describing the details of the
seduction at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, “Anybody can imagine
those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix
once for all the perilous magic of nymphets” (p. 136). Humbert’s
desires are those of a poet as well as a pervert, and not surprisingly,
since they reflect, darkly, in a crooked enough mirror, the artistic
desires of his creator.
Humbert’s is a nightmare vision of the ineffable bliss variously
sought by one Nabokov character after another. For a resonant
summary phrase, one turns to Agaspher (1923), a verse drama
written when Nabokov was twenty-four. An adaptation of the leg-
end of the Wandering Jew, only its Prologue was published. Tor-
mented by “dreams of earthly beauty,” Nabokov’s wanderer ex-
claims, “I shall catch you / catch you, Maria my inexpressible
dream / from age to age!” ^ Near the end of another early work,
the novel King, Queen, Knave (1928), an itinerant photographer
walks down the street, ignored by the crowd, “yelling into the
wind: ‘The artist is coming! The divinely favored, der gottbegnad-
ete artist is coming!’ ” — a yell that ironically refers to the novel’s
unrealized artist, businessman Dreyer, and anticipates and an-
nounces the arrival of such future avatars of the artist as the chess-
player Luzhin in The Defense (1930), the butterfly collector Pil-
gram in “The Aurelian” (1931), the daydreaming art dealer and
critic Albinus Kretschmar in Laughter in the Dark (1932), the im-
prisoned and doomed Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading
(1935-1936), who struggles to write, the inventor Salvator Waltz
in The Waltz Invention (1938), and the philosopher Krug in Bend
Sinister ( 1 947 ) , as well as poets manques such as Humbert Hum-
bert in Lolita (1955), and such genuine yet only partially fulfilled
artists as Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift (1937-1938),
Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941 ), and
John Shade in Pale Fire (1962). When perceived by the reader,
the involuted design of each novel reveals that these characters all
exist in a universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of
Vladimir Nabokov, the only artist of major stature who appears in
Nabokov’s work.
1 Translated and quoted by Andrew Field, op. cit., p. 79.
[ Ivi ]
Some readers, however, may feel that works that are in part
about themselves are limited in range and significance, too special,
too hermetic. But the creative process is fundamental; perhaps
nothing is more personal by implication and hence more relevant
than fictions concerning fiction; identity, after all, is a kind of
artistic construct, however imperfect the created product. If the
artist does indeed embody in himself and formulate in his work the
fears and needs and desires of the race, then a “story” about his
mastery of form, his triumph in art is but a heightened emblem of
all of our own efforts to confront, order, and structure the chaos
of life, and to endure, if not master, the demons within and around
us. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pig-
ments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” says Humbert in the
closing moments of Lolita, and he speaks for more than one of
Nabokov’s characters.
It was the major emigre poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich
who first pointed out, more than thirty years ago, that whatever
their occupations may be, Nabokov’s protagonists represent the art-
ist, and that Nabokov’s principal works in part concern the crea-
tive process.^ Khodasevich died in 1939, and until recently, his crit-
icism remained untranslated. If it had been available earlier, Nabo-
kov’s English and American readers would have recognized his
deep seriousness at a much earlier date. This is especially true of
Lolita, where Nabokov’s constant theme is masked, but not ob-
scured, by the novel’s ostensible subject, sexual perversion. But
what may have been a brilliant formulation in the ’thirties should
be evident enough by now, and not because so many other critics
have said it of Nabokov, but rather because it has become a com-
monplace of recent criticism to note that a work of art is about it-
self (Wordsworth, Mallarme, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Queneau,
Borges, Barth, Claude Mauriac, Robbe-Grillet, Picasso, Saul Stein-
berg, and Fellini’s great film, 8V2 — to name but a baker’s dozen).
What is not so clear is how Nabokov’s artifice and strategies of in-
volution reveal the “second plot” in his fiction, the “contiguous
1 Vladislav Khodasevich, “On Sirin” (1937), translated by Michael H. Walker,
edited by Simon Karlinsky and Robert P. Hughes, TriQuarterly , No. 17 (Win-
ter 1970).
[ Ivu ]
world” of the author’s mind; what it has meant to that mind to
have created a fictional world; and what the effect of those strate-
gies is upon the reader, whose illicit involvement with that fiction
constitutes a “third plot,” and who is manipulated by Nabokov’s
dizzying illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be
said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabo-
kov’s creations.
5. THE ARTIFICE OF LOLITA
Although Lolita has received much serious attention (see this edi-
tion’s selected bibliography), the criticism which it has elicited
usually forces a thesis which does not and in fact cannot accommo-
date the total design of the novel. That intricate design, described
in the Notes to this edition, makes Lolita one of the few supremely
original novels of the century. It is difficult to imagine, say, that
Lord ]im could have been achieved without the example of Henry
James’s narrative strategies, or that The Sound and the Fury would
be the same novel if Faulkner had not read Ulysses. But like The
Castle, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake,
and Pale Fire, Lolita is one of those transcendent works of the im-
agination which defy the neat continuum maintained so carefully
by literary historians. At most, it is one of those works which cre-
ate their own precursors, to use Jorge Luis Borges’s winning
phrase.
Because Nabokov continually parodies the conventions of “real-
istic” and “impressionistic” fiction, readers must accept or reject
him on his own terms. Many of his novels become all but meaning-
less in any other terms. At the same time, however, even Nabo-
kov’s most ardent admirers must sometimes wonder about the
smaller, more hermetic components of Nabokov’s artifice — the
multifarious puns, allusions, and butterfly references which prolif-
erate in novels such as Pale Fire and Lolita. Are they organic? Do
they coalesce to form any meaningful pattern? Humbert’s wide-
ranging literary allusions more than “challenge [our] scholarship,”
as H.H. says of Quilty’s similar performance. Several of Humbert’s
[ Iviii ]
allusions are woven so subtly into the texture of the narrative as to
elude all but the most compulsive exegetes. Many allusions, how-
ever, are direct and available, and these are most frequently to nine-
teenth-century writers; an early Note will suggest that this is of
considerable importance. But unlike the allusions, which are some-
times only a matter of fun, the patterned verbal cross references
are always fundamental, defining a dimension of the novel that has
escaped critical notice.
The verbal figurae in Lolita limn the novel’s involuted design
and establish the basis of its artifice. As indicated in the Foreword,
no total interpretation of Lolita will be propounded here. The fol-
lowing remarks on artifice and game are not intended to suggest
that this “level” of the novel is the most important; they are offered
because no one has yet recognized the magnitude of this verbal pat-
terning, or its significance.^ Just as Nabokov’s Afterword was read
in advance of the novel, so the following pages might well be re-
read after the annotations, many of which they anticipate.
Although Lolita is less dramatically anti-realistic than Pale Fire,
in its own way it is as grandly labyrinthine and as much a work of
artifice as that more ostentatiously tricky novel. This is not imme-
diately apparent because Humbert is Nabokov’s most “humanized”
character since Luzhin (1930), and Lolita the first novel since the
early ’thirties in which “the end” remains intact. Moreover, Nabo-
kov has said that “The Magician,” the 1939 story containing the
central idea of Lolita, went unpublished not because of its subject
matter but rather because “The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly
spoke. Little by little I managed to give her some semblance of real-
ity.” It may seem anomalous for puppeteer Nabokov, creator of
the sham worlds of Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, to
worry this way about “reality” (with or without quotation
marks) ; yet one extreme does not preclude the other in Nabokov,
and the originality of Lolita derives from this very paradox. The
puppet theater never collapses, but everywhere there are fissures, if
1 1 have elsewhere discussed the novel as a novel, as well as an artifice; see my
article “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary
Literature, VIII (Spring 1967), 204-241. Reprinted in L.S. Dembo, ed., Nabokov:
The Man and His Work (Madison, 1967), pp. 106-143. Especially see pp. 125-131
and 139-141.
C lix ]
not gaps, in the structure, crisscrossing in intricate patterns and visi-
ble to the discerning eye — that is, the eye trained on Nabokov fic-
tions and thus accustomed to novelistic trompe-roeil. Lolita is a
great novel to the same extent as Nabokov is able to have it both
ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet
outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other
engaging him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal
figurations which undermine the novel’s realistic base and distance
the reader from its dappled surface, which then assumes the aspect
of a gameboard (the figurations are detailed in the Notes).
As a lecturer, Nabokov was a considerable Thespian, able to ma-
nipulate audiences in a similar manner. His rehearsal of Gogol’s
death agonies remains in one’s mind: how the hack doctors alter-
nately bled him and purged him and plunged him into icy baths,
Gogol so frail that his spine could be felt through his stomach, the
six fat white bloodletting leeches clinging to his nose, Gogol beg-
ging to have them removed — ''Please lift them, lift them, keep
them awayP’’ — and, sinking behind the lectern, now a tub, Nabo-
kov for several moments was Gogol, shuddering and shivering, his
hands held down by a husky attendant, his head thrown back in
pain and terror, nostrils distended, eyes shut, his beseechments fill-
ing the large lecture hall. Even the sea of C-minuses in the back of
the room could not help being moved. And then, after a pause, Na-
bokov would very quietly say, in a sentence taken word-for-word
from his Gogol, “Although the scene is unpleasant and has a
human appeal which I deplore, it is necessary to dwell upon it a lit-
tle longer in order to bring out the curiously physical side of Go-
gol’s genius.”
A great deal has been written about “unreliable narrators,” but
too little about unreliable readers. Although editor John Ray, Jr.,
serves fair enough warning to those “old-fashioned readers who
wish to follow the destinies of ‘real’ people beyond the ‘true
story,’ ” virtually every “move” in the “true story” of Lolita seems
to be structured with their predictable responses in mind; and the
game-element depends on such reflexive action, for it tests the
reader in so many ways. By calling out “Reader! Bruderl” (p.
264), Humbert echoes Au Lecteur, the prefatory poem in Les
[ lx ]
Fleurs du mal (“Hypocrite reader! — My fellow man — My
brother!”); and, indeed, the entire novel constitutes an ironic up-
ending of Baudelaire and a good many other writers who would
enlist the reader’s full participation in the work. “I want my
learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay,”
says Humbert (p. 59), but such illicit participation will find the
reader in constant danger of check, or even rougher treatment:
“As greater authors than L have put it: ‘Let readers imagine’ etc.
On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in
the pants” (p. 67). Humbert addresses the reader directly no less
than twenty-seven times,^ drawing him into one trap after another.
In Nabokov’s hands the novel thus becomes a gameboard on
which, through parody, he assaults his readers’ worst assumptions,
pretentions, and intellectual conventions, realizing and formulating
through game his version of Flaubert’s dream of an E?icyclopedie
des idees regues, a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.
“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game,” says Nabokov, and al-
though the more obvious sallies in Lolita could be called satiric
(e.g., those against Headmistress Pratt), the most telling are
achieved through the games implemented by parody. By creating a
surface that is rich in “psychological” clues, but which finally re-
1 See pp. 6, 36, 50, 59, 67, 89, 98, 106, 131, 139, 141, 156, 159, 167, 169, 186, 192,
205, 212, 218, 228, 249, 252, 255, 259, 260, and 287 — not to mention Humbert’s
several interjections to the jury (p. 134 is typical), to mankind in general (“Human
beings, attend!” [p. 126]), and to his car (“Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow”
[p. 309]). One waxes statistical here because H.H.’s direct address is an im-
portant part of the narrative, and important too in the way that it demonstrates
a paradoxically new technique. In regard to literary forms and devices, there is
almost nothing new under the sun (to paraphrase a poet); it is contexts and
combinations that are continually being made new. One epoch’s realism is an-
other’s surrealism. To the Elizabethan playgoer or the reader of Cervantes, the
work-within-the-work was a convention; to an audience accustomed to nine-
teenth-century realism, it is fantastic, perplexing, and strangely affecting. The
same can be said of the reintroduction of “old-fashioned” direct address, revived
and transmogrified at a moment in literary history when the post-Jamesian novel-
ists seemed to have forever ruled out such self-conscious devices by refining the
newer “impressionistic” conventions (the effaced narrator, the “central intelli-
gence,” the consistent if “unreliable” narrative persona, and so forth). “This
new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism,” writes J.L. Borges in “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote,'' an essential text on the subject (Labyrinths,
p. 44); and cinematic equivalents are readily available in the work of the recent
directors who have reintroduced silent film techniques (notably Frangois Truf-
faut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Richard Lester).
[ Ixi ]
sists and then openly mocks the interpretations of depth psychol-
ogy, Nabokov is able to dispatch any Freudians who choose to
“play” in the blitzkrieg game that is the novel’s first sixty-or-so
pages. The traps are baited with tempting “false scents” drawn
from what Nabokov in Speak, Memory calls the “police state of
sexual myth.” The synthetic incest of Humbert and Lolita seems
to suggest a classical Oedipal situation, but Humbert later calls it a
“parody of incest.” Nabokov further implies that the story works
out the “transference” theory, whereby the daughter transfers her
affections to another, similar man, but not her father, thus exorcis-
ing her Oedipal tension. If Freudians have interpreted Lolita’s
elopement with Quilty in this way, then they stop short in the hos-
pital scene when Humbert says of the nurse, “I suppose Mary
thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering
with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-
poly Romeo” (p. 245). The boyish qualities of a nymphet tempt
the reader into interpreting Humbert’s quest as essentially homosex-
ual, but we may be less absolute in our judgment and practice of
pop psychoanalysis when Humbert tells how during one of his in-
carcerations he trifled with psychiatrists, “teasing them with fake
‘primal scenes.’ ” “By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and
discovered, with glee, cards calling me ‘potentially homosexual’ ”
(p. 36). If the clinical-minded have accepted Humbert’s explana-
tion of the adolescent “trauma” which accounts for his pedophilia
— interrupted coitus — then they should feel the force of the attack
and their own form of loss when Lolita must leave Quilty’s play “a
week before its natural climax” (p. 21 1). Humbert’s “trauma” af-
fords a further trap for the clinical mind, for the incident seems to
be a sly Active transmutation of Nabokov’s own considerably more
innocent childhood infatuation with Colette (Chapter Seven,
Speak, Memory')-, and such hints as the butterfly and the Carmen
allusions shared by that chapter and Lolita only reinforce the more
obvious similarities. When earnest readers, nurtured on the “stan-
dardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket” (p. 287), leap to
make the association between the two episodes — as several have
done— and immediately conclude that Lolita is autobiographical in
the most literal sense, then the trap has been sprung: their wan-
[ Ixii ]
tonly reductive gesture justifies the need for just such a parody as
Nabokov’s. With a cold literary perversity, Nabokov has demon-
strated the falseness of their “truth”; the implications are consider-
able. Even the exegetic act of searching for the “meaning” of Lo-
lita by trying to unfold the butterfly pattern becomes a parody of
the expectations of the most sophisticated reader, who finds he is
chasing a mocking inversion of the “normal” Freudian direction of
symbols which, once identified, may still remain mysterious, ex-
plain very little, or, like the game of Word Golf in Pale Fire, re-
veal nothing.
Until almost the end of Lolita, Humbert’s fullest expressions of
“guilt” and “grief” are qualified, if not undercut completely, and
these passages represent another series of traps in which Nabokov
again parodies the reader’s expectations by having Humbert the
penitent say what the reader wants to hear: “I was a pentapod
monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid,
and everything” (p. 286). Eagerly absorbing Humbert’s “confes-
sion,” the reader suddenly stumbles over the rare word “turpid,”
and then is taken unawares by the silly catchall “and everything,”
which renders absurd the whole cluster, if not the reader. It is easy
to confess, but the moral vocabulary we employ so readily may go
no deeper than Humbert’s parody of it.
Humbert’s own moral vocabulary would seem to find an ideally
expressive vehicle in the person of Clare Quilty. Throughout the
narrative Humbert is literally and figuratively pursued by Quilty,
who is by turns ludicrous and absurd, sinister and grotesque. For a
while Humbert is certain that his “shadow” and nemesis is his Swiss
cousin, Detective Trapp, and when Lolita agrees and says, “Per-
haps he is Trapp,” she is summarizing Quilty’s role in the novel
(p. 221). Quilty is so ubiquitous because he formulates Humbert’s
entrapment, his criminal passion, his sense of shame and self-hate.
Yet Quilty embodies both “the truth and a caricature of it,” for he
is at once a projection of Humbert’s guilt and a parody of the psy-
chological Double; “Lolita was playing a double game,” says
Humbert (p. 245), punningly referring to Lolita’s tennis, the Dop-
pelgdnger parody, and the function of parody as game.
The Double motif figures prominently throughout Nabokov,
[ Ixiii ]
from the early ’thirties in Despair and Laughter in the Dark
(where the Albinus-Axel Rex pairing rehearses the Humbert-
Quilty doubling), to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and on
through Bend Sinister, the story “Scenes from the Life of a Double
Monster,” Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, which offers a monumental
doubling (or, more properly, tripling). It is probably the most in-
tricate and profound of all Doppelgdnger novels, written at pre-
cisely the time when it seemed that the Double theme had been ex-
hausted in modern literature, and this achievement was very likely
made possible by Nabokov’s elaborate parody of the theme in Lo-
lita, which renewed his sense of the artistic efficacy of another liter-
ary “thing which had once been fresh and bright but which was
now worn to a thread” {Sebastian Knight, p. 91).
By making Clare Quilty too clearly guilty, ‘ Nabokov is assault-
ing the convention of the good and evil “dual selves” found in the
traditional Double tale. Humbert would let some of us believe that
when he kills Quilty in Chapter Thirty-five, Part Two, the good
poet has exorcised the bad monster, but the two are finally not to
be clearly distinguished: when Humbert and Quilty wrestle, “I
rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We
rolled over us.” Although the parody culminates in this “silent,
soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati” (p. 301), it is sus-
tained throughout the novel. In traditional Doppelgdnger fiction
the Double representing the reprehensible self is often described as
an ape. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1871), Stavrogin tells Ver-
khovensky, “you’re my ape”; in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886), Hyde plays “apelike tricks,” attacks and kills with
“apelike fury” and “apelike spite”; and in Poe’s “The Murders in
the Rue Morgue” (1845), the criminal self is literally an ape. But
“good” Humbert undermines the doubling by often calling himself
an ape, rather than Quilty, and when the two face one another,
Quilty also calls Humbert an ape. This transference is forcefully
underscored when Humbert refers to himself as running along like
“Mr. Hyde,” his “talons still tingling” (p. 208). In Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness (1902), Kurtz is Marlow’s “shadow” and “shade.” Al-
though Humbert calls Quilty his “shadow,” the pun on Humbert’s
1 The pun is also pointed out by Page Stegner in Escape into Aesthetics: The
Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1966), p. 104.
[ Ixiv ]
name {ombre = shadow) suggests that he is as much a shadow as
Quilty, and like the shadow self who pursues the professor in Hans
Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow” (1850), Humbert is dressed
all in black. Quilty in fact first regards Humbert as possibly being
“some familiar and innocuous hallucination” of his own (p. 296);
and in the novel’s closing moments the masked narrator addresses
Lolita and completes this transferral: “And do not pity C.Q. One
had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to
exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you
live in the minds of later generations.” The book might have been
told by “C.Q.,” the doubling reversed; “H.H.” is simply a better
artist, more likely to possess the “secret of durable pigments.”
If the Humbert-Quilty doubling is a conscious parody of “Wil-
liam Wilson” (1839), it is with good reason, for Poe’s story is un-
usual among Doppelgmger tales in that it presents a reversal of the
conventional situation: the weak and evil self is the main character,
pursued by the moral self, whom he kills. Nabokov goes further
and with one vertiginous sweep stands the convention on its head:
in terms of the nineteenth-century Double tale, it should not even
be necessary to kill Quilty and what he represents, for Humbert
has already declared his love for Lolita bejore he goes to Quilty’s
Pavor Manor, and, in asking the no longer nymphic Lolita to go
away with him, he has transcended his obsession. Although Hum-
bert’s unqualified expression of “guilt” (p. 310) comes at the end
of the novel, in the chronology of events it too occurs before he
kills Quilty. As a “symbolic” act, the killing is gratuitous; the par-
odic design is complete.
Quilty rightly balks at his symbolic role: “I’m not responsible
for the rapes of others. Absurd!” he tells Humbert, and his words
are well taken, for in this scene Humbert is trying to make him to-
tally responsible, and the poem which he has Quilty read aloud
reinforces his effort, and again demonstrates how a Nabokov par-
ody moves beyond the “obscure fun” of stylistic imitation to con-
nect with the most serious region of the book. It begins as a parody
of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” but ends by undercutting all the con-
fessing in which “remorseful” Humbert has just been engaged:
“because of all you did / because of all I did not / you have to die”
(p. 302). Since Quilty has been described as “the American Mae-
[ bcv ]
terlinck,” it goes without saying that his ensuing death scene
should be extravagantly “symbolic.” Because one is not easily rid
of an “evil” self, Quilty, indomitable as Rasputin, is almost impossi-
ble to kill; but the idea of exorcism is rendered absurd by his com-
ically prolonged death throes, which, in the spirit of Canto V of
The Rape of the Lock, burlesque the gore and rhetoric of literary
death scenes ranging from the Elizabethan drama to the worst of
detective novels. Quilty returns to the scene of the crime — a bed —
and it is here that Humbert finally corners him. When Humbert
fires his remaining bullets at close range, Quilty “lay back, and a
big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips,
grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished” (p. 306). The last
details emphasize the mock-symbolic association with Lolita; the
monstrous self that has devoured Lolita, bubble gum, childhood,
and all, is “symbolically” dead, but as the bubble explodes, so does
the Gothic Doppelganger convention, with all its own “juvenile
connotations” about identity, and we learn shortly that Humbert is
still “all covered with Quilty.” Guilt is not to be exorcised so readi-
ly — McFate is McFate, to coin a Humbertism — and the ambiguities
of human experience and identity are not to be reduced to mere
“dualities.” Instead of the successful integration of a neatly divisible
self, we are left with “Clare Obscure” and “quilted Quilty,” the
patchwork self (p. 308). Quilty refuses to die, just as the recap-
tured nose in Gogol’s extraordinary Double story of that name
(1836) would not at first stick to its owner’s face. The reader who
has expected the solemn moral-ethical absolutes of a Poe, Dostoev-
sky, Mann, or Conrad Doppelganger fiction instead discovers him-
self adrift in a fantastic, comic cosmos more akin to Gogol’s. Hav-
ing hoped that Humbert would master his “secret sharer,” we find
instead that his quest for his “slippery self” figuratively resembles
Major Kovaliov’s frantic chase after his own nose through the spec-
tral streets of St. Petersburg, and that Humbert’s “quest” has its
mock “ending” in a final confrontation that, like the end of “The
Overcoat” (1842), is not a confrontation at all.
The parodic references to R.L. Stevenson suggest that Nabokov
had in mind Henry Jekyll’s painfully earnest discovery of the
“truth” that “man is not only one, but truly two. I say two, be-
cause the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that
[ Ixvi ]
point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same
lines.” The “serial selves” of Pale Fire “outstrip” Stevenson and a
good many other writers, and rather than undermining Humbert’s
guilt, the Double parody in Lolita locks Humbert within that
prison of mirrors where the “real self” and its masks blend into one
another, the refracted outlines of good and evil becoming terrify-
ingly confused.
Humbert’s search for the whereabouts and identity of Detective
Trapp (Quilty) invites the reader to wend his way through a laby-
rinth of clues in order to solve this mystery, a process which both
parallels and parodies the Poe “tale of ratiocination.” When Hum-
bert finds Lolita and presses her for her abductor’s name.
She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the
other hand, after all — “Do you really want to know who it was?
Well it was — ”
And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puck-
ering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat
fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name
that the asmte reader has guessed long ago.
Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my
consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along.
There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place,
and evervthing fell into order, into the pattern of branches that
I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of
having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the ex-
press and perverse purpose of rendering — she was talking but I
sat melting in my golden peace — of rendering that golden and
monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition,
which my most inimical reader should experience now. (pp. 273-
274)
Even here Humbert withholds Quilty’s identity, though the “astute
reader” may recognize that “Waterproof” is a clue which leads
back to an early scene at the lake, in which Charlotte had said that
Humbert’s watch was waterproof and Jean Farlow had alluded to
Quilty’s Uncle Ivor (by his first name only), and then had almost
mentioned Clare Quilty by name: Ivor “told me a completely inde-
cent story about his nephew. It appears — ” But she is interrupted
and the chapter ends (p. 91 ). This teasing exercise in ratiocination —
“peace” indeed! — is the detective trap, another parody of the read-
er’s assumptions and expectations, as though even the most astute
[ Ixvii ]
reader could ever fully discover the identity of Quilty, Humbert,
or of himself.
Provided with Quilty’s name, Humbert now makes his way to
Pavor Manor, that latter-day House of Usher, where the extended
and variegated parodies of Poe are laid to rest. All the novel’s par-
odic themes are concluded in this chapter. Its importance is tele-
scoped by Humbert’s conclusion: “This, I said to myself, was the
end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty” (p. 307). In
form, of course, this bravura set piece is not a play; but, as a sum-
mary parodic commentary on the main action, it does function in
the manner of an Elizabethan play-within-the-play, and its “stag-
ing” underscores once more the game-element central to the book.
Simultaneous with these games is a fully novelistic process that
shows Humbert traveling much further than the 27,000 miles he
and Lolita literally traverse. Foolish John Ray describes Humbert’s
as “a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral
apotheosis” (p. 7) and, amazingly enough, he turns out to be right.
The reader sees Humbert move beyond his obsessional passion to a
not altogether straightforward declaration of genuine love (pp.
279^280) and, finally, to a realization of the loss suffered not by
him but by Lolita (pp. 309-310). It is expressed on the next to
the last page in a long and eloquent passage that, for the first time
in the novel, is in no way undercut by parody or qualified by
irony. Midway through this “last mirage of wonder and hopeless-
ness,” the reader is invoked again, because Humbert’s moral apoth-
eosis, so uniquely straightforward, constitutes the end game and
Nabokov’s final trompe-roeil. If the reader has long since decided
that there is no “moral reality” in the novel, and in his sophisticated
way has accepted that, he may well miss this unexpected move in
the farthest corner of the board and lose the game after all. It is the
last time the reader will be addressed directly, for the game is about
over, as is the novel.
In addition to sustaining the game-element, the authorial pattern-
ing reminds us that Lolita is but one part of that universe of fiction
arrayed around the consciousness of Nabokov, who would join
Humbert in his lament that words do indeed have their limitations,
and that “the past is the past”; to live in it, as Humbert tried, is to
die. That the author of Speak, Memory should suggest this surely
[ Ixviii ]
establishes the moral dimension of Lolita; and in the light of Johan
Huizinga’s remark that “Play is outside the range of good and
bad,” ^ Lolita becomes an even more extraordinary achievement.
When in The Gift Nabokov writes of Fyodor’s poem, “At the
same time he had to take great pains not to lose either his control
of the game, or the viewpoint of the plaything,” he is defining the
difficulties he faced in writing novels whose full meaning depends
on the reader’s having a spatial view of the book. It should be evi-
dent by now how the parody and patterning create the distance
necessary for a clear view of the “plaything,” and Nabokov rein-
forces one’s sense of the novel-as-garneboard by having an actual
game in progress within Lolita: the seemingly continuous match
between Humbert and Gaston Godin — -a localized, foreground ac-
tion which in turn telescopes both the Humbert-Quilty “Double
game” being played back and forth across the gameboard of Amer-
ica and the overriding contest waged above the novel, between the
author and the reader.^
1 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Flay Element in Culture
(Boston, 1955 [ist ed. 1944]), p. ii. An excellent introduction to Nabokov, even
if he is not mentioned.
2 This aspect of Lolita is nicely visualized in Tenniel’s drawing of a landscaped
chessboard (or chessbored landscape) for Chapter Two of Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass, in which a chess game is literally woven into the
narrative. For more on Carroll and Nabokov, see Note 13 3/1.
[ Ixix ]
Humbert and Gaston play chess “two or three times weekly” in
Humbert’s study, and several times Nabokov carefully links Lolita
with the Queen in their game (pp. 184-185). One evening while
they are playing, Humbert gets a telephone call from Lolita’s
music teacher informing him that Lolita has again missed her lesson,
the boldest lie he has caught her in, indicating that he is soon to lose
her:
As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now impaired,
and a move or two later, with Gaston to play, I noticed through
the film of my general distress that he could collect my queen;
he noticed it too, but thinking it might be a trap on the part of
his tricky opponent, he demurred for quite a minute, and puffed
and wheezed, and shook his jowls, and even shot furtive glances
at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with his pudgUy bunched
fingers — dying to take that juicy queen and not daring — and all
of a sudden he swooped down upon it (who knows if it did not
teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a dreary hour in
achieving a draw. (pp. 204-205)
In their respective ways, all the players want to capture “that
juicy queen”: poor homosexual Gaston, quite literally; pornogra-
pher Quilty, for only one purpose; pervert and poet Humbert, in
two ways, first carnally but then artistically, out of love; and the
common reader, who would either rescue Lolita by judging and
condemning Humbert, or else participate vicariously, which would
make him of Quilty’s party — though there is every reason to think
that the attentive reader will sooner or later share Humbert’s
perspective: “In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a
square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily
visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused
adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud” (p. 235).
Humbert is being too modest at the outset of Lolita when he
says “it is only a game,” for it is one in which everything on the
board “breath [es] with life,” as Nabokov writes of the match be-
tween Luzhin and Turati in The Defense. Radical and dizzying
shifts in focus are created in the reader’s mind as he oscillates be-
tween a sense that he is by turns confronting characters in a novel
and pieces in a game — as if a telescope were being spun 360 degrees
[ Ixx ]
on its axis, allowing one to look alternately through one end and
then the other. The various “levels” of Lolita are of course not the
New Criticism’s “levels of meaning,” for the telescopic and global
views of the “plaything” should enable one to perceive these levels
or dimensions as instantaneous — as though, to adapt freely an image
used by Mary McCarthy to describe Pale Fire, one were looking
down on three or more games being played simultaneously by two
chess masters on several separate glass boards, each arranged succes-
sively above the other. ^ A first reading of Lolita rarely affords this
limpid, multiform view, and for many reasons, the initially disarm-
ing and distractive quality of its ostensible subject being foremost.
But the uniquely exhilarating experience of rereading it on its own
terms derives from the discovery of a totally new book in place of
the old, and the recognition that its habit of metamorphosis has
happily described the course of one’s own perceptions. What Jorge
Luis Borges says of Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, surely
holds for Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita: he “has en-
riched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary
art of reading.” ^
Alfred Appel, Jr.
Palo Alto, California
January 5/, 1^68
1 Mary McCarthy, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire," Encounter, XIX (October
1962), p. 76.
2 Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," op. cit., p. 44.
[ Ixxi ]
SELECTED
BIBLIOGRAPHY
i. CHECKLIST OF NABOKOrS WRITING
*Denotes a Russian work that has been translated; date following a title
indicates year of magazine serialization; parentheses contain date of trans-
lation into English.
**Denotes work written in English. No asterisk indicates work is in Russian.
Not included below are Nabokov's twenty major entomological papers in
English, nor the vast amount of writing that remains untranslated and un-
collected from the 'twenties and 'thirties, including approximately too
poems, seven plays, several short stories, fifty literary reviews and essays,
and numerous translations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Yeats, Brooke, Shake-
speare, Musset, and others. Andrew Field's Nabokov: His Life in Art
(Boston, contains a comprehensive bibliography.
Poems. St. Petersburg, 1916. 67 poems, privately printed.
Two Paths. Petrograd, 1918. 12 poems by Nabokov and 8 by Andrei Bala-
shov.
The Empyrean Path. Berlin, 1923. 147 poems.
The Cluster. Berlin, 1923. 35 poems.
Carroll. Alice in Wonderland. Berlin, 1923. Translation.
Mashenka. Berlin, 1926 (New York, 1970, as Mary). A novel.
*Kmg, Queen, Knave. Berlin, 1928 (New York, 1968). New York, 1969,
a facsimile of the Russian first edition. A novel.
*The Defense. 1929. Berlin, 1930 (New York, 1964). A novel.
[ Ixxii ]
The Return of Chorb: Stories and Poems. Berlin, 1930. 15 stories and 24
poems dated 1924-1928.
*The Eye. 1930 (New York, 1965). A short novel.
The Exploit. 1931. Paris, 1932 (New York, 1971, as Glory). A novel.
*Camera Obscura. Paris and Berlin, 1932 (London, 1936; rev.. New York,
1938, as Laughter in the Dark). A novel.
*Despair. 1934. Berlin, 1936 (London, 1937; rev.. New York, 1966). A
novel.
*Invitation to a Beheading. 1935-1936. Berlin and Paris, 1938 (New York,
1959). Paris, 1966, a reprint of the Russian edition. A novel.
*The Gift. 1937-1938. New York, 1952, in Russian (New York, 1963). A
novel.
The Eye. Paris, 1938. Short novel and 12 stories.
The Event. 1938. Drama in 3 acts.
*The Waltz Invention. 1938 (New York, 1966). Drama in 3 acts.
Solus Rex. An unfinished novel. Sections published, 1940 and 1942.
**The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Norfolk, Conn., 1941. A novel.
**Three Russian Poets: Translations of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev.
Norfolk, Conn., 1944.
**Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, Conn., 1944. A critical study.
**Nine Stories. Norfolk, Conn., 1947. 4 are translated from the Russian.
**Bend Sinister. New York, 1947. A novel.
**Conclusive Evidence. New York, 1951. A memoir.
Poems ipzp-ipyi. Paris, 1952, in Russian. 15 poems.
Other Shores. New York, 1954. A Russian version of Conclusive Evidence,
rewritten and expanded rather than translated.
**Lolita. Paris, 1955 (New York, 1958). A novel.
Spring in Fialta and Other Stories. New York, 1956, in Russian. 13 stories,
4 of which have been translated into English elsewhere.
**Pnin. New York, 1957. A novel.
**Lermontov. A Hero of Our Time. New York, 1958. A translation.
**Nabokov^s Dozen. New York, 1958. Nine Stories and 4 more.
**Poems. New York, 1959. 14 poems.
** Lolita. Hollywood, 1960. An unpublished screenplay.
**The Song of IgoPs Campaign. New York, i960. A translation of the
twelfth-century epic.
[ Ixxiii ]
**Pale Fire. New York, 1962. A novel.
**Pushkin, Eugene Onegin. New York, 1964. Translation and Commentary
in 4 volumes,
* Nabokov's Quartet. New York, 1966. One story was originally written in
English.
**Speak, Memory. New York, 1966. Definitive version of memoir originally
published as Conclusive Evidence, including Other Shores and new ma-
terial.
Lolita. New York, 1967. A translation into Russian.
**Nabokov's Congeries, Page Stegner, ed. New York, 1968. An anthology.
**Ada. New York, 1969. A novel.
**The Annotated Lolita. New York, 1970. Alfred Appel, Jr., Preface, In-
troduction, and Notes.
* Poems and Problems. New York, 1971. Includes text of Poems, translations
of Russian poems, and chess problems.
2. CRITICISM OF LOLITA
Aldridge, A. Owen, “Lolita and Les Liaisons Danger euses," Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature, II (Fall 1961), 20-26.
Amis, Kingsley, “She Was a Child and I Was a Child,” The Spectator,
No. 6854 (November 6, 1959), 635-636.
Appel, Alfred, Jr., “An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov,” in the Special
all-Nabokov number, Wisconsin Studies, VIII (Spring 1967), 127-152.
Reprinted in L. S. Dembo, ed., Nabokov: The Man and His Work. Mad-
ison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Pp. 19-44.
— , “The Art of Nabokov’s Artifice,” Denver Quarterly, III (Summer
1968), 25-37.
, “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wisconsin Studies, op. cit.,
204-241. Reprinted in Dembo. Pp. 106-143.
Brenner, Conrad, “Nabokov: The Art of the Perverse,” New Republic,
CXXXVIII (June 23, 1958), 18-21.
Bryer, Jackson R. and Thomas J. Bergin, Jr., “Vladimir Nabokov’s Criti-
cal Reputation in English: A Note and a Checklist, Wisconsin Studies,
op. cit., 312-364. Reprinted in Dembo, op. cit. Pp. 225-274.
Butler, Diana, “Lolita Lepidoptera,” New World Writing, No. 16 (1960),
58-84.
[ Ixxiv ]
Dupee, F.W., “Lolita in America,” Encounter, XII (February 1959), 30-
35. Reprinted in Columbia University Forum, II (Winter 1959), 35-39-
, “A Preface to Lolita," Anchor Review, No. 2 (1957), 1-13. Re-
printed in his “The King of the Cats" and Other Remarks on Writers
and Writing. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. Pp. 117-141.
Includes review of The Gift.
Fiedler, Leslie A., “The Profanation of the Child,” New Leader, XLI
(June 23, 1958), 26-29.
Field, Andrew, Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
Pp- 323-351-
Girodias, Maurice, “Lolita, Nabokov, and I,” Evergreen Review, IX (Sep-
tember 1965), 44-47, 89-91. Account of first publication of Lolita; for
Nabokov’s rejoinder, see “Lolita and Mr. Girodias,” Evergreen Review,
XI (February 1967), 37-41.
Gold, Herbert, “The Art of Fiction XL: Vladimir Nabokov, An Inter-
view,” Paris Review, No. 41 (Summer-Fall 1967), 92-1 ii.
Green, Martin, “The Morality of Lolita," Kenyon Review, XXVIII (June
1966), 352-377.
Hicks, Granville, “ ‘Lolita’ and Her Problems,” Saturday Review, XLI
(August 16, 1958), 12, 38.
Hollander, John, “The Perilous Magic of Nymphets,” Partisan Review,
XXIII (Fall 1956), 557-560. Reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz, ed.. On
Contemporary Literature. New York: Avon Books, 1964. Pp. 477-480.
Josipovici, G.D., “Lolita: Parody and the Pursuit of Beauty,” Critical
Quarterly, VI (Spring 1964), 35-48.
Kael, Pauline, “Lolita,” in 7 Lost It at the Movies. New York; Bantam
Books, 1966. Pp. 183-188. Reprinted in Andrew Sarris, ed., The Film.
Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Pp. 11-14. The most
interesting review of the film version of Lolita.
Meyer, Frank S., “The Strange Fate of ‘Lolita’ — A Lance into Cotton
Wool,” National Review, VI (November 22, 1958), 340-341.
Mitchell, Charles, “Mythic Seriousness in Lolita," Texas Studies in Litera-
ture and Language, V (Autumn 1963), 329-343.
Nemerov, Howard, “The Morality of Art,” Kenyon Review, XIX (Spring
1957)1 3 i 3 “ 3 Hi 316-321. Reprinted in his Poetry and Fiction: Essays.
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Pp. 260-269.
Phillips, Elizabeth, “The Hocus-Pocus of Lolita," Literature and Psychol-
ogy, X (Summer i960), 97-101.
[ Ixxv ]
’’'‘Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov,” Playboy, XI (January 1964),
35-41, 44-45. Reprinted in The Twelfth Anniversary Playboy Reader.
Chicago: Playboy Press, 1965.
Prescott, Orville, “Books of The Times,” New York Times, August 18,
1958, p. 17.
Proffer, Carl R., Keys to Lolita. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1968.
Rougemont, Denis de, "Lolita, or Scandal.” In Love Declared — Essays on
the Myths of Love, tr. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon Books,
1963. Pp. 48-54.
Schickel, Richard, “Nabokov’s Artistry,” The Progressive, XXII (Novem-
ber 1958), 46, 48-49.
, “A Review of a Novel You Can’t Buy,” The Reporter, XVII
(November 28, 1957), 45-47.
Smith, Peter Duval, “Vladimir Nabokov on His Life and Work,” The
Listener, LXVIII (November 22, 1962), 856-858. Text of BBC tele-
vision interview. Reprinted in Vogue, CXLI (March i, 1963), 152-155.
Stegner, Page, Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov.
New York: Dial Press, 1966. Pp. 102-115.
Trilling, Lionel, “The Last Lover — Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lolita,’ ” Grif-
fin, VII (August 1958), 4-21. Reprinted in Encounter, XI (October
1958), 9-19.
West, Rebecca, “ ‘Lolita’: A Tragic Book with a Sly Grimace,” London
Sunday Times, November 8, 1959, p. 16.
[ Ixxvi ]
IN PLACE OFA
NOTE ON THE TEXT
Shade’s poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic: my gray-
haired friend, my beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards
into his hat — and shook out a poem.
To this poem we now must turn. My Foreword has been, I trust,
not too skimpy. Other notes, arranged in a running commentary,
will certainly satisfy the most voracious reader. Although those
notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader
is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their
help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text, and per-
haps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third
time so as to complete the picture. I find it wise in such cases as this
to eliminate the bother of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting
out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing, or,
even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work which
can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable table —
not like the shaky little affair on which my typewriter is precari-
ously enthroned now, in this wretched motor lodge, with that car-
rousel inside and outside my head, miles away from New Wye.
Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no
human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his
(being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work),
with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him,
has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surround-
ings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can
provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have
subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has
the last word.
■Charles Kinbote, Pale Fire
IDLITA
FOREWORD
“Lolita, or the Concession of a White Widowed Male,”
such were the two titles under which the writer of the present i
note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert 2
Humbert” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary 3
thrombosis, on November i 6 , i^y2, a few days before his trial
was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation,
Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia
bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a
clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin
to use his discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation
of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been
influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been
awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses
tnake Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions
had been discussed.
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated.
Save for the correction of obvious solecmns and a careful sup- 4
pression of a few tenacious details that despite “H.H.” ’s own
efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones
(indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and
compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. 5
Its author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of 6
course, this mask— through which two hypnotic eyes seem to 7
glow-had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s 8
wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real sur-
[ 5 ]
name^ her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost
fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor {as the reader will
perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so.
References to “//.H.” ’’s crime may be looked up by the
inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 19^2; its
cause and purpose would have continued to remain a complete
mystery., had not this memoir been per?nitted to come under
my reading lamp.
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow
the destinies of the ^^rear people beyo?id the "'true''’ story, a
few details may be given as received from Mr. "Windntullerfi’
of "Ramsdale," who desires his identity suppressed so that "the
long shadow of this sorry and sordid business’’’’ should not reach
the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter,
"Louise,’’’ is by now a college sophomore. "Mona Dahl" is a
student in Paris. "Rita" has recently married the proprietor of a
hotel m Florida. Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed,
giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day ipya, ‘in Gray
Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. "Vivian Dark-
bloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be published
shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her
best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved
report that no ghosts walk.
Viewed simply as a novel, "Lolita" deals with situations and
emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader
had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous
evasions. True, not a single obscene tertn is to be found in the
whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by
modern conventions ‘into accepting without qualms a lavish
array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked
by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's
comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a
certain type of mind might call "aphrodisiac" {see in this
respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, ipqq,
by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably
more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication
of "Lolita" altogether, since those very scenes that one might
[ 6 ]
ineptly accuse of a sensuous existence of their own, are the most
strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tend=
ing unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The i
cytiic may say that commercial pornography makes the same
clahn; the learned may counter by asserting that “H.H.” 's im-
passioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least
12 % of American adult males— -a ‘’^conservative’’’’ estimate ac- 2
cording to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann {verbal communication) 3
—enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience
“H.H.” describes with such despair; that had our demented
diarist gone, in the fatal summer of ip4'l, to a competent psycho-
pathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither
would there have been this book.
This conmientator may be excused for repeating what he
has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that ‘‘‘‘of-
fensive’’’ is frequently but a synonym for ^‘’unusual”; and a great
work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very
nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have
no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is
abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of
ferocity and jocularity that betrays supretne misery perhaps, but 4
is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious.
Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this
country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through
his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical
cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how
magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a com- 5
passion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while
abhorring its author!
As a case history, “’Lolita” will become, no doubt, a classic in 6
psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory
aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance
and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on
the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there
lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother,
the panting maniac— these are not only vivid characters in a
unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out
[ 7 ]
potent evils. '‘’Lolita^’’ should make all of us — parents, social
workers, educators — apply ourselves with still greater vigilance
and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a
safer world.
Widworth, Mass.
August 5, 1955
John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.
PART ONE
1
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, l
Lo“lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps 2
down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in 3
one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was 4
Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. 5
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of
fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one 6
summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. 7
Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age
was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a
fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what
the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, en- 8
vied. Look at this tangle of thorns. 9
2
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going
person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French
and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I
am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue
picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His
father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, re-
spectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of
[ II ]
1 Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset
parsons, experts in obscure subjects — paleopedology and Aeolian
2 harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak
accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a
pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists
within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can
still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of
my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants
of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom
or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom
3 of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
4 My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s
had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family
as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told
me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he
had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and for-
gotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely
fond of her, despite the rigidity — the fatal rigidity- — of some of
her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of
time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-
rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry.
She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die
soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great
traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where
eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated
books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smil-
5 ing faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a
kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue
greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber
to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted
me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward
me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not
pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit
6 papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and
7 dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Miserables,
and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever
[ 12 ]
I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beauti-
ful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed
C*
precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.
I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and
there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was
on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only
definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred
before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little
Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk
about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an l
American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress
whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some
interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photo-
graphs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s
sumptuous La Beaut e Hiimaine that I had filched from under a 2
mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later,
in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the in-
formation he thought I needed about sex; this was just before
sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycee in Lyon (where we 3
were to spend three winters) ; but alas, in the summer of that year,
he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I
had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult.
3
Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half -English,
half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly
today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are
two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an
image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and
then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored
skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big
bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with
shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective,
absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in
natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
[ 13 ]
Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel,
to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her
parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. They
had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr.
1 Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness).
How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral
affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour
through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of in-
telligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and
I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our in-
terest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis,
2 infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby
animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a
nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly
in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that
frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by
our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each
other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as
slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do.
After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden
(of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to
be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the
3 plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders,
we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire,
and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to
touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would
creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer
and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long
cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger
children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s
salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and in-
experienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not
even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each
other, could bring relief.
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my
[ 14 ]
adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed
Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a
Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped
around a table in a sidewalk cafe. Annabel did not come out
well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat
glace, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair i
were about all that could be identified (as I remember that pic-
ture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded;
but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a
kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy
in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs
crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was
taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes
before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate.
Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance,
and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the cafe to the
beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the
violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a 2
brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sun-
glasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of 3
po.ssessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man 4
of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations
of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of
typhus in Corfu. 5
4
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and
keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote
summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire
for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so
forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which
feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which
causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in
the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced,
[ 15 ]
however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began
with Annabel.
I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated
the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a perma-
nent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years
of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in
us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the
matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long
after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long
before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared
notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same
year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and
mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you
loved me thus!
I have reserved for the conclusion of my “Annabel” phase the
account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed
to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and
slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found
a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness
and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted
windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive
memory, appear to me now like playing cards — presumably be-
cause a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled
and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot
lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between
the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as
naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky,
strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own.
Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and
when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expres-
sion, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features.
She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy
she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft,
drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees
caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her
quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious
potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face.
[ 16 ]
She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing
her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away
with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near
and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that
was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my en-
trails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my
passion.
I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder — I believe she
stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid — a sweetish, lowly,
musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my
senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a
nearby bush prevented them from overflowing — and as we drew
away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what
was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her
mother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note — and Dr.
Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that
mimosa grove — the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey- i
dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with
her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since —
until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnat- 2
ing her in another.
5
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly
away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those
morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger
sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary
relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While
a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me.
My studies were meticulous and intense, although not partic-
ularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry
as many manque talents do; but I was even more 7uanque than 3
that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and
I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets
end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I dis-
[ I? ]
1 cussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the
2 Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I
3 composed pastiches:
. . . Fraulein von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull.
A paper of mine entitled “The Proustian theme in a letter
4 from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by the six
or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an ‘‘^Histoire
5 abregee de la poesie anglaise'’’ for a prominent publishing firm,
and then started to compile that manual of French literature for
English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from Eng-
lish writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties —
and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the
time of my arrest.
I found a job — teaching English to a group of adults in
Auteuil. Then a school for boys employed me for a couple of
winters. Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I
had formed among social workers and psychotherapists to visit
in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and
reform schools, where pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes
could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted
one in dreams.
Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age
limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain
bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal
6 their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is,
demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as
“nymphets.”
It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones.
In fact, I would have the reader see “nine” and “fourteen” as the
boundaries — the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks — of an enchanted
island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by
a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children
nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know,
[ i8 ]
we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane.
Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least
what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair
certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive,
shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the
nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more
dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than
on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays
with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of true
nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or
just nice, or “cute,” or even “sweet” and “attractive,” ordinary,
plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls,
with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults
of great beauty (look at the ugly dumplings in black stockings
and white hats that are metamorphosed into stunning stars of
the screen). A normal man given a group photograph of school
girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will
not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to
be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy,
with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super -voluptuous l
flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have
to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable
signs- — the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness
of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame
and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate — the little deadly
demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized
by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.
Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part
in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that
there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should
say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few
known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to
come under a nymphet’s spell. It is a question of focal adjust-
ment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount,
and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of
perverse delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my
little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet 2
C 19 ]
in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time; but
today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed,
1 I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf in my life.
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierce-
ness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and
survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound re-
mained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a
civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of
sixteen but not a girl of twelve.
No wonder, then, that my adult life during the European
period of my existence proved monstrously twofold. Overtly, I
had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial
women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was con-
sumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing
nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared ap-
proach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but
palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I
derived from natural fornication were much the same as those
known to normal big males consorting with their normal big
mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The
trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught
glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest
2 of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling
than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most
talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. I was
aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which was mine; both
would be termed female by the anatomist. But to me, through
the prism of my senses, “they were as different as mist and mast.”
All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I
did not understand my throes quite so clearly. While my body
knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body’s every plea.
One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly
optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me
3 with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me
the only objects of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel’s,
her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a fore-
runner of insanity. At other times I would tell myself that it was
[ 20 ]
all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong
in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind
my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children
and Young Person Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined 1
as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years” (after that,
from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young
person”). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the other hand, a “way-
ward child” is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen
years of age” (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious
or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy 2,3
in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a 4
harlot at ten years of age. This is all very interesting, and I
daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no,
I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle
cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could
the nymphet sing in single tone, but probably preferred a lad’s
perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen 5
Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a 6
litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright
beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with
their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony
eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves
on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical 7
scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty
are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha 8
old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds.
After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she
was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled,
in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private
feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly 9
in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve 10
running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight,
in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse. 11
But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard
to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect
for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and
under no circumstances would he have interfered with the in-
[ 21 ]
nocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how
his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a
1 demon child, "'enfant chnrmante et fourbe,’’^ dim eyes, bright
lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her.
So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with
2 Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast
development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of
somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next matu-
rational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic
3 hair ( 1 1 .2 years) . My little cup brims with tiddles.
A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger’s
4 shivering child. Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous
were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pre-
tending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet
scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or
part of an old tree’s shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little
beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot
near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and
tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun,
with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her '
skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and j
melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek.
5 Another time a red-haired school girl hung over me in the vietro,
and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my
blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these one-sided
diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of I
hell. It happened for instance that from my balcony I would
notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a I
nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror.
Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially i
keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone i
gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of ;
nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting ;
lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper 1
by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night.
Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat
down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet
[ 22 ]
was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had
stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my
pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me
forever. Never grow up.
6
A propos: I have often wondered what became of those
nymphets later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause
and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them
did not affect their future? I had possessed her — and she never
knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I
not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in
my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and 1
terrible wonder.
I learned, however, what they looked like, those lovely, mad-
dening, thin-armed nymphets, when they grew up. I remember
walking along an animated street on a gray spring afternoon
somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slim girl passed me at a 2
rapid, high-heeled, tripping step, we glanced back at the same
moment, she stopped and I accosted her. She came hardly up
to my chest hair and had the kind of dimpled round little face
French girls so often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-
fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her young body
which still retained — and that was the nymphic echo, the chill
of delight, the leap in my loins — a childish something mingling
with the professional fretillejnent of her small agile rump. I 3
asked her price, and she promptly replied with melodious silvery
precision (a bird, a very bird!) “Cc; 2 t.” I tried to haggle but 4
she saw the awful lone longing in my lowered eyes, directed so
far down at her round forehead and rudimentary hat (a band,
a posy); and with one beat of her lashes: “Tant she said, 5
^ and made as if to move away. Perhaps only three years earlier I
I might have seen her coming home from school! That evocation
[ settled the matter. She led me up the usual steep stairs, with the
^ usual bell clearing the way for the monsieur who might not care
[ 23 ]
to meet another monsieur^ on the mournful climb to the abject
room, all bed and bidet. As usual, she asked at once for her -petit
1 cadeau, and as usual I asked her name (Monique) and her age
(eighteen). I was pretty well acquainted with the banal way of
2 streetwalkers. They all answer ^‘‘dix-huit’’’ — a trim twitter, a note
of finality and wistful deceit which they emit up to ten times per
day, the poor little creatures. But in Monique’s case there could
be no doubt she was, if anything, adding one or two years to her
age. This I deduced from many details of her compact, neat,
curiously immature body. Having shed her clothes with fascinat-
ing rapidity, she stood for a moment partly wrapped in the
dingy gauze of the window curtain listening with infantile
pleasure, as pat as pat could be, to an organ-grinder in the dust-
brimming courtyard below. When I examined her small hands
and drew her attention to their grubby fingernails, she said with
3 a naive frown “Ozri, ce n'est pas bien^’’ and went to the wash-
basin, but I said it did not matter, did not matter at all. With
her brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin, she
looked perfectly charming. Her hips were no bigger than those
of a squatting lad; in fact, I do not hesitate to say (and indeed
this is the reason why I linger gratefully in that gauze-gray room
of memory with little Monique) that among the eighty or so
4 gnies I had had operate upon me, she was the only one that
gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. “// hait rnalin, celui qui a
5 invente ce triic-la^' she commented amiably, and got back into
her clothes with the same high-style speed.
I asked for another, more elaborate, assignment later the same
evening, and she said she would meet me at the corner cafe at
6 nine, and swore she had never pose iin lapin in all her young life.
We returned to the same room, and I could not help saying how
very pretty she was to which she answered demurely; “Tz/ es
7 bien gentil de dire pa'' and then, noticing what I noticed too in
the mirror reflecting our small Eden — the dreadful grimace of
clenched-teeth tenderness that distorted my mouth — dutiful little
Monique (oh, she had been a nymphet all right!) wanted to
know if she should remove the layer of red from her lips avant
8 qu'on se couche in case I planned to kiss her. Of course, I
[ 24 ]
planned it. I let myself go with her more completely than I had
with any young lady before, and my last vision that night of
long-lashed Monique is touched up with a gaiety that I find
seldom associated with any event in my humiliating, sordid,
taciturn love life. She looked tremendously pleased with the
bonus of fifty I gave her as she trotted out into the April night
drizzle with Humbert Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake.
Stopping before a window display she said with great gusto:
“/e vais viacheter des basP’’ and never may I forget the way her l
Parisian childish lips exploded on ^‘bas,’' pronouncing it with an
appetite that all but changed the “a” into a brief buoyant burst-
ing “o” as in
I had a date with her next day at 2.15 p.m. in my own rooms,
but it was less successful, she seemed to have grown less juvenile,
more of a woman overnight. A cold I caught from her led me to
cancel a fourth assignment, nor was I sorry to break an emotional
series that threatened to burden me with heart-rending fantasies
and peter out in dull disappointment. So let her remain, sleek,
slender Monique, as she was for a minute or two: a delinquent
nymphet shining through the matter-of-fact young whore.
My brief acquaintance with her started a train of thought that
may seem pretty obvious to the reader who knows the ropes. An
advertisement in a lewd magazine landed me, one brave day, in
the office of a Mile Edith who began by offering me to choose a
kindred soul from a collection of rather formal photographs in
a rather soiled album {^‘’Regardez-moi cette belle bruneP’’). 2
When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to
blurt out my criminal craving, she looked as if about to show
me the door; however, after asking me what price I was prepared
to disburse, she condescended to put me in touch with a person
qui pourrait arranger la chose. Next day, an asthmatic woman, 3
coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical
Provenqal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took
me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after
explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify
the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theat-
rically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part
[ 25 ]
of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept.
It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repul-
sively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black
braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. When
I shook my head and tried to shuffle out of the trap, the woman,
talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the
young giantess’ torso; then, seeing my determination to leave,
1 she demanded son argent. A door at the end of the room was
opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined
in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy
and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed,
bowlegged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic
of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in
2 glasses, said he had served in the police, lui, so that I had better
do as I was told. I went up to Marie — for that was her stellar
3 name — who by then had quietly transferred her heavy haunches
to a stool at the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup
while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity
dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her in-
different hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective,
whereupon I was suffered to leave.
7
I do not know if the pimp’s album may not have been another
link in the daisy-chain; but soon after, for my own safety, I de-
cided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-
cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic
routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual
flowering of certain moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes,
might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and
dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control. A
little money that had come my way after my father’s death
(nothing very grand — the Mirana had been sold long before), in
addition to my striking if somewhat brutal good looks, allowed
[ 26 ]
me to enter upon my quest with equanimity. After considerable
deliberation, my choice fell on the daughter of a Polish doctor:
the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness
and tachycardia. We played chess: his daughter watched me i
from behind her easel, and inserted eyes or knuckles borrowed
from me into the cubistic trash that accomplished misses then
painted instead of lilacs and lambs. Let me repeat with quiet
force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally 2
handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a
gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional
virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen
and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal.
And this was my case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain
at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had
become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to
women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap.
Had I been a frangais moyen with a taste for flashy ladies, I 3
might have easily found, among the many crazed beauties that
lashed my grim rock, creatures far more fascinating than Valeria.
My choice, however, was prompted by considerations whose
essence was, as I realized too late, a piteous compromise. All of
which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always
was in matters of sex.
8
Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing
presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really 4, 5
attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little
girl. She gave it not because she had divined something about
me; it was just her style — and I fell for it. Actually, she was at
least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for
even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under cir-
cumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my
part, was as naive as only a pervert can be. She looked fluffy and
frolicsome, dressed d la gamine^ showed a generous amount of 6
[ ]
smooth leg, knew how to stress the white of a bare instep by the
black of a velvet slipper, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped,
and dirndled, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest
and tritest fashion imaginable.
1 After a brief ceremony at the mairie, I took her to the new
apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her
wear, before I touched her, a girl’s plain nightshirt that I had
managed to filch from the linen closet of an orphanage. I derived
some fun from that nuptial night and had the idiot in hysterics
by sunrise. But reality soon asserted itself. The bleached curl
2 revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a
shaved shin; the mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed
it with love, disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the cor-
responding part in a treasured portrait of her toadlike dead
mama; and presently, instead of a pale little gutter girl, Humbert
Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-
3 breasted and practically brainless baba.
This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her only asset
was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of
comfort in our small squalid flat: two rooms, a hazy view in one
window, a brick wall in the other, a tiny kitchen, a shoe-shaped
bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-
4 necked maiden to stab me. We had quite a few cozy evenings
5 together, she deep in her Paris-Soir, I working at a rickety table.
We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed
to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and
despair. The grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow
drove me mad; but with Valeria’s help I did find after all some
legal outlets to my fantastic predicament. As to cooking, we
tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu and had most of our meals at a
crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on
the table cloth and a good deal of foreign babble. And next door,
an art dealer displayed in his cluttered window a splendid, flam-
boyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American
estampe — a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque
lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches
[ 28 ]
through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-
studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds.
These burst. In the summer of 1939 mon oncle d'Amerique 1
died bequeathing me an annual income of a few thousand dollars
on condition I came to live in the States and showed some
interest in his business. This prospect was most welcome to me.
I felt my life needed a shake-up. There was another thing, too:
moth holes had appeared in the plush of matrimonial comfort.
During the last weeks I had kept noticing that my fat Valeria
was not her usual self; had acquired a queer restlessness; even
showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out
of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to im-
personate. When I informed her we were shortly to sail for New
York, she looked distressed and bewildered. There were some
tedious difficulties with her papers. She had a Nansen, or better
say Nonsense, passport which for some reason a share in her 2
husband’s solid Swiss citizenship could not easily transcend; and
I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the prefecture, and 3
other formalities, that had made her so listless, despite my
patiently describing to her America, the country of rosy children
and great trees, where life would be such an improvement on
dull dingy Paris.
We were coming out of some office building one morning,
with her papers almost in order, when Valeria, as she waddled
by my side, began to shake her poodle head vigorously without
saying a word. I let her go on for a while and then asked if she
thought she had something inside. She answered (I translate
from her French which was, I imagine, a translation in its turn
of some Slavic platitude) : “There is another man in my life.”
Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed
me, I confess. To beat her up in the street, there and then, as an
honest vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of
secret sufferings had taught me superhuman self-control. So I
ushered her into a taxi which had been invitingly creeping along
the curb for some time, and in this comparative privacy I quietly
suggested she comment her wild talk. A mounting fury was suf-
focating me — not because I had any particular fondness for that
[ 29 ]
figure of fun, M7}ie Humbert, but because matters of legal and
illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide, and here she
was, Valeria, the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in
her own way of my comfort and fate. I demanded her lover’s
name. I repeated my question; but she kept up a burlesque
babble, discoursing on her unhappiness with me and announc-
1 ing plans for an immediate divorce. “Mais qui est-ce?'' I shouted
at last, striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without
even wincing, stared at me as if the answer were too simple for
words, then gave a quick shrug and pointed at the thick neck of
the taxi driver. He pulled up at a small cafe and introduced
himself. I do not remember his ridiculous name but after all
those years I still see him quite clearly — a stocky White Russian
ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut; there were
thousands of them plying that fool’s trade in Paris. We sat down
at a table; the Tsarist ordered wine; and Valeria, after applying
a wet napkin to her knee, went on talking — mto me rather than
to me; she poured words into this dignified receptacle with a
volubility I had never suspected she had in her. And every now
and then she would volley a burst of Slavic at her stolid lover.
The situation was preposterous and became even more so when
the taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began
to unfold his views and plans. With an atrocious accent to his
careful French, he delineated the world of love and work into
which he proposed to enter hand in hand with his child-wife
Valeria. She by now was preening herself, between him and
me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her
blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were
absent, and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in
the act of being transferred, for her own good, from one wise
guardian to another even wiser one; and although my helpless
wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured certain impressions,
I can swear that he actually consulted me on such things as her
diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or
should read. “I think,” he said, “she will like ]ean Christophef'’
1 Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.
I put an end to this gibberish by suggesting Valeria pack up
[ 30 ]
her few belongings immediately, upon which the platitudinous
colonel gallantly offered to carry them into the car. Reverting to
his professional state, he drove the Humberts to their residence
and all the way Valeria talked, and Humbert the Terrible delib-
erated with Humbert the Small whether Humbert Humbert
should kill her or her lover, or both, or neither. I remember once
handling an automatic belonging to a fellow student, in the days
(I have not spoken of them, I think, but never mind) when I
toyed with the idea of enjoying his little sister, a most diaphanous
nymphet with a black hair bow, and then shooting myself. I
now wondered if Valechka (as the colonel called her) was really
worth shooting, or strangling, or drowning. She had very vul-
nerable legs, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her
very horribly as soon as we were alone.
But we never were, Valechka— -by now shedding torrents of
tears tinged with the mess of her rainbow make-up,- — ^started to
fill anyhow a trunk, and two suitcases, and a bursting carton,
and visions of putting on my mountain boots and taking a
running kick at her rump were of course impossible to put into
execution with the cursed colonel hovering around all the time.
I cannot say he behaved insolently or anything like that; on the
contrary, he displayed, as a small sideshow in the theatricals I,
had been inveigled in, a discreet old-world civility, punctuating
his movements with all sorts of mispronounced apologies (fai
demannde par donne— excuse me — est-ce que fai puis — may I — ■ i
and so forth), and turning away tactfully when Valechka took
down with a flourish her pink panties from the clothesline above
the tub; but he seemed to be all over the place at once, le gredin, i
agreeing his frame with the anatomy of the flat, reading in my
chair my newspaper, untying a knotted string, rolling a cigarette,
counting the teaspoons, visiting the bathroom, helping his moll
to wrap up the electric fan her father had given her, and carry-
ing streetward her luggage. I sat with arms folded, one hip on
the window sill, dying of hate and boredom. At last both were
out of the quivering apartment^ — the vibration of the door I had
slammed after them still rang in my every nerve, a poor sub-
stitute for the backhand slap with which I ought to have hit her
[ 31 ]
across the cheekbone according to the rules of the movies.
Clumsily playing my part, I stomped to the bathroom to check
if they had taken my English toilet water; they had not; but I
noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor
of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed
the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny
cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult,
and I wildly looked around for a weapon. Actually I daresay it
was nothing but middle-class Russian courtesy (with an oriental
tang, perhaps) that had prompted the good colonel (Maximo-
1 vich! his name suddenly taxies back to me), a very formal
person as they all are, to muffle his private need in decorous
silence so as not to underscore the small size of his host’s
domicile with the rush of a gross cascade on top of his own
hushed trickle. But this did not enter my mind at the moment,
as groaning with rage I ransacked the kitchen for something
better than a broom. Then, canceling my search, I dashed out of
the house with the heroic decision of attacking him barefisted;
despite my natural vigor, I am no pugilist, while the short but
broad-shouldered Maximovich seemed made of pig iron. The
void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife’s departure ex-
cept a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after
preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box, may
have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little
revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that
Mrs. Maximovich nee Zborovski had died in childbirth around
1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had
been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experi-
ment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The
experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of
bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My in-
formant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese
Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite
corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a
brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in
a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quad-
rupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to
[ 32 ]
find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology ;
but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific
products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will i
be illustrated with good photographs when they do get printed,
although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor
such erudite works. The one to which I am restricted these days,
despite my lawyer’s favors, is a good example of the inane eclecti-
cism governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They
have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N. Y.,
G. W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the
Children's Encyclopedia (with some nice photographs of sun-
shine-haired Girl Scouts in shorts), and A Murder Is Announced
by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as 2
A Vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice 3
Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946)
Who's Who in the Limelight — actors, producers, playwrights,
and shots of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume,
I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences
that logicians loathe and poets love. I transcribe most of the 4
page:
Pvm, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage 5
training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y. Made debut in 6
Sunburst. Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from 7
Here, The Girl in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange
Mushroom, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming 8
of You.
Quiltv, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, 9
N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a
commercial career but turned to play writing. Author of The
Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in col- 10,11
laboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The Strange 12,13
Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for 14
children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000
miles and played 280 performances on the road during the
winter before ending in New York. Hobbies; fast cars, pho- 15
tography, pets. 16
Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied 17
[ 33 ]
for stage at American Academy. First played in Ottawa in
1900. Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to
Strangers. Has disappeared since in [a list of some thirty
plays follows].
How the look of my dear love’s name even affixed to some
old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with helpless pain!
Perhaps, she might have been an actress too. Born 1935. Appeared
(I notice the slip of my pen in the preceding paragraph, but
please do not correct it, Clarence) in The Murdered Playwright.
Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I
have only words to play with!
9
Divorce proceedings delayed my voyage, and the gloom of yet
another World War had settled upon the globe when, after a
winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, I at last reached
the States. In New York I eagerly accepted the soft job fate
offered me: it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing per-
fume ads. I welcomed its desultory character and pseudoliterary
aspects, attending to it whenever I had nothing better to do. On
the other hand, I was urged by a war-time university in New
York to complete my comparative history of French literature
for English-speaking students. The first volume took me a couple
of years during which I put in seldom less than fifteen hours of
work daily. As I look back on those days, I see them divided
tidily into ample light and narrow shade: the light pertaining to
the solace of research in palatial libraries, the shade to my ex-
cruciating desires and insomnias of which enough has been said.
Knowing me by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty
and hot I got, trying to catch a glimpse of nymphets (alas, always
remote) playing in Central Park, and how repulsed I was by the
glitter of deodorized career girls that a gay dog in one of the
offices kept unloading upon me. Let us skip all that. A dreadful
[ 34 ]
breakdown sent me to a sanatorium for more than a year; I went
back to my work — only to be hospitalized again.
Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. One
of my favorite doctors, a charming cynical chap with a little 1
brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead
an expedition into arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a “re-
corder of psychic reactions.” With two young botanists and an
old carpenter I shared now and then (never very successfully)
the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita Johnson — who
was soon flown back, I am glad to say. I had little notion of
what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number
of meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair
(somewhere on Prince of Wales’ Island, I understand) the
wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly
with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point
in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected 2
plankton. A third studied tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a
film photographer — an insecure fellow with whom at one time I
was made to partake in a good deal of menial work (he, too, had
some psychic troubles) — maintained that the big men on our
team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in
checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of
the arctic fox.
We lived in prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian
world of granite. We had heaps of supplies — the Reader's Digest,
an ice cream mixer, chemical toilets, paper caps for Christmas.
My health improved wonderfully in spite or because of all the
fantastic blankness and boredom. Surrounded by such dejected
vegetation as willow scrub and lichens; permeated, and, I sup-
pose, cleansed by a whistling gale; seated on a boulder under a
completely translucent sky (through which, however, nothing of
importance showed), I felt curiously aloof from my own self.
No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo
girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig
faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had.
Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.
I left my betters the task of analyzing glacial drifts, drumlins,
[ 35 ]
, 2 and gremlins, and kremlins, and for a time tried to jot down what
I fondly thought were “reactions” (I noticed, for instance, that
dreams under the midnight sun tended to be highly colored, and
this my friend the photographer confirmed). I was also supposed
to quiz my various companions on a number of important mat-
ters, such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food-fantasies,
nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio programs, changes
in outlook and so forth. Everybody got so fed up with this that
I soon dropped the project completely, and only toward the end
of my twenty months of cold labor (as one of the botanists
jocosely put it) concocted a perfectly spurious and very racy
report that the reader will find published in the Annals of Adult
Psychophysics for 1945 or 1946, as well as in the issue of Arctic
Explorations devoted to that particular expedition; which, in
conclusion, was not really concerned with Victoria Island copper
or anything like that, as I learned later from my genial doctor;
for the nature of its real purpose was what is termed “hush-
hush,” and so let me add merely that whatever it was, that pur-
pose was admirably achieved.
The reader will regret to learn that soon after my return to
3 civilization I had another bout with insanity (if to melancholia
and a sense of insufferable oppression that cruel term must be
applied). I owe my complete restoration to a discovery I made
while being treated at that particular very expensive sanatorium.
I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in
trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never
letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; in-
venting for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which
make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shriek-
ing); teasing them with fake “primal scenes”; and never allow-
ing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament.
By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered,
with glee, cards calling me “potentially homosexual” and “totally
impotent.” The sport was so excellent, its results- — in my case —
so ruddy that I stayed on for a whole month after I was quite
well (sleeping admirably and eating like a schoolgirl). And then
I added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a power-
[ 36 ]
ful newcomer, a displaced (and, surely, deranged) celebrity,
known for his knack of making patients believe they had wit-
nessed their own conception.
1
10
Upon signing out, I cast around for some place in the New
England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church)
where I could spend a studious summer subsisting on a compact
boxful of notes I had accumulated and bathing in some nearby
lake. My work had begun to interest me again — I mean my
scholarly exertions; the other thing, my active participation in
my uncle’s posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to
a minimum.
One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished
family, suggested I spend a few months in the residence of his
impoverished cousins, a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who
wanted to let their upper story where a late aunt had delicately
dwelt. He said they had two little daughters, one a baby, the
other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden, not far from a
beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect.
I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was
housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining
in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in
French and fondle in Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy 2
station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody
answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught Mc-
Coo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-
pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned
down — possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had 3
been raging all night in my veins. His family, he said, had fled
to a farm he owned, and had taken the car, but a friend of his
wife’s, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered 4
to accommodate me. A lady who lived opposite Mrs. Haze’s had
lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned, square-
[ 37 ]
topped affair, manned by a cheerful Negro. Now, since the only
reason for my coming at all had vanished, the aforesaid arrange-
ment seemed preposterous. All right, his house would have to be
completely rebuilt, so what? Had he not insured it sufficiently?
I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite Euro-
pean, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that
funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even
more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I saw him scamper
away, and my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En
route, I swore to myself I would not dream of staying in Rams-
dale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the
Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes. Possibilities of sweetness
on technicolor beaches had been trickling through my spine for
some time before, and McCoo’s cousin had, in fact, sharply
diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but as it
transpired now absolutely inane suggestion.
Speaking of sharp turns: we almost ran over a meddlesome
1 suburban dog (one of those who lie in wait for cars) as we
swerved into Lawn Street. A little further, the Haze house, a
white-frame horror, appeared, looking dingy and old, more gray
than white — -the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube
affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower. I tipped the chauf-
feur and hoped he would immediately drive away so that I
might double back unnoticed to my hotel and bag; but the man
merely crossed to the other side of the street where an old lady
was calling to him from her porch. What could I do? I pressed
the bell button.
A colored maid let me in- — and left me standing on the mat
while she rushed back to the kitchen where something was burning
that ought not to burn.
The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed
wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that
2 banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s “Arlesienne.”
A door ajar to the right afforded a glimpse of a living room, with
some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet and a striped sofa
along the wail. There was a staircase at the end of the hallway,
and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how
[ 38 ]
hot it had been out-of-doors) and staring, to stare at something,
at an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came
from the upper landing the contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who
leaning over the banisters inquired melodiously, “Is that Mon-
sieur Humbert?” A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in
addition. Presently, the lady herself — sandals, maroon slacks,
yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order — came down the
steps, her index finger still tapping upon her cigarette.
I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with.
The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny fore-
head, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive
features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of
Marlene Dietrich. Patting her bronze-brown bun, she led me into l
the parlor and we talked for a minute about the McCoo fire and
the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Her very wide-set sea-green
eyes had a funny way of traveling all over you, carefully avoiding
your own eyes. Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow;
and uncoiling herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept mak-
ing spasmodic dashes at three ashtrays and the near fender
(where lay the brown core of an apple); whereupon she would
sink back again, one leg folded under her. She was, obviously,
one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book
club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but
never her soul; women who are completely devoid of humor;
women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible
subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the
rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of
which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distin-
guished. I was perfectly aware that if by any wild chance I be-
came her lodger, she would methodically proceed to do in regard
to me what taking a lodger probably meant to her all along, and
I would again be enmeshed in one of those tedious affairs I
knew so well.
But there was no question of my settling there. I could not
be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines
on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the
comedy of so-called “functional modern furniture” and the
[ 39 ]
tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with dead
lamps. I was led upstairs, and to the left — into “my” room. I
inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I
did discern above “my” bed Rene Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata.”
And she called that servant maid’s room a “semi-studio”! Let’s
get out of here at once, I firmly said to myself as I pretended to
deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price that my
wistful hostess was asking for board and bed.
Old-world politeness, however, obliged me to go on with the
ordeal. We crossed the landing to the right side of the house
(where “I and Lo have our rooms” — Lo being presumably the
maid), and the lodger-lover could hardly conceal a shudder
when he, a very fastidious male, was granted a preview of the
only bathroom, a tiny oblong between the landing and “Lo’s”
room, with limp wet things overhanging the dubious tub (the
question mark of a hair inside); and there were the expected
coils of the rubber snake, and its complement — a pinkish cozy,
coyly covering the toilet lid.
“I see you are not too favorably impressed,” said the lady
letting her hand rest for a moment upon my sleeve: she com-
bined a cool forwardness — the overflow of what I think is called
“poise” — with a shyness and sadness that caused her detached
way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the intonation
of a professor of “speech.” “This is not a neat household, I con-
fess,” the doomed dear continued, “but I assure you [she looked
at my lips], you will be very comfortable, very comfortable,
indeed. Let me show you the garden” (the last more brightly,
with a kind of winsome toss of the voice).
Reluctantly I followed her downstairs again; then through the
kitchen at the end of the hall, on the right side of the house —
the side where also the dining room and the parlor were (under
“my” room, on the left, there was nothing but a garage). In the
kitchen, the Negro maid, a plump youngish woman, said, as she
, took her large glossy black purse from the knob of the door
leading to the back porch: “I’ll go now, Mrs. Haze.” “Yes,
Louise,” answered Mrs. Haze with a sigh. “I’ll settle with you
Friday.” We passed on to a small pantry and entered the dining
[ 40 ]
room, parallel to the parlor we had already admired. I noticed
a white sock on the floor. With a deprecatory grunt, Mrs. Haze
stooped without stopping and threw it into a closet next to the
pantry. We cursorily inspected a mahogany table with a fruit
vase in the middle, containing nothing but the still glistening
stone of one plum. I groped for the timetable I had in my pocket
and surreptitiously fished it out to look as soon as possible for a
train. I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining
room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery —
“the piazza,” sang out my leader, and then, without the least
warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a
mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her
knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. 1
It was the same child — the same frail, honey-hued shoulders,
the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair.
A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my
aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the
juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I
were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnaped, 2
discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at
the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole
on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the
trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely in-
drawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly
paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenu-
lated imprint left by the band of her shorts — that last mad im-
mortal day behind the “Roches Roses.” The twenty-five years I 3
had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.
I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that
flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the
course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the
kneeling child (her eyes blinking over those stern dark spectacles
— the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches)
while I passed by her in my adult disguise (a great big hand-
some hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul
managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these
I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of
[ 41 ]
1 course, she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, 7 fiy Lolita, was to eclipse
completely her prototype. All I want to stress is that my dis-
covery of her was a fatal consequence of that “princedom by the
sea” in my tortured past. Everything between the two events
was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of
joy. Everything they shared made one of them.
I have no illusions, however. My judges will regard all this as a
2 piece of mummery on the part of a madman with a gross liking
3,4 for the fruit vert. Au fond, fa m'est bien egal. All I know is
that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the
breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in
rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and —
“That was my Lo,” she said, “and these are my lilies.”
“Yes,” I said, “yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!”
11
Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation
5 leather, with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-
hand corner. I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co.,
6 Blankton, Mass., as if it were really before me. Actually, it was
destroyed five years ago and what we examine now (by courtesy
of a photographic memory) is but its brief materialization, a
7 puny unfledged phoenix.
I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice.
First I jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and
corrections) on the leaves of what is commercially known as a
“typewriter tablet”; then, I copied it out with obvious abbrevia-
tions in my smallest, most Satanic, hand in the little black book
just mentioned.
May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but
not in the Carolinas. That day an epidemic of “abdominal flu”
(whatever that is) forced Ramsdale to close its schools for the
summer. The reader may check the weather data in the Rams-
dale Journal for 1947. A few days before that I moved into the
[ 42 ]
Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose to reel off
(much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he
swallowed) covers most of June.
Thursday. Very warm day. From a vantage point (bathroom
window) saw Dolores taking things off a clothesline in the
apple-green light behind the house. Strolled out. She wore a
plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Every movement she made
in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive
chord of my abject body. After a while she sat down next to me
on the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the
pebbles between her feet — pebbles, my God, then a curled bit of
milk-bottle glass resembling a snarling lip — and chuck them at a
can. Pmg. You can’t a second time — you can’t hit it — this is
agony — a second time. Ping. Marvelous skin — oh, marvelous;
tender and tanned, not the least blemish. Sundaes cause acne.
The excess of the oily substance called sebum which nourishes
the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irrita-
tion that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not
have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food. God,
what agony, that silky shimmer above her temple grading into
bright brown hair. And the little bone twitching at the side of
her dust-powdered ankle. “The McCoo girl? Ginny McCoo?
Oh, she’s a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio.”
Ping. The glistening tracery of down on her forearm. When she
got up to take in the wash, I had a chance of adoring from afar
the faded seat of her rolled-up jeans. Out of the lawn, bland
Mrs. Haze, complete with camera, grew up like a fakir’s fake tree
and after some heliotropic fussing — sad eyes up, glad eyes down
— had the cheek of taking my picture as I sat blinking on the
steps, Humbert le Bel.
Friday. Saw her going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose.
Why does the way she walks — a child, mind you, a mere child!
— excite me so abominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of
turned in toes. A kind of wiggly looseness below the knee pro-
longed to the end of each footfall. The ghost of a drag. Very
infantile, infinitely meretricious. Humbert Humbert is also
infinitely moved by the little one’s slangy speech, by her harsh
[ 43 ]
high voice. Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across
the fence. Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. Pause. “I
must go now, kiddo.”
Saturday. (Beginning perhaps amended.) I know it is madness
to keep this journal but it gives me a strange thrill to do so; and
only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script. Let me
state with a sob that today my L. was sun-bathing on the so-
called “piazza,” but her mother and some other woman were
around all the time. Of course, I might have sat there in the
rocker and pretended to read. Playing safe, I kept away, for I
was afraid that the horrible, insane, ridiculous and pitiful tremor
1 that palsied me might prevent me from making my e^itree with
any semblance of casualness.
2 Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most favonian week. This
time I took up a strategic position, with obese newspaper and
new pipe, in the piazza rocker be j ore L. arrived. To my intense
disappointment she came with her mother, both in two-piece
bathing suits, black, as new as my pipe. My darling, my sweet-
heart stood for a moment near me— wanted the funnies — and
she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one, but
more intensely so, with rougher overtones — a torrid odor that at
once set my manhood astir — but she had already yanked out of
3 me the coveted section and retreated to her mat near her phocine
mamma. There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing
me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her
slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurva-
tion of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates
clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently,
the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was
4 the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think
up. As I looked on, through prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped,
focusing my lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I
felt that my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon,
might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately;
5 but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to a motion-
less one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with
one of the various girlish movements she made now and then as
[ 44 ]
she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and
revealing a stippled armpit — but fat Haze suddenly spoiled every- 1
thing by turning to me and asking me for a light, and starting a
make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular
fraud.
Monday. Delectatio morosa. I spend my doleful days in
dumps and dolors. We (mother Haze, Dolores and I) were to 2
go to Our Glass Lake this afternoon, and bathe, and bask; but 3
a nacreous morn degenerated at noon into rain, and Lo made a 4
scene.
The median age of pubescence for girls has been found to be
thirteen years and nine months in New York and Chicago. The
age varies for individuals from ten, or earlier, to seventeen.
Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. 5
He gave her lessons in algebra. ]e m' imagine cela. They spent 6
their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. “Monsieur Poe-poe,” as 7
that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert’s classes in Paris
called the poet-poet.
I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the
sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little
girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad
shoulder. Moreover, I am said to resemble some crooner or actor
chap on whom Lo has a crush. 8
Tuesday. Rain. Lake of the Rains. Mamma out shopping. L.,
I knew, was somewhere quite near. In result of some stealthy
maneuvering, I came across her in her mother’s bedroom. Prying
her left eye open to get rid of a speck of something. Checked
frock. Although I do love that intoxicating brown fragrance of
hers, I really think she should wash her hair once in a while. For
a moment, we were both in the same warm green bath of the
mirror that reflected the top of a poplar with us in the sky. Held
her roughly by the shoulders, then tenderly by the temples, and
turned her about. “It’s right there,” she said, “I can feel it.”
“Swiss peasant would use the top of her tongue.” “Lick it out?”
“Yeth. Shly try?” “Sure,” she said. Gently I pressed my quivering
sting along her rolling salty eyeball. “Goody-goody,” she said
nictating. “It is gone.” “Now the other?” “You dope,” she began, 9
[ 45 ]
“there is noth — ” but here she noticed the pucker of my ap-
proaching lips. “Okay,” she said co-operatively, and bending
toward her warm upturned russet face somber Humbert pressed
his mouth to her fluttering eyelid. She laughed, and brushed
past me out of the room. My heart seemed everywhere at once.
Never in my life — not even when fondling my child-love in
France — never —
Night. Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to
describe her face, her ways — and I cannot, because my own desire
for her blinds me when she is near. I am not used to being with
nymphets, damn it. If I close my eyes I see but an immobilized
fraction of her, a cinematographic still, a sudden smooth nether
loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits
1 tying her shoe. “Dolores Haze, Tie montrez pas vos zha7nbes"
(this is her mother who thinks she knows French).
2 A poet d vies hemes, I composed a madrigal to the soot-black
lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes, to the five asymmetrical
freckles of her bobbed nose, to the blond down of her brown
limbs; but I tore it up and cannot recall it today. Only in the
tritest of terms (diary resumed) can I describe Lo’s features:
I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked
red candy, the lower one prettily plump — oh, that I were a lady
writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light! But
instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Hum-
bert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a
cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.
And neither is she the fragile child of a feminine novel. What
drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet — of
every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender
dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming
from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures,
from the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservants in the
Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from
very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels;
and then again, all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stain-
less tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through
the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And what is most
[ 46 ]
singular is that she, this Lolita, 7ny Lolita, has individualized
the writer’s ancient lust, so that above and over everything i
there is — Lolita.
Wednesday . “Look, make Mother take you and me to Our
Glass Lake tomorrow.” These were the textual words said to 2
me by my twelve -year-old flame in a voluptuous whisper, as
we happened to bump into one another on the front porch, I
out, she in. The reflection of the afternoon sun, a dazzling
white diamond with innumerable iridescent spikes quivered
on the round back of a parked car. The leafage of a voluminous
elm played its mellow shadows upon the clapboard wall of
the house. Two poplars shivered and shook. You could make
out the formless sounds of remote traffic; a child calling “Nancy,
Nan-cy!” In the house, Lolita had put on her favorite “Little
Carmen” record which I used to call “Dwarf Conductors,” 3
making her snort with mock derision at my mock wit.
Thursday. Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman,
Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness.
The old girl had finished relating in great detail the plot of a
movie she and L. had seen sometime in the winter. The boxer
had fallen extremely low when he met the good old priest (who
had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and could still
slug a sinner). We sat on cushions heaped on the floor, and
L. was between the woman and me (she had squeezed herself
in, the pet). In my turn, I launched upon a hilarious account
of my arctic adventures. The muse of invention handed me
a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah! All 4
the while I was acutely aware of L.’s nearness and as I spoke
I gestured in the merciful dark and took advantage of those
invisible gestures of mine to touch her hand, her shoulder and
a ballerina of wool and gauze which she played with and kept
sticking into my lap; and finally, when I had completely en-
meshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses,
I dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her
shin, and I chuckled at my own jokes, and trembled, and
concealed my tremors, and once or twice felt with my rapid
lips the warmth of her hair as I treated her to a quick nuzzling,
[ 47 ]
humorous aside and caressed her plaything. She, too, fidgeted
a good deal so that finally her mother told her sharply to quit
it and sent the doll flying into the dark, and I laughed and
addressed myself to Haze across Lo’s legs to let my hand creep
up my nymphet’s thin back and feel her skin through her
boy’s shirt.
But I knew it was all hopeless, and was sick with longing,
and my clothes felt miserably tight, and I was almost glad when
her mother’s quiet voice announced in the dark: “And now we
all think that Lo should go to bed.” “I think you stink,” said
Lo. “Which means there will be no picnic tomorrow,” said
Haze. “This is a free country,” said Lo. When angry Lo with a
Bronx cheer had gone, I stayed on from sheer inertia, while
Haze smoked her tenth cigarette of the evening and complained
of Lo.
She had been spiteful, if you please, at the age of one, when
she used to throw her toys out of her crib so that her poor
mother should keep picking them up, the villainous infant!
Now, at twelve, she was a regular pest, said Haze. All she wanted
from life was to be one day a strutting and prancing baton
twirler or a jitterbug. Her grades were poor, but she was better
adjusted in her new school than in Pisky (Pisky was the Haze
home town in the Middle West. The Ramsdale house was her
late mother-in-law’s. They had moved to Ramsdale less than two
years ago). “Why was she unhappy there?” “Oh,” said Haze,
“poor me should know, I went through that when / was a kid:
boys twisting one’s arm, banging into one with loads of books,
pulling one’s hair, hurting one’s breasts, flipping one’s skirt.
Of course, moodiness is a common concomitant of growing
up, but Lo exaggerates. Sullen and evasive. Rude and defiant.
Stuck Viola, an Italian schoolmate, in the seat with a fountain
pen. Know what I would like? If you, monsieur, happened to be
still here in the fall. I’d ask you to help her with her home-
work — you seem to know everything, geography, mathematics,
French.” “Oh, everything,” answered monsieur. “That means,”
said Haze quickly, “you’ll he here!” I wanted to shout that I
would stay on eternally if only I could hope to caress now and
[ 48 ]
then my incipient pupil. But I was wary of Haze. So I just
grunted and stretched my limbs nonconcomitantly (le mot
juste) and presently went up to my room. The woman, how- i
ever, was evidently not prepared to call it a day. I was already
lying upon my cold bed both hands pressing to my face Lolita’s
fragrant ghost when I heard my indefatigable landlady creeping
stealthily up to my door to whisper through it — just to make sure,
she said, I was through with the Glance and Gulp magazine I
had borrowed the other day. From her room Lo yelled she had
it. W e are quite a lending library in this house, thunder of God.
Friday. I wonder what my academic publishers would say
if I were to quote in my textbook Ronsard’s ‘‘‘‘la vermeillette
jente’’’’ or Remy Belleau’s 'dm petit viont jeutre de inousse i
delicate, trace sur le milieu dhin fillet escarlatte" and so forth. 3
I shall probably have another breakdown if I stay any longer in
this house, under the strain of this intolerable temptation, by
the side of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride. Has 4
she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of
the Menarche? Bloated feeling. The Curse of the Irish. Falling 5
from the roof. Grandma is visiting. “Mr. Uterus [I quote from
a girls’ magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance
a possible baby may have to be bedded down there.” The tiny
madman in his padded cell.
Incidentally; if I ever commit a serious murder . . . Mark the
“if.” The urge should be something more than the kind of
thing that happened to me with Valeria. Carefully mark that
the7i I was rather inept. If and when you wish to sizzle me to
death, remember that only a spell of insanity could ever give
me the simple energy to be a brute (all this amended, perhaps).
Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams. But do you know what 6
happens? For instance I hold a gun. For instance I aim at a bland,
quietly interested enemy. Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one
bullet after another feebly drops on the floor from the sheepish
muzzle. In those dreams, my only thought is to conceal the fiasco
from my foe, who is slowly growing annoyed.
At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong
gleam of motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been
[ 49 ]
describing, in a flippant vein, the delightful little toothbrush
1 mustache I had not quite decided to grow): “Better don’t, if
somebody is not to go absolutely dotty.” Instantly Lo pushed
her plate of boiled fish away, all but knocking her milk over,
and bounced out of the dining room. “Would it bore you very
much,” quoth Haze, “to come with us tomorrow for a swim in
Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes for her manners?”
Later, I heard a great banging of doors and other sounds
coming from quaking caverns where the two rivals were having
a ripping row.
She has not apologized. The lake is out. It might have been
fun.
Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the door
ajar, while I wrote in my room; but only today did the trap
work. With a good deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scrap-
ing — to disguise her embarrassment at visiting me without
having been called — Lo came in and after pottering around,
became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had penned on
a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a belle-
lettrist’s inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the
hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my
fatal lust. As she bent her brown curls over the desk at which
I was sitting, Humbert the Hoarse put his arm around her in a
miserable imitation of blood-relationship; and still studying,
somewhat shortsightedly, the piece of paper she held, my inno-
cent little visitor slowly sank to a half-sitting position upon my
knee. Her adorable profile, parted lips, warm hair were some
three inches from my bared eyetooth; and I felt the heat of
her limbs through her rough tomboy clothes. All at once I
knew I could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth with
perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do so, and even close
her eyes as Hollywood teaches. A double vanilla with hot fudge
— hardly more unusual than that. I cannot tell my learned
reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all
the way to the back of his bald head), I cannot tell him how
2 the knowledge came to me; perhaps my ape-ear had uncon-
sciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of her respira-
[ 50 ]
tion — for now she was not really looking at my scribble, but
waiting with curiosity and composure — oh, my limpid nymphet!
— for the glamorous lodger to do what he was dying to do. A
modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in
dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too strange, I guessed,
if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend — too late. The
house was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise’s voice telling
Mrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead something
she and Leslie Tomson had found in the basement, and little
Lolita was not one to miss such a tale.
Sunday. Changeful, bad-tempered, cheerful, awkward, grace-
ful with the tart grace of her coltish subteens, excruciatingly
desirable from head to foot (all New England for a lady-writer’s
pen!), from the black ready-made bow and bobby pins holding
her hair in place to the little scar on the lower part of her neat
calf (where a roller-skater kicked her in Pisky), a couple of
inches above her rough white sock. Gone with her mother to
the Hamiltons — a birthday party or something. Full-skirted ging-
ham frock. Her little doves seem well formed already. Pre-
cocious pet!
Monday. Rainy morning. “Cey matins gris si doux . . .” My
white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one
of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in
the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or
that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen
from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard. Is Lo in her room?
Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Just heard the toilet paper
cylinder make its staccato sound as it is turned; and no footfalls
has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to her
room. Is she still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo
performs with real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just
slammed, so one has to feel elsewhere about the house for the
beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have a strand of silk
descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means that she is
not in the kitchen — not banging the refrigerator door or screech-
ing at her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her
third, cooing and subduedly mirthful, telephone conversation
[ 51 ]
of the morning). Well, let us grope and hope. Ray-like, I
glide in thought to the parlor and find the radio silent (and
mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton, very
softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free
hand, denying by implication that she denies those amusing
1 rumors, rumor, roomer, whispering intimately, as she never does,
the clear-cut lady, in face to face talk). So my nymphet is not in
the house at all! Gone! What I thought was a prismatic weave
turns out to be but an old gray cobweb, the house is empty, is
dead. And then comes Lolita’s soft sweet chuckle through my
half-open door “Don’t tell Mother but I’ve eaten all your
bacon.” Gone when I scuttle out of my room. Lolita, where are
you? My breakfast tray, lovingly prepared by my landlady, leers
at me toothlessly, ready to be taken in. Lola, Lolita!
Tuesday. Clouds again interfered with that picnic on that
2 unattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming? Yesterday I tried on
before the mirror a new pair of bathing trunks.
Wednesday . In the afternoon. Haze (common-sensical shoes,
tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown to buy a
present for a friend of a friend of hers, and would I please come
too because I have such a wonderful taste in textures and per-
fumes. “Choose your favorite seduction,” she purred. What
could Humbert, being in the perfume business, do? She had
me cornered between the front porch and her car. “Hurry up,”
she said as I laboriously doubled up my large body in order to
crawl in (still desperately devising a means of escape). She
had started the engine, and was genteelly swearing at a backing
and turning truck in front that had just brought old invalid
Miss Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when my Lolita’s sharp
voice came from the parlor window: “You! Where are you
going? I’m coming too! Wait!” “Ignore her,” yelped Haze
(killing the motor); alas for my fair driver; Lo was already pull-
ing at the door on my side. “This is intolerable,” began Haze;
but Lo had scrambled in, shivering with glee. “Move your
bottom, you,” said Lo. “Lo!” cried Haze (sideglancing at me,
3 hoping I would throw rude Lo out). “And behold,” said Lo
(not for the first time), as she jerked back, as I jerked back, as
[ 5 ^ ]
the car leapt forward. “It is intolerable,” said Haze, violently
getting into second, “that a child should be so ill-mannered.
And so very persevering. When she knows she is unwanted. And
needs a bath.”
My knuckles lay against, the child’s blue jeans. She was bare-
footed; her toenails showed remnants of cherry-red polish and
there was a bit of adhesive tape across her big toe; and, God,
what would I not have given to kiss then and there those delicate-
boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet! Suddenly her hand slipped
into mine and without our chaperon’s seeing, I held, and stroked,
and squeezed that little hot paw, all the way to the store. The
wings of the driver’s Marlenesque nose shone, having shed or
burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant
monologue anent the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and
pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in profile, while
I prayed we would never get to that store, but we did.
I have nothing else to report, save, prmio: that big Haze had
little Haze sit behind on our way home, and secundo: that the
lady decided to keep Humbert’s Choice for the backs of her
own shapely ears.
Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical
beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People's
E 7 icyclopedia, I found a map of the States that a child’s pencil
had started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon
the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of
Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names
referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school. It is l
a poem I know already by heart.
Angel, Grace
Austin, Floyd
Beale, Jack 2
Beale, Mary
Buck, Daniel
Byron, Marguerite
Campbell, Alice
Carmine, Rose 3
Chatfield, Phyllis
[ S3 ]
Clarke, Gordon
Cowan, John
Cowan, Marion
Duncan, Walter
Falter, Ted
Fantasia, Stella
Flashman, Irving
Fox, George
Glave, Mabel
Goodale, Donald
Green, Lucinda
Hamilton, Mary Rose
Haze, Dolores
Honeck, Rosaline
Knight, Kenneth
McCoo, Virginia
McCrystal, Vivian
McFate, Aubrey
Miranda, Anthony
Miranda, Viola
Rosato, Emil
Schlenker, Lena
Scott, Donald
Sheridan, Agnes
Sherva, Oleg
Smith, Hazel
Talbot, Edgar
Talbot, Edwin
Wain, Lull
Williams, Ralph
Windmuller, Louise
A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to
discover this “Haze, Dolores” (she!) in its special bower of
names, with its bodyguard of roses — a fairy princess between her
two maids of honor. I am trying to analyze the spine-thrill of
delight it gives me, this name among all those others. What is
it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thick tears
that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity
of this name with its formal veil (“Dolores”) and that abstract
transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair
of new pale gloves or a mask? Is “mask” the keyword? Is it l
because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery,
the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you 2
alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it
because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom
around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe
pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard mas-
turbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes;
Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline;
dark Alary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch
her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry. 3
And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil,
detested by teachers, all the boys’ eyes on her hair and neck,
my Lolita.
Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spec-
tacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and
permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles
around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her
among the ruins. Her surprise, my explanations, demonstrations,
ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A brave Humbert would 4
have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance,
when she was again in my room to show me her drawings, school-
artware); he might have bribed her — and got away with it. A
simpler and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to
various commercial substitutes — if you know where to go, I
don’t. Despite my manly looks, I am horribly timid. Ady ro-
mantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of run-
ning into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald sea
monsters. “Mais allez-y, allez-y!'" Annabel skipping on one foot 5,
to get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her.
Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to
take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at
dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather
bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake
Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing before
trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit
[ 55 ]
by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated
my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake
day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would
I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left
my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder — and
plunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this junc-
ture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a
quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt
and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she could not
possibly behave. At 3 a.m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and pres-
ently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to
me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet
visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a
pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickaxe,
although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered on its grav-
1 elly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have
2 paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her
files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big
Haze and little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I
rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle
although there was no horse between them, only elastic air —
one of those little omissions due to the absent-mindedness of
the dream agent.
Saturday. My heart is still thumping. I still squirm and emit
low moans of remembered embarrassment.
3 Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white
gym shorts. Bending, over a window sill, in the act of tearing off
leaves from a poplar outside while engrossed in torrential talk
with a newspaper boy below (Kenneth Knight, I suspect) who
had just propelled the Ramsdale Journal with a very precise thud
onto the porch. I began creeping up to her — “crippling” up to
her, as pantomimists say. My arms and legs were convex surfaces
between which — rather than upon which — I slowly progressed
by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded
Spider. I must have taken hours to reach her: I seemed to see
her through the wrong end of a telescope, and toward her taut
little rear I moved like some paralytic, on soft distorted limbs,
[ 56 ]
in terrible concentration. At last I was right behind her when
I had the unfortunate idea of blustering a trifle — shaking her
by the scruff of the neck and that sort of thing to cover my real
manege, and she said in a shrill brief whine: “Cut it out!” — 1
most coarsely, the little wench, and with a ghastly grin Humbert
the Humble beat a gloomy retreat while she went on wisecrack-
ing streetward.
But now listen to what happened next. After lunch I was
reclining in a low chair trying to read. Suddenly two deft little
hands were over my eyes: she had crept up from behind as if
re-enacting, in a ballet sequence, my morning maneuver. Her
fingers were a luminous crimson as they tried to blot out the sun,
and she uttered hiccups of laughter and jerked this way and
that as I stretched my arm sideways and backwards without
otherwise changing my recumbent position. My hand swept
over her agile giggling legs, and the book like a sleigh left my lap,
and Mrs. Haze strolled up and said indulgently: “Just slap her
hard if she interferes with your scholarly meditations. How I love
this garden [no exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn’t it divine
in the sun [no question mark either].” And with a sign of
feigned content, the obnoxious lady sank down on the grass and
looked up at the sky as she leaned back on her splayed-out hands,
and presently an old gray tennis ball bounced over her, and
Lo’s voice came from the house haughtily: ‘‘‘'Fardojmez, Mother.
I was not aiming at youT Of course not, my hot downy darling.
12
This proved to be the last of twenty entries or so. It will be
seen from them that for all the devil’s inventiveness, the scheme
remained daily the same. First he would tempt me- — and then
thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my
being. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how to do it,
without impinging on a child’s chastity; after all, I had had some
experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possessed dappled 2
nymphets in parks; had wedged my wary and bestial way into
[ 57 ]
the hottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of strap-
hanging school children. But for almost three weeks I had been
interrupted in all my pathetic machinations. The agent of these
interruptions was usually the Haze woman (who, as the reader
will mark, was more afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from
me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for
that nymphet — for the first nymphet in my life that could be
reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid claws — would have
certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil
realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have
me as a plaything for some time longer.
The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake.
It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as
1 I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat
for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually,
the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had
not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in
her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets
would be whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a
good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome
lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes.
Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life
is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have an
2 old spinster, a Miss Phalen, whose mother had been cook in
Mrs. Haze’s family, come to stay in the house with Lolita and
me, while Mrs. Haze, a career girl at heart, sought some suitable
job in the nearest city. Mrs. Haze had seen the whole situation
very clearly: the bespectacled, round-backed Herr Humbert
coming with his Central-European trunks to gather dust in his
corner behind a heap of old books; the unloved ugly little daugh-
ter firmly supervised by Miss Phalen who had already once had
my Lo under her buzzard wing (Lo recalled that 1944 summer
with an indignant shudder); and Mrs. Haze herself engaged as a
receptionist in a great elegant city. But a not too complicated
event interfered with that program. Miss Phalen broke her hip
in Savannah, Ga., on the very day I arrived in Ramsdale.
[ 58 ]
13
The Sunday after the Saturday already described proved to be
as bright as the weatherman had predicted. When putting the
breakfast things back on the chair outside my room for my
good landlady to remove at her convenience, I gleaned the
following situation by listening from the landing across which
I had softly crept to the bannisters in my old bedroom slippers —
the only old things about me.
There had been another row. Mrs. Hamilton had telephoned
that her daughter “was running a temperature.” Mrs. Haze
informed her daughter that the picnic would have to be post-
poned. Hot little Haze informed big cold Haze that, if so, she
would not go with her to church. Mother said very well and left.
I had come out on the landing straight after shaving, soapy-
earlobed, still in my white pajamas with the cornflower blue
(not the lilac) design on the back; I now wiped off the soap,
perfumed my hair and armpits, slipped on a purple silk dressing
gown, and, humming nervously, went down the stairs in quest
of Lo^^
T’v^t my learned readers to participate in the scene I am
about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see
for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet
event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private
talk we have had, “impartial sympathy.” So let us get started.
I have a difficult job before me.
Main character; Humbert the Hummer. Time; Sunday morn-
ing in June. Place; sunlit living room. Props; old, candy-striped
davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the
late Mr. Harold E. Haze — God bless the good man — had en-
gendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed room,
on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementoes, among
these Dolores, were all over the place). She wore that day a
pretty print dress that I had seen on her once before, ample in
the skirt, tight in the bodice, short-sleeved, pink, checkered with
darker pink, and, to complete the color scheme, she had painted
her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful,
[ 59 ]
banal, Eden-red apple. She was not shod, however, for church.
And her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the phonograph.
My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, cool skirt balloon-
ing, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her
glossy fruit. She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it —
it made a cupped polished plop.
Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple.
“Give it back,” she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of
her palms. I produced Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it,
and my heart was like snow under thin crimson skin, and with
the monkeyish nimbleness that was so typical of that American
nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I
had opened (pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the
monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves).
Rapidly, hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo
flipped violently through the pages in search of something she
wished Humbert to see. Found it at last. I faked interest by
bringing my head so close that her hair touched my temple
and her arm brushed my cheek as she wiped her lips with her
wrist. Because of the burnished mist through which I peered
at the picture, I was slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees
rubbed and knocked impatiently against each other. Dimly there
came into view: a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach,
and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di
Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend.
I whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a
sham effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught her by
her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like
a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back
in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect
simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap.
By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on in-
sanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting there,
on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy move-
ments, my masked lust to her guileless limbs. It was no easy
matter to divert the little maiden’s attention while I performed
the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick.
[ 6o ]
Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it,
mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter
— and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant
golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was
doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the phys-
ically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of 1
the material divide (pajamas and robe) between the weight of
two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor
of an unspeakable passion. Having, in the course of my patter,
hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them
slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular — O
my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those
something nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and
the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic stuff and holding
her under its special spell (spell because of the garbling), and
all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of God might
interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of
which all my being seemed concentrated, and this anxiety forced
me to work, for the first minute or so, more hastily than was con-
sensual with deliberately modulated enjoyment. The stars that
sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the bar- 2
men, were presently taken over by her; her voice stole and cor-
rected the tune I had been mutilating. She was musical and
apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live
lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner,
almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial
fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the
heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile
of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa — and every
movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to con-
ceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence
between beast and beauty — between my gagged, bursting beast
and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Under my glancing finger tips I felt the minute hairs bristle
ever so slightly along her shins. I lost myself in the pungent but
healthy heat which like summer haze hung about little Haze.
Let her stay, let her stay ... As she strained to chuck the core
[ 61 ]
of her abolished apple into the fender, her young weight, her
shameless innocent shanks and round bottom, shifted in my
tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap; and all of a sudden
a mysterious change came over my senses. I entered a plane of
being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed
within my body. What had begun as a delicious distension of
my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had
reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance
not found elsewhere in conscious life. With the deep hot sweet-
ness thus established and well on its way to the ultimate convul-
sion, I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow. Lolita
1 had been safely solipsized. The implied sun pulsated in the sup-
plied poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched
her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight,
unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her
lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-
barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness. Every-
thing was now ready. The nerves of pleasure had been laid bare.
2 The corpuscles of Krause were entering the phase of frenzy. The
least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose. I had ceased
to be Humbert the Hound, the sad-eyed degenerate cur clasping
the boot that would presently kick him away. I was above the
tribulations of ridicule, beyond the possibilities of retribution. In
3 my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliber-
ately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the
moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his
slaves. Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety
of physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in
the arts) I kept repeating chance words after her — barmen,
alarmin’, my charmin’, my carmen, ahmen, ahahamen — as one
talking and laughing in his sleep while my happy hand crept up
her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed. The day
before she had collided with the heavy chest in the hall and —
“Look, look!” — I gasped — “look what you’ve done, what you’ve
done to yourself, ah, look”; for there was, I swear, a yellowish-
violet bruise on her lovely nymphet thigh which my huge hairy
hand massaged and slowly enveloped— and because of her very
[ 62 ]
perfunctory underthings, there seemed to be nothing to prevent
my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin
— just as you might tickle and caress a giggling child — just that —
and; “Oh it’s nothing at all,” she cried with a sudden shrill note
in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head
back, and her teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-
turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury,
almost reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her left
buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had
ever known.
Immediately afterward (as if we had been struggling and now
my grip had eased) she rolled off the sofa and jumped to her
feet — to her foot, rather — in order to attend to the formidably
loud telephone that may have been ringing for ages as far as I
was concerned. There she stood and blinked, cheeks aflame, hair
awry, her eyes passing over me as lightly as they did over the
furniture, and as she listened or spoke (to her mother who was
telling her to come to lunch with her at the Chatfields — neither
Lo nor Hum knew yet what busybody Haze was plotting), she
kept tapping the edge of the table with the slipper she held in
her hand. Blessed be the Lord, she had noticed nothing!
With a handkerchief of multicolored silk, on which her listen-
ing eyes rested in passing, I wiped the sweat off my forehead,
and, immersed in a euphoria of release, rearranged my royal
robes. She was still at the telephone, haggling with her mother
(wanted to be fetched by car, my little Carmen) when, singing
louder and louder, I swept up the stairs and set a deluge of
steaming water roaring into the tub.
At this point I may as well give the words of that song hit in
full — to the best of my recollection at least — I don’t think I ever
had it right. Here goes:
O my Carmen, my little Carmen!
Something, something those something nights.
And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the
[barmen —
And, O my charmin’, our dreadful fights.
[ 63 ]
And the something town where so gaily, arm in
Arm, we went, and our final row.
And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen,
The gun I am holding now.
(Drew his .32 automatic, I guess, and put a bullet through his
moll’s eye.)
14
I had lunch in town — had not been so hungry for years. The
house was still Lo-less when I strolled back. I spent the after-
noon musing, scheming, blissfully digesting my experience of the
morning.
I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm with-
out impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done.
The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne
into a young lady’s new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact.
Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful
dream; and still Lolita was safe — and I was safe. What I had
madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another,
fanciful Lolita — perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, en-
casing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no
consciousness — indeed, no life of her own.
The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And
nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that af-
fected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling
upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the
dark. The afternoon drifted on and on, in ripe silence, and the
sappy tall trees seemed to be in the know; and desire, even
stronger than before, began to afflict me again. Let her come
soon, I prayed, addressing a loan God, and while mamma is in
the kitchen, let a repetition of the davenport scene be staged,
please, I adore her so horribly.
No: “horribly” is the wrong word. The elation with which the
vision of new delights filled me was not horrible but pathetic. I
[ 64 ]
qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic — because despite the insatiable
fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent
force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old
child.
And now see how I was repaid for my pains. No Lolita came
home — she had gone with the Chatfields to a movie. The table
was laid with more elegance than usual; candlelight, if you
please. In this mawkish aura, Mrs. Haze gently touched the silver
on both sides of her plate as if touching piano keys, and smiled
down on her empty plate (was on a diet), and said she hoped I
liked the salad (recipe lifted from a woman’s magazine). She
hoped I liked the cold cuts, too. It had been a perfect day. Mrs.
Chatfield was a lovely person. Phyllis, her daughter, was going
to a summer camp tomorrow. For three weeks. Lolita, it was
decided, would go Thursday. Instead of waiting till July, as had
been initially planned. And stay there after Phyllis had left. Till
school began. A pretty prospect, my heart.
Oh, how I was taken aback — for did it not mean I was losing
my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine? To explain
my grim mood, I had to use the same toothache I had already
simulated in the morning. Adust have been an enormous molar,
with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry.
“We have,” said Haze, “an excellent dentist. Our neighbor,
in fact. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright.
Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have
him ‘brace’ her, as my mother used to say. It may curb Lo a
little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these
days. And we are in for a couple of stormy ones before she goes.
She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I left her with the
Chatfields because I dreaded to face her alone just yet. The
movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is
no earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am
very sorry about that tooth of yours. It would be so much more
reasonable to let me contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow
morning if it still hurts. And, you know, I think a summer
camp is so much healthier, and — well, it is all so much more
reasonable as I say than to mope on a suburban lawn and use
[ 6s ]
mamma’s lipstick, and pursue shy studious gentlemen, and go
into tantrums at the least provocation.”
“Axe you sure,” I said at last, “that she will be happy there?”
(lame, lamentably lame! )
“She’d better,” said Haze. “And it won’t be all play either.
1 The camp is run by Shirley Holmes — you know, the woman who
wrote Campfire Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in
many things — health, knowledge, temper. And particularly in a
sense of responsibility toward other people. Shall we take these
candles with us and sit for a while on the piazza, or do you want
to go to bed and nurse that tooth?”
Nurse that tooth.
15
Next day they drove downtown to buy things needed for the
camp: any wearable purchase worked wonders with Lo. She
seemed her usual sarcastic self at dinner. Immediately afterwards,
she went up to her room to plunge into the comic books acquired
2 for rainy days at Camp Q (they were so thoroughly sampled by
Thursday that she left them behind). I too retired to my lair,
and wrote letters. My plan now was to leave for the seaside and
then, when school began, resume my existence in the Haze
household; for I knew already that I could not live without the
child. On Tuesday they went shopping again, and I was asked to
answer the phone if the camp mistress rang up during their
absence. She did; and a month or so later we had occasion to re-
call our pleasant chat. That Tuesday, Lo had her dinner in her
room. She had been crying after a routine row with her mother
and, as had happened on former occasions, had not wished me to
see her swollen eyes: she had one of those tender complexions
that after a good cry get all blurred and inflamed, and morbidly
alluring. I regretted keenly her mistake about my private aesthet-
3 ics, for I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that raw rose
about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes; and, naturally, her
bashful whim deprived me of many opportunities of specious
[ 66 ]
consolation. There was, however, more to it than I thought. As
we sat in the darkness of the veranda (a rude wind had put out
her red candles). Haze, with a dreary laugh, said she had told
Lo that her beloved Humbert thoroughly approved of the whole
camp idea “and now,” added Haze, “the child throws a fit; pre-
text: you and I want to get rid of her; actual reason: I told her
we would exchange tomorrow for plainer stuff some much too
cute night things that she bullied me into buying for her. You
see, she sees herself as a starlet; / see her as a sturdy, healthy, but
decidedly homely kid. This, I guess, is at the root of our
troubles.”
On Wednesday I managed to waylay Lo for a few seconds:
she was on the landing, in sweatshirt and green-stained white
shorts, rummaging in a trunk. I said something meant to be
friendly and funny but she only emitted a snort without look-
ing at me. Desperate, dying Humbert patted her clumsily on her
coccyx, and she struck him, quite painfully, with one of the late 1
Mr. Haze’s shoetrees. “Doublecrosser,” she said as I crawled
downstairs rubbing my arm with a great show of rue. She did not
condescend to have dinner with Hum and mum: washed her
hair and went to bed with her ridiculous books. And on Thursday
quiet Mrs. Haze drove her to Camp Q.
As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine”
etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a
kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever;
but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be
thirteen on January i. In two years or so she would cease being a
nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a
“college girl” — that horror of horrors. The word “forever” re-
ferred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected
in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the 2
Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the
Lolita of the strident voice and the rich brown hair — of the
bangs and the swirls at the sides and the curls at the back, and
the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary — “revolting,”
“super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip ” — that Lolita, viy Lolita, poor
[ 67 ]
1 Catullus would lose forever. So how could I afford not to see her
for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months out of
the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise my-
self as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mile Humbert, and
put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its
russet nymphets would clamor: “Let us adopt that deep-voiced
2, 3 D.P.,” and drag the sad, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to
their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze!
Idle dry dreams. Two months of beauty, two months of ten-
derness, would be squandered forever, and I could do nothing
4 about it, but nothing, mais rien.
One drop of rare honey, however, that Thursday did hold in
its acorn cup. Haze was to drive her to the camp in the early
morning. Upon sundry sounds of departure reaching me, I rolled
out of bed and leaned out of the window. Under the poplars,
the car was already athrob. On the sidewalk, Louise stood shad-
ing her eyes with her hand, as if the little traveler were already
riding into the low morning sun. The gesture proved to be pre-
mature. “Hurry up!” shouted Haze. My Lolita, who was half in
and about to slam the car door, wind down the glass, wave to
Louise and the poplars (whom and which she was never to see
again), interrupted the motion of fate: she looked up — and
dashed back into the house (Haze furiously calling after her). A
moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My
heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out.
I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and
simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping,
panting, and then she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melt-
ing under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitat-
ing darling! The next instant I heard her — alive, unraped — clatter
downstairs. The motion of fate was resumed. The blond leg was
pulled in, the car door was slammed — was re-slammed — and
driver Haze at the violent wheel, rubber-red lips writhing in
angry, inaudible speech, swung my darling away, while un-
noticed by them or Louise, old Miss Opposite, an invalid, feebly
but rhythmically waved from her vined veranda.
[ 68 ]
16
The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita — full of
the feel of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth,
sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had
worked up and down while I held her. I marched into her
tumbled room, threw open the door of the closet and plunged
into a heap of crumpled things that had touched her. There was
particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid
odor in the seam. I wrapped in it Humbert’s huge engorged
heart. A poignant chaos was welling within me — but I had to
drop those things and hurriedly regain my composure, as I be-
came aware of the maid’s velvety voice calling me softly from
the stairs. She had a message for me, she said; and, topping my
automatic thanks with a kindly “you’re welcome,” good Louise
left an unstamped, curiously clean-looking letter in my shaking
hand.
This is a confession: I love you [so the letter began; and for
a distorted moment I mistook its hysterical scrawl for a
schoolgirl’s scribble]. Last Sunday in church — bad you, who
refused to come to see our beautiful new windows! — only last
Sunday, my dear one, when I asked the Lord what to do about
it, I was told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is no
alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you.
I am a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of
my life.
Now, my dearest, dearest, mon cher, cher monsieur, you 1
have read this; now you know. So, will you please, at once,
pack and leave. This is a landlady’s order. I am dismissing a
lodger. I am kicking you out. Go! Scram! Departez! I shall be 2
back by dinnertime, if I do eighty both ways and don’t have
an accident (but what would it matter?), and I do not wish
to find you in the house. Please, please, leave at once, now,
do not even read this absurd note to the end. Go. Adieu.
The situation, cheri, is quite simple. Of course, I know
with absolute certainty that I am nothing to you, nothing at
all. Oh yes, you enjoy talking to me (and kidding poor me),
[ 69 ]
you have grown fond of our friendly house, of the books I
like, of my lovely garden, even of Lo’s noisy ways — but I am
nothing to you. Right? Right. Nothing to you whatever. But
if, after reading my “confession,” you decided, in your dark
romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for you
to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then
you would be a criminal — worse than a kidnaper who rapes
1 a child. You see, cheri. If you decided to stay, if I found you
at home (which I know I won’t — and that’s why I am able
to go on like this), the fact of your remaining would only
mean one thing: that you want me as much as I do you: as
a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life
with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.
Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my
dearest, since I know this letter has been by now torn by you,
and its pieces (illegible) in the vortex of the toilet. My
2 dearest, mon tres, tres cher, what a world of love I have built
up for you during this miraculous June! I know how reserved
you are, how “British.” Your old-world reticence, your sense
of decorum may be shocked by the boldness of an American
girl! You who conceal your strongest feelings must think me
a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor bruised
heart like this. In years gone by, many disappointments came
my way. Mr. Haze was a splendid person, a sterling soul, but
he happened to be twenty years my senior, and — well, let us
not gossip about the past. My dearest, your curiosity must be
well satisfied if you have ignored my request and read this
letter to the bitter end. Never mind. Destroy it and go. Do
not forget to leave the key on the desk in your room. And
some scrap of address so that I could refund the twelve dol-
lars I owe you till the end of the month. Good-bye, dear one.
Pray for me — -if you ever pray.
C.H.
What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and
what I remember of the letter I remember verbatim (including
that awful French). It was at least twice longer. I have left out
a lyrical passage which I more or less skipped at the time, con-
cerning Lolita’s brother who died at 2 when she was 4, and how
much I would have liked him. Let me see what else can I say?
[ 70 ]
Yes. There is just a chance that “the vortex of the toilet” (where
the letter did go) is my own matter-of-fact contribution. She
probably begged me to make a special fire to consume it.
My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My
second was like a friend’s calm hand falling upon my shoulder
and bidding me take my time. I did. I came out of my daze and
found myself still in Lo’s room. A full-page ad ripped out of a
slick magazine was affixed to the wall above the bed, between a
crooner’s mug and the lashes of a movie actress. It represented
a dark-haired young husband with a kind of drained look in his
Irish eyes. He was modeling a robe by So-and-So and holding a
bridgelike tray by So-and-So, with breakfast for two. The legend,
by the Rev. Thomas Morell, called him a “conquering hero.” l
The thoroughly conquered lady (not shown) was presumably
propping herself up to receive her half of the tray. How her bed-
fellow was to get under the bridge without some messy mishap
was not clear. Lo had drawn a jocose arrow to the haggard lover’s
face and had put, in block letters: H.H. And indeed, despite a
difference of a few years, the resemblance was striking. Under this
was another picture, also a colored ad. A distinguished playwright
was solemnly smoking a Drome. He always smoked Dromes. The 2
resemblance was slight. Under this was Lo’s chaste bed, littered
with “comics.” The enamel had come off the bedstead, leaving
black, more or less rounded, marks on the white. Having con-
vinced myself that Louise had left, I got into Lo’s bed and reread
the letter.
17
Gentlemen of the jury! I cannot swear that certain motions
pertaining to the business in hand — if I may coin an expression —
had not drifted across my mind before. My mind had not re-
tained them in any logical form or in any relation to definitely
recollected occasions; but I cannot swear — let me repeat — that I
had not toyed with them (to rig up yet another expression), in
my dimness of thought, in my darkness of passion. There may
[ 71 ]
have been times — there must have been times, if I know my
Humbert- — when I had brought up for detached inspection the
idea of marrying a mature widow (say, Charlotte Haze) with not
one relative left in the wide gray world, merely in order to have
my way with her child (Lo, Lola, Lolita). I am even prepared
to tell my tormentors that perhaps once or twice I had cast an
appraiser’s cold eye at Charlotte’s coral lips and bronze hair and
dangerously low neckline, and had vaguely tried to fit her into a
plausible daydream. This I confess under torture. Imaginary tor-
ture, perhaps, but all the more horrible. I wish I might digress
1 and tell you more of the pavor nocturmis that would rack me at
night hideously after a chance term had struck me in the random
2 readings of my boyhood, such as peine forte et dure (what a
Genius of Pain must have invented that!) or the dreadful, mys-
terious, insidious words “trauma,” “traumatic event,” and “tran-
som.” But my tale is sufficiently incondite already.
After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and
ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe,
and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenly — Suddenly,
3 gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning
(through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant
and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and per-
fect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother’s husband would
be able to lavish on his Lolita. I would hold her against me three
times a day, every day. All my troubles would be expelled, I
would be a healthy man. “To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee
and print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss . . Well-read
4 Humbert!
Then, with all possible caution, on mental tiptoe so to speak,
5 I conjured up Charlotte as a possible mate. By God, I could make
myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugar-
less breakfast.
Humbert Humbert sweating in the fierce white light, and
howled at, and trodden upon by sweating policemen, is now
6 ready to make a further “statement” {quel mot!) as he turns
his conscience inside out and rips off its innermost lining. I did
not plan to marry poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in
[ 12 ]
some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous manner such as killing her
by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial
sherry or anything like that; but a delicately allied, pharma-
copoeia! thought did tinkle in my sonorous and clouded brain.
Why limit myself to the -modest masked caress I had tried al-
ready? Other visions of venery presented themselves to me sway-
ing and smiling. I saw myself administering a powerful sleeping
potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the latter
through the night with perfect impunity. The house was full of
Charlotte’s snore, while Lolita hardly breathed in her sleep, as
still as a painted girl-child. “Mother, I swear Kenny never even
touched me.” “You either lie, Dolores Haze, or it was an
incubus.” No, I would not go that far. 1
So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed — and the red
sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live
world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of bal-
conies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted
the bliss of past and future nights. Then, figuratively speaking, I
shattered the glass, and boldly imagined (for I was drunk on
those visions by then and underrated the gentleness of my
nature) how eventually I might blackmail — no, that is too strong
a word — mauvemail big Haze into letting me consort with little 2
Haze by gently threatening the poor doting Big Dove with deser-
tion if she tried to bar me from playing with my legal step-
daughter. In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such
a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the
preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.
And now take down the following important remark: the artist
in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman. It is
with a great effort of will that in this memoir I have managed to
tune my style to the tone of the journal that I kept when Mrs.
Haze was to me but an obstacle. That journal of mine is no more;
but I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intona-
tions no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now.
Fortunately, my story has reached a point where I can cease in-
sulting poor Charlotte for the sake of retrospective verisimilitude.
Wishing to spare poor Charlotte two or three hours of sus-
[ 73 ]
pense on a winding road (and avoid, perhaps, a head-on collision
that would shatter our different dreams), I made a thoughtful
but abortive attempt to reach her at the camp by telephone. She
had left half an hour before, and getting Lo instead, I told her —
trembling and brimming with my mastery over fate — that I was
going to marry her mother. I had to repeat it twice because some-
thing was preventing her from giving me her attention. “Gee,
that’s swell,” she said laughing. “When is the wedding? Hold on
a sec, the pup — That pup here has got hold of my sock. Listen — ”
and she added she guessed she was going to have loads of fun . . .
and I realized as I hung up that a couple of hours at that camp
had been sufficient to blot out with new impressions the image
of handsome Humbert Humbert from little Lolita’s mind. But
what did it matter now? I would get her back as soon as a decent
amount of time after the wedding had elapsed. “The orange
1 blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave,” as a poet
might have said. But I am no poet. I am only a very conscientious
recorder.
After Louise had gone, I inspected the icebox, and finding it
much too puritanic, walked to town and bought the richest foods
available. I also bought some good liquor and two or three kinds
of vitamins. I was pretty sure that with the aid of these stimu-
lants and my natural resources, I would avert any embarrassment
that my indifference might incur when called upon to display a
strong and impatient flame. Again and again resourceful Hum-
2 bert evoked Charlotte as seen in the raree-show of a manly
imagination. She was well groomed and shapely, this I could say
for her, and she was my Lolita’s big sister — this notion, perhaps,
I could keep up if only I did not visualize too realistically her
heavy hips, round knees, ripe bust, the coarse pink skin of her
neck (“coarse” by comparison with silk and honey) and all the
rest of that sorry and dull thing: a handsome woman.
The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon
ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet an-
other. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always
double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt
3 lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and
[ 74 ]
a cursed dog — I loathe dogs — had defiled the flat stones where a
sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed
from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and
I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge.
Incarnadine zebras! There are some eructations that sound like 1,
cheers — at least, mine did. An old fence at the back of the garden
separated us from the neighbor’s garbage receptacles and lilacs;
but there was nothing between the front end of our lawn (where
it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore
I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a
good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be
extracted at once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower,
bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye on
that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an arch-
way of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down, down,
quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite’s ivied brick house and
high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared
behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I
happily belched and labored. The dandelions perished. A reek
of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and
Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically followed
of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the
avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a
bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the
top of their sunny voices. Leslie, old Miss Opposite’s gardener
and chauffeur, a very amiable and athletic Negro, grinned at me
from afar and shouted, re -shouted, commented by gesture, that
I was mighty energetic to-day. The fool dog of the prosperous
junk dealer next door ran after a blue car — not Charlotte’s. The
prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter
with little to halt, bright hair — a nymphet, by Pan! — ran back 3
down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from
this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. and Mrs. Humbert’s
residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the
avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows
snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver
roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman’s dog tearing
[ 75 ]
alongside. There was a smiling pause — and then, with a flutter in
my breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide
downhill and disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a
glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she
went upstairs she would not know whether I had gone or not. A
minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she
looked down at me from the window of Lo’s room. By sprinting
upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it.
18
When the bride is a widow and the groom is a widower; when
the former has lived in Our Great Little Town for hardly two
years, and the latter for hardly a month; when Monsieur wants
to get the whole damned thing over with as quickly as possible,
and Madame gives in with a tolerant smile; then, my reader, the
wedding is generally a “quiet” affair. The bride may dispense
with a tiara of orange blossoms securing her finger-tip veil, nor
does she carry a white orchid in a prayer book. The bride’s little
daughter might have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and H.
a touch of vivid vermeil; but I knew I would not dare be too
tender with cornered Lolita yet, and therefore agreed it was not
worth while tearing the child away from her beloved Camp Q.
My soi-disant passionate and lonely Charlotte was in every-
day life matter-of-fact and gregarious. Moreover, I discovered
that although she could not control her heart or her cries, she
was a woman of principle. Immediately after she had become
more or less my mistress (despite the stimulants, her “nervous,
eager cheri ” — a heroic cheri ! — had some initial trouble, for which,
however, he amply compensated her by a fantastic display of
old-world endearments), good Charlotte interviewed mfe about
my relations with God. I could have answered that on that score
my mind was open; I said, instead — paying my tribute to a pious
platitude — that I believed in a cosmic spirit. Looking down at
her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a cer-
[ 76 ]
tain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would
still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had
been, say, a Turk. She said it did not matter a bit; but that, if 1
she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she
would commit suicide. She said it so solemnly that it gave me
the creeps. It was then I knew she was a woman of principle.
Oh, she was very genteel: she said “excuse me” whenever a
slight burp interrupted her flowing speech, called an envelope an
ahnvelope, and when talking to her lady-friends referred to me as
Mr. Humbert. I thought it would please her if I entered the
community trailing some glamor after me. On the day of our
wedding a little interview with me appeared in the Society
Column of the Ramsdale Journal, with a photograph of Char-
lotte, one eyebrow up and a misprint in her name (“Hazer”).
Despite this contretemps, the publicity warmed the porcelain 2
cockles of her heart — and made my rattles shake with awful glee. 3
By engaging in church work as well as by getting to know the
better mothers of Lo’s schoolmates, Charlotte in the course of
twenty months or so had managed to become if not a prominent,
at least an acceptable citizen, but never before had she come
under that thrilling nihrique, and it was I who put her there, 4
Mr. Edgar H. Humbert (I threw in the “Edgar” just for the
heck of it), “writer and explorer.” McCoo’s brother, when tak- 5
ing it down, asked me what I had written. Whatever I told him
came out as “several books on Peacock, Rainbow and other 6
poets.” It was also noted that Charlotte and I had known each
other for several years and that I was a distant relation of her
first husband. I hinted I had had an affair with her thirteen
years ago but this was not mentioned in print. To Charlotte I
said that society columns should contain a shimmer of errors.
Let us go on with this curious tale. When called upon to enjoy
my promotion from lodger to lover, did I experience only bitter-
ness and distaste? No. Mr. Humbert confesses to a certain titilla-
tion of his vanity, to some faint tenderness, even to a pattern of
remorse daintily running along the steel of his conspiratorial
dagger. Never had I thought that the rather ridiculous, though
rather handsome Mrs. Haze, with her blind faith in the wisdom
[ 77 ]
of her church and book club, her mannerisms of elocution, her
harsh, cold, contemptuous attitude toward an adorable, downy-
armed child of twelve, could turn into such a touching, helpless
creature as soon as I laid my hands upon her which happened on
the threshold of Lolita’s room whither she tremulously backed
repeating “no, no, please no.”
The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had
been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of
utter adoration — a radiance having something soft and moist
about it, in which, with wonder, I recognized a resemblance to
the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had when gloating over a new
kind of concoction at the soda fountain or mutely admiring my
expensive, always tailor-fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I would
watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some
other lady and made that national grimace of feminine resigna-
tion (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping sideways) which, in an
infantile form, I had seen Lo making herself. We had highballs
before turning in, and with their help, I would manage to evoke
the child while caressing the mother. This was the white stomach
within which my nymphet had been a little curved fish in 1934.
This carefully dyed hair, so sterile to my sense of smell and
touch, acquired at certain lamplit moments in the poster bed the
tinge, if not the texture, of Lolita’s curls. I kept telling myself,
as I wielded my brand-new large-as-life wife, that biologically this
was the nearest I could get to Lolita; that at Lolita’s age, Lotte
had been as desirable a schoolgirl as her daughter was, and as
Lolita’s daughter would be some day. I had my wife unearth
from under a collection of shoes (Mr. Haze had a passion for
them, it appears) a thirty-year-old album, so that I might see how
Lotte had looked as a child; and even though the light was wrong
and the dresses graceless, I was able to make out a dim first ver-
sion of Lolita’s outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita,
Lolitchen.
So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little
windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively las-
civious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh pre-
pared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a
[ 78 ]
nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed
through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.
I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife
was. At breakfast, in the depressingly bright kitchen, with its
chrome glitter and Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute break-
fast nook (simulating that Coffee Shoppe where in their college
days Charlotte and Humbert used to coo together), she would
sit, robed in red, her elbow on the plastic-topped table, her cheek
propped on her fist, and stare at me with intolerable tenderness
as I consumed my ham and eggs. Humbert’s face might twitch
with neuralgia, but in her eyes it vied in beauty and animation
with the sun and shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrig-
erator. Aly solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love.
My small income added to her even smaller one impressed her
as a brilliant fortune; not because the resulting sum now sufficed
for most middle-class needs, but because even my money shone
in her eyes with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our
joint account as one of those southern boulevards at midday
that have solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the
other, all the way to the end of a prospect, where pink mountains
loom.
Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the
activities of as many years. The poor woman busied herself with
a number of things she had foregone long before or had never
been much interested in, as if (to prolong these Proustian intona-
tions) by my marrying the mother of the child I loved I had
enabled my wife to regain an abundance of youth by proxy.
With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to “glorify the
home.” Knowing as I did its every cranny by heart — since those
days when from my chair I mentally mapped out Lolita’s course
through the house — I had long entered into a sort of emotional
relationship with it, with its very ugliness and dirt, and now I
could almost feel the wretched thing cower in its reluctance to
endure the bath of ecru and ocher and putty-buff-and-snuff that
Charlotte planned to give it. She never got as far as that, thank
God, but she did use up a tremendous amount of energy in wash-
ing window shades, waxing the slats of Venetian blinds, pur-
[ 79 ]
chasing new shades and new blinds, returning them to the store,
replacing them by others, and so on, in a constant chiaroscuro of
smiles and frowns, doubts and pouts. She dabbled in cretonnes
and chintzes; she changed the colors of the sofa — the sacred sofa
where a bubble of paradise had once burst in slow motion within
me. She rearranged the furniture — and was pleased when she
found, in a household treatise, that “it is permissible to separate
a pair of sofa commodes and their companion lamps.” With the
authoress of Your Home Is You, she developed a hatred for little
lean chairs and spindle tables. She believed that a room having
a generous expanse of glass, and lots of rich wood paneling was
an example of the masculine type of room, whereas the feminine
type was characterized by lighter-looking windows and frailer
woodwork. The novels I had found her reading when I moved in
were now replaced by illustrated catalogues and homemaking
guides. From a firm located at 4640 Roosevelt Blvd., Phila-
delphia, she ordered for our double bed a “damask covered 3 1 2
coil mattress” — although the old one seemed to me resilient and
durable enough for whatever it had to support.
A Midwesterner, as her late husband had also been, she had
lived in coy Ramsdale, the gem of an eastern state, not long
enough to know all the nice people. She knew slightly the jovial
1 dentist who lived in a kind of ramshackle wooden chateau be-
hind our lawn. She had met at a church tea the “snooty” wife
of the local junk dealer who owned the “colonial” white horror
at the corner of the avenue. Now and then she “visited with”
old Miss Opposite; but the more patrician matrons among those
she called upon, or met at lawn functions, or had telephone chats
with — such dainty ladies as Mrs. Glave, Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs.
McCrystal, Mrs. Knight and others, seldom seemed to call on
my neglected Charlotte. Indeed, the only couple with whom she
2 had relations of real cordiality, devoid of any arrihe-pensee or
practical foresight, were the Farlows who had just come back
from a business trip to Chile in time to attend our wedding, with
the Chatfields, McCoos, and a few others (but not Mrs. Junk or
the even prouder Mrs. Talbot). John Farlow was a middle-aged,
quiet, quietly athletic, quietly successful dealer in sporting goods,
[ 80 ]
who had an office at Parkington, forty miles away: it was he who
got me the cartridges for that Colt and showed me how to use it,
during a walk in the woods one Sunday; he was also what he
called with a smile a part-time lawyer and had handled some of
Charlotte’s affairs. Jean, his youngish wife (and first cousin), was
a long-limbed girl in harlequin glasses with two boxer dogs, two
pointed breasts and a big red mouth. She painted — landscapes
and portraits — and vividly do I remember praising, over cock-
tails, the picture she had made of a niece of hers, little Rosaline
Honeck, a rosy honey in a Girl Scout uniform, beret of green
worsted, belt of green webbing, charming shoulder-long curls —
and John removed his pipe and said it was a pity Dolly (my
Dolita) and Rosaline were so critical of each other at school, but
he hoped, and we all hoped, they would get on better when they
returned from their respective camps. We talked of the school.
It had its drawbacks, and it had its virtues. “Of course, too many
of the tradespeople here are Italians,” said John, “but on the
other hand we are still spared — ” “I wish,” interrupted Jean with
a laugh, “Dolly and Rosaline were spending the summer to-
gether.” Suddenly I imagined Lo returning from camp — brown,
warm, drowsy, drugged— and was ready to weep with passion and
impatience.
19
A few words more about Mrs. Humbert while the going is
good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon). I had been al-
ways aware of the possessive streak in her, but I never thought
she would be so crazily jealous of anything in my life that had
not been she. She showed a fierce insatiable curiosity for my past.
She desired me to resuscitate all my loves so that she might make
me insult them, and trample upon them, and revoke them
apostately and totally, thus destroying my past. She made me
tell her about my marriage to Valeria, who was of course a
scream; but I also had to invent, or to pad atrociously, a long
1 series of mistresses for Charlotte’s morbid delectation. To keep
I [ 8i ]
her happy, I had to present her with an illustrated catalogue of
them, all nicely differentiated, according to the rules of those
American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio
of races, with one — only one, but as cute as they make them —
chocolate-colored round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle
of the front row. So I presented my women, and had them smile
and sway — the languorous blond, the fiery brunette, the sensual
copperhead — as if on parade in a bordello. The more popular
and platitudinous I made them, the more Mrs. Humbert was
pleased with the show.
Never in my life had I confessed so much or received so many
confessions. The sincerity and artlessness with which she dis-
cussed what she called her “love-life,” from first necking to con-
nubial catch-as-catch-can, were, ethically, in striking contrast
with my glib compositions, but technically the two sets were
congeneric since both were affected by the same stuff (soap
operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew
for my characters and she for her mode of expression. I was
considerably amused by certain remarkable sexual habits that
the good Harold Haze had had according to Charlotte who
thought my mirth improper; but otherwise her autobiography
was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would have been. I never
saw a healthier woman than she, despite thinning diets.
Of my Lolita she seldom spoke — more seldom, in fact, than
she did of the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the
exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom. In one of her
tasteless reveries, she predicted that the dead infant’s soul would
return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her
present wedlock. And although I felt no special urge to supply
the Humbert line with a replica of Harold’s production (Lolita,
with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it
occurred to me that a prolonged confinement, with a nice
Caesarean operation and other complications in a safe maternity
ward sometime next spring, would give me a chance to be alone
with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps — and gorge the limp nymphet
with sleeping pills.
Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially
[ 82 ]
vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with
great diligence the questionnaires in a fool’s book she had (A
Guide to Your Child’s Development)^ published in Chicago.
The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to
fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child’s birthdays. On
Lo’s twelfth, January i, 1947, Charlotte Haze, nee Becker, had
underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under “Your
Child’s Personality”: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful,
impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined
twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining
adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic,
and so forth. It was really maddening. With a brutality that
otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she
attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings that had
wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so
many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that
one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying
to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompany-
ing her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s anklets.
And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling’s letters!
Dear Mummy and Hummy,
Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy.
I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater
in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days.
I’m having a time. Love.
Dolly
“The dumb child,” said Mrs. Humbert, “has left out a word
before ‘time.’ That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would
not send her candy without consulting me.”
20
There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake — not as I had thought
it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one
\ week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily.
^ [ 83 ]
I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last
swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.
We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road
and were making our way down a path cut through the pine
forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow,
in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged to the old school
of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip “in the ebony” (as
John had quipped) at five o’clock in the morning last Sunday.
“The water,” I said, “must have been quite cold.”
“That is not the point,” said the logical doomed dear. “He is
subnormal, you see. And,” she continued (in that carefully
phrased way of hers that was beginning to tell on my health),
“I have a very definite feeling our Louise is in love with that
moron.”
Feeling. “We feel Dolly is not doing as well” etc. (from an
old school report).
The Humberts walked on, sandaled and robed.
“Do you know. Hum: I have one most ambitious dream,”
pronounced Lady Hum, lowering her head — shy of that dream —
and communing with the tawny ground. “I would love to get
hold of a real trained servant maid like that German girl the
Talbots spoke of; and have her live in the house.”
“No room,” I said.
“Come,” she said with her quizzical smile, “surely, chert, you
underestimate the possibilities of the Humbert home. We would
put her in Lo’s room. I intended to make a guestroom of that
hole anyway. It’s the coldest and meanest in the whole house.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, the skin of my cheek-
bones tensing up (this I take the trouble to note only because
my daughter’s skin did the same when she felt that way: dis-
belief, disgust, irritation).
“Are you bothered by Romantic Associations?” queried my
wife — in allusion to her first surrender.
“Hell no,” said I. “I just wonder where will you put your
daughter when you get your guest or your maid.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Humbert, dreaming, smiling, drawing out the
“Ah” simultaneously with the raise of one eyebrow and a soft
[ 84 ]
exhalation of breath. “Little Lo, I’m afraid, does not enter the
picture at all, at all. Little Lo goes straight from camp to a good
boarding school with strict discipline and some sound religious
training. And then — Beardsley College. I have it all mapped out,
you need not worry.”
She went on to say that she, Mrs. Humbert, would have to
overcome her habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalen’s sister
who taught at St. Algebra. The dazzling lake emerged. I said I
had forgotten my sunglasses in the car and would catch up with
her.
I had always thought that wringing one’s hands was a fictional
gesture — the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual;
but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate
meditation, this was the gesture (“look. Lord, at these chains!”) l
that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my
mood.
Had Charlotte been Valeria, I would have known how to
handle the situation; and “handle” is the word I want. In the
good old days, by merely twisting fat Valechka’s brittle wrist
(the one she had fallen upon from a bicycle) I could make her
change her mind instantly; but anything of the sort in regard to
Charlotte was unthinkable. Bland American Charlotte fright-
[ ened me. My lighthearted dream of controlling her through her
I passion for me was all wrong. I dared not do anything to spoil
the image of me she had set up to adore. I had toadied to her
when she was the awesome duenna of my darling, and a grovel-
ing something still persisted in my attitude toward her. The
only ace I held was her ignorance of my monstrous love for her
Lo. She had been annoyed by Lo’s liking me; but my feelings
she could not divine. To Valeria I might have said: “Look here,
; you fat fool, o' est moi qui decide what is good for Dolores Hum- 2
: bert.” To Charlotte, I could not even say (with ingratiating
1 calm): “Excuse me, my dear, I disagree. Let us give the child one
more chance. Let me be her private tutor for a year or so. You
once told me yourself — ” In fact, I could not say anything at all
to Charlotte about the child without giving myself away. Oh,
. you cannot imagine (as I had never imagined) what these
C 85 ]
women of principle are! Charlotte, who did not notice the falsity
of all the everyday conventions and rules of behavior, and foods,
and books, and people she doted upon, would distinguish at
once a false intonation in anything I might say with a view to
keeping Lo near. She was like a musician who may be an odious
vulgarian in ordinary life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will
hear a false note in music with diabolical accuracy of judgment.
To break Charlotte’s will, I would have to break her heart. If
I broke her heart, her image of me would break too. If I said:
“Either I have my way with Lolita, and you help me to keep
the matter quiet, or we part at once,” she would have turned as
pale as a woman of clouded glass and slowly replied: “All right,
whatever you add or retract, this is the end.” And the end it
would be.
Such, then, was the mess. I remember reaching the parking
area and pumping a handful of rust-tasting water, and drinking
it as avidly as if it could give me magic wisdom, youth, freedom,
a tiny concubine. For a while, purple-robed, heel-dangling, I
sat on the edge of one of the rude tables, under the wooshing
pines. In the middle distance, two little maidens in shorts and
halters came out of a sun-dappled privy marked “Women.”
Gum-chewing Mabel (or Mabel’s understudy) laboriously,
absent-mindedly, straddled a bicycle, and Marion, shaking her i
hair because of the flies, settled behind, legs wide apart; and, I
wobbling, they slowly, absently, merged with the light and *
shade. Lolita! Father and daughter melting into these woods! ‘
The natural solution was to destroy Mrs. Humbert. But how?
No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however,
can do it. There was the famous dispatch of a Mme Lacour in
Arles, southern France, at the close of last century. An uniden-
tified bearded six-footer, who, it was later conjectured, had been
the lady’s secret lover, walked up to her in a crowded street, i
soon after her marriage to Colonel Lacour, and mortally stabbed
her in the back, three times, while the Colonel, a small bulldog
of a man, hung onto the murderer’s arm. By a miraculous and i
beautiful coincidence, right at the moment when the operator
was in the act of loosening the angry little husband’s jaws (while i
[ 86 ]
several onlookers were closing in upon the group), a cranky
Italian in the house nearest to the scene set off by sheer accident
some kind of explosive he was tinkering with, and immediately
the street was turned into a pandemonium of smoke, falling
bricks and running people. The explosion hurt no one (except
that it knocked out game Colonel Lacour); but the lady’s venge-
ful lover ran when the others ran — and lived happily ever after.
Now look what happens when the operator himself plans a
perfect removal.
I walked down to Hourglass Lake. The spot from which we
and a few other “nice” couples (the Farlows, the Chatfields)
bathed was a kind of small cove; my Charlotte liked it because
it was almost “a private beach.” The main bathing facilities (or
“drowning facilities” as the Ramsdale Joimial had had occasion
to say) were in the left (eastern) part of the hourglass, and could
not be seen from our covelet. To our right, the pines soon gave
way to a curve of marshland which turned again into forest on
the opposite side.
I sat down beside my wife so noiselessly that she started.
“Shall we go in?” she asked.
“We shall in a minute. Let me follow a train of thought.”
I thought. More than a minute passed.
“All right. Come on.”
“Was I on that train?”
“You certainly were.”
“I hope so,” said Charlotte entering the water. It soon reached
the gooseflesh of her thick thighs; and then, joining her out-
stretched hands, shutting her mouth tight, very plain-faced in her
black rubber headgear, Charlotte flung herself forward with a
great splash.
Slowly we swam out into the shimmer of the lake.
On the opposite bank, at least a thousand paces away (if one
could walk across water), I could make out the tiny figures of
two men working like beavers on their stretch of shore. I knew
exactly who they were: a retired policeman of Polish descent
and the retired plumber who owned most of the timber on that
side of the lake. And I also knew they were engaged in building,
[ 87 ]
just for the dismal fun of the thing, a wharf. The knocks that
reached us seemed so much bigger than what could be distin=
guished of those dwarfs’ arms and tools; indeed, one suspected
1 the director of those acrosonic effects to have been at odds
with the puppet-master, especially since the hefty crack of each
diminutive blow lagged behind its visual version.
The short white-sand strip of “our” beach— from which by
now we had gone a little way to reach deep water — was empty
on weekday mornings. There was nobody around except those
two tiny very busy figures on the opposite side, and a dark-red
private plane that droned overhead, and then disappeared in
the blue. The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling
murder, and here was the subtle point: the man of law and the
man of water were just near enough to witness an accident and
just far enough not to observe a crime. They were near enough
to hear a distracted bather thrashing about and bellowing for
somebody to come and help him save his drowning wife; and
they were too far to distinguish (if they happened to look too
soon) that the anything but distracted swimmer was finishing
to tread his wife underfoot. I was not yet at that stage; I merely
want to convey the ease of the act, the nicety of the setting!
So there was Charlotte swimming on with dutiful awkwardness
(she was a very mediocre mermaid), but not without a certain
solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?); and
as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you
know — trying to see things as you will remember having seen
them), the glossy whiteness of her wet face so little tanned
despite all her endeavors, and her pale lips, and her naked convex
forehead, and the tight black cap, and the plump wet neck, I
knew that all I had to do was to drop back, take a deep breath,
then grab her by the ankle and rapidly dive with my captive
corpse. I say corpse because surprise, panic and inexperience
would cause her to inhale at once a lethal gallon of lake, while
I would be able to hold on for at least a full minute, open-eyed
under water. The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling
star across the blackness of the contemplated crime. It was
like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer holding the
[ 88 ]
ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery twi-
light. I might come up for a mouthful of air while still holding
her down, and then would dive again as many times as would
be necessary, and only when the curtain came down on her
for good, would I permit myself to yell for help. And when
some twenty minutes later the two puppets steadily growing
arrived in a rowboat, one half newly painted, poor Mrs. Humbert
Humbert, the victim of a cramp or coronary occlusion, or both,
would be standing on her head in the inky ooze, some thirty
feet below the smiling surface of Hourglass Lake.
Simple, was it not? But what d’ye know, folks — I just could
not make myself do it!
She swam beside me, a trustful and clumsy seal, and all the
logic of passion screamed in my ear: Now is the time! And,
folks, I just couldn’t! In silence I turned shoreward and gravely,
dutifully, she also turned, and still hell screamed its counsel,
and still I could not make myself drown the poor, slippery,
big-bodied creature. The scream grew more and more remote
as I realized the melancholy fact that neither tomorrow, nor
Friday, nor any other day or night, could I make myself put
her to death. Oh, I could visualize myself slapping Valeria’s
breasts out of alignment, or otherwise hurting her — and I could
see myself, no less clearly, shooting her lover in the underbelly
and making him say “akh!” and sit down. But I could not kill i
Charlotte — especially when things were on the whole not quite
as hopeless, perhaps, as they seemed at first wince on that mis- 2
erable morning. Were I to catch her by her strong kicking foot;
were I to see her amazed look, hear her awful voice; were I still
to go through with the ordeal, her ghost would haunt me all
my life. Perhaps if the year were 1447 instead of 1947 I might
have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some
classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death.
But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the
way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays
you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I
was neither. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of
sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning,
[ 89 ]
physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are
innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely
ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically
harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private
acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking
down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as
good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen,
sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence
of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance
to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never
kill. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal
heaven among an eternal alchemy of asphalt and rubber and
metal and stone — but thank God, not water, not water!
Nonetheless it was a very close shave, speaking quite ob-
jectively. And now comes the point of my perfect-crime parable.
We sat down on our towels in the thirsty sun. She looked
around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to
give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved
me. She sighed deeply. She extended one arm and groped in
the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. She sat up and smoked.
She examined her right shoulder. She kissed me heavily with
open smoky mouth. Suddenly, down the sand bank behind us,
from under the bushes and pines, a stone rolled, then another.
“Those disgusting prying kids,” said Charlotte, holding up
her big bra to her breast and turning prone again. “I shall have
to speak about that to Peter Krestovski.”
From the debouchment of the trail came a rustle, a footfall,
and Jean Farlow marched down with her easel and things.
“You scared us,” said Charlotte.
Jean said she had been up there, in a place of green conceal-
ment, spying on nature (spies are generally shot), trying to
finish a lakescape, but it was no good, she had no talent what-
ever (which was quite true) — “And have you ever tried painting,
Humbert?” Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted
to know if John was coming.
He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had
dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking
[ 90 ]
her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt
a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on 1
such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between
Charlotte and me. She wore shorts. Her long brown legs were
about as attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare. She
showed her gums when she smiled.
“I almost put both of you into my lake,” she said. “I even
noticed something you overlooked. You [addressing Humbert]
had your wrist watch on in, yes, sir, you had.”
“Waterproof,” said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth. 2
Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte’s
gift, then put back Humbert’s hand on the sand, palm up.
“You could see anything that way,” remarked Charlotte
coquettishly.
Jean sighed. “I once saw,” she said, “two children, male and
female, at sunset, right here, making love. Their shadows were
giants. And I told you about Mr. Tomson at daybreak. Next
time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the ivory. He is really a
freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely indecent
story about his nephew. It appears — ” 3
“Hullo there,” said John’s voice.
21
My habit of being silent when displeased, or, more exactly,
the cold and scaly quality of my displeased silence, used to
frighten Valeria out of her wits. She used to whimper and wail,
saying “Cc qui me rend folle, c'’est que je ne sais a quoi tu penses
quand tu es comme ga^ I tried being silent with Charlotte — and 4
she just chirped on, or chucked my silence under the chin.
An astonishing woman! I would retire to my former room, now
a regular “studio,” mumbling I had after all a learned opus to
write, and cheerfully Charlotte went on beautifying the home,
warbling on the telephone and writing letters. From my window,
through the lacquered shiver of poplar leaves, I could see her
[ 91 ]
crossing the street and contentedly mailing her letter to Miss
Phalen’s sister.
The week of scattered showers and shadows which elapsed
after our last visit to the motionless sands of Hourglass Lake
was one of the gloomiest I can recall. Then came two or three
1 dim rays of hope — before the ultimate sunburst.
It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful work-
ing order and that I might as well use it. If I dared not meddle
with my wife’s plans for her daughter (getting warmer and
browner every day in the fair weather of hopeless distance), I
could surely devise some general means to assert myself in a
general way that might be later directed toward a particular
occasion. One evening, Charlotte herself provided me with an
opening.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said looking at me with fond
eyes over a spoonful of soup. “In the fall we two are going to
England.”
I swallowed my spoonful, wiped my lips with pink paper (Oh,
the cool rich linens of Mirana Hotel! ) and said;
“I have also a surprise for you, my dear. We two are not going
to England.”
“Why, what’s the matter?” she said, looking — with more
surprise than I had counted upon — at my hands (I was invol-
untarily folding and tearing and crushing and tearing again the
innocent pink napkin). My smiling face set her somewhat at
ease, however.
“The matter is quite simple,” I replied. “Even in the most
harmonious of households, as ours is, not all decisions are taken
by the female partner. There are certain things that the husband
is there to decide. I can well imagine the thrill that you, a healthy
American gal, must experience at crossing the Atlantic on ;the
same ocean liner with Lady Bumble — or Sam Bumble, the
Erozen Meat King, or a Hollywood harlot. And I doubt not
that you and I would make a pretty ad for the Traveling Agency
when portrayed looking — you, frankly starry-eyed, I, controlling
my envious admiration — at the Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards,
2 or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they are called. But I happen to be
[ 92 ]
allergic to Europe, including merry old England. As you well
know, I have nothing but very sad associations with the Old
and rotting World. No colored ads in your magazines will change
the situation.”
“My darling,” said Charlotte. “I really — ”
“No, wait a minute. The present matter is only incidental.
I am concerned with a general trend. When you wanted me to
spend my afternoons sunbathing on the Lake instead of doing
my work, I gladly gave in and became a bronzed glamor boy for
your sake, instead of remaining a scholar and, well, an educator.
\Vhen you lead me to bridge and bourbon with the charming
Farlows, I meekly follow. No, please, wait. When you decorate
your home, I do not interfere with your schemes. When you
decide — when you decide all kinds of matters, I may be in
complete, or in partial, let us say, disagreement — but I say
nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore the general.
I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules. I am
not cross. I am not cross at all. Don’t do that. But I am one
half of this household, and have a small but distinct voice.”
She had come to my side and had fallen on her knees and
was slowly, but very vehemently, shaking her head and clawing
at my trousers. She said she had never realized. She said I was
her ruler and her god. She said Louise had gone, and let us
make love right away. She said I must forgive her or she would
die.
This little incident filled me with considerable elation. I told
her quietly that it was a matter not of asking forgiveness, but
of changing one’s ways; and I resolved to press my advantage
and spend a good deal of time, aloof and moody, working at
my book — or at least pretending to work.
The “studio bed” in my former room had long been con-
verted into the sofa it had always been at heart, and Charlotte
had warned me since the very beginning of our cohabitation
that gradually the room would be turned into a regular “writer’s
den.” A couple of days after the British Incident, I was sitting
in a new and very comfortable easy chair, with a large volume
in my lap, when Charlotte rapped with her ring finger and
[ 93 ]
sauntered in. How different were her movements from those
of my Lolita, when she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue
jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey,
and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her shirt unfastened.
Let me tell you, however, something. Behind the brashness of
little Haze, and the poise of big Haze, a trickle of shy life ran
that tasted the same, that murmured the same. A great French
doctor once told my father that in near relatives the faintest
gastric gurgle has the same “voice.”
So Charlotte sauntered in. She felt all was not well between
us. I had pretended to fall asleep the night before, and the night
before that, as soon as we had gone to bed, and had risen at dawn.
Tenderly, she inquired if she were not “interrupting.”
“Not at the moment,” I said, turning volume C of the Girls'
Encyclopedia around to examine a picture printed “bottom-
edge” as printers say.
Charlotte went up to a little table of imitation mahogany
with a drawer. She put her hand upon it. The little table was
ugly, no doubt, but it had done nothing to her.
“I have always wanted to ask you,” she said (businesslike,
not coquettish), “why is this thing locked up? Do you want it
in this room? It’s so abominably uncouth.”
“Leave it alone,” I said. I was Camping in Scandinavia.
“Is there a key?”
“Hidden.”
“Oh, Hum . . .”
“Locked up love letters.”
She gave me one of those wounded-doe looks that irritated me
so much, and then, not quite knowing if I was serious, or how
to keep up the conversation, stood for several slow pages (Cam-
pus, Canada, Candid Camera, Candy) peering at the window-
pane rather than through it, drumming upon it with sharp
almond-and-rose fingernails.
Presently (at Canoeing or Canvasback) she strolled up to
my chair and sank down, tweedily, weightily, on its arm, in-
undating me with the perfume my first wife had used. “Would
[ 94 ]
his lordship like to spend the fall here?’’’’ she asked, pointing
with her little finger at an autumn view in a conservative Eastern
State. “Why?” (very distinctly and slowly). She shrugged.
(Probably Harold used to take a vacation at that time. Open
season. Conditional reflex on her part.)
“I think I know where that is,” she said, still pointing. “There
is a hotel I remember. Enchanted Hunters, quaint, isn’t it? And
the food is a dream. And nobody bothers anybody.”
She rubbed her cheek against my temple. Valeria soon got
over that.
“Is there anything special you would like for dinner, dear?
John and Jean will drop in later.”
I answered with a grunt. She kissed me on my underlip, and,
brightly saying she would bake a cake (a tradition subsisted from
my lodging days that I adored her cakes), left me to my idleness.
Carefully putting down the open book where she had sat
(it attempted to send forth a rotation of waves, but an inserted
pencil stopped the pages), I checked the hiding place of the
key: rather self-consciously it lay under the old expensive safety
razor I had used before she bought me a much better and cheaper
one. Was it the perfect hiding place — there, under that razor,
in the groove of its velvet-lined case? The case lay in a small
trunk where I kept various business papers. Could I improve
upon this? Remarkable how difficult it is to conceal things —
especially when one’s wife keeps monkeying with the furniture.
22
I think it was exactly a week after our last swim that the noon
mail brought a reply from the second Miss Phalen. The lady
wrote she had just returned to St. Algebra from her sister’s
funeral. “Euphemia had never been the same after breaking
that hip.” As to the matter of Mrs. Humbert’s daughter, she
wished to report that it was too late to enroll her this year;
but that she, the surviving Phalen, was practically certain that
[ 95 ]
if Mr. and Mrs. Humbert brought Dolores over in January, her
admittance might be arranged.
Next day, after lunch, I went to see “our” doctor, a friendly
fellow whose perfect bedside manner and complete reliance
on a few patented drugs adequately masked his ignorance of,
and indifference to, medical science. The fact that Lo would
have to come back to Ramsdale was a treasure of anticipation.
For this event I wanted to be fully prepared. I had in fact begun
my campaign earlier, before Charlotte made that cruel decision
of hers. I had to be sure when my lovely child arrived, that very
night, and then night after night, until St. Algebra took her
away from me, I would possess the means of putting two crea-
tures to sleep so thoroughly that neither sound nor touch should
rouse them. Throughout most of July I had been experimenting
with various sleeping powders, trying them out on Charlotte,
a great taker of pills. The last dose I had given her (she thought
it was a tablet of mild bromides — to anoint her nerves) had
knocked her out for four solid hours. I had put the radio at
1 full blast. I had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight. I
had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her — and nothing had
disturbed the rhythm of her calm and powerful breathing.
However, when I had done such a simple thing as kiss her, she
had awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I
barely escaped). This would not do, I thought; had to get some-
thing still safer. At first. Dr. Byron did not seem to believe me
when I said his last prescription was no match for my insomnia.
He suggested I try again, and for a moment diverted my atten-
tion by showing me photographs of his family. He had a fas-
2 cinating child of Dolly’s age; but I saw through his tricks and
insisted he prescribe the mightiest pill extant. He suggested I
play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he
said, “would really work”; and going to a cabinet, he produced
a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end,
which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were
intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if
properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who
had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries. I love
[ 96 ]
to fool doctors, and though inwardly rejoicing, pocketed the
pills with a skeptical shrug. Incidentally, I had had to be careful
with him. Once, in another connection, a stupid lapse on my
part made me mention my last sanatorium, and I thought I
saw the tips of his ears twitch. Being not at all keen for Charlotte
or anybody else to know that period of my past, I had hastily
explained that I had once done some research among the insane
for a novel. But no matter; the old rogue certainly had a sweet
girleen.
I left in great spirits. Steering my wife’s car with one finger,
I contentedly rolled homeward. Ramsdale had, after all, lots
of charm. The cicadas whirred; the avenue had been freshly
watered. Smoothly, almost silkily, I turned down into our
steep little street. Everything was somehow so right that day.
So blue and green. I knew the sun shone because my ignition
key was reflected in the windshield; and I knew it was exactly
half past three because the nurse who came to massage Miss
Opposite every afternoon was tripping down the narrow sidewalk
in her white stockings and shoes. As usual. Junk’s hysterical
setter attacked me as I rolled downhill, and as usual, the local
paper was lying on the porch where it had just been hurled by
Kenny.
The day before I had ended the regime of aloofness I had
imposed upon myself, and now uttered a cheerful homecoming
call as I opened the door of the living room. With her cream-
white nape and bronze bun to me, wearing the yellow blouse
and maroon slacks she had on when I first met her, Charlotte
sat at the corner bureau writing a letter. My hand still on the
doorknob, I repeated my hearty cry. Her writing hand stopped.
She sat still for a moment; then she slowly turned in her chair
and rested her elbow on its curved back. Her face, disfigured
by her emotion, was not a pretty sight as she stared at my legs
and said:
“The Haze woman, the big bitch, the old cat, the obnoxious
mamma, the — the old stupid Haze is no longer your dupe. She
has — she has ...”
My fair accuser stopped, swallowing her venom and her tears.
[ 97 ]
Whatever Humbert Humbert said — or attempted to say — is
inessential. She went on:
“You’re a monster. You’re a detestable, abominable, criminal
fraud. If you come near — I’ll scream out the window. Get back! ”
Again, whatever H.H. murmured may be omitted, I think.
“I am leaving tonight. This is all yours. Only you’ll never,
never see that miserable brat again. Get out of this room.”
Reader, I did. I went up to the ex-semi-studio. Arms akimbo,
I stood for a moment quite still and self-composed, surveying
from the threshold the raped little table with its open drawer, a
key hanging from the lock, four other household keys on the
table top. I walked across the landing into the Humberts’ bed-
room, and calmly removed my diary from under her pillow into
my pocket. Then I started to walk downstairs, but stopped half-
way: she was talking on the telephone which happened to be
plugged just outside the door of the living room. I wanted to
hear what she was saying: she canceled an order for something
or other, and returned to the parlor. I rearranged my respiration
and went through the hallway to the kitchen. There, I opened
a bottle of Scotch. She could never resist Scotch. Then I walked
into the dining room and from there, through the half-open door,
contemplated Charlotte’s broad back.
“You are ruining my life and yours,” I said quietly. “Let us
be civilized people. It is all your hallucination. You are crazy,
Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel.
Your name and hers were put in by mere chance. Just because
they came handy. Think it over. I shall bring you a drink.”
She neither answered nor turned, but went on writing in a
scorching scrawl whatever she was writing. A third letter, pre-
sumably (two in stamped envelopes were already laid out on the
desk). I went back to the kitchen.
I set out two glasses (to St. Algebra? to Lo?) and opened the
refrigerator. It roared at me viciously while I removed the ice
from its heart. Rewrite. Let her read it again. She will not recall
details. Change, forge. Write a fragment and show it to her
or leave it lying around. Why do faucets sometimes whine so
horribly? A horrible situation, really. The little pillow-shaped
[ 98 ]
blocks of ice— -pillows for polar teddy bear, Lo — emitted rasping,
crackling, tortured sounds as the warm water loosened them in
their cells. I bumped down the glasses side by side. I poured in
the whiskey and a dram of soda. She had tabooed my pin. Bark
and bang went the icebox. Carrying the glasses, I walked through
the dining room and spoke through the parlor door which was
a fraction ajar, not quite space enough for my elbow.
“I have made you a drink,” I said.
She did not answer, the mad bitch, and I placed the glasses
on the sideboard near the telephone, which had started to ring.
“Leslie speaking. Leslie Tomson,” said Leslie Tomson who
favored a dip at dawn. “Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over
and you’d better come quick.”
I answered, perhaps a bit testily, that my wife was safe and
sound, and still holding the receiver, I pushed open the door
and said:
“There’s this man saying you’ve been killed, Charlotte.”
But there was no Charlotte in the living room.
23
I rushed out. The far side of our steep little street presented a
peculiar sight. A big black glossy Packard had climbed Miss
Opposite’s sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk (where
a tartan laprobe had dropped in a heap), and stood there,
shining in the sun, its doors open like wings, its front wheels
deep in evergreen shrubbery. To the anatomical right of this
car, on the trim turf of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with
a white mustache, well-dressed — doublebreasted gray suit, polka-
dotted bow-tie — lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-
size wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous
vision into a sequence of words; their physical accumulation in
the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression:
Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss O.’s nurse running with a
rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened
[ 99 ]
porch — where the propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself
may be imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown
the rhythmical yaps of the Junk setter walking from group to
group — from a bunch of neighbors already collected on the
sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the car which
he had finally run to earth, and then to another group on the
lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man
with tortoise shell glasses. At this point, I should explain that
the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a
minute after the accident, was due to their having been ticket-
ing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down
the grade; that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale,
Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the
nurse had just watered on the green bank where he lay — a
banked banker so to speak — was not in a dead faint, but was
comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart
attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the side-
walk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval
the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of
Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged
several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street
to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Oppo-
site’s lawn. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty
child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing
them to fragments in my trouser pocket.
Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene
and took over. The widower, a man of exceptional self-control,
neither wept nor raved. He staggered a bit, that he did; but
he opened his mouth only to impart such information or issue
such directions as were strictly necessary in connection with the
identification, examination and disposal of a dead woman, the
top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and
blood. The sun was still a blinding red when he was put to bed
in Dolly’s room by his two friends, gentle John and dewy-eyed
Jean; who, to be near, retired to the Humberts’ bedroom for the
night; which, for all I know, they may not have spent as inno-
cently as the solemnity of the occasion required.
[ 100 ]
I have no reason to dwell, in this very special memoir, on the
pre=funeral formalities that had to be attended to, or on the
funeral itself, which was as quiet as the marriage had been. But
a few incidents pertaining to those four or five days after Char-
lotte’s simple death, have to be noted.
My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as
soundly as the child who had slept in that bed. Next morning
I hastened to inspect the fragments of letters in my pocket. They
had got too thoroughly mixed up to be sorted into three com-
plete sets. I assumed that “. . . and you had better find it because
I cannot buy ...” came from a letter to Lo; and other fragments
seemed to point to Charlotte’s intention of fleeing with Lo to
Parkington, or even back to Pisky, lest the vulture snatch her
precious lamb. Other tatters and shreds (never had I thought
I had such strong talons) obviously referred to an application
not to St. A. but to another boarding school which was said
to be so harsh and gray and gaunt in its methods (although
supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the nick-
name of “Reformatory for Young Ladies.” Finally, the third
epistle was obviously addressed to me. I made out such items
as “. . . after a year of separation we may . . .” . . oh, my dearest,
oh my . . .” “. . . worse than if it had been a woman you kept . .
“. . . or, maybe, I shall die . . .” But on the whole my gleanings
made httle sense; the various fragments of those three hasty
missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as their ele-
ments had been in poor Charlotte’s head.
That day John had to see a customer, and Jean had to feed
her dogs, and so I was to be deprived temporarily of my friends’
company. The dear people were afraid I might commit suicide
if left alone, and since no other friends were available (Miss
Opposite was incommunicado, the McCoos were busy building
a new house miles away, and the Chatfields had been recently
called to Maine by some family trouble of their own), Leslie
and Louise were commissioned to keep me company under
the pretense of helping me to sort out and pack a multitude of
orphaned things. In a moment of superb inspiration I showed
the kind and credulous Farlows (we were waiting for Leslie to
C lOI ]
come for his paid tryst with Louise) a little photograph of
Charlotte I had found among her affairs. From a boulder she
smiled through blown hair. It had been taken in April 1934,
a memorable spring. While on a business visit to the States, I
had had occasion to spend several months in Pisky. We met —
and had a mad love affair. I was married, alas, and she was
engaged to Haze, but after I returned to Europe, we corresponded
through a friend, now dead. Jean whispered she had heard some
rumors and looked at the snapshot, and, still looking, handed
it to John, and John removed his pipe and looked at lovely and
fast Charlotte Becker, and handed it back to me. Then they
left for a few hours. Happy Louise was gurgling and scolding her
swain in the basement.
Hardly had the Farlows gone than a blue-chinned cleric called
— and I tried to make the interview as brief as was consistent
with neither hurting his feelings nor arousing his doubts. Yes,
I would devote all my life to the child’s welfare. Here, inci-
dentally, was a little cross that Charlotte Becker had given me
when we were both young. I had a female cousin, a respectable
spinster in New York. There we would find a good private school
for Dolly. Oh, what a crafty Humbert!
For the benefit of Leslie and Louise who might (and did)
report it to John and Jean I made a tremendously loud and
beautifully enacted long-distance call and simulated a conver-
sation with Shirley Holmes. When John and Jean returned, I
completely took them in by telling them, in a deliberately wild
and confused mutter, that Lo had gone with the intermediate
group on a five-day hike and could not be reached.
“Good Lord,” said Jean, “what shall we do?”
John said it was perfectly simple — he would get the Climax
police to find the hikers — it would not take them an hour. In
fact, he knew the country and —
“Look,” he continued, “why don’ I drive there right now,
and you may sleep with Jean” — (he did not really add that
but Jean supported his offer so passionately that it might be
implied).
I broke down. I pleaded with John to let things remain the
[ 102 ]
way they were. I said I could not bear to have the child all
around me, sobbing, clinging to me, she was so high-strung, the
experience might react on her future, psychiatrists have analyzed
such cases. There was a sudden pause.
“Well, you are the doctor,” said John a little bluntly. “But
after all I was Charlotte’s friend and adviser. One would like to
know what you are going to do about the child anyway.”
“John,” cried Jean, “she is his child, not Harold Haze’s. Don’t
you understand? Humbert is Dolly’s real father.”
“I see,” said John. “I am sorry. Yes, I see. I did not realize
that. It simplifies matters, of course. And whatever you feel is
right.”
The distraught father went on to say he would go and fetch
his delicate daughter immediately after the funeral, and would
do his best to give her a good time in totally different surround-
ings, perhaps a trip to New Mexico or California — granted, of
course, he lived.
So artistically did I impersonate the calm of ultimate despair,
the hush before some crazy outburst, that the perfect Farlows
removed me to their house. They had a good cellar, as cellars
go in this country; and that was helpful, for I feared insomnia
and a ghost.
Now I must explain my reasons for keeping Dolores away.
Naturally, at first, when Charlotte had just been eliminated and
I re-entered the house a free father, and gulped down the two
whiskey-and-sodas I had prepared, and topped them with a
pint or two of my “pin,” and went to the bathroom to get away
from neighbors and friends, there was but one thing in my
mind and pulse — namely, the awareness that a few hours hence,
warm, brown-haired, and mine, mine, mine, Lolita would be
in my arms, shedding tears that I would kiss away faster than
they could well. But as I stood wide-eyed and flushed before
the mirror, John Farlow tenderly tapped to inquire if I was
okay — and I immediately realized it would be madness on my
part to have her in the house with all those busybodies milling
around and scheming to take her away from me. Indeed, unpre-
dictable Lo herself might — who knows? — show some foolish
[ 103 ]
distrust of me, a sudden repugnance, vague fear and the like —
and gone would be the magic prize at the very instant of triumph.
Speaking of busybodies, I had another visitor — friend Beale,
the fellow who eliminated my wife. Stodgy and solemn, looking
like a kind of assistant executioner, with his bulldog jowls, small
black eyes, thickly rimmed glasses and conspicuous nostrils,
he was ushered in by John who then left us, closing the door
upon us, with the utmost tact. Suavely saying he had twins in
my stepdaughter’s class, my grotesque visitor unrolled a large
diagram he had made of the accident. It was, as my stepdaughter
would have put it, “a beaut,” with all kinds of impressive arrows
and dotted lines in varicolored inks. Mrs. H. H.’s trajectory was
illustrated at several points by a series of those little outline
figures — doll-like wee career girl or WAC — used in statistics as
visual aids. Very clearly and conclusively, this route came into
contact with a boldly traced sinuous line representing two con-
secutive swerves — one which the Beale car made to avoid the
Junk dog (dog not shown), and the second, a kind of exagger-
ated continuation of the first, meant to avert the tragedy. A very
black cross indicated the spot where the trim little outline
figure had at last come to rest on the sidewalk. I looked for some
similar mark to denote the place on the embankment where
my visitor’s huge wax father had reclined, but there was none.
That gentleman, however, had signed the document as a witness
underneath the name of Leslie Tomson, Miss Opposite and a
few other people.
With his hummingbird pencil deftly and delicately flying
from one point to another, Frederick demonstrated his absolute
innocence and the recklessness of my wife: while he was in the
act of avoiding the dog, she had slipped on the freshly watered
asphalt and plunged forward whereas she should have flung her-
self not forward but backward (Fred showed how by a jerk of
his padded shoulder). I said it was certainly not his fault, and
the inquest upheld my view.
Breathing violently through jet-black tense nostrils, he shook
his head and my hand; then, with an air of perfect savoir vivre
and gentlemanly generosity, he offered to pay the funeral-home
[ 104 ]
expenses. He expected me to refuse his offer. With a drunken
sob of gratitude I accepted it. This took him aback. Slowly,
incredulously, he repeated what he had said. I thanked him
again, even more profusely than before.
In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul
was for a moment resolved. And no wonder! I had actually
seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate —
and its padded shoulder. A brilliant and monstrous mutation
had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument. Within
the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying housewife, slippery
pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its
wheel), I could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution.
Had I not been such a fool — or such an intuitive genius —
to preserve that journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and
hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to
the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might
have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phan-
tom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun l
and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and
the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate’s formal handshake (as 2
reproduced by Beale before leaving the room) brought me out
of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury —
I wept.
24
The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs
to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed
above Ramsdale’s white church tower when I looked around me
for the last time. For unknown adventures I was leaving the
livid house where I had rented a room only ten weeks before.
The shades — thrifty, practical bamboo shades — were already
down. On porches or in the house their rich textures lend
modern drama. The house of heaven must seem pretty bare
after that. A raindrop fell on my knuckles. I went back into
the house for something or other while John was putting my
[ 105 ]
bags into the car, and then a funny thing happened. I do not
know if in these tragic notes I have sufficiently stressed the
peculiar “sending” effect that the writer’s good looks — pseudo-
Celtic, attractively simian, boyishly manly — had on women
of every age and environment. Of course, such announcements
made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once
in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much
as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some
mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that
mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of
the book. There may be more to it in the present case. My
gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind’s eye if my story
is to be properly understood. Pubescent Lo swooned to Hum-
bert’s charm as she did to hiccuppy music; adult Lotte loved me
with a mature, possessive passion that I now deplore and respect
more than I care to say. Jean Farlow, who was thirty-one and
absolutely neurotic, had also apparently developed a strong liking
for me. She was handsome in a carved-Indian sort of way, with a
burnt sienna complexion. Her lips were like large crimson polyps,
and when she emitted her special barking laugh, she showed
large dull teeth and pale gums.
She was very tall, wore either slacks with sandals or billowing
skirts with ballet slippers, drank any strong liquor in any amount,
had had two miscarriages, wrote stories about animals, painted,
as the reader knows, lakescapes, was already nursing the cancer
that was to kill her at thirty-three, and was hopelessly unattrac-
tive to me. Judge then of my alarm when a few seconds before
I left (she and I stood in the hallway) Jean, with her always
trembling fingers, took me by the temples, and, tears in her
bright blue eyes, attempted, unsuccessfully, to glue herself to
my lips.
“Take care of yourself,” she said, “kiss your daughter for me.”
A clap of thunder reverberated throughout the house, and she
added:
“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we
may see each other again” (Jean, whatever, wherever you are, in
[ io6 ]
minus time-space or plus soul-time, forgive me all this, parenthe-
sis included).
x\nd presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the
street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying
before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress
from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty
house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of
stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had
been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still
wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.
25
One might suppose that with all blocks removed and a pros-
pect of delirious and unlimited delights before me, I would have
mentally sunk back, heaving a sigh of delicious relief. Eh bien,
pas du tout! Instead of basking in the beams of smiling Chance, 1
I was obsessed by all sorts of purely ethical doubts and fears. For
instance: might it not surprise people that Lo was so consistently
debarred from attending festive and funeral functions in her
immediate family? You remember — we had not had her at our
wedding. Or another thing: granted it was the long hairy arm of
Coincidence that had reached out to remove an innocent
woman, might Coincidence not ignore in a heathen moment
what its twin lamb had done and hand Lo a premature note of
commiseration? True, the accident had been reported only by
the Ramsdale Joimial — not by the Parkington Recorder or the
Climax Herald, Camp Q being in another state, and local deaths 2
having no federal news interest; but I could not help fancying
that somehow Dolly Haze had been informed already, and that
at the very time I was on my way to fetch her, she was being
driven to Ramsdale by friends unknown to me. Still more dis-
quieting than all these conjectures and worries, was the fact that
Humbert Humbert, a brand-new American citizen of obscure
European origin, had taken no steps toward becoming the legal
guardian of his dead wife’s daughter (twelve years and seven
[ 107 ]
months old). Would I ever dare take those steps? I could not
repress a shiver whenever I imagined my nudity hemmed in by
mysterious statutes in the merciless glare of the Common Law.
My scheme was a marvel of primitive art: I would whizz over
to Camp Q, tell Lolita her mother was about to undergo a major
operation at an invented hospital, and then keep moving with
my sleepy nymphet from inn to inn while her mother got better
and better and finally died. But as I traveled campward my
anxiety grew. I could not bear to think I might not find Lolita
there — or find, instead, another, scared, Lolita clamoring for
some family friend: not the Farlows, thank God — she hardly
knew them — but might there not be other people I had not
reckoned with? Finally, I decided to make the long-distance call
I had simulated so well a few days before. It was raining hard
when I pulled up in a muddy suburb of Parkington, just before
the Fork, one prong of which bypassed the city and led to the
highway which crossed the hills to Lake Climax and Camp Q.
I flipped off the ignition and for quite a minute sat in the car
bracing myself for that telephone call, and staring at the rain, at
the inundated sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous thing, really,
painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of its
1 arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood
2 dripped upon its argent chains. No wonder that stopping beside
those nightmare cripples is taboo. I drove up to a gasoline station.
A surprise awaited me when at last the coins had satisfactorily
clanked down and a voice was allowed to answer mine.
Holmes, the camp mistress, informed me that Dolly had gone
Monday (this was Wednesday) on a hike in the hills with her
group and was expected to return rather late today. Would I
care to come tomorrow, and what was exactly — Without going
into details, I said that her mother was hospitalized, that the
situation was grave, that the child should not be told it was
grave and that she should be ready to leave with me tomorrow
afternoon. The two voices parted in an explosion of warmth
and good will, and through some freak mechanical flaw all my
coins came tumbling back to me with a hitting-the- jackpot clatter
that almost made me laugh despite the disappointment at hav-
[ io8 ]
ing to postpone bliss. One wonders if this sudden discharge, this
spasmodic refund, was not correlated somehow, in the mind of
McFate, with my having invented that little expedition before
ever learning of it as I did now.
What next? I proceeded to the business center of Parkington
and devoted the whole afternoon (the weather had cleared, the
wet town was like silver-and-glass) to buying beautiful things
for Lo. Goodness, what crazy purchases were prompted by the
poignant predilection Humbert had in those days for check
weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats,
snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts! Oh Lolita, you
are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little l
girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? Did
I have something special in mind? coaxing voices asked me.
Swimming suits? We have them in all shades. Dream pink,
frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black. What about 2, 3
playsuits? Slips? No slips. Lo and I loathed slips.
One of my guides in these matters was an anthropometric
entry made by her mother on Lo’s twelfth birthday (the reader 4
remembers that Know-Your-Child book). I had the feeling that
Charlotte, moved by obscure motives of envy and dislike, had
added an inch here, a pound there; but since the nymphet had
no doubt grown somewhat in the last seven months, I thought
I could safely accept most of those January measurements: hip
girth, twenty-nine inches; thigh girth (just below the gluteal
sulcus), seventeen; calf girth and neck circumference, eleven;
chest circumference, twenty-seven; upper arm girth, eight; waist,
twenty-three; stature, fifty-seven inches; weight, seventy-eight
pounds; figure, linear; intelligence quotient, izi; vermiform ap-
pendix present, thank God.
Apart from measurements, I could of course visualize Lolita
with hallucinational lucidity; and nursing as I did a tingle on
my breastbone at the exact spot her silky top had come level
once or twice with my heart; and feeling as I did her warm
weight in my lap (so that, in a sense, I was always “with Lolita”
as a woman is “with child”), I was not surprised to discover later
that my computation had been more or less correct. Having
[ 109 ]
moreover studied a midsummer sale book, it was with a very
knowing air that I examined various pretty articles, sport shoes,
sneakers, pumps of crushed kid for crushed kids. The painted
girl in black who attended to all these poignant needs of mine
turned parental scholarship and precise description into com-
mercial euphemisms, such as ''petite.’’’’ Another, much older
woman, in a white dress, with a pancake make-up, seemed to be
oddly impressed by my knowledge of junior fashions; perhaps I
had a midget for mistress; so, when shown a skirt with two
“cute” pockets in front, I intentionally put a naive male question
and was rewarded by a smiling demonstration of the way the
zipper worked in the back of the skirt. I had next great fun with
all kinds of shorts and briefs — phantom little Lolitas dancing,
falling, daisying all over the counter. We rounded up the deal
with some prim cotton pajamas in popular butcher-boy style.
Humbert, the popular butcher.
There is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in
those large stores where according to ads a career girl can get a
complete desk-to-date wardrobe, and where little sister can
dream of the day when her wool jersey will make the boys in the
back row of the classroom drool. Lifesize plastic figures of
snubbed-nosed children with dun-colored, greenish, brown-
dotted, faunish faces floated around me. I realized I was the
only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fish-
1 like, in a glaucous aquarium. I sensed strange thoughts form in
the minds of the languid ladies that escorted me from counter
to counter, from rock ledge to seaweed, and the belts and the
bracelets I chose seemed to fall from siren hands into transparent
water. I bought an elegant valise, had my purchases put into it,
and repaired to the nearest hotel, well pleased with my day.
Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical afternoon of
fastidious shopping, I recalled the hotel or inn with the seduc-
2 tive name of The Enchanted Hunters which Charlotte had hap-
pened to mention shortly before my liberation. With the help
of a guidebook I located it in the secluded town of Briceland, a
four-hour drive from Lo’s camp. I could have telephoned but
fearing my voice might go out of control and lapse into coy
[ no ]
croaks of broken English, I decided to send a wire ordering a
room with twin beds for the next night. What a comic, clumsy,
wavering Prince Charming I was! How some of my readers will
laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the wording
of my telegram! What should I put: Humbert and daughter?
Humberg and small daughter? Homberg and immature girl?
Homburg and child? The droll mistake — the “g” at the end —
which eventually came through may have been a telepathic echo
of these hesitations of mine.
And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my broodings over
the philter I had with me! Oh miserly Hamburg! Was he not a
very Enchanted Hunter as he deliberated with himself over his
boxful of magic ammunition? To rout the monster of insomnia
should he try himself one of those amethyst capsules? There were
forty of them, all told — forty nights with a frail little sleeper at
my throbbing side; could I rob myself of one such night in order
to sleep? Certainly not: much too precious was each tiny plum,
each microscopic planetarium with its live stardust. Oh, let me
be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
26
This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is
disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a
hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting
confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t
think I can go on. Heart, head — everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita,
Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page
is full, printer.
27
Still in Parkington. Linally, I did achieve an hour’s slumber —
from which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly exhausting
congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger.
[ III ]
By then it was six in the morning, and it suddenly occurred
to me it might be a good thing to arrive at the camp earlier than
I had said. From Parkington I had still a hundred miles to go,
and there would be more than that to the Hazy Hills and Brice-
land. If I had said I would come for Dolly in the afternoon, it
was only because my fancy insisted on merciful night falling as
soon as possible upon my impatience. But now I foresaw all
kinds of misunderstandings and was all a-jitter lest delay might
give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Rams-
dale. However, when at 9.30 a.m. I attempted to start, I was
confronted by a dead battery, and noon was nigh when at last
I left Parkington.
I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car
1 in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad
stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically
directed by him to an office in a stucco cottage; in a dying state,
had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration
of the camp mistress, a sluttish worn out female with rusty hair.
Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her
mother was sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean,
A-lr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counsellors? Or look at
the cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney
creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent over to
fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room
for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to some-
body or other: “The poor guy looked like his own ghost.”)
Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and
fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her
head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my
impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with
a bright “. . . and five!”; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy
2 moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (“nature
study”); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my trem-
bling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report
of Dolly Haze’s behavior for July (“fair to good; keen on swim-
ming and boating”); a sound of trees and birds, and my pound-
ing heart ... I was standing with my back to the open door, and
[ 112 ]
then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her respiration
and voice behind me. She arrived dragging and bumping her
heavy suitcase. “Hi!” she said, and stood still, looking at me
with sly, glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but
wonderfully endearing smile.
She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me
her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished
for more than a month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too
much lentigo camouflaged her rosy rustic features; and that first l
impression (a very narrow human interval between two tiger
heartbeats) carried the clear implication that all widower Hum-
bert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-
looking though sun-colored little orphan aux yeux battus (and 2
even those plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles) a 3
sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home,
nice girl-friends of her age among whom (if the fates deigned to
repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty little Mdgdlein for Herr 4
Doktor Humbert alone. But “in a wink,” as the Germans say,
the angelic line of conduct was erased, and I overtook my prey
(time moves ahead of our fancies!), and she was my Lolita
again — in fact, more of my Lolita than ever. I let my hand rest
on her warm auburn head and took up her bag. She was all rose
and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, with a pattern of
little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden
brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies,
and the ribbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the
remembered level, and because of her childish gait, or because
I had memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle
oxfords looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her.
Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwhole-
some food, good-bye Charlie boy. In the hot car she settled
down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her lovely knee; then,
her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she
rapidly cranked down the window on her side and settled back
again. We sped through the striped and speckled forest.
“How’s Mother?” she asked dutifully.
I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble
[ II3 ]
was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdomi-
nal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital
was in the country, near the gay town of Lepingville, where a
great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where
we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea
and wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine p.m.
“We should be at Briceland by dinner time,” I said, “and
tomorrow we’ll visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you
have a marvelous time at the camp?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sorry to leave?”
“Un-un.”
“Talk, Lo — don’t grunt. Tell me something.”
“What thing. Dad?” (she let the word expand with ironic
deliberation).
“Any old thing.”
“Okay, if I call you that?” (eyes slit at the road).
“Quite.” I
“It’s a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?” j
“Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situa- '
tions, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual I
relationship.” .
“Bah!” said the cynical nymphet.
Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape. .
“Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside.”
“I think I’ll vomit if I look at a cow again.” '
“You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.”
“/ did not. Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it
does not matter one bit, because you’ve stopped caring for me, i
anyway. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister.”
I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.
“Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?”
“Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?”
Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoul-
der of road ahead, and bumped and wobbled into the weeds, i
Remember she is only a child, remember she is only —
Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively
[ 114 ]
flowed into my arms. Not daring, not daring let myself go — not
even daring let myself realize that this (sweet wetness and trem-
bling fire) was the beginning of the ineffable life which, ably
assisted by fate, I had finally willed into being — not daring really
kiss her, I touched her hot, opening lips with the utmost piety,
tiny sips, nothing salacious; but she, with an impatient wriggle,
pressed her mouth to mine so hard that I felt her big front teeth
and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva. I knew, of
course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of back-
fisch foolery in imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance, 1, 2
and since (as the psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell 3
you) the limits and rules of such girlish games are fluid, or at
least too childishly subtle for the senior partner to grasp — I was
dreadfully afraid 1 might go too far and cause her to start back
in revulsion and terror. And, as above all I was agonizingly
an.\ious to smuggle her into the hermetic seclusion of The En-
chanted Hunters, and we had still eighty miles to go, blessed
intuition broke our embrace— a split second before a highway
patrol car drew up alongside.
Florid and beetle-browed, its driver stared at me:
“Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you
before the junction?”
“Why, no.”
“We didn’t,” said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, her innocent
hand on my legs, “but are you sure it was blue, because — ”
The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little 4
colleen his best smile and went into a U-turn.
W e drove on.
“The fruithead!” remarked Lo. “He should have nabbed yoz/.”
“Why me for heaven’s sake?”
“Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty, and — No, don’t
slow down, you, dull bulb. He’s gone now.”
“We have still quite a stretch,” I said, “and I want to get there
before dark. So be a good girl.”
“Bad, bad girl,” said Lo comfortably. “Juvenile delickwent,
but frank and fetching. That light was red. I’ve never seen such
driving.”
C II5 ]
We rolled silently through a silent townlet.
“Say, wouldn’t Mother be absolutely mad if she found out
we were lovers?”
“Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way.”
“But we are lovers, aren’t we?”
“Not that I know of. I think we are going to have some more
rain. Don’t you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in
camp?”
“You talk like a book. Dad.”
“What have you been up to? I insist you tell me.”
“Are you easily shocked?”
“No. Go on.”
“Let us turn into a secluded lane and I’ll tell you.”
“Lo, I must seriously ask you not to play the fool. Well?”
“Well — I joined in all the activities that were offered.”
1 “EnsuiteF”
“Ansooit, I was taught to live happily and richly with others
and to develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake, in fact.”
“Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet.”
“We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace
or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own
spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.”
“Your memory is excellent, Lo, but I must trouble you to
leave out the swear words. Anything else?”
“The Girl Scout’s motto,” said Lo rhapsodically, “is also mine.
I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as — well, never mind
what. My duty is — to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I
obey orders. I am cheerful. That was another police car. I am
thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed.”
“Now I do hope that’s all, you witty child.”
“Yep. That’s all. No — wait a sec. We baked in a reflector
oven. Isn’t that terrific?”
“Well, that’s better.”
“We washed zillions of dishes. ‘Zillions’ you know is school-
marm’s slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes, last but not
least, as Mother says — Now let me see — what was it? I know. We
2 made shadowgraphs. Gee, what fun.”
[ ii6 ]
1
'‘Cest bien tout?’’’’
^^Cest. Except for one little thing, something I simply can’t
tell you without blushing all over.”
“Will you tell it me later?”
“If we sit in the dark and you let me whisper, I will. Do you
sleep in your old room or in a heap with Mother?”
“Old room. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious
operation, Lo.”
“Stop at that candy bar, will you,” said Lo.
Sitting on a high stool, a band of sunlight crossing her bare
brown forearm, Lolita was served an elaborate ice-cream con-
coction topped with synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought
her by a pimply brute of a boy in a greasy bow-tie who eyed my
fragile child in her thin cotton frock with carnal deliberation.
My impatience to reach Briceland and The Enchanted Hunters
was becoming more than I could endure. Eortunately she dis-
patched the stuff with her usual alacrity.
“How much cash do you have?” I asked.
“Not a cent,” she said sadly, lifting her eyebrows, showing me
the empty inside of her money purse.
“This is a matter that will be mended in due time,” I rejoined
archly. “Are you coming?”
“Say, I wonder if they have a washroom.”
“You are not going there,” I said firmly. “It is sure to be a vile
place. Do come on.”
She was on the whole an obedient little girl and I kissed her
in the neck when we got back into the car.
do that,” she said looking at me with unfeigned sur-
prise. “Don’t drool on me. You dirty man.”
She rubbed the spot against her raised shoulder.
“Sorry,” I murmured. “I’m rather fond of you, that’s all.”
We drove under a gloomy sky, up a winding road, then down
again.
“Well, I’m also sort of fond of you,” said Lolita in a delayed
soft voice, with a sort of sigh, and sort of settled closer to me.
I (Oh, my Lolita, we shall never get there! )
Dusk was beginning to saturate pretty little Briceland, its
, [ 117 ]
phony colonial architecture, curiosity shops and imported shade
trees, when we drove through the weakly lighted streets in search
of the Enchanted Hunters. The air, despite a steady drizzle
beading it, was warm and green, and a queue of people, mainly
children and old men, had already formed before the box office
of a movie house, dripping with jewel-fires.
“Oh, I want to see that picture. Let’s go right after dinner.
Oh, let’s!”
“We might,” chanted Humbert — knowing perfectly well, the
sly tumescent devil, that by nine, when his show began, she
would be dead in his arms.
“Easy!” cried Lo, lurching forward, as an accursed truck in
1 front of us, its backside carbuncles pulsating, stopped at a
crossing.
If we did not get to the hotel soon, immediately, miraculously,
in the very next block, I felt I would lose all control over the
Haze jalopy with its ineffectual wipers and whimsical brakes;
but the passers-by I applied to for directions were either strangers
themselves or asked with a frown “Enchanted what?” as if I
were a madman; or else they went into such complicated expla-
nations, with geometrical gestures, geographical generalities and
strictly local clues (. . . then bear south after you hit the court-
house . . .) that I could not help losing my way in the maze of
their well-meaning gibberish. Lo, whose lovely prismatic entrails
had already digested the sweetmeat, was looking forward to a
big meal and had begun to fidget. As to me, although I had long
become used to a kind of secondary fate (McFate’s inept secre-
tary, so to speak) pettily interfering with the boss’s generous
magnificent plan — to grind and grope through the avenues of
Briceland was perhaps the most exasperating ordeal I had yet
faced. In later months I could laugh at my inexperience when
recalling the obstinate boyish way in which I had concentrated
upon that particular inn with its fancy name; for all along our
route countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon
lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, im-
potents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous
couples. Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer’s black
[ ii8 ]
nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from
your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly
drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes
of glass!
The miracle I hankered for did happen after all. A man and a
girl, more or less conjoined in a dark car under dripping trees,
told us we were in the heart of The Park, but had only to turn
left at the next traffic light and there we would be. We did not
see any next traffic light — in fact, The Park was as black as the
sins it concealed — but soon after falling under the smooth spell
of a nicely graded curve, the travelers became aware of a diamond
glow through the mist, then a gleam of lakewater appeared —
and there it was, marvelously and inexorably, under spectral
trees, at the top of a graveled drive — the pale palace of The En-
chanted Hunters.
A row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough, seemed at first
sight to forbid access; but then, by magic, a formidable con-
vertible, resplendent, rubious in the lighted rain, came into mo- 1
tion — was energetically backed out by a broad-shouldered driver
— and we gratefully slipped into the gap it had left. I immediately
regretted my haste for I noticed that my predecessor had now
taken advantage of a garage -like shelter nearby where there was
ample space for another car; but I was too impatient to follow
his example.
“Wow! Looks swank,” remarked my vulgar darling squinting
at the stucco as she crept out into the audible drizzle and with a
childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had stuck in the
peach-cleft — to quote Robert Browning. Under the arclights 2
enlarged replicas of chestnut leaves plunged and played on white
pillars. I unlocked the trunk compartment. A hunchbacked and
hoary Negro in a uniform of sorts took our bags and wheeled
them slowly into the lobby. It was full of old ladies and clergy-
men. Lolita sank down on her haunches to caress a pale-faced,
blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral 3
carpet under her hand — as who would not, my heart — while I
cleared my throat through the throng to the desk. There a bald
porcine old man — everybody was old in that old hotel— examined 4
[ 119 ]
my features with a polite smile, then leisurely produced my
(garbled) telegram, wrestled with some dark doubts, turned his
head to look at the clock, and finally said he was very sorry, he
had held the room with the twin beds till half past six, and now
it was gone. A religious convention, he said, had clashed with a
flower show in Briceland, and — “The name,” I said coldly, “is
1 not Humberg and not Humbug, but Herbert, I mean Humbert,
and any room will do, just put in a cot for my little daughter.
She is ten and very tired.”
The pink old fellow peered good-naturedly at Lo — still squat-
ting, listening in profile, lips parted, to what the dog’s mistress,
an ancient lady swathed in violet veils, was telling her from the
depths of a cretonne easy chair.
Whatever doubts the obscene fellow had, they were dispelled
by that blossom-like vision. He said, he might still have a room,
had one, in fact — with a double bed. As to the cot —
“Mr. Potts, do we have any cots left?” Potts, also pink and
bald, with white hairs growing out of his ears and other holes,
would see what could be done. He came and spoke while I un-
screwed my fountain pen. Impatient Humbert!
“Our double beds are really triple,” Potts cozily said tucking
me and my kid in. “One crowded night we had three ladies and
a child like yours sleep together. I believe one of the ladies was a
disguised man \my static]. However — would there be a spare cot
in 49, Mr. Swine?”
“I think it went to the Swoons,” said Swine, the initial old
clown.
“We’ll manage somehow,” I said. “My wife may join us later
— but even then, I suppose, we’ll manage.”
The two pink pigs were now among my best friends. In the
slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and
2,3 daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale. A key (342!) was half-
shown to me (magician showing object he is about to palm) —
and handed over to Uncle Tom. Lo, leaving the dog as she would
leave me some day, rose from her haunches; a raindrop fell on
Charlotte’s grave; a handsome young Negress slipped open the
[ 120 ]
elevator door, and the doomed child went in followed by her
throat-clearing father and crayfish Tom with the bags.
Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death. l
“Say, it’s our house number,” said cheerful Lo.
There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, 2
a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark
window, a reflected bed there, the same in the closet mirror,
two chairs, a glass-topped table, two bedtables, a double bed: a
big panel bed, to be exact, with a Tuscan rose chenille spread,
and two frilled, pink -shaded nightlamps, left and right.
I was tempted to place a five-dollar bill in that sepia palm, but
thought the largesse might be misconstrued, so I placed a quarter.
Added another. He withdrew. Click. E7ifin seuls. ^
“Are we to sleep in one room?” said Lo, her features working
in that dynamic way they did — not cross or disgusted (though
plain on the brink of it) but just dynamic — when she wanted to
load a question with violent significance.
“I’ve asked them to put in a cot. Which I’ll use if you like.”
“You are crazy,” said Lo.
“Why, my darling?”
“Because, my dahrling, when dahrling Mother finds out she’ll
divorce you and strangle me.”
Just dynamic. Not really taking the matter too seriously.
“Now look here,” I said, sitting down, while she stood, a few
feet from me, and stared at herself contentedly, not unpleasantly
surprised at her own appearance, filling with her own rosy sun-
shine the surprised and pleased closet-door mirror.
“Look here, Lo. Let’s settle this once for all. For all practical
purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great tenderness
for you. In your mother’s absence I am responsible for your
welfare. We are not rich, and while we travel, we shall be obliged
— we shall be thrown a good deal together. Two people sharing
one room, inevitably enter into a kind — how shall I say — a
kind — ”
“The word is incest,” said Lo — and walked into the closet,
walked out again with a young golden giggle, opened the adjoin-
ing door, and after carefully peering inside with her strange
[ I2I ]
smoky eyes lest she make another mistake, retired to the bath-
room.
I opened the window, tore off my sweat-drenched shirt,
changed, checked the pill vial in my coat pocket, unlocked the —
She drifted out. I tried to embrace her: casually, a bit of con-
trolled tenderness before dinner.
She said: “Look, let’s cut out the kissing game and get some-
thing to eat.”
It was then that I sprang my surprise.
Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase
as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peer-
ing at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was
there something wrong, I wondered, with those great gray eyes
of hers, or were we both plunged in the same enchanted mist?)
She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather
high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked
1 through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under
water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a
copper-colored, charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly
stretching it between her silent hands as if she were a bemused
bird-hunter holding his breath over the incredible bird he spreads
out by the tips of its flaming wings. Then (while I stood waiting
for her) she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and
tried it on.
Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caress-
ing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight
eyes — for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For
that is what nymphets imitate — while we moan and die.
“What’s the katter with misses?” I muttered (word-control
gone) into her hair.
“If you must know,” she said, “you do it the wrong way.”
“Show, wight ray.”
2 “All in good time,” responded the spoonerette.
3 Seva ascendes, pulsata, bnilans, kitzelans, de?nentisshm. Ele-
vator clatterans, pausa, clatterans, populus in corridoro. Hanc
nisi mors mihi adimet nemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondis-
4 shtie, nobserva nihil quidquam; but, of course, in another mo-
[ 122 ]
ment I might have committed some dreadful blunder; form-
nately, she returned to the treasure box.
From the bathroom, where it took me quite a time to shift
back into normal gear for a humdrum purpose, I heard, standing,
drumming, retaining my breath, my Lolita’s “oo’s” and “gee’s”
of girlish delight.
She had used the soap only because it was sample soap.
“Well, come on, my dear, if you are as hungry as I am.”
And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse,
father walking in front (nota bene: never behind, she is not a
lady). As we stood (now side by side) waiting to be taken down,
she threw back her head, yawned without restraint and shook her
curls.
“When did they make you get up at that camp?”
“Half-past — ” she stifled another yawn--=“six” — yawn in full
with a shiver of all her frame. “Half-past,” she repeated, her
throat filling up again.
The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded
smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin
murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and
states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads
and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man
in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining
room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving
girls were, happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us.
“Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like (guilty?” said Lo in
a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly
burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far
corner of the room.
“Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?”
Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put
down her dancing glass.
“Course not,” she said with a splutter of mirth. “I meant the
writer fellow in the Dromes ad.”
Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina!
When the dessert was plunked down — a huge wedge of cherry
pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream for her protector,
[ 123 ]
most of which she expeditiously added to her pie — I produced
a small vial containing Papa’s Purple Pills. As I look back at
those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I
can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of that j
dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the |
time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced '
around, satisfied myself that the last diner had left, removed the '
stopper, and with the utmost deliberation tipped the philter into
my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a mirror the gesture of >
clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a ;
(fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial with i
its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty’s I
Sleep. i
“Blue!” she exclaimed. “Violet blue. What are they made of?” I
“Summer skies,” I said, “and plums and figs, and the grape- |
blood of emperors.” |
“No, seriously — please.” i
“Oh, just Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or
an ax. Want to try one?” |
Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.
I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She
had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning
with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as the adora-
ble accessible nymphet now started to tell me in between sup-
pressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume — oh, how
fast the magic potion worked! — and had been active in other
ways too. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was,
of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room,
forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me,
faintly smiling — wouldn’t you like me to tell you? — half closing
her dark-lidded eyes. “Sleepy, huh?” said Uncle Tom who was
bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter
as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked
with sympathy at my frail, tanned, tottering, dazed rosedarling.
I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on
the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull,
long-drawn tones.
[ 124 ]
“If I tell you — if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy
— head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won’t make com-
plaints?”
“Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I’ll leave you here, and you go to
bed. Give you ten minutes.”
“Oh, I’ve been such a disgusting girl,” she went on, shaking
her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. “Lemme
tell you — ”
“Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed — for goodness sake, to
bed.”
I pocketed the key and walked downstairs.
28
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take
just a tiny bit of your precious time! So this was le grand mo-
ment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal l
bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and
showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the
crotch of her panties — she had always been singularly absent-
minded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then,
was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in — after
satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key,
uith its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith
the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was
mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes — say, 2
twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave 3,4
used to say — I would let myself into that “342” and find my
nymphet, my beauty and bride, emprisoned in her crystal sleep.
Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled
that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret
today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and
leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, —
indeed, the globe — that very same night.
Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self-
[ 125 ]
accusatory innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to pursue my
policy of sparing her purity by operating only in the stealth of
night, only upon a completely anesthetized little nude. Restraint
and reverence were still my motto — even if that “purity” (inci-
dentally, thoroughly debunked by modern science) had been
shghtly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no
doubt homosexual, at that accursed camp of hers. Of course, in
my old-fashioned, old-world way, 1, Jean -Jacques Humbert, had
taken for granted, when I first met her, that she was as un-
ra\'ished as the stereotypical notion of “normal child” had been
since the lamented end of the Ancient A'orld b.c. and its fasci-
nating practices. We are not surrounded in our enlighted era by
little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business
and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we
do not. as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times,
use tiuy entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the
rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old link benveen
the adult world and the child world has been completely
severed nowadavs by new customs and new laws. Despite my
having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, 1 really knew very
little about children. After all, Lolita was only twelve, and no
matter what concessions I made to time and place — even bear-
ing in mind the crude behavior of American schoolchildren — I
still was under the impression that whatever went on among
those brash brats, went on at a later age, and in a different en-
■\tironment. Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation)
the moralist in me by-passed the issue by chnging to conventional
notions of what twelve-year-old girls should be. The child thera-
pist in me (a fake, as most of them are — but no matter) re-
onrgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming and
exae^eratiny Dolly in the “latency” period of girlhood. Finally,
the sensuahst in me (a great and insane monster) had no objec-
tion to some depravin' in his prey. But somewhere behind the
ra^incr bliss, bewildered shadows conferred — and not to have
heeded them, this is what 1 regret! Human beings, attend! 1
should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be
somethin^ quite different from innocent Annabel, and that the
[ 126 ]
nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child
that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the
secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal. I should have
known (by the signs made to me by something in Lolita — ^the
real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that
nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected
rapture. Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my
fist was in my pocket, she was mine. In the course of the evoca-
tions and schemes to which I had dedicated so many insomnias,
I had gradually ehminated all the superfluous blur, and by stack-
ing level upon level of translucent vision, had evolved a final
picture. Naked, except for one sock and her charm bracelet,
spread-eagled on the bed where my philter had felled her — so I
foreghmpsed her; a velvet hair ribbon was still clutched in her
hand; her honey-brown body, with the white negative image
of a rudimentary swimsuit patterned against her tan, presented
to me its pale breastbuds; in the rosy lamphght, a little pubic
floss glistened on its plump hillock. The cold key with its warm
wooden addendum was in my pocket.
I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom
above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite
sure — even when the velvety victim is locked up in one’s dungeon
— that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish i
one’s prepared triumph. In common parlance, I needed a drink;
but there was no barroom in that venerable place full of per-
spiring philistines and period objects.
I drifted to the iVIen’s Room. There, a person in clerical black
—a “hearty parrv^” comme on dit — checking with the assistance 2
of Vienna, if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked
Dr. Boyd’s talk, and looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the 3
Second) said Boyd was quite a boy. Upon which, I neatly
chucked the tissue paper I had been wiping my sensitive fing er
tips with into the receptacle provided for it, and sallied lobby-
ward. Comfortably resting my elbows on the counter, I asked
iMr. Potts was he quite sure my wife had not telephoned, and
what about that cot? He answered she had not (she was dead, of
[ ^■^l ]
course) and the cot would be installed tomorrow if we decided
to stay on. From a big crowded place called The Hunters’ Hall
came a sound of many voices discussing horticulture or eternity.
Another room, called The Raspberry Room, all bathed in light,
with bright little tables and a large one with “refreshments,”
was still empty except for a hostess (that type of worn woman
with a glassy smile and Charlotte’s manner of speaking); she
floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock, because if so.
Miss Beard had been looking for me. “What a name for a
woman,” I said and strolled away.
In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood. I would
give her till half-past-nine. Going back to the lobby, I found
there a change: a number of people in floral dresses or black
cloth had formed little groups here and there, and some elfish
chance oflFered me the sight of a delightful child of Lolita’s age,
in Lolita’s type of frock, but pure white, and there was a white
ribbon in her black hair. She was not pretty, but she was a
nymphet, and her ivory pale legs and lily neck formed for one
1 memorable moment a most pleasurable antiphony (in terms of
spinal music) to my desire for Lolita, brown and pink, flushed
and fouled. The pale child noticed my gaze (which was really
quite casual and debonair), and being ridiculously self-con-
scious, lost countenance completely, rolling her eyes and putting
the back of her hand to her cheek, and pulling at the hem of
her skirt, and finally turning her thin mobile shoulder blades to
me in specious chat with her cow-like mother.
I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps,
2 looking at the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around
the lamps in the soggy black night, full of ripple and stir. All
I would do — all I would dare to do — would amount to such a
trifle . . .
Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there
3 was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not
really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing
oflf, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screw-
ing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
[ 128 ]
“Where the devil did you get her?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: the weather is getting better.”
“Seems so.”
“Who’s the lassie?”
“My daughter.”
“You lie—she’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: July was hot. Where’s her mother?”
“Dead.”
“I see. Sorry. By the way, why don’t you two lunch with me
tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then.”
“We’ll be gone too. Good night.”
“Sorry. I’m pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours
needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?” 1
“Not now.”
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the
wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a
very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotels — and
his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness re-
turned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and
deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus.
I left the porch. At least half an hour in all had elapsed. I
ought to have asked for a sip. The strain was beginning to tell.
If a violin string can ache, then I was that string. But it would
have been unseemly to display any hurry. As I made my way
through a constellation of fixed people in one corner of the
lobby, there came a blinding flash — ^and beaming Dr. Braddock,
two orchid-ornamentalized matrons, the small girl in white, and
presumably the bared teeth of Humbert Humbert sidling be-
tween the bridelike lassie and the enchanted cleric, were im-
mortalized — insofar as the texture and print of small-town
newspapers can be deemed immortal. A twittering group had 2
gathered near the elevator. I again chose the stairs. 342 was near
the fire escape. One could still- — but the key was already in the
lock, and then I was in the room.
[ 129 ]
29
The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to
that, a skeleton glow came through the Venetian blind from
the outside arclights; these intercrossed rays penetrated the dark-
ness of the bedroom and revealed the following situation.
Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, my Lolita lay on her
side with her back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly
veiled body and bare limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows
under her dark tousled head; a band of pale light crossed her top
vertebrae.
I seemed to have shed my clothes and slipped into pajamas
with the kind of fantastic instantaneousness which is implied
when in a cinematographic scene the process of changing is cut;
and I had already placed my knee on the edge of the bed when
Lolita turned her head and stared at me through the striped
shadows.
Now this was something the intruder had not expected. The
1 whole pill-spiel (a rather sordid affair, entre nous soil dit) had
had for object a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would
not have disturbed, and here she was staring at me, and thickly
calling me “Barbara.” Barbara, wearing my pajamas which were
much too tight for her, remained poised motionless over the
little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away,
resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes I waited
and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade
parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel
Tower. Her faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally
I heaved myself onto my narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled
at the odds and ends of sheets piled up to the south of my stone-
cold heels — and Lolita lifted her head and gaped at me.
As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple
pill did not even belong to the big and noble family of barbitu-
rates, and though it might have induced sleep in a neurotic who
believed it to be a potent drug, it was too mild a sedative to
affect for any length of time a wary, albeit weary, nymphet.
Whether the Ramsdale doctor was a charlatan or a shrewd old
[ 130 ]
rogue, does not, and did not, really matter. What mattered, was
that I had been deceived. When Lolita opened her eyes again,
I realized that whether or not the drug might work later in the
night, the security I had relied upon was a sham one. Slowly
her head turned away and dropped onto her unfair amount of
pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpled hair,
at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a haunch and half
a shoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her
sleep by the rate of her respiration. Some time passed, nothing
changed, and I decided I might risk getting a little closer to that
lovely and maddening glimmer; but hardly had I moved into
its warm purlieus than her breathing was suspended, and I had
the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would
explode in screams if I touched her with any part of my wretch-
edness. Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the
tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero
of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I
shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe
in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even
smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance
(I almost wrote “frinstance”), I had no place to rest my head,
and a fit of heartburn (they call those fries “French,” grand
Dieu!) was added to my discomfort. l
She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not
dare to launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse
ou V Amant Kidicule. Tomorrow I would stuff her with those 2
earlier pills that had so thoroughly numbed her mummy. In
the glove compartment — or in the Gladstone bag? Should I
wait a solid hour and then creep up again? The science of
nympholepsy is a precise science. Actual contact would do it in
one second flat. An interspace of a millimeter would do it in ten.
Let us wait.
There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind
you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey
place — “gracious living” and all that stuff. The clatter of the
elevator’s gate — some twenty yards northeast of my head but
as clearly perceived as if it were inside my left temple — alternated
[ 131 ]
with the banging and booming of the machine’s various evolu-
tions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then,
immediately east of my left ear (always assuming I lay on my
back, not daring to direct my viler side toward the nebulous
haunch of my bed-mate), the corridor would brim with cheer-
ful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley of
good-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of
my cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-
throated toilet, and it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush
and long afterflow shook the wall behind me. Then someone
in a southern direction was extravagantly sick, almost coughing
out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like a
1 veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when
finally all the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunt-
ers were sound asleep, the avenue under the window of my
insomnia, to the west of my wake — a staid, eminently residential,
dignified alley of huge trees — degenerated into the despicable
haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night.
And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was
nebulous Lolita! After a long stir less vigil, my tentacles moved
towards her again, and this time the creak of the mattress did
not awake her. I managed to bring my ravenous bulk so close
to her that I felt the aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath
upon my cheek. And then, she sat up, gasped, muttered with
insane rapidity something about boats, tugged at the sheets
and lapsed back into her rich, dark, young unconsciousness. As
she tossed, within that abundant flow of sleep, recently auburn,
at present lunar, her arm struck me across the face. For a second
I held her. She freed herself from the shadow of my embrace —
doing this not consciously, not violently, not with any personal
distaste, but with the neutral plaintive murmur of a child de-
manding its natural rest. And again the situation remained the
same: Lolita with her curved spine to Humbert, Humbert resting
his head on his hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia.
The latter necessitated a trip to the bathroom for a draft of
water which is the best medicine I know in my case, except
perhaps milk with radishes; and when I re-entered the strange
[ 132 ]
pale-striped fastness where Lolita’s old and new clothes reclined
in various attitudes of enchantment on pieces of furniture that
seemed vaguely afloat, my impossible daughter sat up and in
clear tones demanded a drink, too. She took the resilient and
cold paper cup in her shadowy hand and gulped down its con-
tents gratefully, her long eyelashes pointing cupward, and then,
with an infantile gesture that carried more charm than any
carnal caress, little Lolita wiped her lips against my shoulder.
She fell back on her pillow (I had subtracted mine while she
drank) and was instantly asleep again.
I had not dared offer her a second helping of the drug, and
had not abandoned hope that the first might still consolidate
her sleep. I started to move toward her, ready for any disappoint-
ment, knowing I had better wait but incapable of waiting. My
pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward my glimmering
darling, stopping or retreating every time I thought she stirred
or was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to
affect my thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics,
as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm
of that breeze. Time and again my consciousness folded the
wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep,
shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting
into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded moun-
tains of longing. Now and then it seemed to me that the en-
chanted prey was about to meet halfway the enchanted hunter,
that her haunch was working its way toward me under the soft
sand of a remote and fabulous beach; and then her dimpled
dimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from
me than ever.
If I dwell at some length on the tremors and gropings of that
distant night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not,
and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were
the patrimonies of poets — not crime’s prowling ground. Had I
reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all softness, a
case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt
the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she
[ 133 ]
might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that
would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. And so,
in between tentative approximations, with a confusion of per-
ception metamorphosing her into eyespots of moonlight or a
fluffy flowering bush, I would dream I regained consciousness,
dream I lay in wait.
In the first antemeridian hours there was a lull in the restless
hotel night. Then around four the corridor toilet cascaded and
its door banged. A little after five a reverberating monologue
began to arrive, in several installments, from some courtyard
or parking place. It was not really a monologue, since the speaker
stopped every few seconds to listen (presumably) to another
fellow, but that other voice did not reach me, and so no real
meaning could be derived from the part heard. Its matter-of-fact
intonations, however, helped to bring in the dawn, and the
room was already suffused with lilac gray, when several indus-
trious toilets went to work, one after the other, and the clatter-
ing and whining elevator began to rise and take down early
risers and downers, and for some minutes I miserably dozed,
and Charlotte was a mermaid in a greenish tank, and somewhere
in the passage Dr. Boyd said “Good morning to you” in a fruity
voice, and birds were busy in the trees, and then Lolita yawned.
Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months,
perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to
Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen
we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something
very strange: it was she who seduced me.
Upon hearing her first morning yawn, I feigned handsome
profiled sleep. I just did not know what to do. Would she be
shocked at finding me by her side, and not in some spare bed?
Would she collect her clothes and lock herself up in the bath-
room? Would she demand to be taken at once to Ramsdale —
to her mother’s bedside — back to camp? But my Lo was a
sportive lassie. I felt her eyes on me, and when she uttered at
last that beloved chortling note of hers, I knew her eyes had
been laughing. She rolled over to my side, and her warm brown
[ 134 ]
hair came against my collarbone. I gave a mediocre imitation
of waking up. We lay quietly. I gently caressed her hair, and
we gently kissed. Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had
some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which
made me conclude she had been coached at an early age by a
little Lesbian. No Charlie boy could have taught her that. As
if to see whether I had my fill and learned the lesson, she drew
away and surveyed me. Her cheekbones were flushed, her full
underlip glistened, my dissolution was near. All at once, with
a burst of rough glee (the sign of the nymphet!), she put her
mouth to my ear — but for quite a while my mind could not
separate into words the hot thunder of her whisper, and she
laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and tried again,
and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new
dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me
as I realized what she was suggesting. I answered I did not know
what game she and Charlie had played. “You mean you have
never — — her features twisted into a stare of disgusted incre-
dulity. “You have never — ” she started again. I took time out by
nuzzling her a little. “Lay off, will you,” she said with a twangy
whine, hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. (It
was very curious the way she considered — and kept doing so for
a long time — all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark
act of love either “romantic slosh” or “abnormal”.)
“You mean,” she persisted, now kneeling above me, “you
never did it when you were a kid?”
“Never,” I answered quite truthfully.
“Okay,” said Lolita, “here is where we start.”
However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed
account of Lolita’s presumption. Suffice it to say that not a trace
of modesty did I perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young
girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire
racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved. She
saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world,
unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation
was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in an
[ 135 ]
energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget
unconnected with me. While eager to impress me with the
world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared for certain
discrepancies between a kid’s life and mine. Pride alone pre-
vented her from giving up; for, in my strange predicament, I
feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way — at least
while I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters;
I am not concerned with so-called “sex” at all. Anybody can
imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures
me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.
30
I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh
you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once
popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing
that school crossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by
a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall
madly in love with my Lolita! Had I been a painter, had the
management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one
summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining
room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have
thought up, let me list some fragments:
There would have been a lake. There would have been an
arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies —
a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing
1 whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a
sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by
his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb
2 a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous
3 globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of
juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities
4 on the part of the intermediate group. Canoeing, Coranting,
Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been
poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a
[ 136 ]
fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a
last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing
child.
31
I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in
my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of
hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, madden-
ing world — nymphet love. The beastly and beautiful merged at
one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel
I fail to do so utterly. Why?
The stipulation of the Roman law, according to which a girl
may marry at twelve, was adopted by the Church, and is still 1,2
preserved, rather tacitly, in some of the United States. And 3
fifteen is lawful everywhere. There is nothing wrong, say both 4
hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed by the local priest
and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery and
thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride. “In such
stimulating temperate climates [says an old magazine in this
prison library] as St. Louis, Chicago and Cincinnati, girls mature
about the end of their twelfth year.” Dolores Haze was born
less than three hundred miles from stimulating Cincinnati. I
have but followed nature. I am nature’s faithful hound. Why
then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of
her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her
first lover.
32
She told me the way she had been debauched. We ate flavor-
less mealy bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable potato
chips, and die Kleine told me everything. Her voluble but dis- 5
jointed account was accompanied by many a droll moue. As I 6
think I have already observed, I especially remember one wry
[ 137 ]
face on an “ugh!” basis: jelly-mouth distended sideways and eyes
rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation and
tolerance for young frailty.
Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of
her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a “very
select” one as she put it. That tent-mate (“quite a derelict char-
acter,” “half-crazy,” but a “swell kid”) instructed her in various
manipulations. At first, loyal Lo refused to tell me her name.
“Was it Grace Angel?” I asked.
She shook her head. No, it wasn’t, it was the daughter of a
big shot. He —
“Was it perhaps Rose Carmine?”
“No, of course not. Her father—”
“Was it, then, Agnes Sheridan perchance?”
She swallowed and shook her head — and then did a double
take.
“Say, how come you know all those kids?”
I explained.
“Well,” she said. “They are pretty bad, some of that school
bunch, but not that bad. If you have to know, her name was
Elizabeth Talbot, she goes now to a swanky private school, her
father is an executive.”
I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor
Charlotte used to introduce into party chat such elegant tidbits
as “when my daughter was out hiking last year with the Talbot
girl.”
I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic
1 diversions?
“Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo mimicking dread and relief,
pressing a falsely fluttering hand to her chest.
I was more interested, however, in heterosexual experience.
She had entered the sixth grade at eleven, soon after moving to
Ramsdale from the Middle West. What did she mean by
“pretty bad”?
2 Well, the Miranda twins had shared the same bed for years,
and Donald Scott, who was the dumbest boy in the school, had
done it with Hazel Smith in his uncle’s garage, and Kenneth
[ 138 ]
Knight— who was the brightest — used to exhibit himself wherever
and whenever he had a chance, and —
“Let us switch to Camp Q,” I said. And presently I got the
whole story.
Barbara Burke, a sturdy blond, two years older than Lo and
by far the camp’s best swimmer, had a very special canoe
which she shared with Lo “because I was the only other girl who
could make Willow Island” (some swimming test, I imagine).
Through July, every morning — mark, reader, every blessed morn-
ing — Barbara and Lo would be helped to carry the boat to Onyx
or Eryx (two small lakes in the wood) by Charlie Holmes, the i
camp mistress’ son, aged thirteen — and the only human male
for a couple of miles around (excepting an old meek stone-deaf
handyman, and a farmer in an old Ford who sometimes sold
the campers eggs as farmers will); every morning, oh my reader,
the three children would take a short cut through the beautiful
innocent forest brimming with all the emblems of youth, dew,
birdsongs, and at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth,
Lo would be left as sentinel, while Barbara and the boy copulated
behind a bush.
At first, Lo had refused “to try what it was like,” but curiosity
and camaraderie prevailed, and soon she and Barbara were doing
it by turns with the silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable
Charlie, who had as much sex appeal as a raw carrot but sported
a fascinating collection of contraceptives which he used to fish
out of a third nearby lake, a considerably larger and more
populous one, called Lake Climax, after the booming young
factory town of that name. Although conceding it was “sort of
fun” and “fine for the complexion,” Lolita, I am glad to say,
held Charlie’s mind and manners in the greatest contempt.
Nor had her temperament been roused by that filthy fiend. In
fact, I think he had rather stunned it, despite the “fun.”
By that time it was close to ten. With the ebb of lust, an
ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of
a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my
temples. Brown, naked, frail Lo, her narrow white buttocks to
me, her sulky face to a door mirror, stood, arms akimbo, feet
[ 139 ]
(in new slippers with pussy-fur tops) wide apart, and through
a forehanging lock tritely mugged at herself in the glass. From
the corridor came the cooing voices of colored maids at work,
and presently there was a mild attempt to open the door of
our room. I had Lo go to the bathroom and take a much-needed
soap shower. The bed was a frightful mess with overtones of
potato chips. She tried on a two-piece navy wool, then a sleeve-
less blouse with a swirly clathrate skirt, but the first was too tight
and the second too ample, and when I begged her to hurry up
(the situation was beginning to frighten me), Lo viciously sent
those nice presents of mine hurtling into a corner, and put on
yesterday’s dress. When she was ready at last, I gave her a lovely
new purse of simulated calf (in which I had slipped quite a
few pennies and two mint-bright dimes) and told her to buy
herself a magazine in the lobby.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said. “And if I were you, my
1 dear, I would not talk to strangers.”
Except for my poor little gifts, there was not much to pack;
but I was forced to devote a dangerous amount of time (was
she up to something downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such
a way as to suggest the abandoned nest of a restless father and
2 his tomboy daughter, instead of an ex-convict’s saturnalia with
a couple of fat old whores. Then I finished dressing and had
the hoary bellboy come up for the bags.
Everything was fine. There, in the lobby, she sat, deep in an
overstuffed blood-red armchair, deep in a lurid movie magazine.
3 A fellow of my age in tweeds (the genre of the place had changed
overnight to a spurious country-squire atmosphere) was staring
at my Lolita over his dead cigar and stale newspaper. She wore
her professional white socks and saddle oxfords, and that bright
print frock with the square throat; a splash of jaded lamplight
brought out the golden down on her warm brown limbs. There
she sat, her legs carelessly highcrossed, and her pale eyes skim-
ming along the lines with every now and then a blink. Bill’s
wife had worshiped him from afar long before they ever met: in
fact, she used to secretly admire the famous young actor as he
4 ate sundaes in Schwab’s drugstore. Nothing could have been
[ 140 ]
more childish than her snubbed nose, freckled face or the pur-
plish spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had i
feasted, or the unconscious movement of her tongue exploring
a touch of rosy rash around her swollen lips; nothing could be
more harmless than to read about Jill, an energetic starlet who
made her own clothes and was a student of serious literature;
nothing could be more innocent than the part in that glossy
brown hair with that silky sheen on the temple; nothing could
be more naive — But what sickening envy the lecherous fellow
whoever he was — come to think of it, he resembled a little my
Swiss uncle Gustave, also a great admirer of le decouvert — would 2
have experienced had he known that every nerve in me was still
anointed and ringed with the feel of her body — the body of some
immortal daemon disguised as a female child. 3
Was pink pig Mr. Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not
telephoned? He was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone
on to Aunt Clare’s place? He would, indeedie. I settled the bill 4
and roused Lo from her chair. She read to the car. Still reading,
she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few blocks south.
Oh, she ate all right. She even laid aside her magazine to eat,
but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I
knew little Lo could be very nasty, so I braced myself and
grinned, and waited for a squall. I was unbathed, unshaven, and
had had no bowel movement. My nerves were a-jangle. I did
not like the way my little mistress shrugged her shoulders and
distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk. Had
Phyllis been in the know before she joined her parents in Maine?
I asked with a smile. “Look,” said Lo making a weeping grimace,
“let us get off the subject.” I then tried — also unsuccessfully,
no matter how I smacked my lips — to interest her in the road
map. Our destination was, let me remind my patient reader
whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of
Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That des- 5
tination was in itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as, alas, so many
were to be), and I shook in my shoes as I wondered how to
keep the whole arrangement plausible, and what other plausible
objectives to invent after we had taken in all the movies in
[ 141 ]
Lepingville. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel.
It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive,
hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of
somebody I had just killed.
As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression
of pain flitted across Lo’s face. It flitted again, more meaning-
fully, as she settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced
it that second time for my benefit. Foolishly, I asked her what
was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,” she replied. “You what?”
I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland. Loquacious Lo was
silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was
an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom
a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous inter-
course three times that very morning. Whether or not the real-
ization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had,
in a sense, overshot its mark — and plunged into a nightmare.
I had been careless, stupid, and ignoble. And let me be quite
frank: somewhere at the bottom of that dark turmoil I felt
the writhing of desire again, so monstrous was my appetite for
that miserable nymphet. Mingled with the pangs of guilt was
the agonizing thought that her mood might prevent me from
making love to her again as soon as I found a nice country road
where to park in peace. In other words, poor Humbert Humbert
was dreadfully unhappy, and while steadily and inanely driving
toward Lepingville, he kept racking his brains for some quip,
under the bright wing of which he might dare turn to his seat-
mate. It was she, however, who broke the silence:
“Oh, a squashed squirrel,” she said. “What a shame.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” (eager, hopeful Hum).
“Let us stop at the next gas station,” Lo continued. “I want
to go to the washroom.”
“We shall stop wherever you want,” I said. And then as a
lovely, lonely, supercilious grove (oaks, I thought; American
trees at that stage were beyond me) started to echo greenly the
rush of our car, a red and ferny road on our right turned its
head before slanting into the woodland, and I suggested we
might perhaps — -
[ 142 ]
“Drive on,” my Lo cried shrilly.
“Righto. Take it easy.” (Down, poor beast, down.)
I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling.
“You chump,” she said, sweetly smiling at me. “You revolt-
ing creature. I was a daisyTresh girl, and look what you’ve done
to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh,
you dirty, dirty old man.”
Was she just joking? An ominous hysterical note rang through
her silly words. Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips,
she started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I
had torn something inside her. The sweat rolled down my neck,
and we almost ran over some little animal or other that was
crossing the road with tail erect, and again my vile-tempered
companion called me an ugly name. When we stopped at the
filling- station, she scrambled out without a word and was a
long time away. Slowly, lovingly, an elderly friend with a broken
nose wiped my windshield — they do it differently at every place,
from chamois cloth to soapy brush, this fellow used a pink
sponge.
She appeared at last. “Look,” she said in that neutral voice
that hurt me so, “give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call
mother in that hospital. What’s the number?”
“Get in,” I said. “You can’t call that number.”
“Why?”
“Get in and slam the door.”
She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed
at her. I swung onto the highway.
“Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?”
“Because,” I answered, “your mother is dead.”
33
In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of
comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a
manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a
[ H3 ]
real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes,
field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent
1 raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments — swooners, shorts, all
kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but
in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and
we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere
else to go.
[ 144 ]
PART TWO
1
It was then that began our extensive travels all over the
States. To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon
grew to prefer the Functional Motel — clean, neat, safe nooks,
ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit
love. At first, in my dread of arousing suspicion, I would eagerly
pay for both sections of one double unit, each containing a
double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangement
was ever intended for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy i
could be attained by means of the incomplete partition divid-
ing the cabin or room into two communicating love nests. By
and by, the very possibilities that such honest promiscuity sug-
gested (two young couples merrily swapping mates or a child
shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities) made me bolder, 2
and every now and then I would take a bed-and-cot or twin-
bed cabin, a prison cell of paradise, with yellow window shades
pulled down to create a morning illusion of Venice and sunshine
when actually it was Pennsylvania and rain.
We came to know — nous connwnes, to use a Flaubertian into- 3
nation — the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque
trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on 4
what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes
as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. The log
kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown
glaze, of fried-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain
whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell
or some other gloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast
of (except “good beds”), and an unsmiling landlady always pre-
[ 147 ]
pared to have her gift (“. . . well, I could give you . . .”) turned
down.
Nous connumes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements
of their repetitious names — all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam
Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View
Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac’s
Courts. There was sometimes a special line in the write-up, such
as “Children welcome, pets allowed” {You are welcome, you
are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an
endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely
1 non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while
in use, to turn instantly beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you,
depending on whether your neighbor turned on his cold or his
hot to deprive you of a necessary complement in the shower
you had so carefully blended. Some motels had instructions
pasted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels were un-
hygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl
garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies; others had special
notices under glass, such as Things to Do (Riding: You will
often see riders coming down Main Street on their way back
from a romantic moonlight ride. “Often at 3 a.m.,” sneered
unromantic Lo).
Nous connumes the various types of motor court operators,
the reformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop,
among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and ma-
2 damic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would
cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending
and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one
desperate scream.
We avoided Tourist Homes, country cousins of Funeral ones,
old-fashioned, genteel and showerless, with elaborate dressing
tables in depressingly white-and-pink little bedrooms, and photo-
3 graphs of the landlady’s children in all their instars. But I did
surrender, now and then, to Lo’s predilection for “real” hotels.
She would pick out in the book, while I petted her in the parked
car in the silence of a dusk-mellowed, mysterious side-road,
some highly recommended lake lodge which offered all sorts of
[ 148 ]
things magnified by the flashlight she moved over them, such
as congenial company, between-meals snacks, outdoor barbecues
— but which in my mind conjured up odious visions of stinking
high school boys in sweatshirts and an ember-red cheek pressing
against hers, while poor Dr. Humbert, embracing nothing but
two masculine knees, would cold-humor his piles on the damp
turf. Most tempting to her, too, were those “Colonial” Inns,
which apart from “gracious atmosphere” and picture windows,
promised “unlimited quantities of M-m-m food.” Treasured rec-
ollections of my father’s palatial hotel sometimes led me to
seek for its like in the strange country we traveled through. I
was soon discouraged; but Lo kept following the scent of rich
food ads, while I derived a not exclusively economic kick from
such roadside signs as Timber Hotel, Children under 14 Free.
On the other hand, I shudder when recalling that soi-disant
“high-class” resort in a Midwestern state, which advertised “raid-
the-icebox” midnight snacks and, intrigued by my accent, wanted
CO know my dead wife’s and dead mother’s maiden* names. A
cwo-days’ stay there cost me a hundred and twenty-four dollars!
And do you remember, Miranda, that other “ultrasmart” rob-
bers’ den with complimentary morning coffee and circulating
lice water, and no children under sixteen (no Lolitas, of course)?
Immediately upon arrival at one of the plainer motor courts
which became our habitual haunts, she would set the electric
jfan a-whirr, or induce me to drop a quarter into the radio, or
(she would read all the signs and inquire with a whine why she
(could not go riding up some advertised trail or swimming in
irhat local pool of warm mineral water. Most often, in the slouch-
ing, bored way she cultivated, Lo would fall prostrate and
ibominably desirable into a red springchair or a green chaise
longue, or a steamer chair of striped canvas with footrest and
(canopy, or a sling chair, or any other lawn chair under a garden
! umbrella on the patio, and it would take hours of blandishments,
l^hreats and promises to make her lend me for a few seconds her
i Drown limbs in the seclusion of the five-dollar room before
jndertaking anything she might prefer to my poor joy.
A combination of naivete and deception, of charm and vul-
[ 149 ]
garity, of blue sulks and rosy mirth, Lolita, when she chose, could
be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for
her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, i
her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called
goofing off — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was
tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a j
disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square danc-
ing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so i
forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. ,
The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous musics
boxes that came with every meal we had! I still hear the nasal f
1 voices of those invisibles serenading her, people with names likc i
Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and i
Patty and Rex, and sentimental song hits, all of them as similar,
to my ear as her various candies were to my palate. She believed,
with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that:
2 appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land — Starasil Starves Pim-
ples, or “You better watch out if you’re wearing your shirttaik
outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says you shouldn’t.” If a
roadside sign said: Visit Our Gift Shop — we had to visit it,
had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. i
The words “novelties and souvenirs” simply entranced her by
3 their trochaic lilt. If some cafe sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, I
she was automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere |
were ice-cold. She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal
consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster. And she
attempted — unsuccessfully — to patronize only those restaurants
4 where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the
cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads. '
In those days, neither she nor I had thought up yet the sys-;.
tern of monetary bribes which was to work such havoc with
my nerves and her morals somewhat later. I relied on three othen
methods to keep my pubescent concubine in submission and
passable temper. A few years before, she had spent a rainy!
summer under Miss Phalen’s bleary eye in a dilapidated Ap-i
palachian farmhouse that had belonged to some gnarled Haze,
or other in the dead past. It still stood among its rank acres j
[ 150 ]
of golden rod on the edge of a flowerless forest, at the end of a
permanently muddy road, twenty miles from the nearest hamlet.
Lo recalled that scarecrow of a house, the solitude, the soggy
old pastures, the wind, the bloated wilderness, with an energy
of disgust that distorted her mouth and fattened her half-
revealed tongue. And it was there that I warned her she would
dwell with me in exile for months and years if need be, studying
under me French and Latin, unless her “present attitude”
changed. Charlotte, I began to understand you!
A simple child, Lo would scream no! and frantically clutch
at my driving hand whenever I put a stop to her tornadoes of
temper by turning in the middle of a highway with the implica-
tion that I was about to take her straight to that dark and dismal
abode. The farther, however, we traveled away from it west,
the less tangible that menace became, and I had to adopt other
methods of persuasion.
Among these, the reformatory threat is the one I recall with
the deepest moan of shame. From the very beginning of our
concourse, I was clever enough to realize that I must secure
her complete co-operation in keeping our relations secret, that
it should become a second nature with her, no matter what
grudge she might bear me, no matter what other pleasures she
might seek.
“Come and kiss your old man,” I would say, “and drop that
moody nonsense. In former times, when I was still your dream
male [the reader will notice what pains I took to speak Lo’s
tongue], you swooned to records of the number one throb-and-
sob idol of your coevals [Lo: “Of my what? Speak English”].
That idol of your pals sounded, you thought, like friend Flum-
bert. But now, I am just your old man, a dream dad protecting
his dream daughter.
“My chhe Dolores! I want to protect you, dear, from all the i
lorrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and alley ways,
and, alas, comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, in the 2
olueberry woods during the bluest of summers. Through thick
and thin I will still stay your guardian, and if you are good,
[ hope a court may legalize that guardianship before long. Let
[ 151 ]
US, however, forget, Dolores Haze, so-called legal terminology,
terminology that accepts as rational the term ‘lewd and lascivious
cohabitation.’ I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking
indecent liberties with a child. The rapist was Charlie Holmes;
1 I am the therapist — a matter of nice spacing in the way of
distinction. I am your daddum, Lo. Look, I’ve a learned book
here about young girls. Look, darling, what it says. I quote: the
normal girl — normal, mark you — the normal girl is usually
extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him the
forerunner of the desired elusive male (‘elusive’ is good, by
2 Polonius!). The wise mother (and your poor mother would
have been wise, had she lived) will encourage a companionship j
between father and daughter, realizing — excuse the corny style
— that the girl forms her ideals of romance and of men from
her association with her father. Now, what association does this'
cheery book mean — and recommend? I quote again: Among
Sicilians sexual relations between a father and his daughter arel
accepted as a matter of course, and the girl who participates,
in such relationship is not looked upon with disapproval by
the society of which she is part. I’m a great admirer of Sicilians,'
fine athletes, fine musicians, fine upright people, Lo, and great;
lovers. But let’s not digress. Only the other day we read in the
newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender
who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to
transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoralii
purposes, whatever these are. Dolores darling! You are not nine|
but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to consider}
3 yourself my cross-country slave, and I deplore the Mann Act as!
lending itself to a dreadful pun, the revenge that the Gods ofi|
Semantics take against tight-zippered Philistines. I am youfj
father, and I am speaking English, and I love you. '
“Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of
having impaired the morals of an adult in a respectable inn,
what happens if you complain to the police of my having kid-ii
naped and raped you? Let us suppose they believe you. A minoi|j
female, who allows a person over twenty-one to know her car-jj
nally, involves her victim into statutory rape, or second-degree]
[ 152 ]
sodomy, depending on the technique; and the maximum penalty
is ten years. So I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens
to you, my orphan? Well, you are luckier. You become the ward
of the Department of Public Welfare — which I am afraid sounds
a little bleak. A nice grim matron of the Miss Phalen type, but
more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take away your lip-
stick and fancy clothes. No more gadding about! I don’t know
if you have ever heard of the laws relating to dependent,
neglected, incorrigible and delinquent children. While I stand
gripping the bars, you, happy neglected child, will be given a
choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the
correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention
home, or one of those admirable girls’ protectories where you
knit things, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sun-
days. You will go there, Lolita — my Lolita, this Lolita will leave
her Catullus and go there, as the wayward girl you are. In i
plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and
ijnstitutionalized, my pet, c^est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita 2
will dwell (come here, my brown flower) with thirty-nine other
dopes in a dirty dormitory (no, allow me, please) under the
supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is
:he choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores
Haze had better stick to her old man?”
By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who
I despite a certain brash alertness of manner and spurts of wit was
not as intelligent a child as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I
managed to establish that background of shared secrecy and
shared guilt, I was much less successful in keeping her in good
aumor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to
devise some expectation, some special point in space and time
or her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Other-
iwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton
af her day sagged and collapsed. The object in view might be
inything — a lighthouse in Virginia, a natural cave in Arkansas
converted to a cafe, a collection of guns and violins somewhere
n Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in Louisiana,
:;habby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local
[ 153 ]
museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever —
but it had to be there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although
as likely as not Lo would feign gagging as soon as we got to it.
By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I
did my best for hours on end to give her the impression of
“going places,” of rolling on to some definite destination, to
some unusual delight. I have never seen such smooth amiable
roads as those that now radiated before us, across the crazy quilt
1 of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those long high-
ways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance
floors. Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously re-
sented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detailij
of landscape; which I myself learned to discern only after being
exposed for quite a time to the delicate beauty ever present in
the margin of our undeserving journey. By a paradox of pictorial
thought, the average lowland North- American countryside had
at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of
amused recognition because of those painted oilcloths whichli
were imported from America in the old days to be hung above j
washstands in Central-European nurseries, and which fascinated'
a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic green views they
depicted — opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull
white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or
hills of greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those ele-i
mentary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, thei
nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond
2 the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveli-i
ness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach
tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray
cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a
line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still
3 noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds
inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part'
conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Of
4 again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky
rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and
all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh
[ 154 ]
green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, some-
where in Kansas.
Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees
would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by the road-
side and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic
table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups, samaras and dis-
carded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A great user
of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by
toilet signs — Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck’s-
Doe’s; while lost in an artist’s dream, I would stare at the honest
brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid
green of oaks, or at a distant hill scrambling out — scarred but still
untamed — from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to
swallow it.
At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful
giant Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by
the belated little sedan. And again next day a thinly populated
sky, losing its blue to the heat, would melt overhead, and Lo
would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks would hollow vigor-
ously over the straw, and the car inside would be a furnace when
we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote
car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seem-
ing to hang for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in
the hot haze. And as we pushed westward, patches of what the
garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the mys-
terious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted
with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue,
and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady
gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper
mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured
withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which
rhere sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position
(tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of
traffic.
My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the
|itinerary we followed, and I suppose I have reached here a point
where I cannot avoid that chore. Roughly, during that mad year
[ 155 ]
(August 1947 to August 1948), our route began with a series of
wiggles and whorls in New England, then meandered south, up
1 and down, east and west; dipped deep into ce qiCon appelle
Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there,
veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts (this
is not too clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not keep any
notes, and have at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour
book in three volumes, almost a symbol of my torn and tattered
past, in which to check these recollections); crossed and re-
crossed the Rockies, straggled through southern deserts where
we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned north through the pale
lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads; almost reached
the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and
bad lands, back to agriculture on a grand scale, avoiding, despite
little Lo’s strident remonstrations, little Lo’s birthplace, in a
corn, coal and hog producing area; and finally returned to the
fold of the East, petering out in the college town of Beardsley.
2
Now, in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind
not only the general circuit as adumbrated above, with its many
sidetrips and tourist traps, secondary circles and skittish devia-
tions, but also the fact that far from being an indolent partie de
2 platsir, our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose
3 sole raison d'etre (these French cliches are symptomatic) was
to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss.
Thumbing through that battered tour book, I dimly evoke
that Magnolia Garden in a southern state which cost me four
bucks and which, according to the ad in the book, you must
4 visit for three reasons: because John Galsworthy (a stone-dead
writer of sorts) acclaimed it as the world’s fairest garden; be-
cause in 1900 Baedeker’s Guide had marked it with a star; and
finally, because . . . O, Reader, My Reader, guess! . . . because
children (and by Jingo was not my Lolita a child!) will “walk
[ 156 ]
starry-eyed and reverently through this foretaste of Heaven,
drinking in beauty that can influence a life.” “Not mine,” said
grim Lo, and settled down on a bench with the fillings of two
Sunday papers in her lovely lap.
We passed and re-passed through the whole gamut of Ameri-
can roadside restaurants, from the lowly Eat with its deer head
(dark trace of long tear at inner canthus), “humorous” picture i
post cards of the posterior “Kurort” type, impaled guest checks, 2
life savers, sunglasses, adman visions of celestial sundaes, one
half of a chocolate cake under glass, and several horribly ex-
perienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the
ignoble counter; and all the way to the expensive place with the
subdued lights, preposterously poor table linen, inept waiters
(ex-convicts or college boys), the roan back of a screen actress, 3
the sable eyebrows of her male of the moment, and an orchestra
of zoot-suiters with trumpets.
We inspected the world’s largest stalagmite in a cave where
three southeastern states have a family reunion; admission by
age; adults one dollar, pubescents sixty cents. A granite obelisk
commemorating the Battle of Blue Licks, with old bones and
Indian pottery in the museum nearby, Lo a dime, very reason-
able. The present log cabin boldly simulating the past log cabin
where Lincoln was born. A boulder, with a plaque, in memory
of the author of “Trees” (by now we are in Poplar Cove, N.C., 4
reached by what my kind, tolerant, usually so restrained tour
book angrily calls “a very narrow road, poorly maintained,” to
which, though no Kilmerite, I subscribe). From a hired motor-
boat operated by an elderly, but still repulsively handsome
White Russian, a baron they said (Lo’s palms were damp, the
little fool), who had known in California good old Maximovich
and Valeria, we could distinguish the inaccessible “millionaires’
colony” on an island, somewhere off the Georgia coast. We
inspected further: a collection of European hotel picture post
cards in a museum devoted to hobbies at a Mississippi resort,
where with a hot wave of pride I discovered a colored photo of
my father’s Mirana, its striped awnings, its flag flying above the
retouched palm trees. “So what?” said Lo, squinting at the
[ 157 ]
1 bronzed owner of an expensive car who had followed us into the |
Hobby House. Relics of the cotton era. A forest in Arkansas
and, on her brown shoulder, a raised purple-pink swelling (the
work of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent
poison between my long thumbnails and then sucked till I was
gorged on her spicy blood. Bourbon Street (in a town named
New Orleans) whose sidewalks, said the tour book, “may [I
liked the “may”] feature entertainment by pickaninnies who
will [I liked the “will” even better] tap-dance for pennies” (what
fun), while “its numerous small and intimate night clubs are
thronged with visitors” (naughty). Collections of frontier lore.
Ante-bellum homes with iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked ;
stairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoul-
ders run in rich Technicolor, holding up the fronts of their
flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way, and
the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing. The ;
Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck of ‘
it. A patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so .
2 pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping white flies. Independence, i
Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and
3 Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo.
Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish
beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after
hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart
and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless
peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; tim-
bered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, [
interrupted in places by pale puflFs of aspen; pink and lilac j|
4 formations. Pharaonic, phallic, “too prehistoric for words” (blase
Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-
5 elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer moun- !
tains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under
folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with
6 green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of '
7 lucerne at its foot.
Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in |
Colorado, and the snow banks, and the cushionets of tiny alpine
[ 158 1
flowers, and more snow; down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried
to slide, and squealed, and was snowballed by some youngsters,
and retaliated in kind comme on dit. Skeletons of burned aspens, i
patches of spired blue flowers. The various items of a scenic
drive. Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of Bear Creeks, Soda
Springs, Painted Canyons. Texas, a drought-struck plain. Crystal
Chamber in the longest cave in the world, children under 12
free, Lo a young captive. A collection of a local lady’s homemade
sculptures, closed on a miserable Monday morning, dust, wind,
witherland. Conception Park, in a town on the Mexican border
which I dared not cross. There and elsewhere, hundreds of gray
hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim flowers. 2
Shakespeare, a ghost town in New Mexico, where bad man 3
Russian Bill was colorfully hanged seventy years ago. Fish
hatcheries. Cliff dwellings. The mummy of a child (Florentine
Bea’s Indian contemporary). Our twentieth Hell’s Canyon. Our 4,5
fiftieth Gateway to something or other fide that tour book, the
cover of which had been lost by that time. A tick in my groin.
Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling
away the summer afternoon under the trees near the public
fountain. A hazy blue view beyond railings on a mountain pass,
and the backs of a family enjoying it (with Lo, in a hot, happy,
wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper — “Look, the McCrystals,
please, let’s talk to them, please” — let’s talk to them, reader! —
“please! I’ll do anything you want, oh, please...”). Indian
ceremonial dances, strictly commercial. ART; American Refrig-
erator Transit Company. Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings,
aboriginal pictographs, a dinosaur track in a desert canyon,
printed there thirty million years ago, when I was a child. A
lanky, six-foot, pale boy with an active Adam’s apple, ogling Lo
and her orange-brown bare midriff, which I kissed five minutes
later. Jack. Winter in the desert, spring in the foothills, almonds
in bloom. Reno, a dreary town in Nevada, with a nightlife said
to be “cosmopolitan and mature.” A winery in California, with
a church built in the shape of a wine barrel. Death Valley. 6
Scotty’s Castle. Works of Art collected by one Rogers over a 7
period of years. The ugly villas of handsome actresses. R. L.
[ 159 ]
1 Stevenson’s footprint on an extinct volcano. Mission Dolores;
3 good title for book. Surf-carved sandstone festoons. A man having
4 a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park.
Blue, blue Crater Lake. A fish hatchery in Idaho and the State
Penitentiary. Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot
springs, baby geysers, rainbows of bubbling mud — symbols of
my passion. A herd of antelopes in a wildlife refuge. Our hun-
dredth cavern, adults one dollar, Lolita fifty cents. A chateau
built by a French marquess in N.D. The Corn Palace in S.D.;
and the huge heads of presidents carved in towering granite. The
Bearded Woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single.
A zoo in Indiana where a large troop of monkeys lived on con-
crete replica of Christopher Columbus’ flagship. Billions of dead,
or halfdead, fish-smelling May flies in every window of every
eating place all along a dreary sandy shore. Fat gulls on big
stones as seen from the ferry City of Cheboygan, whose brown
woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast
on the aquamarine lake. A motel whose ventilator pipe passed
under the city sewer. Lincoln’s home, largely spurious, with
parlor books and period furniture that most visitors reverently
accepted as personal belongings.
We had rows, minor and major. The biggest ones we had took
place; at Lacework Cabins, Virginia; on Park Avenue, Little
5 Rock, near a school; on Milner Pass, 10,759 Colo-
rado; at the corner of Seventh Street and Central Avenue in
Phoenix, Arizona; on Third Street, Los Angeles, because the
tickets to some studio or other were sold out; at a motel called
Poplar Shade in Utah, where six pubescent trees were scarcely
6 taller than my Lolita, and where she asked, a propos de rien,
how long did I think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing
filthy things together and never behaving like ordinary people?
On N. Broadway, Burns, Oregon, corner of W. Washington,
facing Safeway, a grocery. In some little town in the Sun Valley
of Idaho, before a brick hotel, pale and flushed bricks nicely
mixed, with, opposite, a poplar playing its liquid shadows all
over the local Honor Roll. In a sage brush wilderness, between
Pinedale and Farson. Somewhere in Nebraska, on Main Street,
[ 160 ]
near the First National Bank, established 1889, with a view of
a railway crossing in the vista of the street, and beyond that the
white organ pipes of a multiple silo. And on McEwen St., corner
of Wheaton Ave., in a Michigan town bearing his first name. 1
We came to know the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking
Man, Homo pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and 2
forms: the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly
conscious of khaki’s viatic appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go 3
two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the
mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and
clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college
student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as
proudly as the name of the famous college arching across the
front of his sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just
died on her; the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced
young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priap-
ically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sad- 4
sack salesmen with fancy cravings.
“Let’s take him,” Lo would often plead, rubbing her knees
together in a way she had, as some particularly disgusting pollex,
some man of my age and shoulder breadth, with the face a
claques of an unemployed actor, walked backwards, practically 5
in the path of our car.
Oh, I had to keep a very sharp eye on Lo, little limp Lo!
Owing perhaps to constant amorous exercise, she radiated, de-
spite her very childish appearance, some special languorous glow
which threw garage fellows, hotel pages, vacationists, goons in
luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools, into fits of
concupiscence which might have tickled my pride, had it not 6
incensed my jealousy. For little Lo was aware of that glow of
hers, and I would often catch her coulant un regard in the direc- 7
tion of some amiable male, some grease monkey, with a sinewy
golden-brown forearm and watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly
had I turned my back to go and buy this very Lo a lollipop, than
I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love
song of wisecracks, »
When, during our longer stops, I would relax after a particu-
[ 161 ]
larly violent morning in bed, and out of the goodness of my
lulled heart allow her — indulgent Hum! — to visit the rose garden
or children’s library across the street with a motor court neigh-
bor’s plain little Mary and Mary’s eight-year-old brother, Lo
would come back an hour late, with barefoot Mary trailing far
behind, and the little boy metamorphosed into two gangling,
golden-haired high school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhea. The
reader may well imagine what I answered my pet when — rather
uncertainly, I admit — she would ask me if she could go with
Carl and A1 here to the roller-skating rink.
I remember the first time, a dusty windy afternoon, I did let
her go to one such rink. Cruelly she said it would be no fun if I
accompanied her, since that time of day was reserved for teen-
agers. We wrangled out a compromise; I remained in the car,
among other (empty) cars with their noses to the canvas-topped
open-air rink, where some fifty young people, many in pairs, were
endlessly rolling round and round to mechanical music, and the
wind silvered the trees. Dolly wore blue jeans and white high
shoes, as most of the other girls did. I kept counting the revolu-
tions of the rolling crowd — and suddenly she was missing. When
she rolled past again, she was together with three hoodlums
whom I had heard analyze a moment before the girl skaters from
the outside — and jeer at a lovely leggy young thing who had
arrived clad in red shorts instead of those jeans or slacks.
At inspection stations on highways entering Arizona or Cali-
fornia, a policeman’s cousin would peer with such intensity at
us that my poor heart wobbled. “Any honey.?” he would inquire,
and every time my sweet fool giggled. I still have, vibrating all
along my optic nerve, visions of Lo on horseback, a link in the
chain of a guided trip along a bridle trail: Lo bobbing at a walk-
ing pace, with an old woman rider in front and a lecherous red-
necked dude-rancher behind; and I behind him, hating his fat
flowery-shirted back even more fervently than a motorist does a
slow truck on a mountain road. Or else, at a ski lodge, I would
see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an
ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laugh-
ing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her.
[ 162 ]
In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite
European way, anent the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, i
local schools, the number of children in the nearest school and
so forth; and at school bus time, smiling and twitching a little
(I discovered this tic nerveux because cruel Lo was the first to
mimic it), I would park at a strategic point, with my vagrant
schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave
school — always a pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to
bore my so easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of
sympathy for other people’s whims, she would insult me and my
desire to have her caress me while blue-eyed little brunettes in
blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish
blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun.
As a sort of compromise, I freely advocated whenever and
wherever possible the use of swimming pools with other girl-
children. She adored brilliant water and was a remarkably smart
diver. Comfortably robed, I would settle down in the rich post-
meridian shade after my own demure dip, and there I would sit,
with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or nothing but
my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped, be-
pearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted
satin pants and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly
would I marvel that she was mine, mine, mine, and revise the
recent matitudinal swoon to the moan of the mourning doves, 2
and devise the late afternoon one, and slitting my sun-speared
eyes, compare Lolita to whatever other nymphets parsimonious
chance collected around her for my anthological delectation and
judgment; and today, putting my hand on my ailing heart, I
really do not think that any of them ever surpassed her in de-
sirability, or if they did, it was so two or three times at the most,
in a certain light, with certain perfumes blended in the air —
once in the hopeless case of a pale Spanish child, the daughter
of a heavy- jawed nobleman, and another time — mais je divague. 3
Naturally, I had to be always wary, fully realizing, in my lucid
jealousy, the danger of those dazzling romps. I had only to turn
away for a moment — to walk, say, a few steps in order to see if our
cabin was at last ready after the morning change of linen — and
[ 163 ]
Lo and Behold, upon returning, I would find the former, les
1 yeux perdus, dipping and kicking her long-toed feet in the water i
on the stone edge of which she lolled, while, on either side of
her, there crouched a brun adolescent whom her russet beauty
and the quicksilver in the baby folds of her stomach were sure
2 to cause to se tor dr e — oh Baudelaire! — in recurrent dreams for
months to come.
I tried to teach her to play tennis so we might have more
amusements in common; but although I had been a good player
in my prime, I proved to be hopeless as a teacher; and so, in
California, I got her to take a number of very expensive lessons
with a famous coach, a husky, wrinkled old-timer, with a harem
^ of ball boys; he looked an awful wreck off the court, but now
and then, when, in the course of a lesson, to keep up the ex-
change, he would put out as it were an exquisite spring blossom
of a stroke and twang the ball back to his pupil, that divine
delicacy of absolute power made me recall that, thirty years
4 before, I had seen him in Cannes demolish the great Gobbert! ,
Until she began taking those lessons, I thought she would never
learn the game. On this or that hotel court I would drill Lo, and
try to relive the days when in a hot gale, a daze of dust, and
queer lassitude, I fed ball after ball to gay, innocent, elegant
Annabel (gleam of bracelet, pleated white skirt, black velvet
hair band). With every word of persistent advice I would only
augment Lo’s sullen fury. To our games, oddly enough, she pre-
ferred — at least, before we reached California — formless pat ball
approximations — more ball hunting than actual play — with a
5 wispy, weak, wonderfully pretty in an ange gauche way coeval.
A helpful spectator, I would go up to that other child, and inhale
her faint musky fragrance as I touched her forearm and held her
knobby wrist, and push this way or that her cool thigh to show
her the back-hand stance. In the meantime, Lo, bending for-
ward, would let her sunny-brown curls hang forward as she stuck
her racket, like a cripple’s stick, into the ground and emitted a
tremendous ugh of disgust at my intrusion. I would leave them
to their game and look on, comparing their bodies in motion, a
silk scarf round my throat; this was in south Arizona, I think — ■■
[ 164 ]
and the days had a lazy lining of warmth, and awkward Lo would
slash at the ball and miss it, and curse, and send a simulacrum of i
a serve into the net, and show the wet glistening young down of
her armpit as she brandished her racket in despair, and her even
more insipid partner would dutifully rush out after every ball,
and retrieve none; but both were enjoying themselves beautifully,
and in clear ringing tones kept the exact score of their ineptitudes
all the time.
One day, I remember, I offered to bring them cold drinks from
the hotel, and went up the gravel path, and came back with two
tall glasses of pineapple juice, soda and ice; and then a sudden
void within my chest made me stop as I saw that the tennis court
was deserted. I stooped to set down the glasses on a bench and
for some reason, with a kind of icy vividness, saw Charlotte’s
face in death, and I glanced around, and noticed Lo in white
shorts receding through the speckled shadow of a garden path in
the company of a tall man who carried two tennis rackets. I 2
sprang after them, but as I was crashing through the shrubbery,
I saw, in an alternate vision, as if life’s course constantly
branched, Lo, in slacks, and her companion, in shorts, trudging
up and down a small weedy area, and beating bushes with their
rackets in listless search for their last lost ball.
I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove to my judges
that I did everything in my power to give my Lolita a really good
time. How charming it was to see her, a child herself, showing
another child some of her few accomplishments, such as for
example a special way of jumping rope. With her right hand
holding her left arm behind her untanned back, the lesser
nymphet, a diaphanous darling, would be all eyes, as the pavo- 3
nine sun was all eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees, 4
while in the midst of that oculate paradise, my freckled and 5
raffish lass skipped, repeating the movements of so many others I
had gloated over on the sun-shot, watered, damp-smelling side-
walks and ramparts of ancient Europe. Presently, she would 6
hand the rope back to her little Spanish friend, and watch in her
turn the repeated lesson, and brush away the hair from her brow,
and fold her arms, and step on one toe with the other, or drop
[ 165 ]
her hands loosely upon her still unflared hips, and I would
satisfy myself that the damned staff had at last finished cleaning
up our cottage; whereupon, flashing a smile to the shy, dark-
haired page girl of my princess and thrusting my fatherly fingers
deep into Lo’s hair from behind, and then gently but firmly
clasping them around the nape of her neck, I would lead my
reluctant pet to our small home for a quick connection before
dinner.
“Whose cat has scratched poor you?” a full-blown fleshy
handsome woman of the repulsive type to which I was par-
ticularly attractive might ask me at the “lodge,” during a table
d’hote dinner followed by dancing promised to Lo. This was one
of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people as
possible, while Lo, on the other hand, would do her utmost to
draw as many potential witnesses into her orbit as she could.
She would be, figuratively speaking, wagging her tiny tail, her
whole behind in fact as little bitches do — while some grinning
stranger accosted us and began a bright conversation with a
comparative study of license plates. “Long way from home!”
Inquisitive parents, in order to pump Lo about me, would sug-
gest her going to a movie with their children. We had some
close shaves. The waterfall nuisance pursued me of course in all
1 our caravansaries. But I never realized how wafery their wall
substance was until one evening, after I had loved too loudly, a
neighbor’s masculine cough filled the pause as clearly as mine
would have done; and next morning as I was having breakfast
at the milk bar (Lo was a late sleeper, and I liked to bring her a
pot of hot coffee in bed), my neighbor of the eve, an elderly fool
wearing plain glasses on his long virtuous nose and a convention
badge on his lapel, somehow managed to rig up a conversation
with me, in the course of which he inquired, if my missus was
like his missus a rather reluctant get-upper when not on the
farm; and had not the hideous danger I was skirting almost suf-
focated me, I might have enjoyed the odd look of surprise on his
thin-lipped weather-beaten face when I drily answered, as I
slithered off my stool, that I was thank God a widower.
How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it
[ i66 ]
A
until she had done her morning duty. And I was such a thought-
ful friend, such a passionate father, such a good pediatrician, at-
tending to all the wants of my little auburn brunette’s body!
My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my
Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix,
her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her
lungs, her comely twin kidneys. On especially tropical after-
noons, in the sticky closeness of the siesta, I liked the cool feel
of armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her
in my lap. There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose
while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indif-
ferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a
shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent
to remove. Her eyes would follow the adventures of her favorite
strip characters: there was one well-drawn sloppy bobby-soxer, 1
with high cheekbones and angular gestures, that I was not above
enjoying myself; she studied the photographic results of head-on
collisions; she never doubted the reality of place, time and cir-
cumstance alleged to match the publicity pictures of naked-
thighed beauties; and she was curiously fascinated by the photo-
graphs of local brides, some in full wedding apparel, holding
bouquets and wearing glasses.
A fly would settle and walk in the vicinity of her navel or
explore her tender pale areolas. She tried to catch it in her fist 2
(Charlotte’s method) and then would turn to the column Let’s
Explore Your Mind.
“Let’s explore your mind. Would sex crimes be reduced if
children obeyed a few don’ts? Don’t play around public toilets.
Don’t take candy or rides from strangers. If picked up, mark
down the license of the car.”
“. . . and the brand of the candy,” I volunteered.
She went on, her cheek (recedent) against mine (pursuant); 3
and this was a good day, mark, O reader!
“If you don’t have a pencil, but are old enough to read — ”
“We,” I quip-quoted, “medieval mariners, have placed in this
bottle — ”
“If,” she repeated, “you don’t have a pencil, but are old
[ 167 ]
4
enough to read and write — this is what the guy means, isn’t it,
you dope — scratch the number somehow on the roadside.”
“With your little claws, Lolita.’”
3
1 She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland,
with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused dis-
taste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away
from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she
vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you
are doing?” was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had
to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying
fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger,
she would — invariably, with icy precision — plump for the former.
There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment
ago? It was, of all things. The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little
2 sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the
wistful joke.
Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the
impression that I did not manage to be happy. Reader must
understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet
the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For
there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a
3 nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another
class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite our tiffs, despite her
nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vul-
garity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I
still dwelled deep in my elected paradise — a paradise whose skies
were the color of hell-flames — but still a paradise.
The able psychiatrist who studies my case — and whom by
now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine
4 fascination — is no doubt anxious to have me take my Lolita to
the seaside and have me find there, at last, the “gratification” of
[ i68 ]
a lifetime urge, and release from the “subconscious” obsession of
an incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee.
Well, comrade, let me tell you that I did look for a beach,
though I also have to confess that by the time we reached its
mirage of gray water, so many delights had already been granted
me by my traveling companion that the search for a Kingdom
by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or whatnot, far from being the
impulse of the subconscious, had become the rational pursuit of
a purely theoretical thrill. The angels knew it, and arranged
things accordingly. A visit to a plausible cove on the Atlantic
side was completely messed up by foul weather. A thick damp
sky, muddy waves, a sense of boundless but somehow matter-of-
fact mist — what could be further removed from the crisp charm,
the sapphire occasion and rosy contingency of my Riviera ro-
mance? A couple of semitropical beaches on the Gulf, though
bright enough, were starred and spattered by venomous beasties
and swept by hurricane winds. Finally, on a Californian beach,
facing the phantom of the Pacific, I hit upon some rather
perverse privacy in a kind of cave whence you could hear the
shrieks of a lot of girl scouts taking their first surf bath on a
separate part of the beach, behind rotting trees; but the fog was
like a wet blanket, and the sand was gritty and clammy, and Lo
was all gooseflesh and grit, and for the first time in my life I had
as little desire for her as for a manatee. Perhaps, my learned
readers may perk up if I tell them that even had we discovered
a piece of sympathetic seaside somewhere, it would have come
too late, since my real liberation had occurred much earlier: at
the moment, in point of fact, when Annabel Haze, alias Dolores
Lee, alias Loleeta, had appeared to me, golden and brown, kneel-
ing, looking up, on that shoddy veranda, in a kind of fictitious,
dishonest, but eminently satisfactory seaside arrangement (al-
though there was nothing but a second-rate lake in the neigh-
borhood).
So much for those special sensations, influenced, if not actually
brought about, by the tenets of modern psychiatry. Conse-
quently, I turned away — I headed my Lolita away — from beaches
which were either too bleak when lone, or too populous when
[ 169 ]
ablaze. However, in recollection, I suppose, of my hopeless
hauntings of public parks in Europe, I was still keenly interested
in outdoor activities and desirous of finding suitable playgrounds
in the open where I had suffered such shameful privations. Here,
too, I was to be thwarted. The disappointment I must now
register (as I gently grade my story into an expression of the
continuous risk and dread that ran through my bliss) should in
no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic, tragic but never Arcadian
1 American wilds. They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful,
those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent sur-
render that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaus-
tively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have
clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides,
2 on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic
3 benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so
many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air
lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all
crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart’s
buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest
floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a
4 sustained rustle of potential snakes — que dis-je, of semi-extinct
dragons! — while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in
a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white
sock alike.
I am exaggerating a little. One summer noon, just below tim-
berline, where heavenly-hued blossoms that I would fain call
larkspur crowded all along a purly mountain brook, we did find,
Lolita and I, a secluded romantic spot, a hundred feet or so
above the pass where we had left our car. The slope seemed un-
trodden. A last panting pine was taking a well-earned breather
5 on the rock it had reached. A marmot whistled at us and with-
drew. Beneath the lap-robe I had spread for Lo, dry flowers
6 crepitated softly. Venus came and went. The jagged cliff crown-
ing the upper talus and a tangle of shrubs growing below us
seemed to offer us protection from sun and man alike. Alas, I
had not reckoned with a faint side trail that curled up in cagey
fashion among the shrubs and rocks a few feet from us.
[ 170 ]
It was then that we came closer to detection than ever before,
and no wonder the experience curbed forever my yearning for
rural amours.
I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was
weeping in my arms; — a salutory storm of sobs after one of the
fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the
course of that otherwise admirable year! I had just retracted
some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of
blind impatient passion, and there she was sprawling and sob-
bing, and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing
happily, and the atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I sus-
pect, eternal horror that I know nonjo was still but a dot of black-
ness in the blue of my bliss; and so we lay, when with one of
those jolts that have ended by knocking my poor heart out of
its groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strange and
beautiful children, faunlet and nymphet, whom their identical
flat dark hair and bloodless cheeks proclaimed siblings if not
twins. They stood crouching and gaping at us, both in blue play-
suits, blending with the mountain blossoms. I plucked at the
lap-robe for desperate concealment — and within the same instant,
something that looked like a polka-dotted pushball among the
undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which
was transformed into the gradually rising figure of a stout lady
with a raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to
her bouquet, while staring over her shoulder at us from behind
her lovely carved bluestone children.
Now that I have an altogether different mess on my con-
science, I know that I am a courageous man, but in those days
I was not aware of it, and I remember being surprised by my
own coolness. With the quiet murmured order one gives a sweat-
stained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of
plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast’s flanks
pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made
Lo get up, and we decorously walked, and then indecorously
scuttled down to the car. Behind it a nifty station wagon was
parked, and a handsome Assyrian with a little blue-black beard,
un monsieur tres bien, in silk shirt and magenta slacks, pre-
[ 171 ]
sumably the corpulent botanist’s husband, was gravely taking
the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass. It
was well over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and
with a scrunch and a skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with
her clothes and swearing at me in language that I never dreamed
little girls could know, let alone use.
There were other unpleasant incidents. There was the movie
theatre once, for example. Lo at the time still had for the cinema
a veritable passion (it was to decline into tepid condescension
during her second high school year). We took in, voluptuously
and indiscriminately, oh, I don’t know, one hundred and fifty
or two hundred programs during that one year, and during some
of the denser periods of movie-going we saw many of the news-
reels up to half-a-dozen times since the same weekly one went
with different main pictures and pursued us from town to town.
Her favorite kinds were, in this order: musicals, underworlders,
westerners. In the first, real singers and dancers had unreal stage
careers in an essentially grief-proof sphere of existence where-
from death and truth were banned, and where, at the end, white-
haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctant
father of a show-crazy girl always finished by applauding her
apotheosis on fabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world
apart: there, heroic newspapermen were tortured, telephone
bills ran to billions, and, in a robust atmosphere of incompetent
marksmanship, villains were chased through sewers and store-
houses by pathologically fearless cops (I was to give them less
exercise). Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-
faced, blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher ar-
riving in Roaring Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular
stampede, the pistol thrust through the shivered windowpane,
the stupendous fist fight, the crashing mountain of dusty old-
fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the timely
somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie
knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in
the belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of
pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by
now), nothing to show but the rather becoming bruise on the
[ 172 ]
bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero embracing his gorgeous
frontier bride. I remember one matinee in a small airless theatre
crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath of
popcorn. The moon was yellow above the neckerchiefed crooner,
and his finger was on his strumstring, and his foot was on a pine 1
log, and I had innocently encircled Lo’s shoulder and approached
my jawbone to her temple, when two harpies behind us started 2
muttering the queerest things — I do not know if I understood
aright, but what I thought I did, made me withdraw my gentle
hand, and of course the rest of the show was fog to me.
Another jolt I remember is connected with a little burg we
were traversing at night, during our return journey. Some twenty
miles earlier I had happened to tell her that the day school she
would attend at Beardsley was a rather high-class, non-coeduca-
tional one, with no modern nonsense, whereupon Lo treated
me to one of those furious harangues of hers where entreaty
and insult, self-assertion and double talk, vicious vulgarity and
childish despair, were interwoven in an exasperating semblance
of logic which prompted a semblance of explanation from me.
Enmeshed in her wild words (swell chance ... I’d be a sap if I
took your opinion seriously . . . Stinker ... You can’t boss me . . .
I despise you . . . and so forth), I drove through the slumbering
town at a fifty-mile-per-hour pace in continuance of my smooth
highway swoosh, and a twosome of patrolmen put their spot-
light on the car, and told me to pull over. I shushed Lo who was
automatically raving on. The men peered at her and me with
malevolent curiosity. Suddenly all dimples, she beamed sweetly
at them, as she never did at my orchideous masculinity; for, in a ^
sense, my Lo was even more scared of the law than I — and when
the kind officers pardoned us and servilely we crawled on, her
eyelids closed and fluttered as she mimicked limp prostration.
At this point I have a curious confession to make. You will
laugh — but really and truly I somehow never managed to find out
quite exactly what the legal situation was. I do not know it yet.
Oh, I have learned a few odds and ends. Alabama prohibits a
guardian from changing the ward’s residence without an order
of the court; Minnesota, to whom I take off my hat, provides
[ 173 ]
that when a relative assumes permanent care and custody of any
child under fourteen, the authority of a court does not come into
play. Query; is the stepfather of a gaspingly adorable pubescent
pet, a stepfather of only one month’s standing, a neurotic
widower of mature years and small but independent means, with
the parapets of Europe, a divorce and a few madhouses behind
him, is he to be considered a relative, and thus a natural guard-
ian? And if not, must I, and could I reasonably dare notify
some Welfare Board and file a petition (how do you file a
petition?), and have a court’s agent investigate meek, fishy me
and dangerous Dolores Haze? The many books on marriage,
rape, adoption and so on, that I guiltily consulted at the public
libraries of big and small towns, told me nothing beyond darkly
insinuating that the state is the super-guardian of minor children.
Pilvin and Zapel, if I remember their names right, in an impres-
sive volume on the legal side of marriage, completely ignored
stepfathers with motherless girls on their hands and knees.
My best friend, a social service monograph (Chicago, 1936),
which was dug out for me at great pains from a dusty storage
recess by an innocent old spinster, said “There is no principle
that every minor must have a guardian; the court is passive and
enters the fray only when the child’s situation becomes con-
spicuously perilous.” A guardian, I concluded, was appointed
only when he expressed his solemn and formal desire; but
months might elapse before he was given notice to appear at
a hearing and grow his pair of gray wings, and in the meantime
the fair daemon child was legally left to her own devices which,
after all, was the case of Dolores Haze. Then came the hearing.
A few questions from the bench, a few reassuring answers from
the attorney, a smile, a nod, a light drizzle outside, and the ap-
pointment was made. And still I dared not. Keep away, be a
mouse, curl up in your hole. Courts became extravagantly active
only when there was some monetary question involved: two
greedy guardians, a robbed orphan, a third, still greedier, party.
But here all was in perfect order, an inventory had been made,
and her mother’s small property was waiting untouched for
Dolores Haze to grow up. The best policy seemed to be to
[ 174 ]
refrain from any application. Or would some busybody, some
Humane Society, butt in if I kept too quiet?
Friend Farlow, who was a lawyer of sorts and ought to have
been able to give me some solid advice, was too much occupied
with Jean’s cancer to do anything more than what he had prom-
ised- — namely, to look after Charlotte’s meager estate while I
recovered very gradually from the shock of her death. I had
conditioned him into believing Dolores was my natural child,
and so could not expect him to bother his head about the situa-
tion. I am, as the reader must have gathered by now, a poor
businessman; but neither ignorance nor indolence should have
prevented me from seeking professional advice elsewhere. What
stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate
in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift
would be snatched away like that palace on the mountain top
in the Oriental tale which vanished whenever a prospective owner i
asked its custodian how come a strip of sunset sky was clearly
visible from afar between black rock and foundation.
I decided that at Beardsley (the site of Beardsley College for 2
Women) I would have access to works of reference that I had
not yet been able to study, such as Woerner’s Treatise “On the
American Law of Guardianship” and certain United States 3
Children’s Bureau Publications. I also decided that anything
was better for Lo than the demoralizing idleness in which she
lived. I could persuade her to do so many things — their list might
stupefy a professional educator; but no matter how I pleaded or
stormed, I could never make her read any other book than the
so-called comic books or stories in magazines for American
females. Any literature a peg higher smacked to her of school,
and though theoretically willing to enjoy A Girl of the Lhnber-
lost or the Arabian Nights, or Little Women, she was quite sure 4
she would not fritter away her “vacation” on such highbrow
reading matter.
I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have
her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow
scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was
good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss
[ 175 ]
until I could safely marry my little Creole for I must confess
1 that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I
could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of
insanity to the other — from the thought that around 1950 I
would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose
magic nymphage had evaporated — to the thought that with pa-
tience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet
with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who
would be eight or nine around i960, when I would still be dans
2 la force de I'dge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind,
was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a
3 vieillard encore vert — or was it green rot? — bizarre, tender, sali-
vating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the
Third the art of being a granddad.
In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as
father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best;
I read and reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title
4 Know Your Own Daughter, which I got at the same store where
I bought Lo, for her thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with
commercially “beautiful” illustrations, of Andersen’s The Little
5 Mer?naid. But even at our very best moments, when we sat
reading on a rainy day (Lo’s glance skipping from the window
to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet hearty meal
in a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went
shopping, or silently stared, with other motorists and their
children, at some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young
woman’s shoe in the ditch (Lo, as we drove on: “That was the
exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in
the store”); on all those random occasions, I seemed to myself
as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was,
perhaps, guilty locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers
of impersonation? Would improvement be forthcoming with a
fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl’s day?
In my choice of Beardsley I was guided not only by the fact
of there being a comparatively sedate school for girls located
there, but also by the presence of the women’s college. In my
6 desire to get myself case, to attach myself somehow to some
[ 176 ]
patterned surface which my stripes would blend with, I thought
of a man I knew in the department of French at Beardsley Col-
lege; he was good enough to use my textbook in his classes and
had attempted to get me over once to deliver a lecture. I had
no intention of doing so, since, as I have once remarked in the
course of these confessions, there are few physiques I loathe
more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves and deplor-
able complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe,
the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are
buried alive); but I did crave for a label, a background, and a
simulacrum, and, as presently will become clear, there was a
reason, a rather zany reason, why old Gaston Godin’s company
would be particularly safe.
Finally, there was the money question. My income was crack-
ing under the strain of our joy-ride. True, I clung to the cheaper
motor courts; but every now and then, there would be a loud
hotel de luxe, or a pretentious dude ranch, to mutilate our
budget; staggering sums, moreover, were expended on sightsee-
ing and Lo’s clothes, and the old Haze bus, although a still
vigorous and very devoted machine, necessitated numerous
minor and major repairs. In one of our strip maps that has
happened to survive among the papers which the authorities
have so kindly allowed me to use for the purpose of writing my
statement, I find some jottings that help me compute the fol-
lowing. During that extravagant year 1947-1948, August to
August, lodgings and food cost us around 5,500 dollars; gas, oil
and repairs, 1,234, various extras almost as much; so that
during about 150 days of actual motion (we covered about 27,000
miles!) plus some 200 days of interpolated standstills, this modest l
reenter spent around 8,000 dollars, or better say 10,000 because, 2
unpractical as I am, I have surely forgotten a number of items.
And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with
the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health,
her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad’s, although she had added 3
two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We
had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch
myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled
[ 177 ]
with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enor-
mous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us
than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old
tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the
moment I feigned sleep.
4
When, through decorations of light and shade, we drove up
to 14 Thayer Street, a grave little lad met us with the keys and
a note from Gaston who had rented the house for us. My Lo,
without granting her new surroundings one glance, unseeingly
turned on the radio to which instinct led her and lay down on
the living room sofa with a batch of old magazines which in
the same precise and blind manner she landed by dipping her
hand into the nether anatomy of a lamp table.
I really did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock
my Lolita up somewhere; but I had, I suppose, in the course
of my correspondence with vague Gaston, vaguely visualized a
house of ivied brick. Actually the place bore a dejected resem-
blance to the Haze home (a mere 400 miles distant): it was
the same sort of dull gray frame affair with a shingled roof and
dull green drill awnings; and the rooms, though smaller and
furnished in a more consistent plush-and-plate style, were ar-
ranged in much the same order. My study turned out to be,
however, a much larger room, lined from floor to ceiling with
some two thousand books on chemistry which my landlord
(on sabbatical leave for the time being) taught at Beardsley
College.
I had hoped Beardsley School for girls, an expensive day
school, with lunch thrown in and a glamorous gymnasium,
would, while cultivating all those young bodies, provide some
formal education for their minds as well. Gaston Godin, who
was seldom right in his judgment of American habitus, had
warned me that the institution might turn out to be one of
[ 178 ]
those where girls are taught, as he put it with a foreigner’s love
for such things: “not to spell very well, but to smell very well.”
I don’t think they achieved even that.
At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, she approved
of my child’s “nice blue eyes” (blue! Lolita!) and of my own
friendship with that “French genius” (a genius! Gaston!) — and
then, having turned Dolly over to a Miss Cormorant, she i
wrinkled her brow in a kind of reciieilleinent and said: 2
“We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having
our students become bookworms or be able to reel off all the
capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by
heart the dates of forgotten battles. What we are concerned
with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is why
we stress the four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating.
W e are confronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will
presently enter an age group where dates, dating, date dress,
date book, date etiquette, mean as much to her as, say, business,
business connections, business success, mean to you, or as
much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me. Dorothy
Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life
which consists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands,
corner drugstores, malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing,
blanket parties on beaches, and even hair-fixing parties! Naturally
at Beardsley School we disapprove of some of these activities;
and we rechannel others into more constructive directions. But
we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face the
sunshine. To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching tech-
niques, we are more interested in communication than in com-
position. That is, with due respect to Shakespeare and others,
we want our girls to communicate freely with the live world
around them rather than plunge into musty old books. We are
still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gyne-
cologist feeling a tumor. We think. Dr. Humburg, in organismal
and organizational terms. We have done away with the mass
of irrelevant topics that have traditionally been presented to
young girls, leaving no place, in former days, for the knowledges
and the skills, and the attitudes they will need in managing
[ 179 ]
their lives and — as the cynic might add — the lives of their hus-
bands. Mr. Humberson, let us put it this way: the position of
a star is important, but the most practical spot for an icebox
in the kitchen may be even more important to the budding
housewife. You say that all you expect a child to obtain from
school is a sound education. But what do we mean by educa-
tion? In the old days it was in the main a verbal phenomenon;
I mean, you could have a child learn by heart a good encyclo-
pedia and he or she would know as much as or more than a
school could offer. Dr. Hummer, do you realize that for the
modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of less vital
value than weekend ones [twinkle]? — to repeat a pun that I
heard the Beardsley college psychoanalyst permit herself the
other day. We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in
a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care for Greece and
the Orient with their harems and slaves?”
This program rather appalled me, but I spoke to two intel-
ligent ladies who had been connected with the school, and they
affirmed that the girls did quite a bit of sound reading and that
the “communication” line was more or less ballyhoo aimed at
giving old-fashioned Beardsley School a financially remunera-
tive modern touch, though actually it remained as prim as a
prawn.
Another reason attracting me to that particular school may
seem funny to some readers, but it was very important to me,
for that is the way I am made. Across our street, exactly in front
of our house, there was, I noticed, a gap of weedy wasteland,
with some colorful bushes and a pile of bricks and a few scat-
tered planks, and the foam of shabby mauve and chrome autumn
roadside flowers; and through that gap you could see a shimmery
section of School Rd., running parallel to our Thayer St., and
immediately beyond that, the playground of the school. Apart
from the psychological comfort this general arrangement should
afford me by keeping Dolly’s day adjacent to mine, I imme-
diately foresaw the pleasure I would have in distinguishing from
[ i8o ]
my study-bedroom, by means of powerful binoculars, the sta-
tistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the other
girl-children playing around Dolly during recess; unfortunately,
on the very first day of school, workmen arrived and put up a
fence some way down the gap, and in no time a construction
of tawny wood maliciously arose beyond that fence utterly
blocking my magic vista; and as soon as they had erected a
sufficient amount of material to spoil everything, those absurd
builders suspended their work and never appeared again.
5
In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green,
fawn, and golden of a mellow academic townlet, one was bound
to have a few amiable fine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself
on the exact temperature of my relations with them: never rude,
always aloof. My west-door neighbor, who might have been a
businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me
once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or
watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don’t
mind if these verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just
sufficiently articulate to sound like conventional assents or inter-
rogative pause-fillers, precluded any evolution toward chummi-
ness. Of the two houses flanking the bit of scrubby waste
opposite, one was closed, and the other contained two professors
of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedly
feminine Adiss Fabian, whose only subject of brief sidewalk
conversation with me was (God bless their tact!) the young
loveliness of my daughter and the naive charm of Gaston Godin.
My east-door neighbor was by far the most dangerous one, a
sharp-nosed character whose late brother had been attached
to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds.
I remember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living-
room window, feverishly awaiting my darling’s return from
[ i8r ]
school. The odious spinster, trying to conceal her morbid in-
quisitiveness under a mask of dulcet goodwill, stood leaning
on her slim umbrella (the sleet had just stopped, a cold wet sun
had sidled out), and Dolly, her brown coat open despite the
raw weather, her structural heap of books pressed against her
stomach, her knees showing pink above her clumsy wellingtons,
a sheepish frightened little smile flitting over and off her snub-
nosed face, which — owing perhaps to the pale wintry light —
looked almost plain, in a rustic, German, Magdlein-Yike way,
as she stood there and dealt with Miss East’s questions “And
where is your mother, my dear? And what is your poor father’s
occupation? And where did you live before?’’ Another time the.
loathsome creature accosted me with a welcoming whine — but 1
evaded her; and a few days later there came from her a note in
a blue-margined envelope, a nice mixture of poison and treacle,
suggesting Dolly come over on a Sunday and curl up in a chair to
look through the “loads of beautiful books my dear mother gave
me when I was a child, instead of having the radio on at full
blast till all hours of the night.”
I had also to be careful in regard to a Mrs. Holigan, a char-|
woman and cook of sorts whom I had inherited with the vacuum'
cleaner from the previous tenants. Dolly got lunch at school,
so that this was no trouble, and I had become adept at provid-
ing her with a big breakfast and warming up the dinner that,
Mrs. Holigan prepared before leaving. That kindly and harm-
less woman had, thank God, a rather bleary eye that missed
details, and I had become a great expert in bedmaking; but still
I was continuously obsessed by the feeling that some fatal stain
had been left somewhere, or that, on the rare occasions where;
Holigan’s presence happened to coincide with Lo’s, simple Lo
might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy
kitchen chat. I often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass,;
and that any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would!
peer through a carelessly unshaded window to obtain a free|
glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would have paid a!
small fortune to watch.
[ 182 ]
6
A word about Gaston Godin. The main reason why I enjoyed i
— or at least tolerated with relief — his company was the spell of
absolute security that his. ample person cast on my secret. Not
that he knew it; I had no special reason to confide in him, and
he was much too self-centered and abstract to notice or suspect
anything that might lead to a frank question on his part and a
frank answer on mine. He spoke well of me to Beardsleyans,
he was my good herald. Had he discovered mes gouts and 2
Lolita’s status, it would have interested him only insofar as
throwing some light on the simplicity of my attitude toward
him, which attitude was as free of polite strain as it was of
ribald allusions; for despite his colorless mind and dim memory,
he was perhaps aware that I knew more about him than the
burghers of Beardsley did. He was a flabby, dough-faced, melan-
choly bachelor tapering upward to a pair of narrow, not quite
level shoulders and a conical pear-head which had sleek black
hair on one side and only a few plastered wisps on the other.
But the lower part of his body was enormous, and he ambulated
with a curious elephantine stealth by means of phenomenally
stout legs. He always wore black, even his tie was black; he 3
seldom bathed; his English was a burlesque. And, nonetheless,
everybody considered him to be a supremely lovable, lovably
freakish fellow! Neighbors pampered him; he knew by name
all the small boys in our vicinity (he lived a few blocks away
from me) and had some of them clean his sidewalk and burn
leaves in his back yard, and bring wood from his shed, and
even perform simple chores about the house, and he would
feed them fancy chocolates, with real liqueurs inside — in the
privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement, with
amusing daggers and pistols arrayed on the moldy, rug-adorned
walls among the camouflaged hot-water pipes. Upstairs he had
|a studio — he painted a little, the old fraud. He had decorated its
sloping wall (it was really not more than a garret) with large
photographs of pensive Andre Gide, Tchaikovsky, Norman 4
Douglas, two other well-known English writers, Nijinsky (all 5
[ 183 ]
thighs and fig leaves), Harold D. Doublename (a misty-eyed
left-wing professor at a Midwestern university) and Marcel
Proust. All these poor people seemed about to fall on you from
their inclined plane. He had also an album with snapshots of all
the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, and when I hap-
pened to thumb through it and make some casual remark, Gas-
ton would purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout
1 “Oz/i, Us sont gentils.'’’ His brown eyes would roam around the
various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own
2 banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars,
blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a
vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he
would say “Prejiez done une de ces pokes. La bonne dame d’en face
3 m'en off re plus que je den peux savour er.” Or: ''Mississe Taille
4 Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fieurs que fexecre.’’'
(Somber, sad, full of world-weariness.)
For obvious reasons, I preferred my house to his for the games
of chess we had two or three times weekly. He looked like some
old battered idol as he sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and
stared at the board as if it were a corpse. Wheezing he would
meditate for ten minutes — then make a losing move. Or the
5 good man, after even more thought, might utter: Au rot! with
a slow old-dog woof that had a gargling sound at the back of it
which made his jowls wabble; and then he would lift his circum-
flex eyebrows with a deep sigh as I pointed out to him that he
was in check himself.
Sometimes, from where we sat in my cold study I could hear
Lo’s bare feet practicing dance techniques in the living room
downstairs; but Gaston’s outgoing senses were comfortably
dulled, and he remained unaware of those naked rhythms —
and-one, and-two, and-one, and-two, weight transferred on a
straight right leg, leg up and out to the side, and-one, and-two,
and only when she started jumping, opening her legs at the
height of the jump, and flexing one leg, and extending the other,
and flying, and landing on her toes — only then did my pale,
pompous, morose opponent rub his head or cheek as if confusing
those distant thuds with the awful stabs of my formidable Queen.
[ 184 ]
Sometimes Lola would slouch in while we pondered the board
■—and it was every time a treat to see Gaston, his elephant eye
still fixed on his pieces, ceremoniously rise to shake hands with
her, and forthwith release her limp fingers, and without looking
once at her, descend again into his chair to topple into the trap
I had laid for him. One day around Christmas, after I had not
seen him for a fortnight or so, he asked me toutes vos fil-
lettes, elles vont bienT’’ from which it became evident to me that 1
he had multiplied my unique Lolita by the number of sartorial
categories his downcast moody eye had glimpsed during a whole
series of her appearances; blue jeans, a skirt, shorts, a quilted
robe.
I am loath to dwell so long on the poor fellow (sadly enough,
a year later, during a voyage to Europe, from which he did not
return, he got involved in a sale histoire, in Naples of all places!). 2
I would have hardly alluded to him at all had not his Beardsley
existence had such a queer bearing on my case. I need him for
my defense. There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a
mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old
invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, tri-
umphantly ignorant of the English language — there he was in
priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by
the young — oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody; and
here was I.
7
I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a defi-
nite drop in Lolita’s morals. If her share in the ardors she
kindled had never amounted to much, neither had pure lucre
ever come to the fore. But I was weak, I was not wise, my school-
girl nymphet had me in thrall. With the human element dwin-
dling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture only increased;
and of this she took advantage.
Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill
her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start of the
[ 185 ]
Beardsley era — and went up to one dollar five before its end.
This was a more than generous arrangement seeing she con-
stantly received from me all kinds of small presents and had for
the asking any sweetmeat or movie under the moon — although,
of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or even
a whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted
very badly some item of juvenile amusement. She was, however,
not easy to deal with. Only very listlessly did she earn her three
pennies — or three nickels — per day; and she proved to be a cruel
negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-
wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could
not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of
the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force.
Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she man-
aged — during one schoolyear! — to raise the bonus price of a fancy
embrace to three, and even four bucks. O Reader! Laugh not, as
you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes
and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous,
jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in the
margin of that leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a hand-
ful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open
afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to
hide her loot. And just as every other day I would cruise all
around the school area and on comatose feet visit drugstores,
and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughter
in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now
and then I would burgle her room and scrutinize torn papers
1 in the wastebasket with the painted roses, and look under the
pillow of the virginal bed I had just made myself. Once I found
eight one-dollar notes in one of her books (fittingly — Treasure
2,3 Island), and once a hole in the wall behind Whistler’s Mother
yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and some change — say
twenty-four sixty — which I quietly removed, upon which, next
day, she accused, to my face, honest Mrs. Holigan of being a
filthy thief. Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer
hoarding place which I never discovered; but by that time I
had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the
[ i86 ]
hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school’s
theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that
she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient
cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured
out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might some-
how reach Broadway or Hollywood — or the foul kitchen of a
diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the
wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars,
and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead. 1
8
I did my best, your Honor, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh,
I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for 2
Teens, to find out how to behave!
A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend.
Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys
are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To
the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like
her. Today you clinch big deals in an executive’s office, but
yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school
books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that
her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and com-
pany of boys she likes? Don’t you want them to have whole-
some fun together?
Wholesome fun? Good Lord!
Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house?
Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out,
make them laugh and feel at ease?
Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.
If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of
her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your dis-
pleasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the
daughter of an old ogre.
[ 187 ]
First of all the old ogre drew up a list under “absolutely for- |
bidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.” Absolutely ’
forbidden were dates, single or double or triple — the next step j
being of course mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with j
her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young !
males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I j
promised her that if her group were invited by a socially ac- ■
ceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Boys for their annual
ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the ques-
tion whether a girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a |
kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like fla-
mingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our
house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl ;
friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at ■
the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my
regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with '
a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl
parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot i
in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if “only discussing his
relations with a friend of mine.”
Lo was enraged by all this — called me a lousy crook and worse
— and I would probably have lost my temper had I not soon
discovered, to my sweetest relief, that what really angered her
was my depriving her not of a specific satisfaction but of a
general right. I was impinging, you see, on the conventional
program, the stock pastimes, the “things that are done,” the
routine of youth; for there is nothing more conservative than
a child, especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet,
the most mythopoeic nymphet in October’s orchard-haze.
Do not misunderstand me. I cannot be absolutely certain that
in the course of the winter she did not manage to have, in a
casual way, improper contacts with unknown young fellows; of
course, no matter how closely I controlled her leisure, there
1 would constantly occur unaccounted-for time leaks with over-
elaborate explanations to stop them up in retrospect; of course,
my jealousy would constantly catch its jagged claw in the fine ■
fabrics of nymphet falsity; but I did definitely feel — and can now j
[ i88 ]
vouchsafe for the accuracy of my feeling — that there was no rea-
son for serious alarm. I felt that way not because I never once
discovered any palpable hard young throat to crush among the
masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the background;
but because it was to me “overwhelmingly obvious” (a favorite
expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school
boys=~from the perspiring nincompoop whom “holding hands”
thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up
car — equally bored my sophisticated young mistress. “All this
noise about boys gags me,” she had scrawled on the inside of a
schoolbook, and underneath, in Mona’s hand (Mona is due
any minute now), there was the sly quip: “What about Rigger?”
(due too).
Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her
company. There was for instance Red Sweater who one day, the
day we had the first snow — saw her home; from the parlor win-
dow I observed them talking near our porch. She wore her first
cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my
favorite hairdo — the fringe in front and the swirl at the sides
and the natural curls at the back — and her damp-dark moccasins
and white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual
her books to her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet
gestured all the time: she would stand on her left instep with
her right toe, remove it backward, cross her feet, rock slightly,
sketch a few steps, and then start the series all over again. There
was Windbreaker who talked to her in front of a restaurant one
Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister attempted to walk
me away for a chat; I dragged along and looked back at my only
love. She had developed more than one conventional manner-
ism, such as the polite adolescent way of showing one is literally
“doubled up” with laughter by inclining one’s head, and so
(as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless merriment, she
walked backward a couple of steps, and then faced about, and
walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I
greatly liked — perhaps because it reminded me of her first un-
forgettable confession — her trick of sighing “oh dear!” in humor-
ous wistful submission to fate, or emitting a long “no-o” in a
[ 189 ]
deep almost growling undertone when the blow of fate had ^
actually fallen. Above all — since we are speaking of movement *
and youth — I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer j
Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to I
work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture !
while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our
mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a magazine she
found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side
of her upperlip and push off with her foot, and again sprint ^
through pale shade and sun. i
On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her sur- '
roundings than I had hoped she would be when considering :
my spoiled slave-child and the bangles of demeanor she naively !
affected the winter before in California. Although I could never i
get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the !
great, the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the
way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed after a session ,
of adoration and despair in Lolita’s cold bedroom, I used to i
review the concluded day by checking my own image as it®
prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye. I watched i
dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic, probably high-church, pos-
sibly very high-church. Dr. Humbert see his daughter off to
school. I watched him greet with his slow smile and pleasantly
arched thick black ad-eyebrows good Mrs. Holigan, who smelled
of the plague (and would head, I knew, for master’s gin at the
first opportunity). With Mr. West, retired executioner or writer
of religious tracts — who cared? — I saw neighbor what’s his name,
I think they are French or Swiss, meditate in his frank-windowed
study over a typewriter, rather gaunt-profiled, an almost Hitlerian ^
cowlick on his pale brow. Weekends, wearing a well-tailored over-
coat and brown gloves. Professor H. might be seen with his
daughter strolling to Walton Inn (famous for its violet-ribboned
china bunnies and chocolate boxes among which you sit and wait
for a “table for two” still filthy with your predecessor’s crumbs).
Seen on weekdays, around one p.m., saluting with dignity Argus-
eyed East while maneuvering the car out of the garage and around
the damned evergreens, and down onto the slippery road. Raising
[ 190 ]
a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley
College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified
in the overflow of human knowledge. Walking across the campus
with the college clergyman, the Rev. Rigger (who also taught
Bible in Beardsley School). “Somebody told me her mother was
a celebrated actress killed in an airplane accident. Oh? My mis- i
take, I presume. Is that so? I see. How sad.” (Sublimating her
mother, eh?) Slowly pushing my little pram through the laby-
rinth of the supermarket, in the wake of Professor W., also a
slow-moving and gentle widower with the eyes of a goat. Shovel-
ing the snow in my shirt-sleeves, a voluminous black and white
muffler around my neck. Following with no show of rapacious
haste (even taking time to wipe my feet on the mat) my school-
girl daughter into the house. Taking Dolly to the dentist — pretty
nurse beaming at her — old magazines — ne vi07itrez pas vos
zhaiubes. At dinner with Dolly in town, Mr. Edgar H. Humbert 2 , 3
was seen eating his steak in the continental knife-and-fork
manner. Enjoying, in duplicate, a concert: two marble-faced, be-
calmed Erenchmen sitting side by side, with Monsieur H. H.’s
musical little girl on her father’s right, and the musical little boy
of Professor W. (father spending a hygienic evening in Provi-
dence) on Monsieur G. G.’s left. Opening the garage, a square 4
of light that engulfs the car and is extinguished. Brightly paja-
maed, jerking down the window shade in Dolly’s bedroom. Satur-
day morning, unseen, solemnly weighing the winter-bleached
lassie in the bathroom. Seen and heard Sunday morning, no
churchgoer after all, saying don’t be too late, to Dolly who is
bound for the covered court. Letting in a queerly observant
schoolmate of Dolly’s: “First time I’ve seen a man wearing a
smoking jacket, sir — except in movies, of course.”
9
Her girl friends, whom I had looked forward to meet, proved
on the whole disappointing. There was Opal Something, and
Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman, and Eva Rosen, and Mona Dahl 5
[ 191 ]
1 (save one, all these names are approximations, of course). Opal
was a bashful, formless, bespectacled, bepimpled creature who
doted on Dolly who bullied her. With Linda Hall the school
tennis champion, Dolly played singles at least twice a week: I
suspect Linda was a true nymphet, but for some unknown reason
she did not come — was perhaps not allowed to come — to our
house; so I recall her only as a flash of natural sunshine on an
indoor court. Of the rest, none had any claims to nymphetry
except Eva Rosen. Avis was a plump lateral child with hairy legs,
while Mona, though handsome in a coarse sensual way and only
a year older than my aging mistress, had obviously long ceased to
be a nymphet, if she ever had been one. Eva Rosen, a displaced
little person from France, was on the other hand a good example
of a not strikingly beautiful child revealing to the perspicacious
amateur some of the basic elements of nymphet charm, such as
a perfect pubescent figure and lingering eyes and high cheek-
bones. Her glossy copper hair had Lolita’s silkiness, and the fea-
tures of her delicate milky- white face with pink lips and silverfish
eyelashes were less foxy than those of her likes — the great clan of
intra-racial redheads; nor did she sport their green uniform but
wore, as I remember her, a lot of black or cherry dark — a
very smart black pullover, for instance, and high-heeled black
shoes, and garnet-red fingernail polish. I spoke French to her
(much to Lo’s disgust). The child’s tonalities were still admi-
rably pure, but for school words and play words she resorted to
current American and then a slight Brooklyn accent would crop
up in her speech, which was amusing in a little Parisian who went
to a select New England school with phoney British aspirations.
Unfortunately, despite “that French kid’s uncle” being “a mil-
lionaire,” Lo dropped Eva for some reason before I had had time
to enjoy in my modest way her fragrant presence in the Hum-
bert open house. The reader knows what importance I attached
to having a bevy of page girls, consolation prize nymphets, around
my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my senses in
Mona Dahl who was a good deal around, especially during the
spring term when Lo and she got so enthusiastic about dramatics.
I have often wondered what secrets outrageously treacherous
[ 192 ]
Dolores Haze had imparted to Mona while blurting out to me
by urgent and well-paid request various really incredible details
concerning an affair that Mona had had with a marine at the sea-
side. It was characteristic of Lo that she chose for her closest
chum that elegant, cold, lascivious, experienced young female
whom I once heard (misheard, Lo swore) cheerfully say in the
hallway to Lo — who had remarked that her (Lo’s) sweater was of
virgin wool: “The only thing about you that is, kiddo . . She
had a curiously husky voice, artificially waved dull dark hair,
earrings, amber-brown prominent eyes and luscious lips. Lo said
teachers had remonstrated with her on her loading herself with
so much costume jewelry. Her hands trembled. She was burdened
with a 1 50 I.Q. And I also know she had a tremendous chocolate-
brown mole on her womanish back which I inspected the night
Lo and she had worn low-cut pastel-colored, vaporous dresses for
a dance at the Butler Academy.
I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my mem-
ory all over the keyboard of that school year. In meeting my at-
tempts to find out what kind of boys Lo knew. Miss Dahl was
elegantly evasive. Lo who had gone to play tennis at Linda’s
country club had telephoned she might be a full half hour late,
and so, would I entertain Mona who was coming to practice with
her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the modu-
lations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of
and staring at me with perhaps — could I be mistaken? — a faint
gleam of crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: “Well, sir,
the fact is Dolly is not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is,
we are rivals. She and I have a crush on the Reverend Rigger.”
(This was a joke — I have already mentioned that gloomy giant of
a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to near murder
with his impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents that
I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.)
How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A
panic. Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh, not a fright-
ful lot, just as much as she could stand. What did she, languor-
ous Mona, think of Lo? Sir? Did she think Lo was doing well at
school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a kid. But her general be-
[ 193 ]
havior was — ? Oh, she was a swell kid. But still? “Oh, she’s a
doll,” concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a
book that happened to lie at hand, and with a change of expres-
sion, falsely furrowing her brow, inquired: “Do tell me about
1 Ball Zack, sir. Is he really that good?” She moved up so close to
my chair that I made out through lotions and creams her un-
interesting skin scent. A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my
Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the wrong substitute.
Avoiding Mona’s cool ga7X, I talked literature for a minute.
Then Dolly arrived — and slit her pale eyes at us. I left the two
friends to their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a
small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was
glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained
rectangles and its asymmetrical position — a knight’s move from
the top — always strangely disturbed me.
10
Sometimes . . . Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you
recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart
have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in
reply to your question), while Lolita would be haphazardly pre-
paring her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an
easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my
pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my mascu-
line pride — and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my
2 Lolita! You would give me one look — a gray furry question mark
of a look: “Oh no, not again” (incredulity, exasperation) ; for you
never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific de-
signs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling!
The fragility of those bare arms of yours — how I longed to enfold
them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take
your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-
skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and —
“Pulease, leave me alone, will you,” you would say, “for Christ’s
[ 194 ]
sake leave me alone.” And I would get up from the floor while
you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of
my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute,
never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.
11
One Monday forenoon, in December I think, Pratt asked me
to come over for a talk. Dolly’s last report had been poor, 1
knew. But instead of contenting myself with some such plausible
explanation of this summons, I imagined all sorts of horrors, and
had to fortify myself with a pint of my “pin” before I could face
the interview. Slowly, all Adam’s apple and heart, I went up the
steps of the scaffold.
A huge woman, gray-haired, frowsy, with a broad flat nose and
small eyes behind black-rimmed glasses — “Sit down,” she said,
pointing to an informal and humiliating hassock, while she
perched with ponderous spryness on the arm of an oak chair.
For a moment or two, she peered at me with smiling curiosity.
She had done it at our first meeting, I recalled, but I could
afford then to scowl back. Her eye left me. She lapsed into
thought- — probably assumed. Making up her mind she rubbed,
fold on fold, her dark gray flannel skirt at the knee, dispelling a
trace of chalk or something. Then she said, still rubbing, not
looking up:
“Let me ask a blunt question, Mr. Haze. You are an old-
fashioned Continental father, aren’t you?”
“Why, no,” I said, “conservative, perhaps, but not what you l
would call old-fashioned.”
She sighed, frowned, then clapped her big plump hands to-
gether in a let’s-get-down-to-business manner, and again fixed her
beady eyes upon me.
“Dolly Haze,” she said, “is a lovely child, but the onset of
sexual maturing seems to give her trouble.”
' I bowed slightly. What else could I do?
[ 19s ]
“She is still shuttling,” said Miss Pratt, showing how with her !
liver-spotted hands, “between the anal and genital zones of
development. Basically she is a lovely — ”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, “what zones?”
“That’s the old-fashioned European in you!” cried Pratt de- i
livering a slight tap on my wrist watch and suddenly disclosing ,
her dentures. “All I mean is that biologic and psychologic drives |
— do you smoke? — are not fused in Dolly, do not fall so to speak j
into a — into a rounded pattern.” Her hands held for a moment '
an invisible melon.
‘^She is attractive, bright though careless” (breathing heavily, i
without leaving her perch, the woman took time out to look at
the lovely child’s report sheet on the desk at her right). “Her
marks are getting worse and worse. Now I wonder, Mr. Haze — ”
Again the false meditation.
“Well,” she went on with zest, “as for me, I do smoke, and,
as dear Dr. Pierce used to say: I’m not proud of it but I jeest
love it.” She lit up and the smoke she exhaled from her nostrils
was like a pair of tusks.
“Let me give you a few details, it won’t take a moment. Now
let me see [rummaging among her papers]. She is defiant toward
Miss Redcock and impossibly rude to Miss Cormorant. Now
here is one of our special research reports: Enjoys singing with
group in class though mind seems to wander. Crosses her knees
and wags left leg to rhythm. Type of by-words: a two-hundred-
forty-two word area of the commonest pubescent slang fenced in
by a number of obviously European polysyllables. Sighs a good
deal in class. Let me see. Yes. Now comes the last week in No-
vember. Sighs a good deal in class. Chews gum vehemently.
Does not bite her nails though if she did, this would conform
better to her general pattern — scientifically speaking, of course.
Menstruation, according to the subject, well established. Be-
longs at present to no church organization. By the way, Mr.
Haze, her mother was — ? Oh, I see. And you are — ? Nobody’s
business is, I suppose, God’s business. Something else we wanted
to know. She has no regular home duties, I understand. Making
a princess of your Dolly, Mr. Haze, eh? Well, what else have we
[ i9<5 ]
got here? Handles books gracefully. Voice pleasant. Giggles
rather often. A littly dreamy. Has private jokes of her own, trans-
posing for instance the first letters of some of her teachers’ names, l
Hair light and dark brown, lustrous — well [laughing] you are
aware of that, I suppose. Nose unobstructed, feet high-arched,
eyes — let me see, I had here somewhere a still more recent re-
port. Aha, here we are. Miss Gold says Dolly’s tennis form is
excellent to superb, even better than Linda Hall’s, but concen-
tration and point-accumulation are just “poor to fair.” Miss
Cormorant cannot decide whether Dolly has exceptional emo-
tional control or none at all. Miss Horn reports she — I mean,
Dolly- — cannot verbalize her emotions, while according to Miss
Cole Dolly’s metabolic efficiency is superfine. Miss Molar thinks 2
Dolly is myopic and should see a good ophthalmologist, but
Miss Redcock insists that the girl simulates eye-strain to get
away with scholastic incompetence. And to conclude, Mr. Haze,
our researchers are wondering about something really crucial.
Now I want to ask you something. I want to know if your poor
wife, or yourself, or anyone else in the family — I understand she
has several aunts and a maternal grandfather in California? — oh,
had! — I’m sorry — well, we all wonder if anybody in the family
has instructed Dolly in the process of mammalian reproduction.
The general impression is that fifteen-year-old Dolly remains
morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, re-
presses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-
dignity. All right — fourteen. You see, Mr. Haze, Beardsley School
does not believe in bees and blossoms, and storks and love birds,
but it does believe very strongly in preparing its students for
mutually satisfactory mating and successful child rearing. We
feel Dolly could make excellent progress if only she would put
her mind to her work. Miss Cormorant’s report is significant in
that respect. Dolly is inclined to be, mildly speaking, impudent.
But all feel that priino, you should have your family doctor tell
her the facts of life and, semndo, that you allow her to enjoy the
company of her schoolmates’ brothers at the Junior Club or in
Dr. Rigger’s organization, or in the lovely homes of our parents.”
“She may meet boys at her own lovely home,” I said.
[ 197 ]
“I hope she will,” said Pratt buoyantly. ‘“When we questioned
her about her troubles, Dolly refused to discuss the home situa-
tion, but we have spoken to some of her friends and really —
well, for example, we insist you un-veto her nonparticipation in
the dramatic group. You just must allow her to take part in The
Himted Enchanters. She was such a perfect little nymph in the
try-out, and sometime in spring the author will stay for a few
days at Beardsley College and may attend a rehearsal or two in
our new auditorium. I mean it is all part of the fun of being
young and alive and beautiful. You must understand — ”
“I always thought of myself,” I said, “as a very understanding
father.”
“Oh no doubt, no doubt, but Miss Cormorant thinks, and I
am inclined to agree with her, that Dolly is obsessed by sexual
thoughts for which she finds no outlet, and will tease and martyr-
ize other girls, or even our younger instructors because they do
have innocent dates with boys.”
Shrugged my shoulders. A shabby hnigre.
“Let us put our two heads together, Mr. Haze. What on earth
is wrong with that child?”
“She seems quite normal and happy to me,” I said (disaster
coming at last? was I found out? had they got some hypnotist?).
“What worries me,” said Miss Pratt looking at her watch and
starting to go over the whole subject again, “is that both teachers
and schoolmates find Dolly antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey —
and everybody wonders why you are so firmly opposed to all the
natural recreations of a normal child.”
“Do you mean sex play?” I asked jauntily, in despair, a cor-
nered old rat.
“Well, I certainly welcome this civilized terminology,” said
Pratt with a grin. “But this is not quite the point. Under the
auspices of Beardsley School, dramatics, dances and other natural
activities are not technically sex play, though girls do meet boys,
if that is what you object to.”
“All right,” I said, my hassock exhaling a weary sigh. “You
win. She can take part in that play. Provided male parts are
taken by female parts.”
[ 198 ]
“I am always fascinated,” said Pratt, “by the admirable way
foreigners — or at least naturalized Americans — use our rich
language. I’m sure Miss Gold, who conducts the play group, will
be overjoyed. I notice she is one of the few teachers that seem
to like — I mean who seem to find Dolly manageable. This takes
care of general topics, I guess; now comes a special matter. We
are in trouble again.”
Pratt paused truculently, then rubbed her index finger under
her nostrils with such vigor that her nose performed a kind of
war dance.
“I’m a frank person,” she said, “but conventions are conven-
tions, and I find it difficult . . . Let me put it this way . . . The
Walkers, who live in what we call around here the Duke’s
Manor, you know the great gray house on the hill — they send
their two girls to our school, and we have the niece of President
Moore with us, a really gracious child, not to speak of a number
of other prominent children. Well, under the circumstances, it
is rather a jolt when Dolly, who looks like a little lady, uses
words which you as a foreigner probably simply do not know or
do not understand. Perhaps it might be better— Would you like
me to have Dolly come up here right away to discuss things? No?
You see — oh well, let’s have it out. Dolly has written a most
obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-
Mexican for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets
which Miss Redcock, who is getting married in June, distributed
among the girls, and we thought she should stay after hours —
another half hour at least. But if you like — ”
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to interfere with rules. I shall talk
to her later. I shall thrash it out.”
“Do,” said the woman rising from her chair arm. “And per-
haps we can get together again soon, and if things do not im-
prove we might have Dr. Cutler analyze her.”
Should I marry Pratt and strangle her?
“. . . And perhaps your family doctor might like to examine
her physically — just a routine check-up. She is in Mushroom — 1
the last classroom along that passage.”
Beardsley School, it may be explained, copied a famous girls’
[ 199 ]
2
school in England by having “traditional” nicknames for its
various classrooms: Mushroom, Room-In 8, B-room, Room-BA
1 and so on. Mushroom was smelly, with a sepia print of Reynolds’
“Age of Innocence” above the chalkboard, and several rows of
clumsy-looking pupil desks. At one of these, my Lolita was read-
2 ing the chapter on “Dialogue” in Baker’s Dramatic Technique,
and all was very quiet, and there was another girl with a very
naked, porcelain-white neck and wonderful platinum hair, who '
sat in front reading too, absolutely lost to the world and inter-
minably winding a soft curl around one finger, and I sat beside
Dolly just behind that neck and that hair, and unbuttoned my
overcoat and for sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate
in the school play, had Dolly put her inky, chalky, red-knuckled
hand under the desk. Oh, stupid and reckless of me, no doubt,
but after the torture I had been subjected to, I simply had to
take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur
again.
12
Around Christmas she caught a bad chill and was examined by
3 a friend of Miss Lester, a Dr. Use Tristramson (hi. Use, you were
a dear, uninquisitive soul, and you touched my dove very gently). \
She diagnosed bronchitis, patted Lo on the back (all its bloom '
erect because of the fever) and put her to bed for a week or i
longer. At first she “ran a temperature” in American parlance,
4 and I could not resist the exquisite caloricity of unexpected de- i
5 lights — Venus febriculosa — though it was a very languid Lolita
that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace. And as
soon as she was well again, I threw a Party with Boys.
Perhaps I had drunk a little too much in preparation for the
ordeal. Perhaps I made a fool of myself. The girls had decorated
and plugged in a small fir tree — German' custom, except that
colored bulbs had superseded wax candles. Records were chosen
and fed into my landlord’s phonograph. Chic Dolly wore a nice
gray dress with fitted bodice and flared skirt. Humming, I retired
[ 200 ]
to my study upstairs — and then every ten or twenty minutes I
would come down like an idiot just for a few seconds; to pick
up ostensibly my pipe from the mantelpiece or hunt for the news-
paper; and with every new visit these simple actions became
harder to perform, and I was reminded of the dreadfully distant
days when I used to brace myself to casually enter a room in the
Ramsdale house where Little Carmen was on.
The party was not a success. Of the three girls invited, one
did not come at all, and one of the boys brought his cousin Roy,
so there was a superfluity of two boys, and the cousins knew all
the steps, and the other fellows could hardly dance at all, and
most of the evening was spent in messing up the kitchen, and
then endlessly jabbering about what card game to play, and
sometime later, two girls and four boys sat on the floor of the
living room, with all windows open, and played a word game
which Opal could not be made to understand, while Mona and
Roy, a lean handsome lad, drank ginger ale in the kitchen, sitting
on the table and dangling their legs, and hotly discussing Pre-
destination and the Law of Averages. After they had all gone
my Lo said ugh, closed her eyes, and dropped into a chair with all
four limbs starfished to express the utmost disgust and exhaus-
tion and swore it was the most revolting bunch of boys she had
ever seen. I bought her a new tennis racket for that remark.
January was humid and warm, and February fooled the for-
sythia: none of the townspeople had ever seen such weather.
Other presents came tumbling in. For her birthday I bought her
a bicycle, the doe-like and altogether charming machine already
mentioned — and added to this a History of Modern American
fainting: her bicycle manner, I mean her approach to it, the hip
movement in mounting, the grace and so on, afforded me su-
preme pleasure; but my attempt to refine her pictorial taste was
a failure; she wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on Doris
Lee’s hay was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the
foreground, and could not understand why I said Grant Wood
or Peter Hurd was good, and Reginald Marsh or Frederick
Waugh awful. 1
[ 201 ]
13
By the time spring had touched up Thayer Street with yellow
and green and pink, Lolita was irrevocably stage-struck. Pratt,
whom I chanced to notice one Sunday lunching with some
people at Walton Inn, caught my eye from afar and went
through the motion of sympathetically and discreetly clapping
her hands while Lo was not looking. I detest the theatre as being
a primitive and putrid form, historically speaking; a form that
smacks of stone-age rites and communal nonsense despite those
1 individual injections of genius, such as, say, Elizabethan poetry
which a closeted reader automatically pumps out of the stuff.
Being much occupied at the time with my own literary labors, I
did not bother to read the complete text of The Enchanted
Hujiters, the playlet in which Dolores Haze was assigned the part
of a farmer’s daughter who imagines herself to be a woodland
2 witch, or Diana, or something, and who, having got hold of a
book on hypnotism, plunges a number of lost hunters into
various entertaining trances before falling in her turn under the
spell of a vagabond poet (Mona Dahl). That much I gleaned
from bits of crumpled and poorly typed script that Lo sowed all
over the house. The coincidence of the title with the name of an
unforgettable inn was pleasant in a sad little way; I wearily
thought I had better not bring it to my own enchantress’s notice,
lest a brazen accusation of mawkishness hurt me even more than
her failure to notice it for herself had done. I assumed the playlet
was just another, practically anonymous, version of some banal
legend. Nothing prevented one, of course, from supposing that
in quest of an attractive name the founder of the hotel had been
immediately and solely influenced by the chance fantasy of the
second-rate muralist he had hired, and that subsequently the
3 hotel’s name had suggested the play’s title. But in my credulous,
simple, benevolent mind I happened to twist it the other way
round, and without giving the whole matter much thought really,
supposed that mural, name and title had all been derived from a
common source, from some local tradition, which I, an alien
unversed in New England lore, would not be supposed to know.
[ 202 ]
In consequence I was under the impression (all this quite
casually, you understand, quite outside any orbit of importance)
that the accursed playlet belonged to the type of whimsey for
juvenile consumption, arranged and rearranged many times, such
as Hajjsel and Gretel by Richard Roe, or The Sleeping Beauty 1,2
by Dorothy Doe, or The Emperor'’ s New Clothes by Maurice
Vermont and Marion Rumpelmeyer — all this to be found in any 3
Plays for School Actors or LePs Have a Play! In other words, I
did not know — and would not have cared, if I did — that actually
The Enchanted Hunters was a quite recent and technically
original composition which had been produced for the first
time only three or four months ago by a highbrow group in New
York. To me — inasmuch as I could judge from my charmer’s
part — it seemed to be a pretty dismal kind of fancy work, with
echoes from Lenormand and Maeterlinck and various quiet 4, 5
British dreamers. The red-capped, uniformly attired hunters, of 6
which one was a banker, another a plumber, a third a policeman,
a fourth an undertaker, a fifth an underwriter, a sixth an escaped
convict (you see the possibilities!), went through a complete
change of mind in Dolly’s Dell, and remembered their real lives
only as dreams or nightmares from which little Diana had
aroused them; but a seventh Hunter (in a gree?! cap, the fool) 7
was a Young Poet, and he insisted, much to Diana’s annoyance,
that she and the entertainment provided (dancing nymphs, and
elves, and monsters) were his, the Poet’s, invention. I under- 8
stand that finally, in utter disgust at this cocksureness, barefooted
Dolores was to lead check-trousered Mona to the paternal farm
behind the Perilous Forest to prove to the braggard she was not
a poet’s fancy, but a rustic, down-to-brown-earth lass — and a last-
minute kiss was to enforce the play’s profound message, namely,
that mirage and reality merge in love. I considered it wiser not
to criticize the thing in front of Lo: she was so healthily en-
grossed in “problems of expression,” and so charmingly did she
put her narrow Florentine hands together, batting her eyelashes
and pleading with me not to come to rehearsals as some ridicu-
lous parents did because she wanted to dazzle me with a perfect
First Night — and because I was, anyway, always butting in and
[ 203 ]
saying the wrong thing, and cramping her style in the presence
of other people.
There was one very special rehearsal . . . my heart, my heart . . .
there was one day in May marked by a lot of gay flurry — it all
rolled past, beyond my ken, immune to my memory, and when
I saw Lo next, in the late afternoon, balancing on her bike, press-
ing the palm of her hand to the damp bark of a young birch tree
on the edge of our lawn, I was so struck by the radiant tenderness
of her smile that for an instant I believed all our troubles gone.
“Can you remember,” she said, “what was the name of that
hotel, yoic know [nose puckered], come on, you know — with
those white columns and the marble swan in the lobby? Oh, you
know [noisy exhalation of breath] — the hotel where you raped
me. Okay, skip it. I mean, was it [almost in a whisper] The En-
1 chanted Hunters? Oh, it was? [musingly] Was it?” — and with
a yelp of amorous vernal laughter she slapped the glossy bole and
tore uphill, to the end of the street, and then rode back, feet at
rest on stopped pedals, posture relaxed, one hand dreaming in
her print-flowered lap.
14
Because it supposedly tied up with her interest in dance and
dramatics, I had permitted Lo to take piano lessons with a Miss
2 Emperor (as we French scholars may conveniently call her) to
whose blue-shuttered little white house a mile or so beyond
Beardsley Lo would spin off twice a week. One Friday night
toward the end of May (and a week or so after the very special
rehearsal Lo had not had me attend) the telephone in my study,
3 where I was in the act of mopping up Gustave’s — I mean Gas-
ton’s — king’s side, rang and Miss Emperor asked if Lo was com-
ing next Tuesday because she had missed last Tuesday’s and
today’s lessons. I said she would by all means — and went on with
the game. As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now
impaired, and a move or two later, with Gaston to play, I noticed
[ 204 ]
through the film of my general distress that he could collect my
queen; he noticed it too, but thinking it might be a trap on the
part of his tricky opponent, he demurred for quite a minute,
and puffed and wheezed, and shook his jowls, and even shot
furtive glances at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with his
pudgily bunched fingers — dying to take that juicy queen and not
daring — and all of a sudden he swooped down upon it (who knows
if it did not teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a
dreary hour in achieving a draw. He finished his brandy and
presently lumbered away, quite satisfied with this result {mon
paiivre ami, je 7ie voiis ai jai/iais revii et quoiqii’il y ait bien peu
de chance que vous voyiez mon livre, permettez-moi de vons
dire qiie je vons serre la tnain bien cordialeme7it, et que toutes
77ies fillettes vous saluetit). I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen l
table, consuming a wedge of pie, with her eyes fixed on her
script. They rose to meet mine with a kind of celestial vapidity.
She remained singularly unruffled when confronted with my
discovery, and said d'trn petit air jaussetnent contrit that she 2
knew she was a very wicked kid, but simply had not been able to
resist the enchantment, and had used up those music hours — O
Reader, My Reader! — in a nearby public park rehearsing the
magic forest scene with Mona. I said “fine” — and stalked to the 3
telephone. Mona’s mother answered: “Oh yes, she’s in” and re-
treated with a mother’s neutral laugh of polite pleasure to shout
off stage “Roy calling!” and the very next moment Mona rustled
up, and forthwith, in a low monotonous not untender voice
started berating Roy for something he had said or done and I
'nterrupted her, and presently Mona was saying in her humblest,
sexiest contralto, “yes, sir,” “surely, sir,” “I am alone to blame,
sir, in this unfortunate business,” (what elocution! what poise!)
‘‘honest, I feel very bad about it” — and so on and so forth as
i :hose little harlots say.
So downstairs I went clearing my throat and holding my
peart. Lo was now in the living room, in her favorite overstuffed
i'shair. As she sprawled there, biting at a hangnail and mocking
Ijne with her heartless vaporous eyes, and all the time rocking a
‘tool upon which she had placed the heel of an outstretched
I [ 205 ]
shoeless foot, I perceived all at once with a sickening qualm how
much she had changed since I first met her two years ago. Or had
this happened during those last two weeks? Tendresse? Surely
that was an exploded myth. She sat right in the focus of my
incandescent anger. The fog of all lust had been swept away
leaving nothing but this dreadful lucidity. Oh, she had changed!
Her complexion was now that of any vulgar untidy highschool
girl who applies shared cosmetics with grubby fingers to an un-
washed face and does not mind what soiled texture, what pustu-
late epidermis comes in contact with her skin. Its smooth tender
bloom had been so lovely in former days, so bright with tears,
when I used to roll, in play, her tousled head on my knee. A
coarse flush had now replaced that innocent fluorescence. What
was locally known as a “rabbit cold” had painted with flaming
pink the edges of her contemptuous nostrils. As in terror I
lowered my gaze, it mechanically slid along the underside of her
tensely stretched bare thigh — how polished and muscular her
legs had grown! She kept her wide-set eyes, clouded-glass gray ’
and slightly bloodshot, fixed upon me, and I saw the stealthy
thought showing through them that perhaps after all Mona
was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose me without getting
penalized herself. How wrong I was. How mad I was! Every-
thing about her was of the same exasperating impenetrable order ■
— the strength of her shapely legs, the dirty sole of her white j
sock, the thick sweater she wore despite the closeness of the !
room, her wenchy smell, and especially the dead end of her
face with its strange flush and freshly made-up lips. Some of the
red had left stains on her front teeth, and I was struck by a
ghastly recollection — the evoked image not of Monique, but
of another young prostitute in a bell-house, ages ago, who had
been snapped up by somebody else before I had time to decide
whether her mere youth warranted my risking some appalling
disease, and who had just such flushed prominent pommettes
and a dead 7naman, and big front teeth, and a bit of dingy red
ribbon in her country-brown hair.
“Well, speak,” said Lo. “Was the corroboration satisfactory?”
[ 206 ]
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Perfect. Yes. And I do not doubt you two
made it up. As a matter of fact, I do not doubt you have told her
everything about us.”
“Oh, yah?”
I controlled my breath and said; “Dolores, this must stop right
away. I am ready to yank you out of Beardsley and lock you up
you know where, but this must stop. I am ready to take you away
the time it takes to pack a suitcase. This must stop or else any-
thing may happen.”
“Anything may happen, huh?”
I snatched away the stool she was rocking with her heel and
her foot fell with a thud on the floor.
“Hey,” she cried, “take it easy.”
“First of all you go upstairs,” I cried in my turn, — and simul-
taneously grabbed at her and pulled her up. From that moment,
I stopped restraining my voice, and we continued yelling at each
other, and she said unprintable things. She said she loathed me.
She made monstrous faces at me, inflating her cheeks and pro-
ducing a diabolical plopping sound. She said I had attempted to
violate her several times when I was her mother’s roomer. She
said she was sure I had murdered her mother. She said she would
sleep with the very first fellow who asked her and I could do
nothing about it. I said she was to go upstairs and show me all
her hiding places. It was a strident and hateful scene. I held
her by her knobby wrist and she kept turning and twisting it this
way and that, surreptitiously trying to find a weak point so as to
wrench herself free at a favorable moment, but I held her quite
hard and in fact hurt her rather badly for which I hope my heart
may rot, and once or twice she jerked her arm so violently that I
feared her wrist might snap, and all the while she stared at me
with those unforgettable eyes where cold anger and hot tears
struggled, and our voices were drowning the telephone, and
when I grew aware of its ringing she instantly escaped.
With people in movies I seem to share the services of the
machina telephonica and its sudden god. This time it was an
irate neighbor. The east window happened to be agape in the
, [ 207 ]
living room, with the blind mercifully down, however; and be-
hind it the damp black night of a sour New England spring had
been breathlessly listening to us. I had always thought that type
1 of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of
considerable literary inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am
convinced that prude and prurient Miss East — or to explode her
incognito. Miss Eenton Lebone — had been probably protruding
three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she strove to
catch the gist of our quarrel. j
“. . . This racket . . . lacks all sense of . . .” quacked the receiver,!
“we do not live in a tenement here. I must emphatically ...”
I apologized for my daughter’s friends being so loud. Young
people, you know — and cradled the next quack and a half. |
Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped? l!
Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous^
ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark — hub of
bicycle wheel — moved, shivered, and she was gone. ,
It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair}
shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue ori
foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years
have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night
street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before
their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Eabian’si
2, 3 dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three
steps and run three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chest-
nut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron;
railing, a blurred youth held and kissed — no, not her, mistake
My talons still tingling, I flew on.
Half a mile or so east of number fourteen, Thayer Street
tangles with a private lane and a cross street; the latter leads tc
the town proper; in front of the first drugstore, I saw — with wha^
melody of relief! — Lolita’s fair bicycle waiting for her. I pusheq
instead of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled, and entered. Loot
out! Some ten paces away Lolita, through the glass of a tele!
phone booth (membranous god still with us), cupping the tube!
confidentially hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned awa^
[ 208 ]
with her treasure, hurriedly hung up, and walked out with a i
flourish.
“Tried to reach you at home,” she said brightly. “A great
decision has been made. But first buy me a drink, dad.”
She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour
in the coke, add the cherry syrup — and my heart was bursting
with love-ache. That childish wrist. My lovely child. You have a
lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes
by. Mr. Pirn watched Pippa suck in the concoction. 2
}'ai tonjours admire Pceuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois. 3
And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.
“Look,” she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot
scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk, “look. I’ve decided some-
thing. I want to leave school. I hate that school. I hate the play,
I really do! Never go back. Find another. Leave at once. Go for
a long trip again. But this time we’ll go wherever / want, won’t
we?”
I nodded. My Lolita.
“I choose? Cest entendu?’’'’ she asked wobbling a little beside 4
me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl.
“Okay. Entendu. Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you’ll get 5
soaked.” (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.)
She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashion,
leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird.
Miss Lester’s finely groomed hand held a porch-door open for
1 waddling old dog qtd prejiait son temps. 6
Lo was waiting for me near the ghostly birch tree.
“I am drenched,” she declared at the top of her voice. “Are
/ou glad? To hell with the play! See what I mean?”
An invisible hag’s claw slammed down an upper-floor window.
In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita
oeeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards
ne two bare arms, raised one knee:
“Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic to-night.”
It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have
he ability — a most singular case, I presume — of shedding tor-
ents of tears throughout the other tempest.
[ 209 ]
15
The brakes were relined, the waterpipes unclogged, the valves
ground, and a number of other repairs and improvements were
paid for by not very mechanically-minded but prudent papa
Humbert, so that the late Mrs. Humbert’s car was in respectable
shape when ready to undertake a new journey.
We had promised Beardsley School, good old Beardsley
School, that we would be back as soon as my Hollywood engage-
ment came to an end (inventive Humbert was to be, I hinted, '
chief consultant in the production of a film dealing with “ex-
istentialism,” still a hot thing at the time). Actually I was toying
with the idea of gently trickling across the Mexican border — I
was braver now than last year — and there deciding what to do
with my little concubine who was now sixty inches tall and
weighed ninety pounds. We had dug out our tour books and i
maps. She had traced our route with immense zest. Was it thanks i
to those theatricals that she had now outgrown her juvenile
jaded airs and was so adorably keen to explore rich reality? I
experienced the queer lightness of dreams that pale but warm i
1 Sunday morning when we abandoned Professor Chem’s puzzled
house and sped along Main Street toward the four-lane highway, i
My Love’s striped, black-and-white, cotton frock, jaunty blue I
cap, white socks and brown moccasins were not quite in keeping
with the large beautifully cut aquamarine on a silver chainlet, j
which gemmed her throat: a spring rain gift from me. We passed I
the New Hotel, and she laughed. “A penny for your thoughts,” i
I said and she stretched out her palm at once, but at that
moment I had to apply the brakes rather abruptly at a red light.
As we pulled up, another car came to a gliding stop alongside, !
and a very striking looking, athletically lean young woman ,
(where had I seen her?) with a high complexion and shoulder- i
length brilliant bronze hair, greeted Lo with a ringing “Hi!” — i
2 and then, addressing me, effusively, edusively (placed!), stressing ■
certain words, said: “What a shai?ie it was to tear Dolly away ,
3 from the play — you should have heard the author raving about j
her after that rehearsal — ” “Green light, you dope,” said Lo t
[ 210 ]
under her breath, and simultaneously, waving in bright adieu a
bangled arm, Joan of Arc (in a performance we saw at the local
theatre) violently outdistanced us to swerve into Campus
Avenue.
“Who was it exactly? Vermont or Rumpelmeyer?”
“No — Edusa Gold — the gal who coaches us.” i
“I was not referring to her. Who exactly concocted that play?”
“Oh! Yes, of course. Some old woman, Clare Something, I 2
guess. There was quite a crowd of them there.”
“So she complimented you?”
“Complimented my eye — she kissed me on my pure brow” —
and my darling emitted that new yelp of merriment which —
perhaps in connection with her theatrical mannerisms — she had
lately begun to affect.
“You are a funny creature, Lolita,” I said — or some such words.
“Naturally, I am overjoyed you gave up that absurd stage busi-
ness. But what is curious is that you dropped the whole thing
only a week before its natural climax. Oh, Lolita, you should be 3
careful of those surrenders of yours. I remember you gave up
Ramsdale for camp, and camp for a joyride, and I could list
other abrupt changes in your disposition. You must be careful.
There are things that should never be given up. You must per-
severe. You should try to be a little nicer to me, Lolita. You
should also watch your diet. The tour of your thigh, you know,
should not exceed seventeen and a half inches. More might be
fatal (I was kidding, of course). We are now setting out on a
long happy journey. I remember — ”
16
1 remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North
A.merica that had “Appalachian Mountains” boldly running
from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region
:hey spanned — Tennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New
York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my
[ 211 ]
imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet, all moun-
tain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le
1 montagnard hnigre in his bear skin glory, and ¥elis tigris gold-
2, 3 smithi, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all boiled
down to a measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinera-
tor, was appalling. Farewell, Appalachia! Leaving it, we crossed
Ohio, the three states beginning with “I,” and Nebraska — ah,
4 that first whiff of the West! We travelled very leisurely, having :
more than a week to reach Wace, Continental Divide, where ;
she passionately desired to see the Ceremonial Dances marking !
the seasonal opening of Magic Cave, and at least three weeks to
reach Elphinstone, gem of a western State where she yearned to j
5 climb Red Rock from which a mature screen star had recently |
jumped to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo.
Again we were welcomed to wary motels by means of inscrip- ;
tions that read: j
“We wish you to feel at home while here. All equipment was
carefully checked upon your arrival. Your license number is on
record here. Use hot water sparingly. We reserve the right to
eject without notice any objectionable person. Do not throw
waste material of a7iy kind in the toilet bowl. Thank you. Call
again. The Management. P.S. We consider our guests the Finest i
People of the World.”
In these frightening places we paid ten for twins, flies queued
outside at the screenless door and successfully scrambled in, the *
ashes of our predecessors still lingered in the ashtrays, a woman’s j
hair lay on the pillow, one heard one’s neighbor hanging his coat !
in his closet, the hangers were ingeniously fixed to their bars by i
coils of wire so as to thwart theft, and, in crowning insult, the
pictures above the twin beds were identical twins. I also noticed
that commercial fashion was changing. There was a tendency
6 for cabins to fuse and gradually form the caravansary, and, lo
(she was not interested but the reader may be), a second story
was added, and a lobby grew in, and cars were removed to a com-
munal garage, and the motel reverted to the good old hotel.
I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze.
It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a
[ 212 ]
destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest
mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the
clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where l
the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way —
even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.
For instance: I would not swear that there was not at least one
occasion, prior to, or at the very beginning of, the Midwest lap
of our journey, when she managed to convey some information
to, or otherwise get into contact with, a person or persons un-
known. We had stopped at a gas station, under the sign of 2
Pegasus, and she had slipped out of her seat and escaped to the 3
rear of the premises while the raised hood, under which I had
bent to watch the mechanic’s manipulations, hid her for a
moment from my sight. Being inclined to be lenient, I only
shook my benign head though strictly speaking such visits were
taboo, since I felt instinctively that toilets — as also telephones —
happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my
destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects — it
may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another —
carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special signifi-
cance for US: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s
heart always break.
Well — my car had been attended to, and I had moved it
away from the pumps to let a pickup truck be serviced — when the
growing volume of her absence began to weigh upon me in the
windy grayness. Not for the first time, and not for the last, had
I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary
trivialities that look almost surprised, like staring rustics, to find
themselves in the stranded traveller’s field of vision: that green
garbage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale,
those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted
drinks, the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incom-
aleted crossword puzzle of their wooden cells, that bug patiently 4
vvalking up the inside of the window of the office. Radio music
was coming from its open door, and because the rhythm was not
synchronized with the heave and flutter and other gestures of
iwind-animated vegetation, one had the impression of an old
[ 213 ]
scenic film living its own life while piano or fiddle followed a
line of music quite outside the shivering flower, the swaying
branch. The sound of Charlotte’s last sob incongruously vibrated
through me as, with her dress fluttering athwart the rhythm,
Lolita veered from a totally unexpected direction. She had found
the toilet occupied and had crossed over to the sign of the
1 Conche in the next block. They said there they were proud of
their home-clean restrooms. These prepaid postcards, they said, i
had been provided for your comments. No postcards. No soap.
Nothing. No comments.
That day or the next, after a tedious drive through a land of!
food crops, we reached a pleasant little burg and put up at|
2 Chestnut Court — nice cabins, damp green grounds, apple trees,!
an old swing — and a tremendous sunset which the tired child |
ignored. She had wanted to go through Kasbeam because it was
only thirty miles north from her home town but on the following
morning I found her quite listless, with no desire to see again the
sidewalk where she had played hopscotch some five years before.
For obvious reasons I had rather dreaded that side trip, evenj
though we had agreed not to make ourselves conspicuous in anyi
way — to remain in the car and not look up old friends. My relief |
at her abandoning the project was spoiled by the thought that
had she felt I were totally against the nostalgic possibilities of
Pisky, as I had been last year, she would not have given up soj
easily. On my mentioning this with a sigh, she sighed too and
complained of being out of sorts. She wanted to remain in bed,
till teatime at least, with lots of magazines, and then if she felt;
better she suggested we just continue westward. I must say she'
was very sweet and languid, and craved for fresh fruits, and I
decided to go and fetch her a toothsome picnic lunch in Kas-^
beam. Our cabin stood on the timbered crest of a hill, and from
our window you could see the road winding down, and then
running as straight as a hair parting between two rows of chest-
nut trees, towards the pretty town, which looked singularly
distinct and toylike in the pure morning distance. One could
3 make out an elf-like girl on an insect-like bicycle, and a dog, a
bit too large proportionately, all as clear as those pilgrims and
[ 214 ]
mules winding up wax-pale roads in old paintings with blue hills
and red little people. I have the European urge to use my feet
when a drive can be dispensed with, so I leisurely walked down,
eventually meeting the cyclist — a plain plump girl with pigtails,
followed by a huge St. Bernard dog with orbits like pansies. In
Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he
babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent,
spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on
my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to pro-
duce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it
came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photo-
graph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young
ball player had been dead for the last thirty years.
I had a cup of hot flavorless coffee, bought a bunch of bananas
for my monkey, and spent another ten minutes or so in a delica-
tessen store. At least an hour and a half must have elapsed when
• this homeward-bound little pilgrim appeared on the winding
road leading to Chestnut Castle. 1
, The girl I had seen on my way to town was now loaded with
linen and engaged in helping a misshapen man whose big head
and coarse features reminded me of the “Bertoldo” character in
low Italian comedy. They were cleaning the cabins of which 2
there was a dozen or so on Chestnut Crest, all pleasantly spaced
amid the copious verdure. It was noon, and most of them, with
,2. final bang of their screen doors, had already got rid of their
occupants. A very elderly, almost mummy-like couple in a very
new model were in the act of creeping out of one of the con-
tiguous garages; from another a red hood protruded in some- 3
,what cod-piece fashion; and nearer to our cabin, a strong and 4
handsome young man with a shock of black hair and blue eyes
was putting a portable refrigerator into a station wagon. For
some reason he gave me a sheepish grin as I passed. On the grass
expanse opposite, in the many-limbed shade of luxuriant trees,
the familiar St. Bernard dog was guarding his mistress’ bicycle,
and nearby a young woman, far gone in the family way, had
seated a rapt baby on a swing and was rocking it gently, while a
jealous boy of two or three was making a nuisance of himself by
[ 215 ]
trying to push or pull the swing board; he finally succeeded ir
getting himself knocked down by it, and bawled loudly as he lay
supine on the grass while his mother continued to smile gently
at neither of her present children. I recall so clearly these!
minutiae probably because I was to check my impressions sc!
thoroughly only a few minutes later; and besides, something in!
me had been on guard ever since that awful night in Beardsley,!
I now refused to be diverted by the feeling of well-being that my*
walk had engendered — by the young summer breeze that envel-
oped the nape of my neck, the giving crunch of the damp gravel
the juicy tidbit I had sucked out at last from a hollow tooth, and
even the comfortable weight of my provisions which the general'
condition of my heart should not have allowed me to carry; but
even that miserable pump of mine seemed to be working sweetly,
1 and I felt adolori d' amoureuse langueur, to quote dear old Ron-]
sard, as I reached the cottage where I had left my Dolores.
To my surprise I found her dressed. She was sitting on the edge'i
of the bed in slacks and T-shirt, and was looking at me as if she,
could not quite place me. The frank soft shape of her small
breasts was brought out rather than blurred by the limpness of
her thin shirt, and this frankness irritated me. She had not|
washed; yet her mouth was freshly though smudgily painted,-
and her broad teeth glistened like wine-tinged ivory, or pinkish
poker chips. And there she sat, hands clasped in her lap, and
2 dreamily brimmed with a diabolical glow that had no relation-
to me whatever.
I plumped down my heavy paper bag and stood staring at the
bare ankles of her sandaled feet, then at her silly face, then again
at her sinful feet. “You’ve been out,” I said (the sandals were
filthy with gravel). '
“I just got up,” she replied, and added upon intercepting my
downward glance: “Went out for a sec. Wanted to see if you
were coming back.”
She became aware of the bananas and uncoiled herself table-
ward.
What special suspicion could I have? None indeed — but thosei
muddy, moony eyes of hers, that singular warmth emanatingl
[ 216 ]
from her! I said nothing. I looked at the road meandering so
distinctly within the frame of the window . . . Anybody wishing
to betray my trust would have found it a splendid lookout. With
rising appetite, Lo applied herself to the fruit. All at once I
remembered the ingratiating grin of the Johnny nextdoor. I
stepped out quickly. All cars had disappeared except his station
wagon; his pregnant young wife was now getting into it with her
baby and the other, more or less cancelled, child.
“What’s the matter, where are you going?” cried Lo from the
porch.
I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and
went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her.
[ tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her 1
nfidelity; but the scent I travelled upon was so slight as to be
practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy.
17
'■'jTOS Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make presents — 2
presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he prissily
! bought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was
oroken, he sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper
:ase: it had an elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could
)e securely locked. One glance sufficed to assure me that it was
)ne of those cheap money boxes called for some reason “luizet-
as” that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to 3
lo with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for holding
ny bulky chessmen, but I kept it — using it for a totally different
purpose.
In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely
elt myself being enmeshed, I had decided — despite Lo’s visible
nnoyance — to spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely
vaking up at four in the morning, I ascertained that Lo was still
pund asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the
-uriously inane life we all had rigged up for her) and satisfied my-
[ 217 ]
. I
L
I
self that the precious contents of the “luizetta” were safe. There,
snugly wrapped in a white woollen scarf, lay a pocket auto-
matic: caliber .32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a
little under one ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut,
finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late Harold Haze,
with a 1938 catalog which cheerily said in part: “Particularly
well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the per-
son.” There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or
persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety
position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must re-
member that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s
central forelimb. j
I was now glad I had it with me — and even more glad that I
had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around
my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed
those remote woods, was an admirable marksman, and with his
.38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird, though I must say
not much of it could be retrieved for proof — only a little iri-
1 descent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in
the twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us
and bagged a tiny woodpecker — completely out of season, inci-
dentally. Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice)
and kept missing everything, though I did wound a squirrel on
a later occasion when I went out alone. “You lie here,” I whis-|
pered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted I
it with a dram of gin.
18
2 The reader must now forget Chestnuts and Colts, and ac-'
company us further west. The following days were marked by a'
number of great thunderstorms — or perhaps, there was but one!
single storm which progressed across country in ponderous frog-|
leaps and which we could not shake off just as we could not shake!
off detective Trapp: for it was during those days that the problem
[ 218 ]
of the Aztec Red Convertible presented itself to me, and quite i
overshadowed the theme of Lo’s lovers.
Queer! I who was jealous of every male we met — queer, how I
misinterpreted the designations of doom. Perhaps I had been
lulled by Lo’s modest behavior in winter, and anyway it would
have been too foolish even for a lunatic to suppose another
Humbert was avidly following Humbert and Humbert’s nymphet
with Jovian fireworks, over the great and ugly plains. I surmised, 2
done, that the Red Yak keeping behind us at a discreet distance 3
mile after mile was operated by a detective whom some busy-
body had hired to see what exactly Humbert Humbert was doing
with that minor stepdaughter of his. As happens with me at
periods of electrical disturbance and crepitating lightnings, I had 4
hallucinations. Maybe they were more than hallucinations. I
do not know what she or he, or both had put into my liquor but
one night I felt sure somebody was tapping on the door of our
cabin, and I flung it open, and noticed two things — that I was
)tark naked and that, white-glistening in the rain-dripping dark-
ness, there stood a man holding before his face the mask of Jut-
ring Chin, a grotesque sleuth in the funnies. He emitted a muffled 5
guffaw and scurried away, and I reeled back into the room, and
fell asleep again, and am not sure even to this day that the visit
was not a drug-provoked dream: I have thoroughly studied
Trapp’s type of humor, and this might have been a plausible
iample. Oh, crude and absolutely ruthless! Somebody, I imag-
ned, was making money on those masks of popular monsters
ind morons. Did I see next morning two urchins rummaging in
i garbage can and trying on Jutting Chin? I wonder. It may all
lave been a coincidence — due to atmospheric conditions, I
oppose.
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and un-
irthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the
:xact day when I first knew with utter certainty that the red
ronvertible was following us. I do remember, however, the first
ime I saw its driver quite clearly. I was proceeding slowly one
fternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing that red ghost
dimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently
[ 219 ]
the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended alto-
gether. With a swishing sound a sunburst swept the highway,
and needing a pair of new sunglasses, I pulled up at a filling
station. What was happening was a sickness, a cancer, that could
not be helped, so I simply ignored the fact that our quiet pur-
suer, in his converted state, stopped a little behind us at a cafe
or bar bearing the idiotic sign: The Bustle: A Deceitful Seatful.
Having seen to the needs of my car, I walked into the office to
get those glasses and pay for the gas. As I was in the act of signing
a traveller’s check and wondered about my exact whereabouts, I
happened to glance through a side window, and saw a terrible
thing. A broad-backed man, baldish, in an oatmeal coat and!
dark-brown trousers, was listening to Lo who was leaning out of ,
the car and talking to him very rapidly, her hand with outspread |
fingers going up and down as it did when she was very serious i
and emphatic. What struck me with sickening force was — how
should I put it? — the voluble familiarity of her way, as if they had
known each other — oh, for weeks and weeks. I saw him scratch
his cheek and nod, and turn, and walk back to his convertible, a;
broad and thickish man of my age, somewhat resemblingj
Gustave Trapp, a cousin of my father’s in Switzerland — samel
smoothly tanned face, fuller than mine, with a small dark mus-
tache and a rosebud degenerate mouth. Lolita was studying a
road map when I got back into the car.
“What did that man ask you, Lo?”
“Man? Oh, that man. Oh yes. Oh, I don’t know. He won-
dered if I had a map. Lost his way, I guess.”
We drove on, and I said:
“Now listen, Lo. I do not know whether you are lying or not,
and I do not know whether you are insane or not, and I do not
care for the moment; but that person has been following us all|
day, and his car was at the motel yesterday, and I think he is a
cop. You know perfectly well what will happen and where you;
will go if the police find out about things. Now I want to know
exactly what he said to you and what you told him.”
She laughed.
“If he’s really a cop,” she said shrilly but not illogically, “the
[ 220 ]
worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared.
Ignore him, Dad”
“Did he ask where we were going?”
“Oh, he knows that” (mocking me).
“Any\^’ay,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is
not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.”
“Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you — Oh, look, all the nines
are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,”
she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go
back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.”
It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her
pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her
that trick; and silently we travelled on, unpursued.
But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the
drug and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy
red beast. The traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody
passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between our
humble blue car and its imperious red shadow — as if there were
some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and
magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like
virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his
stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display
dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an
invisible rope of silent silk connected it with our shabby vehicle.
We were many times weaker than his splendid, lacquered ma-
chine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him. O lente
currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed long 1
grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and
.spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the
black wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter
how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact,
mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic 2
carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my
right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek.
A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets
at half-past-four p.m. in a factory town — was the hand of
!chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then
[ 221 ]
with the same hand cut off my shadow. A score of cars were
launched in between us, and I sped on, and deftly turned into a
narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was
tackled by another, and lost the crumb.
When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate
meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had dis-
appeared.
Lola snorted and said: “If he is what you think he is, how
silly to give him the slip.”
“I have other notions by now,” I said.
“You should — ah — check them by — ah — keeping in touch with
him, fahther deah,” said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own
sarcasm. “Gee, you are mean,” she added in her ordinary voice.
We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous
amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder
incessantly rolling above us.
1 “I am not a lady and do not like lightning,” said Lo, whose
dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace.
2 We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. looi.
“Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is al-
ready here.”
“Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.”
We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a
day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that
3 discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas
gave way to real mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace.
Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread
a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were
over! She took it bravely, I must admit — and, when we dis-
4 covered there was in kurortish Wace a summer theatre in full
swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening.
T really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial
affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre
leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of
seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, bare-
limbed — seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that had
been recruited locally (judging by the partisan flurry here and
[ 222 ]
there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a
living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and
rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I re-
member thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted
by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage l
in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperat-
ingly lovely — Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and 2
Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit
where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her
protector.
As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause — a sound
my nerves cannot stand — began to crash all around me, I started
to pull and push Lo toward the exit, in my so natural amorous
impatience to get her back to our neon-blue cottage in the
stunned, starry night: I always say nature is stunned by the
sights she sees. Dolly-Lo, however, lagged behind, in a rosy daze,
her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the
rest of her senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly
came together at all in the mechanical action of clapping they
still went through. I had seen that kind of thing in children
before but, by God, this was a special child, myopically beaming
at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of the
joint authors — a man’s tuxedo and the bare shoulders of a hawk-
like, black-haired, strikingly tall woman.
“You’ve again hurt my wrist, you brute,” said Lolita in a small
voice as she slipped into her car seat.
“I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet
darling,” I said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow, and I
added, to change the conversation — to change the direction of
fate, oh God, oh God: “Vivian is quite a woman. I am sure we
>aw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop.”
“Sometimes,” said Lo, “you are quite revoltingly dumb. First,
Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second,
>he is forty, married and has Negro blood.”
“I thought,” I said kidding her, “Quilty was an ancient flame
yours, in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale.”
“What?” countered Lo, her features working. “That fat den-
[ 223 ]
tist? You must be confusing me with some other fast little
article.”
And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget
everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch
of their nymphancy.
19
With Lo’s knowledge and assent, the two post offices given to
the Beardsley postmaster as forwarding addresses were P.O. Wacel
and P.O. Elphinstone. Next morning we visited the former and:
had to wait in a short but slow queue. Serene Lo studied thei
rogues’ gallery. Handsome Bryan Bryansk!, alias Anthony Bryan,
alias Tony Brown, eyes hazel, complexion fair, was wanted for
kidnaping. A sad-eyed old gentleman’s faux-pas was mail fraud,,
and, as if that were not enough, he was cursed with deformed!
arches. Sullen Sullivan came with a caution: Is believed armed,!
and should be considered extremely dangerous. If you want toi
make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently
melt into my own, while I look. And moreover there was a
smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen, wearing brown
shoes when last seen, rhymes. Please notify Sheriff Buller.
I forget my letters; as to Dolly’s, there was her report and a
very special-looking envelope. This I deliberately opened and
perused its contents. I concluded I was doing the foreseen since:
she did not seem to mind and drifted toward the newsstand neat
the exit. '
“Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three!
hounds lay quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I
suspect, and Linda knew all your lines. She was fine, she had
alertness and control, but lacked somehow the responsiveness^
the relaxed vitality, the charm of my — and the author’s — Diana:
but there was no author to applaud us as last time, and the ter-
rific electric storm outside interfered with our own modest off-
stage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is overJl
[ 224 ]
school, play, the Roy mess, mother’s confinement (our baby,
alas, did not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though
practically I still bear traces of the paint.
“We are going to New York after to-morrow, and I guess I
can’t manage to wriggle out of accompanying my parents to
Europe. I have even worse news for you. Dolly-Lo! I may not be
back at Beardsley if and when you return. With one thing and
another, one being you know who, and the other not being who
^ou think you know, Dad wants me to go to school in Paris for
one year while he and Fullbright are around.
“As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving
at the bit of French nonsense. Remember? Ne manque pas de
dire d ton amant, Chimhie, comme le lac est beau car il faut
qudl fy mene. Lucky beau! QuHl t’y — What a tongue-twister! i
Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from your Poet, and best
regards to the Governor. Your Mona. P.S. Because of one thing
and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly con-
trolled. So better wait till I write you from Europe.” (She never
did as far as I know. The letter contained an element of mys-
cerious nastiness that I am too tired to-day to analyze. I found 2
It later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and give it here
d titre documentaire. I read it twice.) 3
I looked up from the letter and was about to— There was no
Lo to behold. While I was engrossed in Mona’s witchery, Lo had 4
shrugged her shoulders and vanished. “Did you happen to see —
il asked of a hunchback sweeping the floor near the entrance. He
,iad, the old lecherer. He guessed she had seen a friend and had
lurried out. I hurried out too. I stopped — she had not. I hurried
in. I stopped again. It had happened at last. She had gone for
ever.
In later years I have often wondered why she did not go for
bver that day. Was it the retentive quality of her new summer
‘clothes in my locked car? Was it some unripe particle in some
{general plan? Was it simply because, all things considered, I
inight as well be used to convey her to Elphinstone — the secret
yerminus, anyway? I only know I was quite certain she had left
|ue for ever. The noncommittal mauve mountains half encircling
\ [ 225 ]
the town seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling,
laughing, panting Lolitas who dissolved in their haze. A big W
made of white stones on a steep talus in the far vista of a cross
street seemed the very initial of woe.
The new and beautiful post office I had just emerged from
stood between a dormant movie house and a conspiracy of
poplars. The time was 9 a.m. mountain time. The street was
Main Street. I paced its blue side peering at the opposite one:
charming it into beauty, was one of those fragile young summer
mornings with flashes of glass here and there and a general air
of faltering and almost fainting at the prospect of an intolerably
torrid noon. Crossing over, I loafed and leafed, as it were,
through one long block: Drugs, Real Estate, Fashions, Auto ;
Parts, Cafe, Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Furniture, Appliances, \
Western Union, Cleaners, Grocery. Officer, officer, my daughter |
has run away. In collusion with a detective; in love with a black- 1
mailer. Took advantage of my utter helplessness. I peered into I
all the stores. I deliberated inly if I should talk to any of the j
sparse foot-passengers. I did not. I sat for a while in the parked]
car. I inspected the public garden on the east side. I went back
to Fashions and Auto Parts. I told myself with a burst of furious 1
sarcasm — un ricane 7 nent — that I was crazy to suspect her, that '
she would turn up in a minute.
She did.
I wheeled around and shook off the hand she had placed on
my sleeve with a timid and imbecile smile.
“Get into the car,” I said.
She obeyed, and I went on pacing up and down, struggling
with nameless thoughts, trying to plan some way of tackling her
duplicity.
Presently she left the car and was at my side again. My sense
of hearing gradually got tuned in to station Lo again, and I be-
came aware she was telling me that she had met a former girl
friend.
“Yes? Whom?”
“A Beardsley girl.”
“Good. I know every name in your group. Alice Adams?”
[ 226 ]
“This girl was not in my group.”
“Good. I have a complete student list with me. Her name
please.”
“She was not in my school. She is just a town girl in
Beardsley.”
“Good. I have the Beardsley directory with me too. We’ll look
up all the Browns.” 1
“I only know her first name.”
“Mary or Jane?”
“No — Dolly, like me.”
“So that’s the dead end” (the mirror you break your nose
against). “Good. Let us try another angle. You have been absent
twenty-eight minutes. What did the two Dollys do?”
“We went to a drugstore.”
“And you had there — ?”
“Oh, just a couple of Cokes.” 2
“Careful, Dolly. We can check that, you know.”
“At least, she had. I had a glass of water.”
“Good. Was it that place there?”
“Sure.”
“Good, come on, we’ll grill the soda jerk.”
“Wait a sec. Come to think it might have been further down
— just around the corner.”
“Come on all the same. Go in please. Well, let’s see.” (Open-
ing a chained telephone book.) “Dignified Funeral Service.
No, not yet. Here we are; Druggists-Retail. Hill Drug Store.
Larkin’s Pharmacy. And two more. That’s all Wace seems to
have in the way of soda fountains — at least in the business sec-
tion. Well, we will check them all.”
“Go to hell,” she said.
“Lo, rudeness will get you nowhere.”
“Okay,” she said. “But you’re not going to trap me. Okay, so
we did not have a pop. We just talked and looked at dresses in
show windows.”
“Which? That window there for example?”
“Yes, that one there, for example.”
“Oh Lo! Let’s look closer at it.”
[ 227 ]
It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was
vacuum-cleaning a carpet of sorts upon which stood two figures
that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them.
One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its compara-
tively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when
clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed
again, a girl-child of Lolita’s size. But in its present state it was
sexless. Next to it, stood a much taller veiled bride, quite perfect
1 and Intacta except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the
feet of these damsels, where the man crawled about laboriously
with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a
blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed
to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.
“Look, Lo,” I said quietly. “Look well. Is not that a rather
good symbol of something or other? However” — I went on as we
got back into the car — “I have taken certain precautions. Here
(delicately opening the glove compartment), on this pad, I
2 have our boy friend’s car number.”
As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of
it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing figure as if
the whole amphitheatre of six signs receded concavely behind a
tinted glass too opaque to allow the central series to be deci-
phered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme
edges— a capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which
in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) be-
cause otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a
3 blond-bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomnie de sa
4 canne as he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the
quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had
acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had been deleted alto-
gether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried shuttle
smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers
obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand, presented a tangle
of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the
state — one adjacent to the state Beardsley was in.
I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment,
and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the
[ 228 ]
back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of
the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or
clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the
shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its
litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile
of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous back-
hand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheek-
bone.
And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing
atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconcilia-
tion. In the velvet night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed i
the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I immolated myself . . .
But it was all of no avail. Both doomed were we. And soon I was
to enter a new cycle of persecution.
In a street of Wace, on its outskirts . . . Oh, I am quite sure it
was not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had glimpsed the
Aztec Red Convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp,
it contained four or five loud young people of several sexes — but
I said nothing. After Wace a totally new situation arose. For a
day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis with which I told
myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and then
I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his
tactics and was still with us, in this or that rented car.
A veritable Proteus of the highway, \tdth bewildering ease he 2
switched from one vehicle to another. This technique implied
the existence of garages specializing in “stage-automobile” opera-
tions, but I never could discover the remises he used. He seemed 3
to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a
Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon
Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Drift-
wood Gray. Then he turned to other makes and passed through
a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself
attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own
Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile he had 4
rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, 5
and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly
[ 229 ]
such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Gray, Chevrolet’s Thistle Gray,
Dodge’s French Gray . . .
The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little
moustache and open shirt — or for his baldish pate and broad
shoulders — led me to a profound study of all cars on the road — i
behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the
dancing sun: the quiet vacationist’s automobile with the box of
Tender-Touch tissues in the back window; the recklessly speed-
ing jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog’s head pro-
truding, and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor’s tudor sedan
crowded with suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer weav-
ing in front, immune to the Indian file of fury boiling behind j
it; the car with the young female passenger politely perched in j
the middle of the front seat to be closer to the young male I
driver; the car carrying on its roof a red boat bottom up . . . The i
gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us.
We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow
and Champion, and rolling down an almost imperceptible grade,
when I had my next distinct view of Detective Paramour Trapp.
The gray mist behind us had deepened and concentrated into the
compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden, as if
the car I drove responded to my poor heart’s pangs, we were i
slithering from side to side, with something making a helpless
plap-plap-plap under us.
“You got a flat, mister,” said cheerful Lo.
I pulled up — near a precipice. She folded her arms and put her
foot on the dashboard. I got out and examined the right rear
wheel. The base of its tire was sheepishly and hideously square.
Trapp had stopped some fifty yards behind us. His distant face :
formed a grease spot of mirth. This was my chance. I started to ;
walk towards him — with the brilliant idea of asking him for a
jack though I had one. He backed a little. I stubbed my toe
against a stone — and there was a sense of general laughter. Then
a tremendous truck loomed from behind Trapp and thundered
by me — and immediately after, I heard it utter a convulsive
honk. Instinctively I looked back — and saw my own car gently
creeping away. I could make out Lo ludicrously at the wheel, I
[ 230 ]
and the engine was certainly running — though I remembered I
had cut it but had not applied the emergency brake; and during
the brief space of throb-time that it took me to reach the croak-
ing machine which came to a standstill at last, it dawned upon
me that during the last two years little Lo had had ample time
to pick up the rudiments of driving. As I wrenched the door
open, I was goddam sure she had started the car to prevent me
from M^alking up to Trapp. Her trick proved useless, however,
for even while I was pursuing her he had made an energetic
U-turn and was gone. I rested for a while. Lo asked wasn’t I
going to thank her — the car had started to move by itself and —
Getting no answer, she immersed herself in a study of the map.
I got out again and commenced the “ordeal of the orb,” as 1
Charlotte used to say. Perhaps, I was losing my mind.
We continued our grotesque journey. After a forlorn and
useless dip, we went up and up. On a steep grade I found myself
behind the gigantic truck that had overtaken us. It was now
groaning up a winding road and was impossible to pass. Out of 2
its front part a small oblong of smooth silver — the inner wrap-
ping of chewing gum — escaped and flew back into our wind-
shield. It occurred to me that if I were really losing my mind, I
might end by murdering somebody. In fact — said high-and-dry
Humbert to floundering Humbert — it might be quite clever to
prepare things — to transfer the weapon from box to pocket — so
as to be ready to take advantage of the spell of insanity when it
does come.
20
By permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suflFered
her to cultivate deceit. It now appeared that it had not been
merely a matter of learning the answers to such questions as
what is the basic conflict in “Hedda Gabler,” or where are the
climaxes in “Love Under the Lindens,” or analyze the prevailing 3
mood of “Cherry Orchard”; it was really a matter of learning to
betray me. How I deplored now the exercises in sensual simula-
[ 231 ]
tion that I had so often seen her go through in our Beardsley
parlor when I would observe her from some strategic point
while she, like a hypnotic subject or a performer in a mystic rite,
produced sophisticated versions of infantile make-believe by
going through the mimetic actions of hearing a moan in the
dark, seeing for the first time a brand new young stepmother,
tasting something she hated, such as buttermilk, smelling
crushed grass in a lush orchard, or touching mirages of objects
with her sly, slender, girl-child hands. Among my papers I still
have a mimeographed sheet suggesting;
Tactile drill. Imagine yourself picking up and holding; a
pingpong ball, an apple, a sticky date, a new flannel-fluffed
tennis ball, a hot potato, an ice cube, a kitten, a puppy, a
1 horseshoe, a feather, a flashlight.
Knead with your fingers the following imaginary things; a
piece of bread, india rubber, a friend’s aching temple, a
sample of velvet, a rose petal.
You are a blind girl. Palpate the face of; a Greek youth,
Cyrano, Santa Claus, a baby, a laughing faun, a sleeping
2 stranger, your father.
But she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate
spells, in the dreamy performance of her enchantments and
duties! On certain adventurous evenings, in Beardsley, I also had
her dance for me with the promise of some treat or gift, and
although these routine leg-parted leaps of hers were more like
those of a football cheerleader than like the languorous and
3 jerky motions of a Parisian petit rat, the rhythms of her not quite
nubile limbs had given me pleasure. But all that was nothing,
absolutely nothing, to the indescribable itch of rapture that her
tennis game produced in me — the teasing delirious feeling of
teetering on the very brink of unearthly order and splendor.
Despite her advanced age, she was more of a nymphet than
ever, with her apricot-colored limbs, in her sub-teen tennis togs!
Winged gentlemen! No hereafter is acceptable if it does not
produce her as she was then, in that Colorado resort between
Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right; the white wide
[ 232 ]
little-boy shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the white
breast-kerchief whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to
end behind in a dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly young
and adorable apricot shoulder blades with that pubescence and
those lovely gentle bones, and the smooth, downward-tapering
back. Her cap had a white peak. Her racket had cost me a small
fortune. Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I would have
had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of
my pain and despair!
She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time
before going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball
once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, al-
ways rather vague about the score, always cheerful as she so
seldom was in the dark life she led at home. Her tennis was the
highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bring-
ing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was
the very geometry of basic reality.
The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory
counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The
ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter,
its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision
she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate
at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an
absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis —
without any utilitarian results. As Edusa’s sister, Electra Gold, a
marvelous young coach, said to me once while I sat on a pulsat-
ing hard bench watching Dolores Haze toying with Linda Hall
(and being beaten by her): “Dolly has a magnet in the center
of her racket guts, but why the heck is she so polite?” Ah, Electra,
what did it matter, with such grace! I remember at the very first
game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convul-
sion of beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her
bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle
when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a
vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished
arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming
teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the
[ 233 ]
powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express
purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her
golden whip.
It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical
purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly
easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant
hop.
That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments,
immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me moan to-day
with frustration. They would have been so much more than the
snapshots I burned! Her overhead volley was related to her
service as the envoy is to the ballade; for she had been trained,
my pet, to patter up at once to the net on her nimble, vivid,
white-shod feet. There was nothing to choose between her fore-
hand and backhand drives: they were mirror images of one
another — my very loins still tingle with those pistol reports re-
peated by crisp echoes and Electra’s cries. One of the pearls of
1 Dolly’s game was a short half-volley that Ned Litam had taught
her in California.
She preferred acting to swimming, and swimming to tennis;
yet I insist that had not something within her been broken by
me — not that I realized it then! — she would have had on the top
of her perfect form the will to win, and would have become a
real girl champion. Dolores, with two rackets under her arm, in
2 Wimbledon. Dolores endorsing a Dromedary. Dolores turning
professional. Dolores acting a girl champion in a movie. Dolores
and her gray, humble, hushed husband-coach, old Humbert.
There was nothing wrong or deceitful in the spirit of her game
— unless one considered her cheerful indifference toward its out-
come as the feint of a nymphet. She who was so cruel and crafty
in everyday life, revealed an innocence, a frankness, a kindness of
ball-placing, that permitted a second-rate but determined player,
no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to poke and cut his way
to victory. Despite her small stature, she covered the one thou-
3 sand and fifty-three square feet of her half of the court with
wonderful ease, once she had entered into the rhythm of a rally
and as long as she could direct that rhythm; but any abrupt
[ 234 ]
attack, or sudden change of tactics on her adversary’s part, left
her helpless. At match point, her second serve, which — rather
typically — was even stronger and more stylish than her first (for
she had none of the inhibitions that cautious winners have),
would strike vibrantly the harp-cord of the net — and ricochet out
of court. The polished gem of her dropshot was snapped up and
put away by an opponent who seemed four-legged and wielded a
crooked paddle. Her dramatic drives and lovely volleys would
candidly fall at his feet. Over and over again she would land an
easy one into the net — and merrily mimic dismay by drooping in
a ballet attitude, with her forelocks hanging. So sterile were her
grace and whipper that she could not even win from panting me
and my old-fashioned lifting drive.
I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games.
In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square i
pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible 2
upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused 3
adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud. Similarly, the initial
tennis coaching I had inflicted on Lolita — prior to the revela-
tions that came to her through the great Californian’s lessons —
remained in my mind as oppressive and distressful memories —
not only because she had been so hopelessly and irritatingly
irritated by every suggestion of mine— but because the pre-
cious symmetry of the court instead of reflecting the harmo-
nies latent in her was utterly jumbled by the clumsiness and
lassitude of the resentful child I mistaught. Now things were
different, and on that particular day, in the pure air of ChampioU,
Colorado, on that admirable court at the foot of steep stone
stairs leading up to Champion Hotel where we had spent the
night, I felt I could rest from the nightmare of unknown be-
trayals within the innocence of her style, of her soul, of her
essential grace.
She was hitting hard and flat, with her usual effortless sweep,
feeding me deep skimming balls — all so rhythmically coordinated
and overt as to reduce my footwork to, practically, a swinging
stroll — crack players will understand what I mean. My rather
heavily cut serve that I had been taught by my father who had
C 235 ]
1 learned it from Decugis or Borman, old friends of his and great
champions, would have seriously troubled my Lo, had I really
tried to trouble her. But who would upset such a lucid dear? Did
I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination?
That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen?
2 An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us.
Two people in tennis shorts, a red-haired fellow only about
eight years my junior, with sunburnt bright pink shins, and an
indolent dark girl with a moody mouth and hard eyes, about
two years Lolita’s senior, appeared from nowhere. As is common
with dutiful tyros, their rackets were sheathed and framed, and
they carried them not as if they were the natural and com-
fortable extensions of certain specialized muscles, but hammers
3 or blunderbusses or wimbles, or my own dreadful cumbersome
sins. Rather unceremoniously seating themselves near my pre-
cious coat, on a bench adjacent to the court, they fell to admir-
ing very vocally a rally of some fifty exchanges that Lo innocently
helped me to foster and uphold — until there occurred a syncope
4 in the series causing her to gasp as her overhead smash went
out of court, whereupon she melted into winsome merriment,
my golden pet.
I felt thirsty by then, and walked to the drinking fountain;
there Red approached me and in all humility suggested a mixed
double. “I am Bill Mead,” he said. “And that’s Fay Page, ac-
5 tress. Maffy On Say” — he added (pointing with his ridiculously
hooded racket at polished Fay who was already talking to
Dolly). I was about to reply “Sorry, but — ” (for I hate to have
my filly involved in the chops and jabs of cheap bunglers), when
a remarkably melodious cry diverted my attention: a bellboy was
tripping down the steps from the hotel to our court and making
me signs. I was wanted, if you please, on an urgent long distance
call — so urgent in fact that the line was being held for me. Cer-
tainly. I got into my coat (inside pocket heavy with pistol) and
told Lo I would be back in a minute. She was picking up a ball
— in the continental foot-racket way which was one of the few
nice things I had taught her, — and smiled — she smiled at me!
An awful calm kept my heart afloat as I followed the boy up
[ 236 ]
to the hotel. This, to use an American term, in which discovery,
retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a
singularly repulsive nutshell, was it. I had left her in mediocre
hands, but it hardly mattered now. I would fight, of course. Oh,
I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her. Yes,
quite a climb.
At the desk, a dignified, Roman-nosed man, with, I suggest,
a very obscure past that might reward investigation, handed me
a messag^e in his own hand. The line had not been held after
all. The note said:
“Mr. Humbert. The head of Birdsley (sic! ) School called.
Summer residence — Birdsley 2-8282. Please call back immedi-
ately. Highly important.”
I folded myself into a booth, took a little pill, and for about
twenty minutes tussled with space-spooks. A quartet of propo-
sitions gradually became audible: soprano, there was no such
number in Beardsley; alto. Miss Pratt was on her way to Eng-
land; tenor, Beardsley School had not telephoned; bass, they
could not have done so, since nobody knew I was, that particular
day, in Champion, Colo. Upon my stinging him, the Roman
took the trouble to find out if there had been a long distance
call. There had been none. A fake call from some local dial was
not excluded. I thanked him. He said: You bet. After a visit to
the purling men’s room and a stiff drink at the bar, I started on 1
my return march. From the very first terrace I saw, far below,
on the tennis court which seemed the size of a school child’s
ill-wiped slate, golden Lolita playing in a double. She moved
like a fair angel among three horrible Boschian cripples. One of 2
these, her partner, while changing sides, jocosely slapped her on
her behind with his racket. He had a remarkably round head
and wore incongruous brown trousers. There was a momentary
flurry — he saw me, and throwing away his racket — mine! — scuttled
up the slope. He waved his wrists and elbows in would-be comi-
cal imitation of rudimentary wings, as he climbed, bow-legged,
to the street, where his gray car awaited him. Next moment he
and the grayness were gone. When I came down, the remaining
trio were collecting and sorting out the balls.
[ 237 ]
“Mr. Mead, who was that person?”
Bill and Fay, both looking very solemn, shook their heads.
That absurd intruder had butted in to make up a double,
hadn’t he, Dolly?
Dolly. The handle of my racket was still disgustingly warm.
Before returning to the hotel, I ushered her into a little alley
half-smothered in fragrant shrubs, with flowers like smoke, and
was about to burst into ripe sobs and plead with her imper-
turbed dream in the most abject manner for clarification, no
matter how meretricious, of the slow awfulness enveloping me,
when we found ourselves behind the convulsed Mead twosome
— assorted people, you know, meeting among idyllic settings in
old comedies. Bill and Fay were both weak with laughter^ — we
had come at the end of their private joke. It did not really matter.
Speaking as if it really did not really matter, and assuming,
apparently, that life was automatically rolling on with all its
routine pleasures, Lolita said she would like to change into her
bathing things, and spend the rest of the afternoon at the swim-
ming pool. It was a gorgeous day. Lolita!
21
“Lo! Lola! Lolita!” I hear myself crying from a doorway into
the sun, with the acoustics of time, domed time, endowing my i
call and its tell-tale hoarseness with such a wealth of anxiety, j
passion and pain that really it would have been instrumental in ll
wrenching open the zipper of her nylon shroud had she been j
dead. Lolita! In the middle of a trim turfed terrace I found her
at last — she had run out before I was ready. Oh Lolita! There
she was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a i
terrier of sorts, was losing and snapping up again and adjusting
between his jaws a wet little red ball; he took rapid chords with
his front paws on the resilient turf, and then would bounce
away. I had only wanted to see where she was, I could not swim
with my heart in that state, but who cared — and there she was, ! |
[ 238 ] i|
and there was I, in my robe — and so I stopped calling; but sud-
denly something in the pattern of her motions, as she dashed
this way and that in her Aztec Red bathing briefs and bra, struck i
me . . . there was an ecstasy, a madness about her frolics that
was too much of a glad thing. Even the dog seemed puzzled
by the extravagance of her reactions. I put a gentle hand to my
chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming
pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that
lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like
excrements in the blue sea water in Nice. One of the bathers had
left the pool and, half-concealed by the peacocked shade of
trees, stood quite still, holding the ends of the towel around his
neck and following Lolita with his amber eyes. There he stood,
in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and
masked by his own nakedness, his damp black hair or what was
left of it, glued to his round head, his little mustache a humid
smear, the wool on his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy,
his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with bright drop-
lets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting
with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back
like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood. And as I looked 2
at his oval nut-brown face, it dawned upon me that what I had
recognized him by was the reflection of my daughter’s counte-
nance — the same beatitude and grimace but made hideous by
his maleness. And I also knew that the child, my child, knew
he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting
on a show of gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As
she made for the ball and missed it, she fell on her back, with
her obscene young legs madly pedalling in the air; I could sense
the musk of her excitement from where I stood, and then I saw
(petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes
and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned
against a tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered.
Immediately afterwards a marvelous transformation took place.
He was no longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish
Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned more than
once, who used to counteract his “sprees” (he drank beer with
[ 239 ]
milk, the good swine) by feats of weight-lifting — tottering and
grunting on a lake beach with his otherwise very complete bath-
ing suit jauntily stripped from one shoulder. This Trapp noticed
me from afar and working the towel on his nape walked back
with false insouciance to the pool. And as if the sun had gone
out of the game, Lo slackened and slowly got up ignoring the
ball that the terrier placed before her. Who can say what heart-
breaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp? I started
to say something, and then sat down on the grass with a quite
monstrous pain in my chest and vomited a torrent of browns
and greens that I had never remembered eating.
I saw Lolita’s eyes, and they seemed to be more calculating
than frightened. I heard her saying to a kind lady that her father
was having a fit. Then for a long time I lay in a lounge chair
swallowing pony upon pony of gin. And next morning I felt
strong enough to drive on (which in later years no doctor
believed).
22
The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court,
1 Elphinstone, turned out to belong to the glossily browned pine-
log kind that Lolita used to be so fond of in the days of our
carefree first journey; oh, how different things were now! I am
not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After all — well, really . . . After
all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly clear that all those
identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments
of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence
2 and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the cocky
Gallic part of my brain — and proceeded to rout the notion of a
Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges,
persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous
advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember
humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explana-
tion of the “Birdsley” telephone call . . . But if I could dismiss
Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at
[ 240 ]
Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing
Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and be-
loved on the very eve of a new era, when my alembics told me
she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me.
An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry
was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull
and silent during the last lap — two hundred mountainous miles
uncontaminated by smoke -gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She
hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed
rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off
for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town
was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-
foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would
spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays,
saguaro deserts, fatamorganas. Jose Lizzarrabengoa, as you re- i, 2 , 3
member, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I con- 4
jured up a Central American tennis competition in which
Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions
would dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling
level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why
did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environ-
ment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and
lungs, rely.
Mrs. Hays, the brisk, brickly rouged, blue-eyed widow who
ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, be-
cause her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas
my daughter happened to be half Irish. I registered. Hays gave
me the key and a twinkling smile, and, still twinkling, showed
me where to park the car; Lo crawled out and shivered a little:
the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the
cabin, she sat down on a chair at a card table, buried her face
in the crook of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I
thought, shamming, no doubt, to evade my caresses; I was pas-
sionately parched; but she began to whimper in an unusually
dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill. Lolita
dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her temperature, orally,
then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter
[ 241 ]
and after laboriously reducing the, meaningless to me, degrees
Fahrenheit to the intimate centrigrade of my childhood, found
she had 40.4, which at least made sense. Hysterical little nymphs
might, I knew, run up all kinds of temperature — even exceed-
ing a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip of hot
spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon
an examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her
body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I undressed her.
Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of blood.
She was shaking from head to toe. She complained of a painful
stiffness in the upper vertebrae — and I thought of poliomyelitis
as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of inter-
course, I wrapped her up in a laprobe and carried her into the
car. Kind Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local
doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only
1 was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hos-
pital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited
2 capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkonig in pursuit, thither I
drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and
guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his
daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never
to see again. Dr. Blue, whose learning, no doubt, was infinitely
inferior to his reputation, assured me it was a virus infection,
and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said
this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all
3 of which sounded like the “ague” of the ancients. I wondered
if I should mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-
old daughter had had a minor accident while climbing an awk-
ward fence with her boy friend, but knowing I was drunk, I
decided to withhold the information till later if necessary. To
an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter’s
age as “practically sixteen.” While I was not looking, my child
was taken away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to
spend the night on a “welcome” mat in a corner of their damned
hospital. I ran up constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to
trace my darling so as to tell her she had better not babble, espe-
cially if she felt as lightheaded as we all did. At one point, I
[ 242 ]
was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and very cheeky
nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black eyes
— of Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported
shepherd, a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car
and remained in it for I do not know how many hours, hunched
up in the dark, stunned by my new solitude, looking out open-
mouthed now at the dimly illumed, very square and low hos-
pital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now
up at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the
haute viontagne where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely l
Joseph Lore, was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas — que sais-je! 2
— or seducing a ewe. Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have
been always a solace to me in times of unusual stress, and only
when, despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the
endless night, did I think of driving back to the motel. The old
woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way.
Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangular shadows. I
made out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what
was probably a school playground; and in another wastelike
block there rose in domed silence the pale temple of some local
sect. I found the highway at last, and then the motel, where
millions of so-called “millers,” a kind of insect, were swarming
around the neon contours of “No Vacancy”; and, when, at
3 A.M., after one of those untimely hot showers which like some
mordant only help to fix a man’s despair and weariness, I lay
on her bed that smelled of chestnuts and roses, and peppermint,
and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly 3
allowed her to use, I found myself unable to assimilate the
dmple fact that for the first time in two years I was separated
from my Lolita. All at once it occurred to me that her illness
vvas somehow the development of a theme — that it had the same
:aste and tone as the series of linked impressions which had
ouzzled and tormented me during our journey; I imagined that
;ecret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or hallucination, or 4
whatever he was, prowling around the hospital — and Aurora had 5
lardly “warmed her hands,” as the pickers of lavender say in 6
■:he country of my birth, when I found myself trying to get into
[ 243 ]
that dungeon again, knocking upon its green doors, breakfast-
less, stool-less, in despair.
This was Tuesday, and Wednesday or Thursday, splendidly
reacting like the darling she was to some “serum” (sparrow’s
sperm or dugong’s dung), she was much better, and the doctor
said that in a couple of days she would be “skipping” again.
Of the eight times I visited her, the last one alone remains
sharply engraved on my mind. It had been a great feat to come
for I felt all hollowed out by the infection that by then was
at work on me too. None will know the strain it was to carry
that bouquet, that load of love, those books that I had traveled
sixty miles to buy: Browning’s Dramatic Works, The History
of Dancing, Clowns and Columbines, The Russian Ballet,
Flowers of the Rockies, The Theatre Guild Anthology , Tennis
by Helen Wills, who had won the National Junior Girl Singles
at the age of fifteen. As I was staggering up to the door of my
daughter’s thirteen-dollar-a-day private room, Mary Lore, the
beastly young part-time nurse who had taken an unconcealed
dislike to me, emerged with a finished breakfast tray, placed it
with a quick crash on a chair in the corridor, and, fundament
jigging, shot back into the room — probably to warn her poor
little Dolores that the tyrannic old father was creeping up on
crepe soles, with books and bouquet: the latter I had composed
of wild flowers and beautiful leaves gathered with my own
gloved hands on a mountain pass at sunrise (I hardly slept at
all that fateful week).
Feeding my Carmencita well? Idly I glanced at the tray. On
a yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope. It had con-
tained something, since one edge was torn, but there was no
address on it — nothing at all, save a phony armorial design with|
“Ponderosa Lodge” in green letters; thereupon I performed a|
chasse-croise with Mary, who was in the act of bustling out-
again — wonderful how fast they move and how little they do,
those rumpy young nurses. She glowered at the envelope I hadji
put back, uncrumpled.
“You better not touch,” she said, nodding directionally.
“Could burn your fingers.”
[ 244 ]
Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was:
croyais que c'etait un bill — not a billet doux." Then, l
entering the sunny room, to Lolita: ^‘’Bojijour, mon petit. ’’’’
“Dolores,” said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me,
through me, the plump whore, and blinking, and starting to
fold very rapidly a white flannel blanket as she blinked: “Dolores,
your pappy thinks you are getting letters from my boy friend.
It’s me (smugly tapping herself on the small gilt cross she wore)
gets them. And my pappy can parlay-voo as well as yours.”
She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly
painted, hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms straightened out on
neat coverlet, lay innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the
bed table, next to a paper napkin and a pencil, her topaz ring
burned in the sun.
“What gruesome funeral flowers,” she said. “Thanks all the
same. But do you mind very much cutting out the French? It
annoys everybody.”
Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking
of urine and garlic, with the Deseret News, which her fair 2
patient eagerly accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated
Volumes I had brought.
“My sister Ann,” said Mary (topping information with after- 3
thought), “works at the Ponderosa place.”
Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne
m'ahnes plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I 4
knew my love was as hopeless as ever — and I also knew the two
girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against 5,6
my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing
a double game since she was also fooling sentimental Mary 7
whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with
her fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me.
And another nurse whom I never identified, and the village
idiot who carted cots and coffins into the elevator, and the
idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting room— all were
in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy
father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance
I O
between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for 8
[ 245 ]
I
you njoere rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that “snow”
and “joy juice”).
My throat hurt. I stood, swallowing, at the window and stared
at the mountains, at the romantic rock high up in the smiling
plotting sky.
“My Carmen,” I said (I used to call her that sometimes),
“we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed.”
1 “Incidentally, I want all my clothes,” said the gitanilla, hump-
ing up her knees and turning to another page.
“. . . Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in stay-
ing here.”
“There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita.
I lowered myself into a cretonne chair and, opening the at-
tractive botanical work, attempted, in the fever-humming hush
of the room, to identify my flowers. This proved impossible.
Presently a musical bell softly sounded somewhere in the
passage.
I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three
or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier)
in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much
leisure. However — likewise for reasons of show — regulations were
rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not
without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next
2 time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through
Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I
looked at her hand; it dropped. As I was leaving, leaving volun-
tarily, Dolores Haze reminded me to bring her next morning . . .
She did not remember where the various things she wanted
were . . .“Bring me,” she cried (out of sight already, door on the
move, closing, closed), “the new gray suitcase and Mother’s
trunk”; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and
dying in the motel bed she had used for just a few minutes,
and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circum-
stances was to send the two bags over with the widow’s beau, a
robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo displaying her treas-
ures to Mary . . . No doubt, I was a little delirious — and on the
following day I was still a vibration rather than a solid, for
[ '=46 ]
when I looked out of the bathroom window at the adjacent
lawn, I saw Dolly’s beautiful young bicycle propped up there
on its support, the graceful front wheel looking away from me,
as it always did, and a sparrow perched on the saddle — but it
was the landlady’s bike, and smiling a little, and shaking my
poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed, and
lay as quiet as a saint — l
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine —
— which was represented by numerous specimens wherever
Dolores landed, and there was some great national celebration
in town judging by the firecrackers, veritable bombs, that ex-
ploded all the time, and at five minutes to two p.m. I heard
the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my
cabin, and then a thump upon it.
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door,
one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to
know was I better and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health;
at five, as now, he w^as a ruddy mosaic of scars — had been blown
through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was
able to man a tremendous truck, fish, hunt, drink, and buoy-
antly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was
such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a 2
sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his
left hand (the one pressing against the side of the door) and
revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of
fourth and fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar
nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of
his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs
while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious . . .
reclining against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.
I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day
[ 247 ]
and would get into touch with my daughter sometime to-
morrow if I felt probably Polynesian.
He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip
twitch amorously.
“Okey-dokey,” big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and
whistling, carried my message away, and I went on drinking,
and by morning the fever was gone, and although I was as limp
as a toad, I put on the purple dressing gown over my maize
yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone. Every-
thing was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything
was fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around
two, her uncle, Mr. Gustave, had called for her with a cocker
, 2 spaniel pup and a smile for everyone, and a black Caddy Lack,
and had paid Dolly’s bill in cash, and told them to tell me I
should not worry, and keep warm, they were at Grandpa’s ranch
as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town.
3 It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat green-i
wool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I
think I have alluded earlier to its model school and temple
and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously
enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn
grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one
gravel-groaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said
4 to myself telestically — and, telephathically (I hoped), to its ges-
ticulating owner — that I would return later, address Bird School,
5 Bird, New Bird, the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my
brain, and after some lapses and losses common to dream
sequences, I found myself in the reception room, trying to beat
up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and clamor-
ing for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands
plucked at my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and some-
how I seem to have been sitting on a bald brown-headed patient,
whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue, and who eventually stood
up, remarking with a preposterous accent: “Now, who is
nevrotic, I ask?” — and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented
me with seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely
[ 248 ]
folded tartan lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the
sudden silence I became aware of a policeman in the hallway,
to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me out, and meekly
1 signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my Lolita
to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and
stark thought stood out and this was: “Freedom for the mo-
ment is everything.” One false move — and I might have been
made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out
of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was
fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke
in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not
necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I
apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding
however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest
of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my
gun, and was still a free man — free to trace the fugitive, free to
destroy my brother. 1
23
A thousand-mile stretch of silk-smooth road separated Kas-
beam, where, to the best of my belief, the red fiend had been
scheduled to appear for the first time, and fateful Elphinstone
which we had reached about a week before Independence Day.
The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom
made more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day,
spending the rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at
various stopping places, all of them also prearranged, no doubt.
It was that stretch, then, along which the fiend’s spoor should 2
be sought; and to this I devoted myself, after several unmen-
tionable days of dashing up and down the relentlessly radiating
roads in the vicinity of Elphinstone.
Imagine me, reader, with my shyness, my distaste for any
ostentation, my inherent sense of the comrne il faut, imagine 3
me masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating
smile while devising some casual pretext to flip through the
[ M9 ]
hotel register: “Oh,” I would say, “I am almost positive that
I stayed here once— let me look up the entries for mid-June
— no, I see I’m wrong after all — what a very quaint name for
1 a home town, Kawtagain. Thanks very much.” Or: “I had a
customer staying here — I mislaid his address — may I . . . ?” And
every once in a while, especially if the operator of the place
happened to be a certain type of gloomy male, personal inspec-
tion of the books was denied me.
I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18,
when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if
2 not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes.
This figure includes a few registrations between Chestnut and
Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend (“N. Petit,
3 Larousse, 111 .”); I had to space and time my inquiries carefully
so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been
at least fifty places where I merely inquired at the desk — but
that was a futile quest, and I preferred building up a foundation
of verisimilitude and good will by first paying for an unneeded
room. My survey showed that of the 300 or so books inspected,
at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering fiend had
stopped even more often than we, or else — he was quite capable
of that — he had thrown in additional registrations in order to
keep me well furnished with derisive hints. Only in one case
had he actually stayed at the same motor court as we, a few
4 paces from Lolita’s pillow. In some instances he had taken up
quarters in the same or in a neighboring block; not infrequently
he had lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two be-
spoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our
departure from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour
books and maps, and marking laps and stops with her lipstick!
I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations
and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit.
5 At the very first motel office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his
entry, among a dozen obviously human ones, read: Dr. Gratiano
6 Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy connotations
could not fail to strike me, of course. The landlady deigned to
inform me that the gentleman had been laid up for five days
[ 250 ]
with a bad cold, that he had left his car for repairs in some
garage or other and that he had checked out on the 4th of
July. Yes, a girl called Ann Lore had worked formerly at the
Lodge, but was now married to a grocer in Cedar City. One
moonlit night I waylaid white-shoed Mary on a solitary street;
an automaton, she was about to shriek, but I managed to
humanize her by the simple act of falling on my knees and with
pious yelps imploring her to help. She did not know a thing, she
swore. Who was this Gratiano Forbeson? She seemed to waver.
I whipped out a hundred-dollar bill. She lifted it to the light
of the moon. “He is your brother,” she whispered at last. I 1
plucked the bill out of her moon-cold hand, and spitting out
a French curse turned and ran away. This taught me to rely on
myself alone. No detective could discover the clues Trapp had
tuned to my mind and manner. I could not hope, of course,
he would ever leave his correct name and address; but I did
hope he might slip on the glaze of his own subtlety, by daring,
say, to introduce a richer and more personal shot of color than
was strictly necessary, or by revealing too much through a quali-
tative sum of quantitative parts which revealed too little. In one
thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly enmeshing me
and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. With in-
finite skill, he swayed and staggered, and regained an impossible
balance, always leaving me with the sportive hope — if I may use 2
such a term in speaking of betrayal, fury, desolation, horror and
hate — that he might give himself away next time. He never did
— though coming damn close to it. We all admire the spangled
acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope
in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sag-
ging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a
grotesque drunk! / should know.
The clues he left did not establish his identity but they re-
flected his personality, or at least a certain homogenous and
striking personality; his genre, his type of humor — at its best at
least — the tone of his brain, had affinities with my own. He
mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow.
He was well-read. He knew French. He was versed in logodaedaly
[ 251 ]
1
and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a femi-
nine handwriting. He would change his name but he could not
disguise, no matter how he slanted them, his very peculiar t’s,
2 w’s and I’s. Quelquepart Island was one of his favorite resi-
dences. He did not use a fountain pen which fact, as any psycho-
analyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed
undinist. One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the
3 Styx.
His main trait was his passion for tantalization. Goodness,
what a tease the poor fellow was! He challenged my scholar-
ship. I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be
modest about my not knowing all; and I daresay I missed some
4 elements in that cryptogrammic paper chase. What a shiver
of triumph and loathing shook my frail frame when, among the
plain innocent names in the hotel recorder, his fiendish conun-
drum would ejaculate in my face! I noticed that whenever he
felt his enigmas were becoming too recondite, even for such a
solver as I, he would lure me back with an easy one. “Arsene
5 Lupin” was obvious to a Frenchman who remembered the de-
tective stories of his youth; and one hardly had to be a Coleridg-
6 ian to appreciate the trite poke of “A. Person, Porlock, Eng-
land.” In horrible taste but basically suggestive of a cultured
man — not a policeman, not a common goon, not a lewd sales-
man — were such assumed names as “Arthur Rainbow” — plainly
the travestied author of Le Bateau Bleu — let me laugh a little
too, gentlemen — and “Morris Schmetterling,” of UOiseau Ivre
1 fame {touche, reader!). The silly but funny “D. Orgon, Elmira,
8 NY,” was from Moliere, of course, and because I had quite
recently tried to interest Lolita in a famous 18th-century play,
9 I welcomed as an old friend “Harry Bumper, Sheridan, Wyo.”
An ordinary encyclopedia informed me who the peculiar look-
10 ing “Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH” was; and any good
Freudian, with a German name and some interest in religious
prostitution, should recognize at a glance the implication of
11 “Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.” So far so good. That sort of fun
was shoddy but on the whole impersonal and thus innocuous.
Among entries that arrested my attention as undoubtable clues
[ 252 ]
per se but baffled me in respect to their finer points I do not
care to mention many since I feel I am groping in a border-land
mist with verbal phantoms turning, perhaps, into living vaca-
tionists. Who was “Johnny Randall, Ramble, Ohio”? Or was l
he a real person who just happened to write a hand similar to
“N.S. Aristoff, Catagela, NY”? What was the sting in “Cata- 2
gela”? And what about “James Mavor Morell, Hoaxton, Eng- 3
land”? “Aristophanes,” “hoax” — fine, but what was I missing?
There was one strain running through all that pseudonymity
which caused me especially painful palpitations when I came
across it. Such things as “G. Trapp, Geneva, NY.” was the sign 4
of treachery on Lolita’s part. “Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart 5
Island” suggested more lucidly than the garbled telephone mes-
sage had that the starting point of the affair should be looked '
for in the East. “Lucas Picador, Merrymay, Pa.” insinuated that 6
my Carmen had betrayed my pathetic endearments to the im- 7
postor. Horribly cruel, forsooth, was “Will Brown, Dolores,
Colo.” The gruesome “Harold Haze, Tombstone, Arizona” 8, 9
(which at another time would have appealed to my sense of
humor) implied a familiarity with the girl’s past that in night-
mare fashion suggested for a moment that my quarry was an
old friend of the family, maybe an old flame of Charlotte’s,
maybe a redresser of wrongs (“Donald Quix, Sierra, Nev.”). 10
Bur the most penetrating bodkin was the anagramtailed entry H
in the register of Chestnut Lodge “Ted Hunter, Cane, NH.”. 12, l
The garbled license numbers left by all these Persons and
Orgons and Morells and Trapps only told me that motel keepers
omit to check if guests’ cars are accurately listed. References —
incompletely or incorrectly indicated — to the cars the fiend had
hired for short laps between Wace and Elphinstone were of
course useless; the license of the initial Aztec was a shimmer of
shifting numerals, some transposed, others altered or omitted,
but somehow forming interrelated combinations (such as “WS 14
1564” and “SH 1616,” and “Q32888” or “CU 88322”) which
however were so cunningly contrived as to never reveal a com-
mon denominator. 15
[ 253 ]
It occurred to me that after he had turned that convertible
over to accomplices at Wace and switched to the stage-motor
car system, his successors might have been less careful and might
have inscribed at some hotel office the archtype of those inter-
related figures. But if looking for the fiend along a road I knew
he had taken was such a complicated vague and unprofitable
business, what could I expect from any attempt to trace un-
known motorists traveling along unknown routes?
24
By the time I reached Beardsley, in the course of the har-
rowing recapitulation I have now discussed at sufficient length,
a complete image had formed in my mind; and through the—
always risky — process of elimination I had reduced this image
to the only concrete source that morbid cerebration and torpid
memory could give it.
Except for the Rev. Rigor Mortis (as the girls called him),
and an old gentleman who taught non-obligatory German and
Latin, there were no regular male teachers at Beardsley School.
But on two occasions an art instructor on the Beardsley College
faculty had come over to show the schoolgirls magic lantern
pictures of French castles and nineteenth-century paintings. I
had wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly,
as was her wont, had asked me not to, period. I also remem-
bered that Gaston had referred to that particular lecturer as a
1 brilliant gargon; but that was all; memory refused to supply
me with the name of the chateau-lover.
On the day fixed for the execution, I walked through the sleet
across the campus to the information desk in Maker Hall,
Beardsley College. There I learned that the fellow’s name was
Riggs (rather like that of the minister), that he was a bachelor,
and that in ten minutes he would issue from the “Museum”
where he was having a class. In the passage leading to the audi-
torium I sat on a marble bench of sorts donated by Cecilia
[ 254 ]
3 alrymple Ramble. As I waited there, in prostatic discomfort,
irunk, sleep-starved, with my gun in my fist in my raincoat
Docket, it suddenly occurred to me that I was demented and
vas about to do something stupid. There was not one chance
n a million that Albert Riggs, Ass. Prof., was hiding my Lolita
It his Beardsley home, 24 Pritchard Road. He could not be the
/illain. It was absolutely preposterous. I was losing my time
md my wits. He and she were in California and not here at all.
Presently, I noticed a vague commotion behind some white
>tatues; a door — not the one I had been staring at — opened
briskly, and amid a bevy of women students a baldish head
and two bright brown eyes bobbed, advanced.
He was a total stranger to me but insisted we had met at a
lawn party at Beardsley School. How was my delightful tennis-
playing daughter? He had another class. He would be seeing me.
Another attempt at identification was less speedily resolved:
through an advertisement in one of Lo’s magazines I dared to
get in touch with a private detective, an ex-pugilist, and merely
to give him some idea of the inethod adopted by the fiend, I
acquainted him with the kind of names and addresses I had
collected. He demanded a goodish deposit and for two years —
two years, reader! — that imbecile busied himself with checking
those nonsense data. I had long severed all monetary relations
with him when he turned up one day with the triumphant in-
formation that an eighty-year-old Indian by the name of Bill
Brown lived near Dolores, Colo. 1
25
This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the
part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal com-
bustion martyr) might be called “Do/orcy Disparue,” there 2
would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that
followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the
general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing
[ 255 ]
open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drown-
ing with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I '
remembered her — as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my
1 conscious mind during my daymares and insomnias. More pre-
cisely: she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange i
and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross be-
tween them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding
shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and dis - 1
gust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board '
or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer '
ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hope- 1
2 lessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would bc'
entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended
with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and
being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder
3 of auctioneered Viennese bric-Vbrac, pity, impotence and the
brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.
One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumula-t
tion of teen-magazines. You know the sort. Stone age at heart;
up to date, or at least Mycenaean, as to hygiene. A handsome,
very ripe actress with huge lashes and a pulpy red underlip,
endorsing a shampoo. Ads and fads. Young scholars dote on
4 plenty of pleats — que c'etait loin, tout cela! It is your hostess’
duty to provide robes. Unattached details take all the sparkle
out of your conversation. All of us have known “pickers” — one
who picks her cuticle at the office party. Unless he is very elderly
or very important, a man should remove his gloves before
shaking hands with a woman. Invite Romance by wearing the
Exciting New Tummy Flattener. Trims turns, nips hips. Tris-
tram in Movielove. Yessir! The Joe-Roe marital enigma is mak-
ing yaps flap. Glamourize yourself quickly and inexpensively.
5 Comics. Bad girl dark hair fat father cigar; good girl red hair
handsome daddums clipped mustache. Or that repulsive strip
6 with the big gagoon and his wife, a kiddoid gnomide. Et mol
7 qui foffrais mon genie ... I recalled the rather charming non-
[ 256 ]
sense verse I used to write her when she was a child: “nonsense,”
she used to say mockingly, “is correct.”
The Squirl and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits
Have certain obscure and peculiar habits.
Male hummingbirds make the most exquisite rockets.
The snake when he walks holds his hands in his pockets . . .
Other things of hers were harder to relinquish. Up to the end
of 1949, I cherished and adored, and stained with my kisses and
merman tears, a pair of old sneakers, a boy’s shirt she had worn, l
some ancient blue jeans I found in the trunk compartment, a
crumpled school cap, suchlike wanton treasures. Then, when
I understood my mind was cracking, I collected these sundry
belongings, added to them what had been stored in Beardsley —
a box of books, her bicycle, old coats, galoshes — and on her
fifteenth birthday mailed everything as an anonymous gift to a
home for orphaned girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian
border.
It is just possible that had I gone to a strong hypnotist he
might have extracted from me and arrayed in a logical pattern
certain chance memories that I have threaded through my book
with considerably more ostentation than they present them-
selves with to my mind even now when I know what to seek in
the past. At the time I felt I was merely losing contact with
reality; and after spending the rest of the winter and most of the 2
following spring in a Quebec sanatorium where I had stayed
before, I resolved first to settle some affairs of mine in New York
and then to proceed to California for a thorough search there.
Here is something I composed in my retreat: 3
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Profession: none, or “starlet.”
Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?
' Why are you hiding, darling?
(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze,
I cannot get out, said the starling). 4
[ 257 ]
Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?
What make is the magic carpet?
Is a Cream Cougar the present craze?
And where are you parked, my car pet?
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?
Still one of those blue-caped star-men?
Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays.
And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen!
Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts!
Are you still dancin’, darlin’?
(Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts,
And I, in my corner, snarlin’).
Happy, happy is gnarled McFate
Touring the States with a child wife.
Plowing his Molly in every State
Among the protected wild life.
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?
U autre soir un air froid d' opera m'alita:
Son fe/c — bien fol est qui s'y fie!
II fieige, le decor s^ecroide, Lolita!
Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie?
Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse. I’m dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise.
And again I hear you crying.
Officer, officer, there they go —
In the rain, where that lighted store is!
And her socks are white, and I love her
And her name is Haze, Dolores.
Officer, officer, there they are —
Dolores Haze and her lover!
Whip out your gun and follow that car.
Now tumble out, and take cover.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of si.xty inches.
Mv car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest.
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays.
And the rest is rust and stardust.
By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac’s
masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very ex-
actly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and
figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn
by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers. I wrote
many more poems. I immersed myself in the poetry of others.
But not for a second did I forget the load of revenge.
I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe,
that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis. My
accursed nature could not change, no matter how my love for
her did. On playgrounds and beaches, my sullen and stealthy
eye, against my will, still sought out the flash of a nymphet’s
limbs, the sly tokens of Lolita’s handmaids and rosegirls. But
one essential vision in me had withered: never did I dwell now
on possibilities of bliss with a little maiden, specific or synthetic,
in some out-of-the-way place; never did my fancy sink its fangs
into Lolita’s sisters, far far away, in the coves of evoked islands.
That was all over, for the time being at least. On the other
hand, alas, two years of monstrous indulgence had left me
with certain habits of lust: I feared lest the void I lived in might
drive me to plunge into the freedom of sudden insanity when
confronted with a chance temptation in some lane between
[ 259 ]
school and supper. Solitude was corrupting me. I needed com-
pany and care. My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ. This
is how Rita enters the picture.
26
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very
slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and
five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, an angular,
1 rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing enselhire to her
2 supple back — I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood.
3 I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between
Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toyles-
4 town and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of
5 the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we
had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little
hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I
decided to give her a try; I did — and adopted her as a constant
companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that
I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature
or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of
sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third
husband — and a little more recently had been abandoned by her
6 seventh cavalier servant — the others, the mutables, were too
numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was — and no
doubt still is — a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-
tie-wearing politician, mayor and booster of his ball-playing,
Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight
years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred
dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would
never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with
wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy
friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a
fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would
[ 260 ]
find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would
be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it — “going round
and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry
moth.” 1
She had a natty little coupe; and in it we traveled to California
so as to give my venerable vehicle a rest. Her natural speed was
ninety. Dear Rita! We cruised together for two dim years, from
summer 1950 to summer 1952, and she was the sweetest, sim-
plest, gentlest, dumbest Rita imaginable. In comparison to her,
Valechka was a Schlegel, and Charlotte a Hegel. There is no 2,3
earthly reason why I should dally with her in the margin of this
sinister memoir, but let me say (hi, Rita— -wherever you are,
drunk or hangoverish, Rita, hi!) that she was the most soothing,
the most comprehending companion that I ever had, and cer-
tainly saved me from the madhouse. I told her I was trying to
trace a girl and plug that girl’s bully. Rita solemnly approved of
the plan — and in the course of some investigation she undertook
on her own (without really knowing a thing), around San Hum-
ibertino, got entangled with a pretty awful crook herself; I had
the devil of a time retrieving her — used and bruised but still
cocky. Then one day she proposed playing Russian roulette with
my sacred automatic; I said you couldn’t, it was not a revolver,
and we struggled for it, until at last it went off, touching off a very
thin and very comical spurt of hot water from the hole it made
in the wall of the cabin room; I remember her shrieks of laughter.
The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her
slow languorous columbine kisses kept me from mischief. It is
not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as
some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: 4
sex is but the ancilla of art. One rather mysterious spree that had 5
interesting repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the
search; the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my 6
cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but cer-
tainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the
Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous
hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled,
fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and
[ 261 ]
booze^ — dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our room, a
blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and
large transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having
ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and
with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond
my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth was gone, amber pustules
grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in
my raincoat — the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-
striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses
had been used, which, in the way of clues, was an embarrassment
of riches. The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair
of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner
into miserable consciousness. He was completely amnesic. In an
accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly
insinuated that somehow we had purloined his (worthless)
identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the
nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other
after forgotten gyrations, we were in Grainball. Half a year later
Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been
tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his personal past. Oh
1 Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!
I would not have mentioned this incident had it not started
a chain of ideas that resulted in my publishing in the Cmtrip
2 Review an essay on “Mimir and Memory,” in which I suggested
among other things that seemed original and important to that
splendid review’s benevolent readers, a theory of perceptual time
based on the circulation of the blood and conceptually depend-
ing (to fill up this nutshell) on the mind’s being conscious not
only of matter but also of its own seif, thus creating a continuous
spanning of two points (the storable future and the stored past).
In result of this venture — and in culmination of the impression
3 made by my previous travanx — I was called from New York,
where Rita and I were living in a little flat with a view of gleam-
ing children taking shower baths far below in a fountainous arbor
of Central Park, to Cantrip College, four hundred miles away,
for one year. I lodged there, in special apartments for poets and
philosophers, from September 1951 to June 1952, while Rita
[ 262 ]
whom I preferred not to display vegetated — somewhat indeco-
rously, I am afraid — in a roadside inn where I visited her twice
a week. Then she vanished — more humanly than her predecessor
had done: a month later I found her in the local jail. She was
trh digiie, had had her appendix removed, and managed to con- 1
vince me that the beautiful bluish furs she had been accused of
stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spon-
taneous, if somewhat alcoholic, gift from Roland himself. I
succeeded in getting her out without appealing to her touchy
brother, and soon afterwards we drove back to Central Park
West, by way of Briceland, where we had stopped for a few
hours the year before.
A curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold
of me. I was entering a phase of existence where I had given up
all hope of tracing her kidnaper and her. I now attempted to fall
back on old settings in order to save what still could be saved in
the way of souvenir, souvenir que me veux-tu? Autumn was ring- 2
ing in the air. To a post card requesting twin beds Professor
Hamburg got a prompt expression of regret in reply. They were
full up. They had one bathless basement room with four beds
which they thought I would not want. Their note paper was
headed:
The Enchanted Hunters
NEAR churches NO DOGS
All legal beverages
I wondered if the last statement was true. All? Did they have
for instance sidewalk grenadine? I also wondered if a hunter,
enchanted or otherwise, would not need a pointer more than a
pew, and with a spasm of pain I recalled a scene worthy of a
great artist: petite nymphe accroupie; but that silky cocker 3
ipaniel had perhaps been a baptized one. No — I felt I could not 4
;endure the throes of revisiting that lobby. There was a much
better possibility of retrievable time elsewhere in soft, rich-
colored, autumnal Briceland. Leaving Rita in a bar, I made for
the town library. A twittering spinster was only too glad to help
: [ ^63 ]
me disinter mid-August 1947 from the bound Briceland Gazette^
and presently, in a secluded nook under a naked light, I was
turning the enormous and fragile pages of a coffin-black volume
almost as big as Lolita.
1 Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was!
Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene,
he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it — which re-
minds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue
who throws the girl’s black shawl over her white face so as not
to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in
the sad, sacked village. What / lusted to get was the printed
picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image while
the Gazette's photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock
2 and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait
3 of the artist as a younger brute. An innocent camera catching me
on my dark way to Lolita’s bed — what a magnet for Mnemosyne!
I cannot well explain the true nature of that urge of mine. It was
allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to
examine with a magnifying glass bleak little figures — still life
practically, and everybody about to throw up — at an early morn-
ing execution, and the patient’s expression impossible to make
out in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and
one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach
4 while I scanned and skimmed . . . Brute Force and Possessed
were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom,
independent tobacco auctioneer, said that ever since 1925 he had
5 been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and his petite
bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore,
6 58 Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain parasites is one sixth of
the host. Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century. Misses’
socks, 39 c. Saddle Oxfords 3.98. Wine, wine, wine, quipped the
7 author of Dark Age who refused to be photographed, may suit
a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the
8 shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time. Dimples are
caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues. Greeks
repulse a heavy guerilla assault — and, ah, at last, a little figure in
white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder
[ 264 ]
was brushing against his ample form — nothing of myself could I i
make out.
I went to find Rita who introduced me with her vin triste smile 2
to a pocket-sized wizened truculently tight old man saying this
was — what was the name again, son? — a former schoolmate of
hers. He tried to retain her, and in the slight scuffle that fol-
lowed I hurt my thumb against his hard head. In the silent
painted park where I walked her and aired her a little, she sobbed
and said I would soon, soon leave her as everybody had, and I
sang her a wistful French ballad, and strung together some
fugitive rhymes to amuse her:
The place was called EnchaJited Hunters. Query:
What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell
endorse to make of Picture Lake a very
blood bath of trees before the blue hotel?
She said: “Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s 3
sake?” and started to cry again, and I marched her to the car, and
we drove on to New York, and soon she was reasonably happy
again high up in the haze on the little terrace of our flat. I notice
I have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to
Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Brice-
land again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of
swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recol-
lection.
27
My letterbox in the entrance hall belonged to the type that
allows one to glimpse something of its contents through a glassed
slit. Several times already, a trick of harlequin light that fell
through the glass upon an alien handwriting had twisted it into
a semblance of Lolita’s script causing me almost to collapse as
I leant against an adjacent urn, almost my own. Whenever that
[ 265 ]
happened — whenever her lovely, loopy, childish scrawl was hor-
ribly transformed into the dull hand of one of my few cor-
respondents — I used to recollect, with anguished amusement,
the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be
misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking
eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out
from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her
1 Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a
perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because
the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to
spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may
well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so
much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty
as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the
gap between the little given and the great promised — the great
2 rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fenetres! Hanging above blotched
sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all
the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing
balcony: it would be ready to take off in the apricot and black
humid evening; did take off — whereupon the lighted image would
move and Eve would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing
in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper.
Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s
reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when
chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for
3 me. ‘’^Savez-vous qii’a dix ans via petite halt folle de vous?’’’’ said
a woman I talked to at a tea in Paris, and the petite had just
married, miles away, and I could not even remember if I had
ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis courts, a
dozen years before. And now likewise, the radiant foreglimpse,
the promise of reality, a promise not only to be simulated se-
ductively but also to be nobly held — all this, chance denied me
— chance and a change to smaller characters on the pale beloved
writer’s part. My fancy was both Proustianized and Procrus-
4,5 teanized; for that particular morning, late in September 1952,
as I had come down to grope for my mail, the dapper and bilious^
janitor with whom I was on execrable terms started to complain
[ 266 ]
that a man who had seen Rita home recently had been “sick like
a dog” on the front steps. In the process of listening to him and
tipping him, and then listening to a revised and politer version
of the incident, I had the impression that one of the two letters
which that blessed mail brought was from Rita’s mother, a crazy
little woman, whom we had once visited on Cape Cod and who
kept writing me to my various addresses, saying how wonderfully
well matched her daughter and I were, and how wonderful it
would be if we married; the other letter which I opened and
?canned rapidly in the elevator was from John Farlow.
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends
v^dth the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the
reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King
Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in i
ligh revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three
daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by
•rhe sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. What- 2
wer evolution this or that popular character has gone through
oetween the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and,
dmilarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and
:onventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never
:ompose the immortal music that would clash with the second-
•ate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit
nurder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have
t all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular
person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he con-
orms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any
ieviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not
)nly anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have
mown at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if
t turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his
ige has seen.
I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was
)y Farlow’s hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I
certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widow-
lood, the dull, sedate and reliable person he had always been.
Yow he wrote that after a brief visit to the U.S. he had returned
[ 267 ]
to South America and had decided that whatever affairs he had
controlled at Ramsdale he would hand over to Jack Windmuller
of that town, a lawyer whom we both knew. He seemed par-
ticularly relieved to get rid of the Haze “complications.” He had
married a Spanish girl. He had stopped smoking and had gained
thirty pounds. She was very young and a ski champion. They
1 were going to India for their honeymonsoon. Since he was “build-
ing a family” as he put it, he would have no time henceforth foi
my affairs which he termed “very strange and very aggravating.”
Busybodies — a whole committee of them, it appeared — had in-
formed him that the whereabouts of little Dolly Haze were un-
known, and that I was living with a notorious divorcee in Cali-
fornia. His father-in-law was a count, and exceedingly wealthy.
The people who had been renting the Haze house for some
years now wished to buy it. He suggested that I better produce
Dolly quick. He had broken his leg. He enclosed a snapshot of
himself and a brunette in white wool beaming at each other
among the snows of Chile.
I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say:
2 Well, at least we shall now track them down — when the other
letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact voice:
Dear Dad:
How’s everything? I’m married. I’m going to have a baby.
I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll come right for *
Christmas. This is a hard letter to write. I’m going nuts be-
cause we don’t have enough to pav our debts and get out of
here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very special-
ized corner of the mechanical field, that’s all I know about
it but it’s really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home
address but you may still be mad at me, and Dick must not
know. This town is something. You can’t see the morons for
the smog. Please do send us a check. Dad. We could manage
with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome,
you might sell my old things, because once we get there the
dough will just start rolling in. Write, please. I have gone
through much sadness and hardship.
Yours expecting,
Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)
[ 268 ]
28
; was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue
;edan, again alone. Rita had still been dead to the world when I
‘ead that letter and fought the mountains of agony it raised
I vvithin me. I had glanced at her as she smiled in her sleep and
lad kissed her on her moist brow, and had left her forever, with
' L note of tender adieu which I taped to her navel — otherwise
he might not have found it.
' “Alone” did I say? Pas tout a fait. I had my little black chum i
vith me, and as soon as I reached a secluded spot, I rehearsed
, vir. Richard F. Schiller’s violent death. I had found a very old and
, ^ery dirty gray sweater of mine in the back of the car, and this I
I lung up on a branch, in a speechless glade, which I had reached
)y a wood road from the now remote highway. The carrying out
' if the sentence was a little marred by what seemed to me a cer-
■ ain stiffness in the play of the trigger, and I wondered if I should
ret some oil for the mysterious thing but decided I had no time
I o spare. Back into the car went the old dead sweater, now with
I idditional perforations, and having reloaded warm Chum, I
t .'ontinued my journey.
The letter was dated September i8, 1952 (this was Septem-
ber 22), and the address she gave was “General Delivery, Coal-
; nont” (not “Va.,” not “Pa.,” not “Tenn.” — and not Coalmont,
I nyway — I have camouflaged everything, my love). Inquiries
howed this to be a small industrial community some eight
i lundred miles from New York City. At first I planned to drive
11 day and all night, but then thought better of it and rested for
! couple of hours around dawn in a motor court room, a few
niles before reaching the town. I had made up my mind that the
iend, this Schiller, had been a car salesman who had perhaps
rot to know my Lolita by giving her a ride in Beardsley — the day
ler bike blew a tire on the way to Miss Emperor — and that he
lad got into some trouble since then. The corpse of the executed
weater, no matter how I changed its contours as it lay on the
)ack seat of the car, had kept revealing various outlines pertain-
ng to Trapp-Schiller — the grossness and obscene bonhommie of
[ 269 ]
his body, and to counteract this taste of coarse corruption I re-
solved to make myself especially handsome and smart as I
pressed home the nipple of my alarm clock before it exploded at
the set hour of six a.m. Then, with the stern and romantic care
of a gentleman about to fight a duel, I checked the arrangement
of my papers, bathed and perfumed my delicate body, shaved,
my face and chest, selected a silk shirt and clean drawers, pulled
on transparent taupe socks, and congratulated myself for having
with me in my trunk some very exquisite clothes — a waistcoat
with nacreous buttons, for instance, a pale cashmere tie and
so on.
I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that
physicality as a trivial contretemps, wiped my mouth with a
1 gossamer handkerchief produced from my sleeve, and, with a
blue block of ice for heart, a pill on my tongue and solid death
in my hip pocket, I stepped neatly into a telephone booth ir
2 Coalmont (Ah-ah-ah, said its little door) and rang up the only
Schiller — Paul, Furniture — to be found in the battered book,
Hoarse Paul told me he did know a Richard, the son of a cousin
of his, and his address was, let me see, lo Killer Street (I am not
going very far for my pseudonyms). Ah-ah-ah, said the little door,
At lo Killer Street, a tenement house, I interviewed a number
of dejected old people and two long-haired strawberry-blond
incredibly grubby nymphets (rather abstractly, just for the heck
of it, the ancient beast in me was casting about for some lightly
clad child I might hold against me for a minute, after the killing
was over and nothing mattered any more, and everything wa‘
3 allowed). Yes, Dick Skiller had lived there, but had moved when
he married. Nobody knew his address. “They might know at the
store,” said a bass voice from an open manhole near which 1
happened to be standing with the two thin-armed, barefoot little
girls and their dim grandmothers. I entered the wrong store ano
a wary old Negro shook his head even before I could ask any -I
thing. I crossed over to a bleak grocery and there, summoned b)l
a customer at my request, a woman’s voice from some wooden
abyss in the floor, the manhole’s counterpart, cried out: Huntej
4 Road, last house.
[ 270 ]
Hunter Road was miles away, in an even more dismal district,
ill dump and ditch, and wormy vegetable garden, and shack, and
yray drizzle, and red mud, and several smoking stacks in the dis-
ance. I stopped at the last “house” — a clapboard shack, with
wo or three similar ones farther away from the road and a waste
)f withered weeds all around. Sounds of hammering came from
)ehind the house, and for several minutes I sat quite still in my
)ld car, old and frail, at the end of my journey, at my gray goal,
mis, my friends, finis, my fiends. The time was around two.
vly pulse was 40 one minute and 100 the next. The drizzle
Tepitated against the hood of the car. My gun had migrated to
ny right trouser pocket. A nondescript cur came out from be-
lind the house, stopped in surprise, and started good-naturedly
voof-woofing at me, his eyes slit, his shaggy belly all muddy,
nd then walked about a little and woofed once more.
29
got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact,
ow square that slam sounded in the void of the sunless day!
y oof, commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell
'utton, it vibrated through my whole system. Personne. Je
•esonne. Reperso?me. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, 1
lid the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woof went the door.
Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up
air do, new ears. How simple! The moment, the death I had
ept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry
/ood. She was frankly and hugely pregnant. Her head looked
mailer (only two seconds had passed really, but let me give them
s much wooden duration as life can stand), and her pale-
■eckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had
!)st all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a
rOwn, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers.
I “We — e — ell!” she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis
f wonder and welcome.
[ 271 ]
“Husband at home?” I croaked, fist in pocket.
I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see.
I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever
sight.
“Come in,” she said with a vehement cheerful note. Against
the splintery deadwood of the door, Dolly Schiller flattened her-
self as best she could (even rising on tiptoe a little) to let mt
pass, and was crucified for a moment, looking down, smiling dowr
at the threshold, hollow-cheeked with round pomniettes, hei
watered-milk-white arms outspread on the wood. I passed with-
out touching her bulging babe. Dolly-smell, with a faint friec
addition. My teeth chattered like an idiot’s. “No, you stay out’
(to the dog). She closed the door and followed me and her belly
into the dollhouse parlor.
“Dick’s down there,” she said pointing with an invisible tenni;
racket, inviting my gaze to travel from the drab parlor-bedroorr
where we stood, right across the kitchen, and through the back-
doorway where, in a rather primitive vista, a dark-haired young
stranger in overalls, instantaneously reprieved, was perched witbj
his back to me on a ladder fixing something near or upon thtij
shack of his neighbor, a plumper fellow with only one arm, whci
stood looking up.
This pattern she explained from afar, apologetically (“Meri
will be men”) ; should she call him in? i
No. I
Standing in the middle of the slanting room and emitting!
questioning “hm’s,” she made familiar Javanese gestures witlij
her wrists and hands, offering me, in a brief display of humorou'j
courtesy, to choose between a rocker and the divan (their bee
after ten p.m.). I say “familiar” because one day she had welj;
corned me with the same wrist dance to her party in Beardsleyli
We both sat down on the divan. Curious: although actually hei^
looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the
day, how much she looked — had always looked — like Botticelli’'}
russet Venus — the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty. Ir|’
my pocket my fingers gently let go and repacked a little at th(
tip, within the handkerchief it was nested in, my unused weapon} j
[ 272 ]
“That’s not the fellow I want,” I said.
The diffuse look of welcome left her eyes. Her forehead
muckered as in the old bitter days:
“Not who?'"
“Where is he? Quick!”
“Look,” she said, inclining her head to one side and shaking
t in that position. “Look, you are not going to bring that up.”
“I certainly am,” I said, and for a moment — strangely enough
he only merciful, endurable one in the whole interview — we
vere bristling at each other as if she were still mine.
A wise girl, she controlled herself.
Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I
vas her father. He thought she had run away from an upper-
dass home just to wash dishes in a diner. He believed anything.
ATy should I want to make things harder than they were by
•aking up all that muck?
But, I said, she must be sensible, she must be a sensible girl
'with her bare drum under that thin brown stuff), she must
mderstand that if she expected the help I had come to give, I
nust have at least a clear comprehension of the situation.
“Come, his name!”
She thought I had guessed long ago. It was (with a mischie-
vous and melancholy smile) such a sensational name. I would
lever believe it. She could hardly believe it herself.
His name, my fall nymph.
It was so unimportant, she said. She suggested I skip it. Would
like a cigarette?
No. His name.
■ She shook her head with great resolution. She guessed it was
00 late to raise hell and I would never believe the unbelievably
inbelievable —
I said I had better go, regards, nice to have seen her.
She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the
jither hand, after all — “Do you really want to know who it was?
Veil, it was — ”
1 And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and
I'uckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, some-
[ 273 ]
I
what fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, th(
name that the astute reader has guessed long ago.
1 Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross mj
consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, al
along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion tool
place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branche
that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express pur
pose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, witl
the express and perverse purpose of rendering — she was talking
but I sat melting in my golden peace — of rendering that goldei
and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recogni
2 tion, which my most inimical reader should experience now.
She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. Hi'
was the only man she had ever been crazy about. What abou
Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together
but she meant something different. And / had never counted, o
course?
She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible— -
and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary — fact that thu
3 distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velve’
coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore am
follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eye;
strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment re
fleeted, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like
rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like
humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood
I just managed to jerk my knee out of the range of a sketch'
tap — one of her acquired gestures.
She asked me not to be dense. The past was the past. I hai
been a good father, she guessed — granting me that. Proceec
Dolly Schiller.
Well, did I know that he had known her mother? That he wa
practically an old friend? That he had visited with his uncle i:
4 Ramsdale? — oh, years ago — and spoken at Mother’s club, an
had tugged and pulled her, Dolly, by her bare arm onto his la
■ in front of everybody, and kissed her face, she was ten an
furious with him? Did I know he had seen me and her at the in
[ 274 ]
/here he was writing the very play she was to rehearse in Beards-
;y, two years later? Did I know — It had been horrid of her to
detrack me into believing that Clare was an old female, maybe 1
relative of his or a sometime lifemate — and oh, what a close
have it had been when the Wace Journal carried his picture.
The Bricelaiid Gazette had not. Yes, very amusing.
Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if
omebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it.
At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen
■ito which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through
le doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor.
“Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent
oice that struck me as totally strange, and new, and cheerful,
nd old, and sad, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote
/ar, was hard of hearing.
Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin. We
took hands. Discreet Bill, who evidently took pride in working
mnders with one hand, brought in the beer cans he had opened.
Vanted to withdraw. The exquisite courtesy of simple folks.
Vas made to stay. A beer ad. In point of fact, I preferred it that
,^ay, and so did the Schillers. I switched to the jittery rocker,
widly munching, Dolly plied me with marshmallows and potato
hips. The men looked at her fragile, frileux, diminutive, old- 2
mrld, youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige vest,
laybe a viscount.
They were under the impression I had come to stay, and
hck with a great wrinkling of brows that denoted difficult
lought, suggested Dolly and he might sleep in the kitchen on
spare mattress. I waved a light hand and told Dolly who trans-
litted it by means of a special shout to Dick that I had merely
topped in on my way to Readsburg where I was to be enter-
ined by some friends and admirers. It was then noticed that
le of the few thumbs remaining to Bill was bleeding (not such
I wonder-worker after all). How womanish and somehow never
cn that way before was the shadowy divison between her pale
I'easts when she bent down over the man’s hand! She took him
i)r repairs to the kitchen. For a few minutes, three or four little
[ 275 ]
eternities which positively welled with artificial warmth, Dicl(
and I remained alone. He sat on a hard chair rubbing his fore-,
limbs and frowning. I had an idle urge to squeeze out the black-
heads on the wings of his perspiring nose with my long agate
claws. He had nice sad eyes with beautiful lashes, and very
white teeth. His Adam’s apple was large and hairy. Why don’t
they shave better, those young brawny chaps? He and his Dolly '
had had unrestrained intercourse on that couch there, at least e
hundred and eighty times, probably much more; and before that
— how long had she known him? No grudge. Funny — no grudge
at all, nothing except grief and nausea. He was now rubbing hi;
nose. I was sure that when finally he would open his mouth, he
would say (slightly shaking his head); “Aw, she’s a swell kid
Mr. Haze. She sure is. And she’s going to make a swell mother.’
He opened his mouth — and took a sip of beer. This gave hin
countenance — and he went on sipping till he frothed at the
1 mouth. He was a lamb. He had cupped her Florentine breasts
His fingernails were black and broken, but the phalanges, the,
whole carpus, the strong shapely wrist were far, far finer thar^^ ^
mine: I have hurt too much too many bodies with my twistec;
poor hands to be proud of them. French epithets, a Dorset |
2 yokel’s knuckles, an Austrian tailor’s flat finger tips — that’
Humbert Humbert. !
Good. If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I couk i
very well do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-deatl'
3 rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast’s lair was— |i
and then pulled the pistol’s foreskin back, and then enjoyed th( |i
orgasm of the crushed trigger: I was always a good little followe: |l
4 of the Viennese medicine man. But presently I became sort) |l
5 for poor Dick whom, in some hy^pnotoid way, I was horribly ‘
preventing from making the only remark he could think uj jl
(“She’s a swell kid .. .”). s
“And so,” I said, “you are going to Canada?” | (
In the kitchen, Dolly was laughing at something Bill had sak f
or done. ! i
“And so,” I shouted, “you are going to Canada? Not Canada' '
— I re-shouted— “I mean Alaska, of course.” s
[ 276 ]
He nursed his glass and, nodding sagely, replied: “Well, he
;ut it on a jagger, I guess. Lost his right arm in Italy.”
Lovely mauve almond trees in bloom. A blown-ofF surrealistic
rrm hanging up there in the pointillistic mauve. A flowergirl
:attoo on the hand. Dolly and band-aided Bill reappeared. It
jccurred to me that her ambiguous, brown and pale beauty ex-
ited the cripple. Dick, with a grin of relief stood up. He guessed
3ill and he would be going back to fix those wires. He guessed
\Ir. Haze and Dolly had loads of things to say to each other. He
j'uessed he would be seeing me before I left. Why do those
people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful
:)f hearing aids?
“Sit down,” she said, audibly striking her flanks with her
3alms. I relapsed into the black rocker.
i “So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?”
She took from the mantelpiece a concave glossy snapshot. Old
voman in white, stout, beaming, bowlegged, very short dress;
)ld man in his shirtsleeves, drooping mustache, watch chain. Her
ndaws. Living with Dick’s brother’s family in Juneau.
“Sure you don’t want to smoke?”
( She was smoking herself. First time I saw her doing it. Streng
^berboten under Humbert the Terrible. Gracefully, in a blue i
:nist, Charlotte Haze rose from her grave. I would find him
' hrough Uncle Ivory if she refused.
“Betrayed you? No.” She directed the dart of her cigarette,
ndex rapidly tapping upon it, toward the hearth exactly as her
nother used to do, and then, like her mother, oh my God, with 2
ler fingernail scratched and removed a fragment of cigarette
oaper from her underlip. No. She had not betrayed me. I was
mong friends. Edusa had warned her that Cue liked little girls, 3
lad been almost jailed once, in fact (nice fact), and he knew
he knew. Yes . . . Elbow in palm, puff, smile, exhaled smoke,
larting gesture. Waxing reminiscent. He saw — smiling — through
I'verything and everybody, because he was not like me and her
)ut a genius. A great guy. Full of fun. Had rocked with laughter
ivhen she confessed about me and her, and said he had thought
o. It was quite safe, under the circumstances, to tell him . . .
[ 277 ]
1
Well, Cue — they all called him Cue —
Her camp five years ago. Curious coincidence — . . . took hei
to a dude ranch about a day’s drive from Elephant (Elphin-
2 stone). Named? Oh, some silly name — Duk Duk Ranch — yoi
know just plain silly — but it did not matter now, anyway, be-
cause the place had vanished and disintegrated. Really, sht
meant, I could not imagine how utterly lush that ranch was
she meant it had everything but everything, even an indooi
3 waterfall. Did I remember the redhaired guy we (“we” wa;
good) had once had some tennis with? Well, the place really
belonged to Red’s brother, but he had turned it over to Cue foi|
the summer. When Cue and she came, the others had therr
actually go through a coronation ceremony and then — a terrific
ducking, as when you cross the Equator. Y on know.
Her eyes rolled in synthetic resignation.
“Go on, please.”
Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Holly-
wood and arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the tennis-match|
scene of a movie picture based on a play of his — Golden Guts —
and perhaps even have her double one of its sensational starlets'
on the Klieg-struck tennis court. Alas, it never came to that.
“Where is the hog now?”
He was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects. But it
was all drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a complete freah
in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not
imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at
Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part because she loved
him, and he threw her out.
“What things?”
“Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and
two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us
to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.”
4 (Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.)
“What things exactly?”
“Oh, things . . . Oh, I — really I” — she uttered the “I” as a
subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for
lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-
[ 278 ]
lown-moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into
)articulars with that baby inside her.
That made sense.
. “It is of no importance now,” she said pounding a gray
ushion with her fist and then lying back, belly up, on the divan.
Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to [she
'.sed, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in
■ literal French translation, would be souffler] your beastly l
toys, because I want only you. Well, he kicked me out.”
There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and
he had found jobs. For almost two years she had — oh, just
Irifted, oh, doing some restaurant work in small places, and
hen she had met Dick. No, she did not know where the other
vas. In New York, she guessed. Of course, he was so famous she
vould have found him at once if she had wanted. Fay had tried
0 get back to the Ranch — and it just was not there any more —
: had burned to the ground, nothing remained, just a charred
eap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange —
She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, leaning back on
he cushion, one felted foot on the floor. The wooden floor
lanted, a little steel ball would have rolled into the kitchen. I
new all I wanted to know. I had no intention of torturing my
arling. Somewhere beyond Bill’s shack an afterwork radio had
egun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined
Doks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-
esh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt arm-
its, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, 2
/ith that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot
nd retiring around 2020 a . d . — and I looked and looked at her, 3
nd knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more
lan anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for
nywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf
cho of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in
le past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood
nder a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one
!ist cricket in the crisp weeds . . . but thank God it was not that
[ 279 ]
i
echo alone that I worshiped. What I used to pamper among thi
1 tangled vines of my heart, mon grand peche radieux, hac
dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I cancelei
and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court
but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poo
truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, thi
Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but stil
gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Car
mencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allojts vivr>
2 quelque part oil nous ne serons jamais separes; Ohio? The wild
of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers wouk
fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and he
lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn — evei
then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of you
dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice
my Lolita.
“Lolita,” I said, “this may be neither here nor there but
have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car yoi
know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It i
a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Righ
3 now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.'
4 Carmen, voulez-vous veiiir avec moi?
“You mean,” she said opening her eyes and raising hersel
slightly, the snake that may strike, “you mean you will give u
[us] that money only if I go with you to a motel. Is that wha
you mean?”
“No,” I said, “you got it all wrong. I want you to leave you
incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me
and die with me, and everything with me” (words to that effect)
“You’re crazy,” she said, her features working.
“Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Excepi
perhaps — well, no matter.” (A reprieve, I wanted to say but dii
not.) “Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your . . . trousseau. ^
“No kidding?” asked Dolly.
I handed her an envelope with four hundred dollars in cas '
and a check for three thousand six hundred more.
[ 280 ]
Gingerly, uncertainly, she received mon petit cadeau; and l
[len her forehead became a beautiful pink. “You mean,” she
aid, with agonized emphasis, “you are giving us ^our thousand
■ucks?'’’ I covered my face with my hand and broke into the
ottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my
ngers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got
logged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist.
“I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. “You are sure you are not
oming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only
pis.”
; “No,” she said. “No, honey, no.”
She had never called me honey before.
, “No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner
,o back to Cue. I mean — ”
She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (“i7e broke
ly heart. You merely broke my life”).
“I think,” she went on— “oops” — the envelope skidded to the
oor — she picked it up— “I think it’s oh utterly grand of you to
ive us all that dough. It settles everything, we can start next
^eek. Stop crying, please. You should understand. Let me get
ou some more beer. Oh, don’t cry. I’m so sorry I cheated so
luch, but that’s the way things are.”
I wiped my face and my fingers. She smiled at the cadeau.
he exulted. She wanted to call Dick. I said I would have to leave
ii a moment, did not want to see him at all, at all. We tried to
link of some subject of conversation. For some reason, I kept
.ieing- — it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina — a
idiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles
an empty can. I almost said — trying to find some casual remark
-“I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo
,irl, did she ever get better?”— but stopped in time lest she
ejoin: “I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze
jirl . . .” Finally, I reverted to money matters. That sum, I said,
jpresented more or less the net rent from her mother’s house;
jie said: “Had it not been sold years ago?” No (I admit I had
)ld her this in order to sever all connections with R.); a lawyer
[ 281 ]
I
would send a full account of the financial situation later; it wa
rosy; some of the small securities her mother had owned hai
gone up and up. Yes, I was quite sure I had to go. I had to gc
and find him, and destroy him.
Since I would not have survived the touch of her lips, I kep
retreating in a mincing dance, at every step she and her belh
made toward me.
She and the dog saw me off. I was surprised (this a rhetorics
figure, I was not) that the sight of the old car in which she ha*
ridden as a child and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent. Ai
she remarked was it was getting sort of purplish about the gilk^
I said it was hers, I could go by bus. She said don’t be silly, the>
1 would fly to Jupiter and buy a car there. I said I would buy thi
one from her for five hundred dollars.
“At this rate we’ll be millionnaires next,” she said to th'
ecstatic dog.
2 Carmencita, lui demandais-je . . . “One last word,” I said ii'
my horrible careful English, “are you quite, quite sure that—
well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—
well — some day, any day, you will not come to live with me?
will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries
if you give me that microscopic hope” (to that effect).
“No,” she said smiling, “no.”
“It would have made all the difference,” said Humber
Humbert.
Then I pulled out my automatic — I mean, this is the kind o
3 fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurrec
to me to do it.
“Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immorta
4 dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this,
mean, such is the formal agreement with the so-called authorities
Then, as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice t(
her Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my car like a fa
dolphin, but he was too heavy and old, and very soon gave up
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dyinj
day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope
with my tears.
[ 282 ]
30
^caving as I did Coalmont around four in the afternoon (by
loute X — I do not remember the number), 1 might have made
lamsdale by dawn had not a short-cut tempted me. I had to
jet onto Highway Y. My map showed quite blandly that just
)eyond Woodbine, which I reached at nightfall, I could leave
)aved X and reach paved Y by means of a transverse dirt road.
it was only some forty miles long according to my map. Other-
vise I would have to follow X for another hundred miles and
hen use leisurely looping Z to get to Y and my destination,
dowever, the short-cut in question got worse and worse, bumpier
nd bumpier, muddier and muddier, and when I attempted to
urn back after some ten miles of purblind, tortuous and
ortoise-slow progress, my old and weak Melmoth got stuck in
leep clay. All was dark and muggy, and hopeless. My head-
ights hung over a broad ditch full of water. The surrounding
.'ountry, if any, was a black wilderness. I sought to extricate my-
elf but my rear wheels only whined in slosh and anguish,
mrsing my plight, I took off my fancy clothes, changed into
lacks, pulled on the bullet-riddled sweater, and waded four l
rules back to a roadside farm. It started to rain on the way
>ut I had not the strength to go back for a mackintosh. Such
ticidents have convinced me that my heart is basically sound
iespite recent diagnoses. Around midnight, a wrecker dragged
ny car out. I navigated back to Highway X and traveled on.
Jtter weariness overtook me an hour later, in an anonymous
ttle town. I pulled up at the curb and in darkness drank deep
rom a friendly flask.
The rain had been cancelled miles before. It was a black
;k^arm night, somewhere in Appalachia. Now and then cars
■assed me, red tail-lights receding, white headlights advancing,
i'Ut the town was dead. Nobody strolled and laughed on the
idewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting
purope. I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my ter-
ible thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular
bout acceptable contents: Sweepings. Paper. No Garbage.
C 283 ]
Sherry-red letters of light marked a Camera Shop. A large ther
mometer with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt on thi
front of a drugstore. Rubinov’s Jewelry Company had a display
of artificial diamonds reflected in a red mirror. A lighted greei
clock swam in the linenish depths of Jiffy Jeff Laundry. On th
other side of the street a garage said in its sleep — genuflexioi
1 lubricity; and corrected itself to Gulflex Lubrication. An air
plane, also gemmed by Rubinov, passed, droning, in the velve
heavens. How many small dead-of-night towns I had seen! Thi
was not yet the last.
2 Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed. Some wa]
further across the street, neon lights flickered twice slower thai
my heart: the outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot
kept bursting, every full second or so, into emerald life, an(
every time it went out, pink letters saying Fine Foods relayec
it, but the pot could still be made out as a latent shadow teasing
the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made shadow
3 graphs. This furtive burg was not far from The Enchantec'
Hunters. I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
31
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont anc
Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Unck
Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity am
clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemec
out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, undei
the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, tc
whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turnec
over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popisl
cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence
of a Supreme Being. On those frosty mornings in rime-lacef
Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tender'
ness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and th(
great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcenc
[ 284 ]
the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might
find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, i
nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had in-
flicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am
now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction
—that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North
American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of
her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it
can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my
misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate
art. To quote an old poet: 2
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
32
There was the day, during our first trip — our first circle of
paradise — when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I
firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the
fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not
a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of
engorged brawn — to mention only mentionable matters. There
was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I
had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little
heart on — a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie
matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to
glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of
mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face . . . that look I
cannot exactly describe ... an expression of helplessness so per-
fect that it seemed to grade into one of rather omfortable
inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and
frustration — and every limit presupposes something beyond it —
hence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that
these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you
[ 285 ]
may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what
reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and
dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to what-
ever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty
and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her.
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding
themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-
ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I
was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them
so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned
to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to some-
thing the other had said about its being better to die than hear
Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music,
my Lolita remarked:
“You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are
completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton
knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing
about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the
awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twi-
1 light, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which hap-
pened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my
polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that
living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would
become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss some-
thing she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real
healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, puri-
fied, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — an
,3 abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire,
4 God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind. Good will!
She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and bore-
dom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an
artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, pro-
voked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any
further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child.
5 I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I
6 was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, niais je
7 t’aimais, je faimais! And there were times when I knew how
[ 286 ]
you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl,
brave Dolly Schiller.
I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise,
when after having had my fill of her — after fabulous, insane ex-
ertions that left me limp and azure-barred — I would gather her
in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness
(her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved
court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted,
her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever — for all the world a
little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major opera-
tion) — and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair,
and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble
arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random
and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human
agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging
around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironi-
cally, horribly, lust would swell again — and “oh, no^’’ Lolita
would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the
tenderness and the azure — all would be shattered.
Mid-ru^entieth century ideas concerning child-parent relation-
ship have been considerably tainted by the scholastic rigmarole
and standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket, but I
hope I am addressing myself to unbiased readers. Once when
Avis’s father had honked outside to signal papa had come to
take his pet home, I felt obliged to invite him into the parlor,
and he sat down for a minute, and while we conversed. Avis,
a heavy, unattractive, affectionate child, drew up to him and
eventually perched plumply on his knee. Now, I do not remem-
ber if I have mentioned that Lolita always had an absolutely
enchanting smile for strangers, a tender furry slitting of the
eyes, a dreamy sweet radiance of all her features which did not
mean a thing of course, but was so beautiful, so endearing that
one found it hard to reduce such sweetness to but a magic gene
automatically lighting up her face in atavistic token of some
ancient rite of welcome — hospitable prostitution, the coarse
reader may say. Well, there she stood while Mr. Byrd twirled
his hat and talked, and — yes, look how stupid of me, I have left
[ 287 ]
out the main characteristic of the famous Lolita smile, namely:
while the tender, nectared, dimpled brightness played, it was ,
never directed at the stranger in the room but hung in its own |
remote flowered void, so to speak, or wandered with myopic
softness over chance objects — and this is what was happening
now: while fat Avis sidled up to her papa, Lolita gently beamed
at a fruit knife that she fingered on the edge of the table,
whereon she leaned, many miles away from me. Suddenly, as
Avis clung to her father’s neck and ear while, with a casual ^
arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw I
Lolita’s smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow
of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her i
with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made
her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one [
leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children
hold till the tears gush, she was gone — to be followed at once i
and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who had such a wonderful
fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new j
baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had ;
nothing. And I have a neat pendant to that little scene — also in
a Beardsley setting. Lolita, who had been reading near the fire,
stretched herself, and then inquired, her elbow up, with a grunt:
“Where is she buried anyway?” “Who?” “Oh, you know, my
murdered mummy.” “And you know where her grave is,” I
said controlling myself, whereupon I named the cemetery — just
outside Ramsdale, between the railway tracks and Lakeview
Hill. “Moreover,” I added, “the tragedy of such an accident is i
somewhat cheapened by the epithet you saw fit to apply to it. j
If you really wish to triumph in your mind over the idea of ^
death — ” “Ray,” said Lo for hurray, and languidly left the room, j
and for a long while I stared with smarting eyes into the fire. '
Then I picked up her book. It was some trash for young people. :
There was a gloomy girl Marion, and there was her stepmother |
who turned out to be, against all expectations, a young, gay, j
understanding redhead who explained to Marion that Marion’s j
dead mother had really been a heroic woman since she had de-
liberately dissimulated her great love for Marion because she was
[ 288 ]
dying, and did not want her child to miss her. I did not rush
up to her room with cries. I always preferred the mental hygiene
of noninterference. Now, squirming and pleading with my own
memory, I recall that on this and similar occasions, it was
always my habit and method to ignore Lolita’s states of mind
'while comforting my own base self. When my mother, in a
livid wet dress, under the tumbling mist (so I vividly imagined
her), had run panting ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet 1
to be felled there by a thunderbolt, I was but an infant, and in
'retrospect no yearnings of the accepted kind could I ever graft
upon any moment of my youth, no matter how savagely psycho-
therapists heckled me in my later periods of depression. But I
admit that a man of my power of imagination cannot plead
personal ignorance of universal emotions. I may also have relied
too much on the abnormally chill relations between Charlotte
and her daughter. But the awful point of the whole argument
is this. It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita
I during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most
miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest,
which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.
33
Ramsdale revisited. I approached it from the side of the lake.
The sunny noon was all eyes. As I rode by in my mud-flecked
car, I could distinguish scintillas of diamond water between the 2
far pines. I turned into the cemetery and walked among the
long and short stone monuments. Bonzhur, Charlotte. On some 3
of the graves there were pale, transparent little national flags
slumped in the windless air under the evergreens. Gee, Ed, that
was bad luck — referring to G. Edward Grammar, a thirty-five-
year-old New York office manager who had just been arrayed 4
on a charge of murdering his thirty-three-year -old wife, Dorothy.
Bidding for the perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his wife and
put her into a car. The case came to light when two county
[ 289 ]
policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar’s new big blue Chrysler, .
an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily down
a hill, just inside their jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!).
The car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with '
beard grass, wild strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned.
The wheels were still gently spinning in the mellow sunlight
when the officers removed Mrs. G’s body. It appeared to be a
routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s battered ,
body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by ‘
the car. I did better.
I rolled on. It was funny to see again the slender white church .
and the enormous elms. Forgetting that in an American sub-
urban street a lone pedestrian is more conspicuous than a lone
motorist, I left the car in the avenue to walk unobtrusively past
342 Lawn Street. Before the great bloodshed, I was entitled to
a little relief, to a cathartic spasm of mental regurgitation, jj
Closed were the white shutters of the Junk mansion, and some- !
body had attached a found black velvet hair ribbon to the |
white FOR SALE sign which was leaning toward the sidewalk, j
No dog barked. No gardener telephoned. No Miss Opposite sat
on the vined porch — where to the lone pedestrian’s annoyance
two pony-tailed young women in identical polka-dotted pina-
fores stopped doing whatever they were doing to stare at him:
she was long dead, no doubt, these might be her twin nieces ;
from Philadelphia. ]
1 Should I enter my old house? As in a Turgenev story, a tor- |
rent of Italian music came from an open window — ^that of the Ij
living room: what romantic soul was playing the piano where
2 no piano had plunged and plashed on that bewitched Sunday !;
with the sun on her beloved legs? All at once I noticed that ij
from the lawn I had mown a golden-skinned, brown-haired
nymphet of nine or ten, in white shorts, was looking at me with
wild fascination in her large blue-black eyes. I said something
pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment,
what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the
music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glis- !
tening with sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the i
[ 290 ] !
point of identifying myself when, with a pang of dream-
embarrassment, I became aware of my mud-caked dungarees, my
filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my bum’s bloodshot
eyes. Without saying a word, I turned and plodded back the way
I had come. An aster-like anemic flower grew out of a remem-
bered chink in the sidewalk. Quietly resurrected. Miss Opposite
was being wheeled out by her nieces, onto her porch, as if it
were a stage and I the star performer. Praying she would not
call to me, I hurried to my car. What a steep little street. What
a profound avenue. A red ticket showed between wiper and
windshield; I carefully tore it into two, four, eight pieces.
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the
downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than
five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by
telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down
for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was
suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in
Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit
of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table
where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming
Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by
suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had
fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-
faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a
round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It l
was eight minutes to three. As I walked through the lobby,
I had to skirt a group of ladies who with 7 nille graces were 2
taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh
cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout,
short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her
small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake
smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, per-
haps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to
eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that
avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California.
How was — ? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my
stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer
[ 291 ]
with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved
of such early marriages, she would never let her Phyllis, who
was now eighteen —
“Oh yes, of course,’^ I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis
and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell
you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little
charges?”
Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated com-
pletely.
“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor ,
boy has just been killed in Korea.”
1 I said didn’t she think '"‘'vient tfc,” with the infinitive, ex-
pressed recent events so much more neatly than the English
“just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. ,
There were only two blocks to Windmuller’s office. He greeted ;
me with a very slow, very enveloping, strong, searching grip. i
He thought I was in California. Had I not lived at one time i
at Beardsley? His daughter had just entered Beardsley College.
And how was — ? I gave all necessary information about Mrs.
Schiller. We had a pleasant business conference. I walked out
into the hot September sunshine a contented pauper.
Now that everything had been put out of the way, I could
dedicate myself freely to the main object of my visit to Rams-
dale. In the methodical manner on which I have always prided
myself, I had been keeping Clare Quilty’s face masked in my
dark dungeon, where he was waiting for me to come with barber
2 and priest: ‘‘‘'Reveillez-vous, Laqueue, il est temps de mourirr
I have no time right now to discuss the mnemonics of physiog-
nomization — I am on my way to his uncle and walking fast —
but let me jot down this: I had preserved in the alcohol of a
3 clouded memory the toad of a face. In the course of a few
glimpses, I had noticed its slight resemblance to a cheery and
rather repulsive wine dealer, a relative of mine in Switzerland.
With his dumbbells and stinking tricot, and fat hairy arms,
and bald patch, and pig-faced servant-concubine, he was on the
whole a harmless old rascal. Too harmless, in fact, to be con-
fused with my prey. In the state of mind I now found myself,
[ 292 ]
; had lost contact with Trapp’s image. It had become com-
i aletely engulfed by the face of Clare Quilty — as represented,
kvith artistic precision, by an easeled photograph of him that
I ;tood on his uncle’s desk.
I In Beardsley, at the hands of charming Dr. Molnar, I had l
landergone a rather serious dental operation, retaining only a
' few upper and lower front teeth. The substitutes were dependent
3n a system of plates with an inconspicuous wire affair run-
j ning along my upper gums. The whole arrangement was a
; masterpiece of comfort, and my canines were in perfect health.
I However, to garnish my secret purpose with a plausible pretext,
; I told Dr. Quilty that, in hope of alleviating facial neuralgia,
I I had decided to have all my teeth removed. What would a
I complete set of dentures cost? How long would the process take,
, assuming we fixed our first appointment for some time in No-
ivember? Where was his famous nephew now? Would it be pos-
' sible to have them all out in one dramatic session?
A white-smocked, gray-haired man, with a crew cut and the
big flat cheeks of a politician. Dr. Quilty perched on the corner
of his desk, one foot dreamily and seductively rocking as he
launched on a glorious long-range plan. He would first provide
me with provisional plates until the gums settled. Then he
would make me a permanent set. He would like to have a look
at that mouth of mine. He wore perforated pied shoes. He had
not visited with the rascal since 1946, but supposed he could be
found at his ancestral home, Grimm Road, not far from Park-
ington. It was a noble dream. His foot rocked, his gaze was
inspired. It would cost me around six hundred. He suggested 2
he take measurements right away, and make the first set before
starting operations. My mouth was to him a splendid cave full
of priceless treasures, but I denied him entrance.
“No,” I said. “On second thoughts, I shall have it all done by
Dr. Molnar. His price is higher, but he is of course a much
better dentist than you.”
I do not know if any of my readers will ever have a chance
to say that. It is a delicious dream feeling. Clare’s uncle re-
[ 293 ]
mained sitting on the desk, still looking dreamy, but his foot
had stopped push-rocking the cradle of rosy anticipation. On the
other hand, his nurse, a skeleton-thin, faded girl, with the tragic
eyes of unsuccessful blondes, rushed after me so as to be able
to slam the door in my wake.
Push the magazine into the butt. Press home until you hear
or feel the magazine catch engage. Delightfully snug. Capacity: 1
1 eight cartridges. Full Blued. Aching to be discharged.
34
A gas station attendant in Parkington explained to me very
clearly how to get to Grimm Road. Wishing to be sure Quilty
would be at home, I attempted to ring him up but learned that
his private telephone had recently been disconnected. Did that
mean he was gone? I started to drive to Grimm Road, twelve,
miles north of the town. By that time night had eliminated most
of the landscape and as I followed the narrow winding highway,
a series of short posts, ghostly white, with reflectors, borrowed
my own lights to indicate this or that curve. I could make out
a dark valley on one side of the road and wooded slopes on
the other, and in front of me, like derelict snowflakes, moths
drifted out of the blackness into my probing aura. At the twelfth
mile, as foretold, a curiously hooded bridge sheathed me for a
moment and, beyond it, a white -washed rock loomed on the
right, and a few car lengths further, on the same side, I turned
off the highway up gravelly Grimm Road. For a couple of min-
2 utes all was dank, dark, dense forest. Then, Pavor Manor, a
wooden house with a turret, arose in a circular clearing. Its win-
dows glowed yellow and red; its drive was cluttered with half a
dozen cars. I stopped in the shelter of the trees and abolished
my lights to ponder the next move quietly. He would be sur-
rounded by his henchmen and whores. I could not help seeing
the inside of that festive and ramshackle castle in terms of
“Troubled Teens,” a story in one of her magazines, vague
[ m ]
“orgies,” a sinister adult with penele cigar, drugs, bodyguards, i
At least, he was there. I would return in the torpid morning.
Gently I rolled back to town, in that old faithful car of mine
which was serenely, almost cheerfully working for me. My Lolita! 2
There was still a three-year-old bobby pin of hers in the depths
of the glove compartment. There was still that stream of pale
moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns
still propped themselves up here and there by the roadside.
People were still going to the movies. While searching for night
lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical 3
in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic
screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom
raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dish- 4
water by the oblique angle of that receding world, — and the
next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation.
35
I left Insomnia Lodge next morning around eight and spent 5
some time in Parkington. Visions of bungling the execution
kept obsessing me. Thinking that perhaps the cartridges in the
automatic had gone stale during a week of inactivity, I removed
them and inserted a fresh batch. Such a thorough oil bath did
I give Chum that now I could not get rid of the stuff. I band-
aged him up with a rag, like a maimed limb, and used another
rag to wrap up a handful of spare bullets.
A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to
Grimm Road, but when I reached Pavor Manor, the sun was
visible again, burning like a man, and the birds screamed in the
drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house
s^^emed to stand in a kind of daze, reflecting as it were my own
state, for I could not help realizing, as my feet touched the
springy and insecure ground, that I had overdone the alcoholic
stimulation business.
A guardedly ironic silence answered my bell. The garage, how-
[ 295 ]
ever, was loaded with his car, a black convertible for the nonce.
I tried the knocker. Re-nobody. With a petulant snarl, I pushed
the front door — and, how nice, it swung open as in a medieval
1 fairy tale. Having softly closed it behind me, I made my way
across a spacious and very ugly hall; peered into an adjacent i
drawing room; noticed a number of used glasses growing out of ;
the carpet; decided that master was still asleep in the master I
bedroom. ,
So I trudged upstairs. My right hand clutched muffled Chum
in my pocket, my left patted the sticky banisters. Of the three
bedrooms I inspected, one had obviously been slept in that
night. There was a library full of flowers. There was a rather
2 bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin
on the slippery floor. There were still other rooms. A happy
thought struck me. If and when master returned from his con-
stitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it
might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before
him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room.i
Consequently, for at least five minutes I went about — lucidly,
insane, crazily calm, an enchanted and very tight hunter — turn-
ing whatever keys in whatever locks there were and pocketing
3 them with my free left hand. The house, being an old one, had
more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where
the bathroom, the only lockable locus, has to be used for the
furtive needs of planned parenthood.
Speaking of bathrooms — I was about to visit a third one when
4 master came out of it, leaving a brief waterfall behind him.
The corner of a passage did not quite conceal me. Gray-faced,
baggy-eyed, fluffily disheveled in a scanty balding way, but still
perfectly recognizable, he swept by me in a purple bathrobe,
very like one I had. He either did not notice me, or else dis-
missed me as some familiar and innocuous hallucination — and,
showing me his hairy calves, he proceeded, sleepwalker-wise,
downstairs. I pocketed my last key and followed him into the
entrance hall. He had half opened his mouth and the front door,
to peer out through a sunny chink as one who thinks he has
heard a half-hearted visitor ring and recede. Then, still ignoring
[ 296 ]
the raincoated phantasm that had stopped in midstairs, master
walked into a cozy boudoir across the hall from the drawing
room, through which — taking it easy, knowing he was safe — I
now went away from him, and in a bar-adorned kitchen gingerly
unwrapped dirty Chum, taking care not to leave any oil stains
on the chrome — I think I got the wrong product, it was black
and awfully messy. In my usual meticulous way, I transferred
naked Chum to a clean recess about me and made for the little
boudoir. My step, as I say, was springy — too springy perhaps for
success. But my heart pounded wnth tiger joy, and I crunched
a cocktail glass underfoot.
Master met me in the Oriental parlor.
“Now who are you?” he asked in a high hoarse voice, his
hands thrust into his dressing-gown pockets, his eyes fixing a
point to the northeast of my head. “Are you by any chance
Brewster?”
By now it was evident to everybody that he was in a fog and
completely at my so-called mercy. I could enjoy myself.
“That’s right,” I answered suavely, “/e suis Monsieur Brustere.
Let us chat for a moment before we start.”
He looked pleased. His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed
my raincoat. I was wearing a black suit, a black shirt, no tie.
We sat down in two easy chairs.
“You know,” he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty
gray cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin,
“you don’t look like Jack Brewster. I mean, the resemblance is
not particularly striking. Somebody told me he had a brother
with the same telephone company.”
To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and
rage . . .To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy
hands ... To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks
ind hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and
music of pain . . . To know that this semi-animated, subhuman
trickster who had sodomized my darling — oh, my darling, this
was intolerable bliss!
“No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters.”
He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever.
[ 297 ]
1
“Guess again, Punch.”
“Ah,” said Punch, “so you have not come to bother me about
those long-distance calls?”
“You do make them once in a while, don’t you?”
“Excuse me?”
I said I had said I thought he had said he had never —
“People,” he said, “people in general. I’m not accusing you
Brewster, but you know it’s absurd the way people invade thi;
2 damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre
they use the kitchen, they use the telephone. Phil calls Phila
3 delphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny
accent. Captain.”
“Quilty,” I said, “do you recall a little girl called Dolorei
4 Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?” i
“Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Para,
5 dise. Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?”
“I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “You are not. You are some foreign liter]
ary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as Li\
6 Fierte de la Chair. Absurd.”
“She was my child, Quilty.” i
In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by
anything, but his blustering manner was not quite convincing!
A sort of wary inkling kindled his eyes into a semblance of life|
They were immediately dulled again. !
“I’m very fond of children myself,” he said, “and fathers ar(i
among my best friends.”
He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat hil
pockets. He attempted to rise from his seat.
“Down!” I said — apparently much louder than I intended.
“You need not roar at me,” he complained in his strangt
feminine manner. “I just wanted a smoke. I’m dying for ;
smoke.” j
“You’re dying anyway.” i
“Oh, chucks,” he said. “You begin to bore me. What do yoJ
7 want? Are you French, mister? Woolly-woo-boo-are? Let’s g«
to the barroomette and have a stiff — ” I
[ 298 ]
He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were
)ffering it to him.
“Say!” he drawled (now imitating the underworld numbskull
)f movies), “that’s a swell little gun you’ve got there. What
I’you want for her.^”
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to
mock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful
)f cigarettes.
“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling; une
emine est une femme^ mats un Caporal est une cigarette? Now l
ve need matches.”
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going
0 die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an
ternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last
ugarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is
lappening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits
)f it.
“I am willing to try,” he said. “You are either Australian, or
L German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile’s
louse, you know. Maybe, you’d better run along. And do stop 2
lemonstrating that gun. I’ve an old Stern-Luger in the music
00m.”
I pointed Chum at his shppered foot and crushed the trigger,
t clicked. He looked at his foot, at the pistol, again at his foot,
made another awful effort, and, with a ridiculously feeble and
uvenile sound, it went off. The bullet entered the thick pink
:ug, and I had the paralyzing impression that it had merely
rickled in and might come out again.
“See what I mean?” said Quilty. “You should be a little more
:areful. Give me that thing for Christ’s sake.”
He reached for it. I pushed him back into the chair. The rich
oy was waning. It was high time I destroyed him, but he
oust understand why he was being destroyed. His condition
rifected me, the weapon felt limp and clumsy in my hand.
1 “Concentrate,” I said, “on the thought of Dolly Haze whom
mu kidnaped — ”
[ 299 ]
“I did not!” he cried. “You’re all wet. I saved her from j
beastly pervert. Show me your badge instead of shooting at m)
foot, you ape, you. Where is that badge? I’m not responsibh
for the rapes of others. Absurd! That joy ride, I grant you, wa:
a silly stunt but you got her back, didn’t you? Come, let’s hav(
a drink.”
I asked him whether he wanted to be executed sitting o:
standing.
“Ah, let me think,” he said. “It is not an easy question. In '
cidentally — I made a mistake. Which I sincerely regret. You see
I had no fun with your Dolly. I am practically impotent, to tell
the melancholy truth. And I gave her a splendid vacation. Shi i
met some remarkable people. Do you happen to know — ”
And with a tremendous lurch he fell all over me, sending thi
pistol hurtling under a chest of drawers. Fortunately he was mot'
impetuous than vigorous, and I had little difficulty in shovinj
him back into his chair.
He puffed a little and folded his arms on his chest.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said. ^‘‘V ous voild dans de beau:
1 draps, inon vieuxT
His French was improving.
I looked around. Perhaps, if — Perhaps I could — On my hand
and knees? Risk it?
2 ^‘‘Alors, que ^ait-on?'''' he asked watching me closely.
I stooped. He did not move. I stooped lower.
“My dear sir,” he said, “stop trifling with life and death,
am a playwright. I have written tragedies, comedies, fantasie;
3 I have made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth
century sexcapades. I’m the author of fifty-two successft
scenarios. I know all the ropes. Let me handle this. Ther
should be a poker somewhere, why don’t I fetch it, and the
we’ll fish out your property.” I
Fussily, busybodily, cunningly, he had risen again while h ;
talked. I groped under the chest trying at the same time to kee |
an eye on him. All of a sudden I noticed that he had notice
that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from b(
neath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling agaii j
[ 300 ] j
IVe rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge
aelpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and
[ felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We
rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.
In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in
:he first years of 2000 a.d. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long,
my love); and elderly readers will surely recall at this point the
obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle,
however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture.
He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and
rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two
literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while
the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much
gin. When at last I had possessed myself of my precious weapon,
and the scenario writer had been reinstalled in his low chair,
both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never
do after their battle.
I decided to inspect the pistol — our sweat might have spoiled
something — and regain my wind before proceeding to the main
item in the program. To fill in the pause, I proposed he read
his own sentence — in the poetical form I had given it. The term
“poetical justice” is one that may be most happily used in this
respect. I handed him a neat typescript.
“Yes,” he said, “splendid idea. Let me fetch my reading
glasses” (he attempted to rise).
“No.”
“Just as you say. Shall I read out loud?”
“Yes.”
“Here goes. I see it’s in verse.
, Because you took advantage of a sinner
because you took advantage
because you took
because you took advantage of my disadvantage . . .
; “That’s good, you know. That’s damned good.”
. . . when I stood Adam-naked
before a federal law and all its stinging stars
[ 301 ]
“Oh, grand stuff!”
. . . Because you took advantage of a sin
1 when I was helpless moulting moist and tender
hoping for the best
dreaming of marriage in a mountain state
aye of a litter of Lolitas . . .
“Didn’t get that.”
Because you took advantage of my inner
essential innocence
because you cheated me — ■
“A little repetitious, what? Where was I?”
Because you cheated me of my redemption
because you took
her at the age when lads
play with erector sets
“Getting smutty, eh?”
a little downy girl still wearing poppies
still eating popcorn in the colored gloam
where tawny Indians took paid croppers
because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
2 ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die
“Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as
I am concerned.”
He folded and handed it back to me.
[ 302 ]
I asked him if he had anything serious to say before dying.
The automatic was again ready for use on the person. He looked
at it and heaved a big sigh.
“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a
sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to
nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to
take me to a game. This pistol-packing farce is becoming a
frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything—
sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am
ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre^ 1
sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere — is not excluded. My mem-
ory and my eloquence are not at their best today but really,
my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and
I did not force your little protegee to join me. It was she made
me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern
as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool
in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I
intend retiring to England or Elorence forever, I suggest you
move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop point-
ing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do
not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer
you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a
young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and
delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables. You will 2
only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuper-
ate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be
happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from
my next play — I have not much at the bank right now but I
propose to borrow — you know, as the Bard said, with that cold 3
in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There
are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable
charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa — curious name — who comes from 4
the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters,
granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police
makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called
the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. 5
Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am
[ 303 ]
1 doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now
drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife
slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing — you are
going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of
erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe
Bagration Isla7id by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie
2 Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work — drop that gun — !
with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs
she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda !
3 Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant
skies — drop that gun — and moreover I can arrange for you to
attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted
yellow — ”
4 Fen. This time I hit something hard. I hit the back of a
black rocking chair, not unlike Dolly Schiller’s — my bullet hit
the inside surface of its back whereupon it immediately went '
into a rocking act, so fast and with such zest that any one coming ;
into the room might have been flabbergasted by the double ,
miracle: that chair rocking in a panic all by itself, and the arm-
chair, where my purple target had just been, now void of all
live content. Wiggling his fingers in the air, with a rapid heave
of his rump, he flashed into the music room and the next second
we were tugging and gasping on both sides of the door which
had a key I had overlooked. I won again, and with another
5 abrupt movement Clare the Impredictable sat down before the
piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally
hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands
tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts
which had been ^absent from our fight. Still singing those im-
possible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his
foot a kind of seaman’s chest near the piano. My next bullet
caught him somewhere in the side, and he rose from his chair
higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old Faith-
ful, like some old nightmare of mine, to a phenomenal altitude,
or so it seemed, as he rent the air — still shaking with the rich
black music — head thrown back in a howl, hand pressed to his
brow, and with his other hand clutching his armpit as if stung 1
by a hornet, down he came on his heels and, again a normal
robed man, scurried out into the hall.
I see myself following him through the hall, with a kind of
double, triple, kangaroo jump, remaining quite straight on
straight legs while bouncing up twice in his wake, and then
bouncing between him and the front door in a ballet-like stiff
bounce, with the purpose of heading him off, since the door
was not properly closed.
Suddenly dignified, and somewhat morose, he started to walk
up the broad stairs, and, shifting my position, but not actually
following him up the steps, I fired three or four times in quick
succession, wounding him at every blaze; and every time I did
It to him, that horrible thing to him, his face would twitch in
in absurd clownish manner, as if he were exaggerating the pain;
he slowed down, rolled his eyes half closing them and made a
feminine “ah!” and he shivered every time a bullet hit him as 1
if I were tickling him, and every time I got him with those slow,
ffumsy, blind bullets of mine, he would say under his breath,
with a phoney British accent — all the while dreadfully twitch-
ing, shivering, smirking, but withal talking in a curiously de-
:ached and even amiable manner: “Ah, that hurts, sir, enough!
-\h, that hurts atrociously, my dear fellow. I pray you, desist.
.\h-— very painful, very painful, indeed . . . God! Hah! This is
ibominable, you should really not — ” His voice trailed off as he
■eached the landing, but he steadily walked on despite all the
ead I had lodged in his bloated body — and in distress, in dismay,
i understood that far from killing him I was injecting spurts
Df energy into the poor fellow, as if the bullets had been cap-
mles wherein a heady elixir danced.
■ I reloaded the thing with hands that were black and bloody —
ji had touched something he had anointed with his thick gore.
Then I rejoined him upstairs, the keys jangling in my pockets
ike gold.
He was trudging from room to room, bleeding majestically, 2
Tying to find an open window, shaking his head, and still trying
;o talk me out of murder. I took aim at his head, and he retired
[ 305 ]
to the master bedroom with a burst of royal purple where hh
ear had been.
“Get out, get out of here,” he said coughing and spitting:
and in a nightmare of wonder, I saw this blood-spattered but
still buoyant person get into his bed and wrap himself up in the
chaotic bedclothes. I hit him at very close range through the j
blankets, and then he lay back, and a big pink bubble with I
juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of £ j
toy balloon, and vanished. ^
I may have lost contact with reality for a second or two — oh i
nothing of the I-just-blacked-out sort that your common crimi *
nal enacts; on the contrary, I want to stress the fact that I wa: j
responsible for every shed drop of his bubbleblood; but a kinc I
of momentary shift occurred as if I were in the connubial bed j
room, and Charlotte were sick in bed. Quilty was a very sicl
man. I held one of his slippers instead of the pistol — I was sit '
ting on the pistol. Then I made myself a little more comfortabk !
in the chair near the bed, and consulted my wrist watch. Th(, I
crystal was gone but it ticked. The whole sad business hat I
taken more than an hour. He was quiet at last. Far from feeling
any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had hopec
to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. I could not brinj
myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead ,
He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies besidt :
themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck. Mj
hands were hardly in better condition than his. I washed up a
best I could in the adjacent bathroom. Now I could leave. A
I emerged on the landing, I was amazed to discover that :
vivacious buzz I had just been dismissing as a mere singing ii
my ears was really a medley of voices and radio music comin*
from the downstairs drawing room.
I found there a number of people who apparently had jus
arrived and were cheerfully drinking Quilty’s liquor. There wa
a fat man in an easy chair; and two dark-haired pale youni
beauties, sisters no doubt, big one and small one (almost
child), demurely sat side by side on a davenport. A florid-facei
fellow with sapphire-blue eyes was in the act of bringing tw' |i
[ 306 ]
glasses out of the bar-like kitchen, where two or three women
;v^ere chatting and chinking ice. I stopped in the doorway and
'.aid: “I have just killed Clare Quilty.” “Good for you,” said the
forid fellow as he offered one of the drinks to the elder girl.
■‘Somebody ought to have done it long ago,” remarked the fat
nan. “What does he say, Tony?” asked a faded blonde from the
5ar. “He says,” answered the florid fellow, “he has killed Cue.”
‘Well,” said another unidentified man rising in a corner where
le had been crouching to inspect some records, “I guess we
ill should do it to him some day.” “Anyway,” said Tony, “he’d
jetter come down. We can’t wait for him much longer if we
:vant to go to that game.” “Give this man a drink somebody,”
-aid the fat person. “Want a beer?” said a woman in slacks,
howing it to me from afar.
Only the two girls on the davenport, both wearing black,
he younger fingering a bright something about her white neck,
only they said nothing, but just smiled on, so young, so lewd.
\s the music paused for a moment, there was a sudden noise
)n the stairs. Tony and I stepped out into the hall. Quilty of
ill people had managed to crawl out onto the landing, and
here we could see him, flapping and heaving, and then subsid-
ng, forever this time, in a purple heap. 1
“Hurry up. Cue,” said Tony with a laugh. “I believe, he’s
till — ” He returned to the drawing room, music drowned the
est of the sentence.
This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play
taged for me by Quilty. With a heavy heart I left the house 2
nd walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car. Two
')ther cars were parked on both sides of it, and I had some
.rouble squeezing out.
36
I
The rest is a little flattish and faded. Slowly I drove downhill,
jud presently found myself going at the same lazy pace in a
lirection opposite to Parkington. I had left my raincoat in the
[ 307 ]
boudoir and Chum in the bathroom. No, it was not a house
I would have liked to live in. I wondered idly if some surgeon
of genius might not alter his own career, and perhaps the whole
destiny of mankind, by reviving quilted Quilty, Clare Obscure,
Not that I cared; on the whole I wished to forget the whole
mess — and when I did learn he was dead, the only satisfaction
it gave me, was the relief of knowing I need not mentally accom-
pany for months a painful and disgusting convalescence inter-,
rupted by all kinds of unmentionable operations and relapses^
and perhaps an actual visit from him, with trouble on my pan
to rationalize him as not being a ghost. Thomas had something
It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less|
precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments out
main, if not only, handle to reality. I was all covered with Quiltyj
— with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. i
The road now stretched across open country, and it occurrecj
to me — not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like
that, but merely as a novel experience — that since I had dis^i
regarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the
rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway anc
checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant
diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all thi;
enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to thf
elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving oij
the wrong side of the road. In a way, it was a very spiritual itchi|
Gently, dreamily, not exceeding twenty miles an hour, I drov(|j
on that queer mirror side. Traffic was light. Cars that now ancj
then passed me on the side I had abandoned to them, honketj
at me brutally. Cars coming towards me wobbled, swerved, an(||
cried out in fear. Presently I found myself approaching popuj!
lated places. Passing through a red light was like a sip of fori
bidden Burgundy when I was a child. Meanwhile complicationj
were arising. I was being followed and escorted. Then in fron|
of me I saw two cars placing themselves in such a manner a| ’
to completely block my way. With a graceful movement I turneil |
off the road, and after two or three big bounces, rode up |
grassy slope, among surprised cows, and there I came to a gentlj
[ 308 ]
ocking stop. A kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis linking i
ip two dead women.
I was soon to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, thanks
lot, old fellow) — and was, indeed, looking forward to sur-
ender myself to many hands, without doing anything to co-
’perate, while they moved and carried me, relaxed, comfortable,
urrendering myself lazily, like a patient, and deriving an eerie
njoyment from my limpness and the absolutely reliable support
iven me by the police and the ambulance people. And while I
i^as waiting for them to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked
last mirage of wonder and hopelessness. One day, soon after
.er disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to
lull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accom-
lanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population
f asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue after-
noon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested
while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do
he good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the
irecipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of
he withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its
rms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belong-
ig to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I ap-
roached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of
ounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my
eet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of 2
he streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs
f trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of
le city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy
uilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered
lountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors
-for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves
1 good company — both brighter and dreamier to the ear than
ley were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated
3unds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of
ranite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized
lat all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds
ut these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the
[ 309 ]
women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard wa:
but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and s(
limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices
majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank anc
divinely enigmatic — one could hear now and then, as if released
an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat
or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for th(
eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets,
stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, t(
those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur fo
background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thinj
was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of heil
voice from that concord. !
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrov:
sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At thi
or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding inn
deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camou
flaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyec
with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly
1 apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesme
2,3 Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I thinl
my choice expresses the nastiness best.
4 When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in thi
psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated
albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes ii
toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. Ii
mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parad'
living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetii
sessions, but publication is to be deferred. [
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they realh
are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be,
trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before mysell
I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape
and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schille
will probably survive me by many years. The following decision
make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament
[ 310 ] I
wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer
live.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book,
lut while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you
re still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still
alk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not
it other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you l
v'ill love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of
ours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my
pecter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented
iant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q.
)ne had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted 2
L H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have
im make you live in the minds of later generations. I am think-
ig of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, pro-
hetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality
ou and I may share, my Lolita.
[ 311 ]
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
ON A BOOK ENTITLED LOLITA l
A.fter doing my impersonation of suave John Ray, the character in
Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from
me may strike one — may strike me, in fact — as an impersonation of
V^ladimir Nabokov talking about his own book. A few points, how-
ever, have to be discussed; and the autobiographic device may induce
mimic and model to blend.
Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as “What
is the author’s purpose?” or still worse “What is the guy trying to
5ay?” Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work
Dn a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who,
when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such
ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination —
which, I admit, sounds hke a conjurer explaining one trick by per-
forming another.
The first little throb of Lolita went through me late in 1939 or
early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe
attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial shiver
Df inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an
ape in the Jar din des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a
scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal:
this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage. The impulse 2
[ record had no textual connection with the ensuing train of thought,
which resulted, however, in a prototype of my present novel, a short
story some thirty pages long. I wrote it in Russian, the language in
which I had been writing novels since 1924 (the best of these are not
translated into English, and all are prohibited for political reasons in 3
[ 313 ]
Russia). The man was a Central European, the anonymous nymphet
was French, and the loci were Paris and Provence. I had him marry
the little girl’s sick mother who soon died, and after a thwarted at-
tempt to take advantage of the orphan in a hotel room, Arthur (for
that was his name) threw himself under the wheels of a truck. I read
the story one blue-papered wartime night to a group of friends — Mark
Aldanov, two social revolutionaries, and a woman doctor; but I was
not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to
1 America in 1940.
Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing, which
had never quite ceased, began to plague me again. Combination
joined inspiration with fresh zest and involved me in a new treatment
of the theme, this time in English — the language of my first governess ,
in St. Petersburg, circa 1903, a Miss Rachel Home. The nymphet,
now with a dash of Irish blood, was really much the same lass, and
the basic marrying-her-mother idea also subsisted; but otherwise the
thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel.
2 The book developed slowly, with many interruptions and asides. It ;!
had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe,
and now I was faced by the task of inventing America. The obtaining
of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of
average “reality” (one of the few words which mean nothing without;
3 quotes) into the brew of individual fancy, proved at fifty a much
more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth
when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best. Other
books intervened. Once or twice I was on the point of burning the
unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow
of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped
by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my
files for the rest of my life.
Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting. The specimens
are deposited at scientific institutions, such as the Museum of Com- !
parative Zoology at Harvard or the Cornell University collection. The i
locality labels pinned under these butterflies will be a boon to some !
twenty-first-century scholar with a taste for recondite biography. It I
was at such of our headquarters as Telluride, Colorado; Afton, Wyo-
ming; Portal, Arizona; and Ashland, Oregon, that Lolita was ener-
getically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days. I finished copying -
the thing out in longhand in the spring of 1954, and at once began j
casting around for a publisher.
[ 314 ]
At first, on the advice ot a wary old friend, I was meek enough to
stipulate that the book be brought out anonymously. I doubt that I
■shall ever regret that soon afterwards, realizing how likely a mask was
:o betray my own cause, I decided to sign Lolita. The four American
publishers, W, X, Y, Z, who in turn were offered the typescript and
lad their readers glance at it, were shocked by Lolita to a degree that
even my wary old friend F.P. had not expected.
While it is true that in ancient Europe, and well into the eight-
eenth century (obvious examples come from France), deliberate
lewdness was not inconsistent with flashes of comedy, or vigorous
satire, or even the verve of a fine poet in a wanton mood, it is also
true that in modern times the term “pornography” connotes medioc-
rity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity
must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoy-
ment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which
demands the traditional word for direct action upon the patient. Old
rigid rules must be followed by the pornographer in order to have his
I patient feel the same security of satisfaction as, for example, fans of
i detective stories feel — stories where, if you do not watch out, the real
murderer may turn out to be, to the fan’s disgust, artistic originahty
(who for instance would want a detective story without a single dia-
logue in it?). Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be hmited
to the copulation of cliches. Style, structure, imagery should never
distract the reader from his tepid lust. The novel must consist of an
; alternation of sexual scenes. The passages in between must be reduced
to sutures of sense, logical bridges of the simplest design, brief exposi-
tions and explanations, which the reader will probably skip but must
know they exist in order not to feel cheated (a mentality stemming
from the routine of “true” fairy tales in childhood). Moreover, the
sexual scenes in the book must follow a crescendo line, with new varia-
tions, new combinations, new sexes, and a steady increase in the
number of participants (in a Sade play they call the gardener in),
and therefore the end of the book must be more replete with lewd
lore than the first chapters.
Certain techniques in the beginning of Lolita (Humbert’s Journal,
for example) misled some of my first readers into assuming that this
was going to be a lewd book. They expected the rising succession of
erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt
bored and let down. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why not all
the four firms read the typescript to the end. Whether they found it
[ 315 ]
pornographic or not did not interest me. Their refusal to buy the j
book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme ,
itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as !
far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: |
a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success
resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist
who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age
of io6.
Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested
that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a
twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in aj
barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short,
strong, “realistic” sentences (“He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess, j
I guess God acts crazy.” Etc.). Although everybody should know that
I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud
with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generaliza-
tions devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intel-i
ligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita asl
“Old Europe debauching young America,” while another flipper saw
1 in it “Young America debauching old Europe.” Publisher X, whose!
advisers got so bored with Humbert that they never got beyond pagej
1 88, had the naivete to write me that Part Two was too long. Pub-
lisher Y, on the other hand, regretted there were no good people in
the book. Publisher Z said if he printed Lolita, he and I would go to
jail.
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the
exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is
preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of,
judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed:
in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to pro-j
voke a past master’s chuckle and just high enough not to make a post-,
master frown. I presume there exist readers who find titillating the
display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novelsj
which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and calledj
“powerful” and “stark” by the reviewing hack. There are gentle soulsj
who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach;
them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction,;
and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For mei
a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall;
bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, some-|
[ 316 ]
vhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity,
enderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such
)ooks. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Litera-
ure of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks
I )f plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until some-
I )odv comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac,
I .t Gorki, at Mann.
I Another charge which some readers have made is that Lolita is
} inti- American. This is something that pains me considerably more
han the idiotic accusation of immorality. Considerations of depth
ind perspective (a suburban lawn, a mountain meadow) led me to
mild a number of North American sets. I needed a certain exhilarat-
ng milieu. Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
3ut in regard to philistine vulgarity there is no intrinsic difference
,oetween Palearctic manners and Nearctic manners. Any proletarian 1
Tom Chicago can be as bourgeois (in the Flaubertian sense) as a
iuke. I chose American motels instead of Swiss hotels or English inns
inly because I am trying to be an American writer and claim only
:he same rights that other American writers enjoy. On the other
aand, my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there
lire many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him.
A^nd all my Russian readers know that my old worlds — Russian,
I British, German, French — are just as fantastic and personal as my
lew one is.
Lest the little statement I am making here seem an airing of
grudges, I must hasten to add that besides the lambs who read the
typescript of Lolita or its Olympia Press edition in a spirit of “Why
did he have to write it?” or “Why should I read about maniacs?”
there have been a number of wise, sensitive, and staunch people who
jnderstood my book much better than I can explain its mechanism
iiere.
Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published
book of his as of a constant comforting presence. Its pilot light is
steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch ap-
plied to one’s private thermostat instantly results in a quiet little
explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book
in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and
the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color
the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain
loints, byroads, favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and
[ 317 ]
enjoys more tenderly than the rest of one’s book. I have not rereac'
1 Lolita since I went through the proofs in the spring of 1955 but Ij
find it to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about th(
house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the
haze. And when I thus think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out foiij
2 special delectation such images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list
3^4 of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying “waterproof,” or Lolita ir
5 slow motion advancing toward Humbert’s gifts, or the picture?
6 decorating the stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbean
7,8 barber (who cost me a month of work), or Lolita playing tennis, oi
the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievabk
9 Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star (the capital town of the book), 01
the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trai
(on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides subliven:
10 Nabokov). These are the nerves of the novel. These are the secrei
points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book i<
plotted — although I realize very clearly that these and other scene?:
will be skimmed over or not noticed, or never even reached, by thost!
who begin reading the book under the impression that it is something
on the lines of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Les Amours de,
Milord Grosvit. That my novel does contain various allusions to the
physiological urges of a pervert is quite true. But after all we are not
children, not ilhterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school
boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the
paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information;
about a country or about a social class or about the author. And yet'
one of my very few intimate friends, after reading Lolita, was sincerely
worried that I (I!) should be living “among such depressing people”
— when the only discomfort I really experienced was to live in my
workshop among discarded limbs and unfinished torsos. i
After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic
suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the roman-
tic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel’
would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel myj
voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American!!
friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on thej
strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private!
tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concernJi
is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich,|
[ 318 ]
11
ind infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of
l^nglish, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the
I’jlack velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which
khe native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend 1
fie heritage in his own way.
]■
>
t November 12, 1956
[ 319 ]
NOTES
( The word or passage in the text to which each annotation refers is indi-
! cated by two numbers, the first giving the page and the second the number
i !72 the margin of the text. The numbering begins anew on each ptige, and
[ disregards chapter divisions. All page references to other Nabokov books
\are to the first American editions {hardcover).
' FOREWORD
j 5/1 two titles: the term “white widowed” occurs in the case histories of
I psychiatric works, while the entire subtitle parodies the titillating con-
I fessional novel, such as John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
1 (1749), and the expectations of the reader who hopes Lolita will provide
I the pleasures of pornography (see 278/2). Although Nabokov could
I hardly have realized it at the time of writing, there is no small irony in
I the fact that the timidity of American publishers resulted in the novel’s
i being first brought out by the Olympia Press, publishers of The Sexual
Life of Robinson Crusoe and other “eighteenth-century sexcapades” (to
I use Clare Quilty’s description of Sade’s Justine, ou, Les Infortunes de la
vertu [. . . The Misfortunes of Virtue]; see p. 300).
5/ 2 preambulates: to make a preamble, introduce.
5/3 ''^Humbert Humbert": in his Playboy interview (1964), Nabokov says,
“The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hate-
ful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, but I did need
a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble.
[ 321 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 5
Lends itself also to a number of puns.” Like James Joyce, Nabokov fash-
ions his puns from literary sources, from any of the several languages
available to him, from obsolete words, or the roots of arcane words. If
the associations are rich enough, a pun succeeds in projecting a theme
central to the fiction, in summarizing or commenting on the action. In
both The Gift (1937) and the 1959 Foreword to the English translation
of Invitation to a Beheading (1935-1936), Nabokov mentions Discours
sur les ombres, by Pierre Delalande, “the only author whom I must
gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at the time of writing this
book . . . [and] whom I invented.” Delalande’s Discours provided the
epigraph for Invitation — “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous
croyons mortels’’’' [“As a madman deems himself God, we deem our-
selves mortal”] — and Nabokov’s entire corpus might be described as a
“Discourse on Shadows, or Shades.” John Shade is the author of the
poem Bale Fire. In a rejected draft of his poem, he writes, “I like my
name: Shade, Ombre, almost ‘man’ / In Spanish...” — an accurate ety-
mological pairing (hombre> ombre) and a resonant pun that figuratively
places hombre in ombre — a card game popular in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries — and sets man to playing in Nabokov’s “game of!
worlds” (see 22/4). Humbert was brought up on the French Riviera;
pronounced with a French accent, his name partakes of these shadows
and shades. By “solipsizing” Lolita (p. 62), Humbert condemns her to
the solitary confinement of his obsessional shadowland. “She had en-
tered my world, umber and blank Humberland,” says Humbert (p. 168),
who, by choosing to chase the figurative shadows that play on the walls
of his “cave,” upends Plato’s famous allegory. Although Humbert has
had the benefit of a journey in the sunny “upper world” — a Riviera boy-
hood, in fact, and a full-sized wife or two — he nevertheless pursues the
illusion that he can recapture what is inexorably lost. As Humbert dem-
onstrates, illusions are realities in their ability to destroy us. “I was the
shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane,”
writes John Shade in the opening lines of Pale Fire, while in Nabokov’s
poem “An Evening of Russian Poetry” (1945), the speaker says:
My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger.
False shadows turn to track me as I pass
and, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents,
creep in to blot the freshly written page
and read the blotter in the looking-glass.
And in the dark, under my bedroom window,
until, with a chill whirr and shiver, day
presses its starter, warily they linger
C 3^2 ]
I
NOTES FOR PAGES 5-6
or silently approach the door and ring
the bell of memory and run away.
I Seventeen years later in Pale Fire the Shadows are the Zemblan “regi-
I cidal organization” who dispatch Gradus, one of whose aliases is d’Argus,
to assassinate the exiled King Charles (Kinbote). But the Shadows’ secret
j agent accidentally kills Shade instead. Lolita offers the converse, for
“Shade” (Humbert) purposely kills his “shadow” (Clare Quilty). Thus
■ the delusive namre of identity and perception, the constricting burdens
•. of memory, and a haunting sense of mutability are all capsuled in a re-
verberating pun.
r/4 solecism: an irregularity or impropriety in speech and diction, gram-
mar or syntax. Also in conduct, and therefore not an unwarranted defi-
! nition in Humbert’s instance.
■i/s Presented intact: it is important to recognize how Nabokov belies the
! illusion of “realism” which both Ray and Humbert seem to create. See
I i/i and 34/ 7.
t/6 cognomen: its current definition, “a distinguishing nickname,” is fun-
damental, and the humorous incongruity of using so high-toned a Latin-
ate word is heightened by its original meaning: “The third or family
name of a Roman citizen.”
3/7 this mask: “Is ‘mask’ the keyword?” Humbert later asks (p. 55). In
his Foreword to Pale Fire, Kinbote says of Shade: “His whole being
constituted a mask.”
5/8 remain unlifted: not quite; although the “real” name is never revealed,
the mask does slip. See Chapter Twenty-six, the shortest in the book
(p. III).
5/1 her first name: Lolita’s given name is “Dolores.” See 11/5.
6/2 .H y ’’ s crime: the murder of Clare Quilty (pp. 295-307), Humbert’s
grotesque alter ego and parodic Double. Humbert will henceforth be
identified by his initials.
6/3 ig$2: a corrected author’s error (“September-October 1952,” instead
of the 1958 edition’s “September”). The following pages in the text con-
tain corrections which are detailed in the Notes: pp. 6 (below), 8, 21,
25^ 33> 34> 54> 62, 1 19, 123, 140, 152, 164, 187, 195, 197, 199, 201, 206, 227,
232, 234, 255, 261, 264, 266, 316, and 318. The 1958 Putnam’s edition was
set in type from the 1955 Olympia Press edition. The latter contains
many minuscule mistakes (e.g., punctuation) which were carried over
[ 3H ]
I
NOTES FOR PAGE 6
into the Putnam’s edition and identified only when the present text was ^
in page proof. Although these errors have been corrected, it was impos- 1
sibie to describe them separately in the Notes. However, since the pres-
ent edition follows the Putnam’s format exactly, assiduous students ol
such textual matters can easily identify these corrections by collating
the two texts, as follows: p. 7, line sixteen; p. 33, line fourteen; p. 42, Iasi
line; p. 65, lines three and twenty-six; p. 75, line nineteen; p. 84, last line:
p. 1 13, line seventeen; p. 138, line thirteen; p. 143, lines six and seven; p
152, line twenty-five; p. 158, line six; p. 163, line fifteen; p. 166, line nine;
p. 181, line three; p. 182, line nine; p. 220, line ten; p, 228, line seven; p,
241, line thirteen; p. 245, line twenty-three; p. 257, line five; p. 264, line
twenty-five; p. 277, line four; and p. 278, line thirty-three.
6/4 “red people” . . . “true story”: in the Afterword, Nabokov mentions:!
his “impersonation of suave John Ray” (p. 313); but by mocking thej
conventional reader’s desire for verisimilitude, as Nabokov does in the '
opening paragraphs of Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a.
Beheading, and The Gift, Dr. Ray here expresses the concerns of a'
novelist rather than psychologist, suggesting that the mask has not re-
mained totally in place. There are subtle oscillations between the shrill
locutions and behavioristic homilies of Ray and the quite reasonable"
statements of an authorial voice projected, as it were, from the wings.
Note 6/9 underlines this, while 7/1 and 7/3-775 suggest other instances
of that presence.
6/5 sophomore: a corrected misprint (a period instead of the 1958 edition’s
semicolon after “sophomore”).
6/6 Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller”: Lolita’s married name, first revealed on p.
268. The covert disclosure of Lolita’s death is significant, for the an-i
nouncement that the three main characters are now dead challenges the!
“old-fashioned reader” ’s idea of “story”: to reveal the outcome before:
the story even begins is of course to ruin it. The heroine of “The Beauty”'
(1934), an untranslated Nabokov story, also dies in childbirth withini
a year after her marriage (noted by Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life]
in Act [Boston, 1967], p. 330). |
6/7 ipS2: for a hermetic allusion to this crucial year, see 253/14. |
6/8 Gray Star: it is most remote, for there is no town by this name any-l
where in the world. Nabokov calls it “the capital town of the book” (p.j
318). A gray star is one veiled by haze (Lolita’s surname), and H.H.'
recalls “the haze of stars” that has always “remained with me.” See 17/1
and 282/1.
[ 324 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 6
6/9 '’’’Vivian Darkbloom " . . . ’’’’My Cue": “Vivian Darkbloom” is Clare
Quilty’s mistress and an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov” (see my 1967
Wisconsin Studies article, p. 216, and my 1968 Denver Quarterly article,
p. 32 [see bibliography]). Among her alphabetical cousins are “Vivian
Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine,” who appears in Speak,
Memory (p. 218), and “Mr. Vivian Badlook,” a photographer and
teacher of English in the 1968 translation of the 1928 novel King, Queen,
Knave (p. 153) — and they all descend from “Vivian Calmbrood” (see
Field, op. cit., p. 73), the alleged author of The Wanderers, an uncom-
pleted play written by Nabokov in Russian (the anagram is helped along
by the fact that in Cyrillic, the c is a k). One act of it was published
in the emigre almanac Facets (1923), as an English play written by
Vivian Calmbrood in 1768 and translated by V. Sirin (the pen name
under which all of Nabokov’s Russian work appeared). In a discussion
in Ada (1969) of Van Veen’s first novel. Letters from Terra, mention
is made of the influence “of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of ana-
grammatic dreams, Ben Sirine” (p. 344).
As for H.H. and John Ray, unless characters in a novel can be said
to have miraculously fashioned their creators, someone else must be re-
sponsible for an anagram of the author’s name, and such phenomena un-
dermine the narrative’s realistic base by pointing beyond the book to
Nabokov, the stage manager, ventriloquist, and puppeteer, who might
simply state, “My cue.” Because Nabokov considered publishing Lolita
anonymously (see p. 315), there was also a purely utilitarian reason for
anagrammatizing his name, as proof of authorship. “Cue” is also the
cognomen of Clare Quilty, who pursues H.H. throughout the novel.
But who is Quilty? — a question the reader will surely ask (see the In-
troduction, pp. xiii-bcviii, and 33/9). As with H.H. and Lolita (nee
Dolores Haze), Quilty’s name lends itself to wordplay by turns jocose
(see 225/1) and significant, since H.H. suggests that Clare Quilty is
clearly guilty. Clare is also a town in Michigan (see 161/1), and, al-
though Nabokov did not know it until this note came into being, Quilty
is a town in County Clare, Ireland, appropriate to a verbally playful
novel in which there are several apt references to James Joyce. See 6/1 1.
6/10 etiolated: to blanch or whiten a plant by exclusion of sunlight.
6/11 outspoken book: Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish
novelist and poet. Judge Woolsey’s historic decision paved the way for
the 1934 American publication of Ulysses, and his decision, along with
a statement by Morris Ernst, prefaces the Modern Library edition of
the novel. Ray’s parenthetical allusion echoes and compresses its com-
[ 3^5 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 7
plete title; "the monumental decision of the united states district
COURT RENDERED DECEMBER 6 , 1 93 3 , BY HON. JOHN M. WOOLSEY LIFTING t
THE BAN ON ‘uLYSSES.’ ” Ray’s FoTcword in part burlesques the expert
opinions which have inevitably prefaced subsequent “controversial”
novels. For other allusions to Joyce, see 71/1, 122/4, 189/1, 200/3, 209/3,
223/1, 252/3, 264/3, ^rid 286/4.
7/ 1 moral apotheosis: a just description of H.H.’s realization at the end
of the novel: “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence
from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (p. 310).
7/2' 12%: such “sextistics” (as H.H. or Quilty might call them) poke fun
at the work of Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) and his Indiana University
Institute for Sex Research.
7/ 3 Blanche Schwarzmann: schwarz is German for “black”; her name is 1
“White Blackman,” because, to Nabokov, Freudians figuratively see no
colors other than black and white (see 7/6). For a similarly hued lady,
see p. 304 and “Melanie Weiss.”
7/4 a mixture of ...supreme misery: an accurate description of the pain '
at the center of H.H.’s playfulness.
7/5 his singing violin: another gap in the texture of Ray’s rhetoric reveals
the voice of his maker. In his Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading, j
Nabokov calls the novel a “violin in a void,” and in Speak, Memory he j
calls the poet Boris Poplavski “a far violin among near balalaikas” (p. 1
287).
’j/6 a case history: among other things, Lolita parodies such studies, and I
Nabokov’s quarrel with psychoanalysis is well-known. No Foreword to
his translated novels seems complete unless a few words are addressed
to “the Viennese delegation,” who are also invoked frequently through-
out the works. Asked in a 1966 National Educational Television inter-
view why he “detest[ed] Dr. Freud,” Nabokov replied: “I think he’s
crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from
Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the 1
dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams, j
Or balloons” (this half-hour interview may be rented for a nominal fee ;|
from the Audio-Visual Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, In-
diana 47401; the film, notes their catalog, is “available to responsible in- I
dividuals and groups both in and out of Indiana”). When I queried j
Nabokov about Freud (by now a trite question), just to see if he could
rise to the occasion once more, he obliged me; “Oh, I am not up to;
[ 326 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 8
discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention
than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the
credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can
be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
I really do not care” {Wisconsin Studies interview).
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls having seen from a Biarritz window
“a huge custard-colored balloon . . . being inflated by Sigismond Lejoy-
eux, a local aeronaut” (p. 156); and “the police state of sexual myth”
(p. 300) is in Ada called “psykitsch” (p. 29). The good doctor’s parono-
mastic avatars are “Dr. Sig Heiler” (p. 28), and “A Dr. Froid...who
may have been an emigre brother with a passport-changed name of the
Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu” (p. 27). Since no parodist could
improve on Erich Fromm’s realization that “The little cap of red velvet
in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of men-
struation” (from The Forgotten Language, 1951, p. 240), or Dr. Oskar
Pfister’s felicitously expressed thought that “When a youth is all the
time sticking his finger through his buttonhole . . . the analytic teacher
knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phan-
tasies” (from The Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, p. 79), Nabokov the
literary anatomist simply includes these treasures in Pale Fire (p. 271).
See Lolita, pp. 36, 169, 196-197, 252, and 287; and 37/1, 127/3,
and 276/4.
8/1 John Ray, Jr.: the first John Ray (1627-1705) was an English natural-
ist famous for his systems of natural classification. His system of plant
classification greatly influenced the development of systematic botany
{Historia plantarium, 1686-1704). He was the first to attempt a defini-
tion of what constitutes a species. His system of insects, as set forth in
Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (1713), is based
on the concept of metamorphosis (see 18/6). The reference to Ray is
no coincidence (it was first pointed out by Diana Butler, in “Lolita
Lepidoptera,” New World Writing 16 [i960], p. 63). Nabokov is a
distinguished lepidopterist, worked in Lepidoptera as a Research Fellow
in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (1942-1948), and
has published some twenty papers on the subject. While I was visiting
him in 1966, he took from the shelf his copy of Alexander B. Klots’s
standard work, A Field Guide to the Butterflies (1951), and, opening it,
pointed to the first sentence of the section on ‘‘‘'Genus Lycaeides Scudder:
The Orange Margined Blues,” which reads; “The recent work of Na-
bokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus” (p. 164).
“That’s real fame,” said the author of Lolita. “That means more than
[ 327 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 8
anything a literary critic could say.” In Speak, Memory (Chapter Six), |
he writes evocatively of his entomological forays, of the fleeting mo-
ments of ecstasy he experiences in catching exquisite and rare butter- |
flies. These emotions are perhaps best summarized in his poem “A Dis- |
covery” (1943; from Poems, p. 15), its twentieth line echoing what he I
said to me more than two decades later: j
!
I found it in a legendary land
all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,
where it was settled on some sodden sand
hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.
The features it combines mark it as new
to science: shape and shade — the special tinge,
akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,
the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.
My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;
corroded tissues could no longer hide
that priceless mote now dimpling the convex
and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.
Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist
two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,
or scales like battledores of amethyst
cross the charmed circle of the microscope.
I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first !
describer — and I want no other fame.
Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
There are many references to butterflies in Lolita, but it must be re-
membered that it is Nabokov, and not H.H., who is the expert. As Na-,
bokov says, “H.H. knows nothing about Lepidoptera. In fact, I went
[ 328 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 8-1 1
out of my way to indicate [p. 112 and p. 159] that he confuses the hawk-
moths visiting flowers at dusk with ‘gray hummingbirds.’ ” The author
has implored the unscientific annotator to omit references to Lepidoptera,
“a tricky subject,” and this is at least one instance when, in spite of
Kinbote’s ringing final phrase in the epigraph, the annotator has not had
the last word. Only the most specific lepidopterological allusions will be
noted, though even this modest trove will make it clear how the butterfly
motif enables Nabokov to leave behind on H.H.’s pages a trail of his
own phosphorescent fingerprints. For entomological allusions, see 11/5,
12/3, 14/1, 18/6, 44/5, 48/1, 58/2, 112/3, 114/1, 128/2, 143/1, 158/2,
159/2, 191/5, 211/1, 212/2, 213/4, 229/4, 233/1, 236/2, 260/5, 261/1,
264/6, 303/5, 3 1 7/ 1, and 318/10.
8/2 /pjj: a corrected author’s error (the date was not included in the
1958 edition).
PART ONE
Chapter 1
ii/i Lolita, light of my life: her name is the first word in the Foreword,
as well as the first and last words of the novel. Such symmetries and
carefully effected alliterations and rhythms undermine the credibility of
H.H.’s “point of view,” since the narrative is presented as an unrevised
first draft, mistakes intact, started in a psychiatric ward and completed
in a prison cell, the product of the fifty-six frenzied final days of H.H.’s
life (see his reminder, p. 310, and 34/7 and 36/3). When asked how her
name occurred to him, Nabokov replied, “For my nymphet I needed a
diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and lumin-
ous letters is ‘L.’ The suffix ‘-ita’ has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this
I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced
as . . . most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy
‘L’ and a long ‘O.’ No, the first syllable should be as in ‘lollipop,’ the
‘L’ liquid and delicate, the ‘lee’ not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians
pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and
caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source
name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in ‘Dolores’ [see 11/5].
My little girl’s heart-rending fate had to be taken into account together
with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another,
plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely
[ 329 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 1 1
with the surname ‘Haze,’ where Irish mists blend with a German bunny
— I mean a small German hare [=tee]” (Playboy interview). Since most
everything is in a name, Nabokov both memorializes and instructs in
Ada: “For the big picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday . . . the child was
permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian
gipsy [see Carmen note, 246/1 — A.A.] of that name in Osberg’s novel
and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish ‘t,’ not a thick English
one) ...” (p. 77). Lolita’s name is lovingly celebrated by Anthony Bur-
gess in his poem, “To Vladimir Nabokov on His Seventieth Birthday,”
in TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970):
That nymphet’s beauty lay less on her bones
Than in her name’s proclaimed two allophones.
A boned veracity slow to be found
In all the channels of recorded sound.
1 1/2 Lo-lee-ta: the middle syllable alludes to “Annabel Lee” (1849), by
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). H.H. will lead one to believe that “Anna-
bel Leigh” is the cause of his misery; “Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee,
alias Loleeta,” he says on p. 169. References to Poe are noted in 33/5,
45/51 77/51 109/1, 120/2, 191/3, and 294/2; while “Annabel Lee” is vari-
ously invoked on pp. 42, 127, and 232, and otherwise as noted 11/7, 11/8,
14/1, 15/4, 41/1, 44/3, 49/41 55/51 and 168/2. But rather than identify
every “Annabel Lee” echo occurring in the first chapter and elsewhere,
the text of the poem is provided:
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;—
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child.
In this kingdom by the sea.
But we loved with a love that was more than love —
10 I and my Annabel Lee —
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago.
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
[ 330 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE II
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
20 In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me: —
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know.
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we —
Of many far wiser than we —
30 And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: —
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
40 In her sepulchre there by the sea —
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Poe is referred to more than twenty times in Lolita, far more than any
other writer (followed by Merimee, Shakespeare, and Joyce, in that
order). Not surprisingly, Poe allusions have been the most readily iden-
tifiable to readers and earlier commentators (I pointed out several in
my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody”
[see bibliography] ) . See also the earlier articles by Elizabeth Phillips
(“The Hocus-Pocus of Lolita," Literature and Psychology, X [Summer
i960], 97-101) and Arthur F. DuBois (“Poe and Lolita," CEA Critic,
XXVI [No. 6, 1963], I, 7). Most recent is Carl R. Proffer’s thorough
compilation in Keys to Lolita (henceforth called Keys), pp. 34-45.
Although my Notes rarely discuss in any detail the significance of
the literary allusions they limn, Poe’s conspicuous presence surely calls
for a few general remarks; subsequent Notes will establish the most
specific — and obvious — links between H.H. and Poe (e.g., their “child
brides”; see 45/5). Poe is appropriate for many reasons. He wrote the
NOTES FOR PAGE II
kind of Doppelganger tale (“William Wilson”) which the H.H.-Quilty
relationship seemingly parallels but ultimately upends, and he of course
“fathered” the detective tale. Although, as a reader, Nabokov today ab-
hors the detective story, he is not alone in recognizing that the genre’s
properties are well-suited to the fictive treatment of metaphysical ques-
tions and problems of identity and perception. Thus — along with other
contemporary writers such as Graham Greene {Brighton Rock, 1938),
Raymond Queneau (Pierrot mon ami [Pierrot], 1942), Jorge Luis Borges
(“Death and the Compass,” “An Examination of the Work of Herbert :
Quain,” “The Garden of Forking Paths” [first published in Ellery ;
Queen's Mystery Magazine], and “The South”), Alain Robbe-Grillet
(Les Gommes [The Erasers], 1953), Michel Butor (L'Emploi du temps
[Passing Time], 1956), and Thomas Pynchon {V., 1963)- — Nabokov has '
often transmuted or parodied the forms, techniques, and themes of the i
detective story, as in Despair, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita,
and, less directly, in The Eye, where, Nabokov says, “The texture of the
tale mimics that of detective fiction.” The reader of Lolita is invited to
wend his way through a labyrinth of clues in order to solve the mystery ,
of Quilty’s identity, which in part makes Lolita a “tale of ratiocination,”
to use Poe’s phrase (see 33/9). Early in the novel one is told that H.H. ;
is a murderer. Has he killed Charlotte? Or Lolita? (See also Keys, p. 39.)
The reader is led to expect both possibilities, and his various attempts at
ratiocination should ultimately tell the reader as much about his own j
mind as about the “crimes,” “identities,” or “psychological development”
of fictional characters. For allusions to detective story writers other
than Poe, see 33/2 (Agatha Christie), 66/1 (Conan Doyle), and 213/1 1
and 252/5 (Maurice Leblanc). ]
It is also in part through Poe that Nabokov manages to suggest some
consistently held attitudes toward language and literature. H.H. says of
his artistic labors, “The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and i
it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly.
Why?” (p. 137). The rhetorical question is coy enough, because he |
has answered it at the beginning of his narrative; he hasn’t failed, but)
neither can he ever be entirely successful, because “Oh, my Lolita, I
have only words to play with!” (p. 34) — an admission many Romantic |
and Symbolist writers would not make. Nabokov’s remark about Joyce’s )
giving “too much verbal body to words” (Playboy interview) succinctly!
defines the burden the post-Romantics placed on the word, as though j I
it were an endlessly resonant object rather than one component in a
referential system of signs (see 122/4 for a parody of Joycean stream-
of-consciousness writing). H.H.’s acknowledgment of the limitations of
[ 33 ^ ]
NOTES FOR PAGE I I
language leaves many writers open to criticism, especially Romantic
poets such as Poe. “When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love
Melville,” says Nabokov; “I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,” writes John
Shade in Pale Fire (line 632 of the poem); the implications are clear
enough. In Lolita, his choice of both subject matter and narrator parody
Poe’s designation, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” of the “most
poetical topic in the world”: “the death of a beautiful woman . . . and
equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are
those of a bereaved lover” (see also my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article,
op. cit., p. 236). Both Annabel Lee and Lolita “die,” the latter figura-
tively as well as literally, in terms of her fading nymphic qualities and
escape from H.H., who seems to invoke yet another of Poe’s lost ladies
when he calls Lolita “Lenore” (though the primary allusion is to Burger’s
poem, says Nabokov; see 209/5).
The speaker in Poe’s “Lenore” gropes for the right elegiac chord:
“How shall the ritual, then, be read? — the requiem how be sung / By
you — by yours, the evil eye, — by yours, the slanderous tongue / That
did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?” How shall
it be “sung” is also the main question in Lolita, and Nabokov found his
answer in a parodic style that seems to parody all styles, including the
novel’s own. “You talk like a book. Dad,” Lolita tells H.H.; and, in
order to protect his own efforts to capture her essence, he tries to ex-
haust the “fictional gestures,” such as Edgar Poe’s, which would reduce
the nymphet’s ineffable qualities to a convention of language or litera-
ture. “Well-read Humbert” thus toys with one writer after another, as
though only through parody and caricature can he rule out the possi-
bility of his memoir’s finally being nothing more than what the author-
ial voice in Invitation to a Beheading suggests to its captive creation:
“Or is this all but obsolete romantic rot, Cincinnatus? ” (p. 139).
:/3 four feet ten: see 264/6 for an involuted conversion to inches.
:/4 Lola: in addition to being a diminutive of “Dolores,” it is the name
of the young cabaret entertainer who enchants a middle-aged professor
in the German film. The Blue Angel (1930), directed by Josef von
Sternberg. Nabokov has never seen the film (though he has seen still
photos from it) and doubts that he had the association in mind. Lola
was played by Marlene Dietrich (1904- ), and it is worth noting that
H.H. describes Lolita’s mother as having “features of a type that may
be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich” (p. 39) and, after he
reports her death, bids “Adieu, Marlene!” (p. 105). In Ada, Van Veen
visits a don and his family, “a charming wife and a triplet of charming
[ 333 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 1 1
twelve-year-old daughters, Ala, Lola and Lalage — especially Lalage”
[“the age” — twelve, a nymphet’s prime (p. 353)].
1/5 Dolores: derived from the Latin, dolor: sorrow, pain (see 45/2).
Traditionally an allusion to the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows,
and the Seven Sorrows concerning the life of Jesus. H.H. observes a
church, “Mission Dolores,” and takes advantage of the ready-made pun;
“good title for book” (p. 160). Less spiritual are the sorrows detailed
in “Dolores” (1866), by Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), English poet
(see also Keys, p. 28). “Our Lady of Pain” is its constant refrain, and
her father is Priap, whom H.H. mentions several times (see 44/4). The
name Dolores is in two ways “closely interwound with the inmost
fiber of the book,” as John Ray says on p. 6. When in the Afterword
Nabokov defines the “nerves of the novel,” he concludes with “the
tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on
which I caught the first known female of Lycceides sublivens Nabokov)”'
(p. 318). Diana Butler, in “Lolita Lepidoptera,” op. cit., p. 62, notes thatjj
this important capture was made at Telluride, Colorado (see p. 314)^!
and that in his paper on it, Nabokov identifies Telluride as a “cul-de-|i'
sac ... at the end of two converging roads, one from Placerville, theji
other from Dolores” {The Lepidopterists' News, VI, 1952). Dolores Ej
in fact everywhere in that region: river, town, and county are so.
named. When H.H. finally confronts Quilty, he asks, “do you recall a
little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?’ [
(p. 298). “Dolly” is an appropriate diminutive (“you/ took a dull dollj
to pieces /and threw its head away,” writes H.H. of Quilty [p. 302])
For the entomological allusions, see 8/ 1. On shipboard in Ada, Var'
Veen sees a film of Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Dolores the dancj
ing girl turns out to be Ada (pp. 488-490). Ada later gives Van “a
sidelong ‘Dolores’ glance” (p. 513).
1/6 in point of fact: the childhood “trauma” which H.H. will soon offef
as the psychological explanation of his condition (see p. 15). H.H.’:,
first chapter is so extraordinarily short in order to mock the traditional
novel’s expository opening. How reassuring, by comparison, are th(|
initial paragraphs of those conventional novels — so anachronistic to Na)
bokov— which prepare the reader for the story about to unfold by supi
plying him with the complete psychological, social, and moral prehis:
tories of the characters. Anticipating such needs, H.H. poses the reader’:
questions (“Did she have a precursor?”; “Oh when?”), and parodie|
more than that kind of reader dependence on such exposition. It maj
seem surprising in a supposedly “confessional” novel that this shoulo
be the narrator’s initial concern; but it is by way of a challenge to play
C 334 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES II-I2
like the good-humored cry of ^‘'Avantr with which Luzhin greets Turati
in The Defense, before they begin their great match game. H.H.’s “point
of fact” mocks the “scientific” certitude of psychiatrists who have turned
intensely private myths and symbols — in short, fictions — into hard fact.
The H.H. who is the subject of a case study immediately undercuts the
persuasiveness of his own specific “trauma” by projecting it in fragments
of another man’s verse; literary allusions, after all, point away from the
unique, inviolable, formative “inner reality” of a neurotic or psychotic
consciousness. Annabel Leigh, the object of H.H.’s unconsummated love,
has no reality other than literary. See also Keys, p. 45.
1/7 princedo 7 n by the sea: a variant of the most famous line in “Annabel
Lee.” Poe’s “kingdom” has been changed to accommodate the fact that
H.H. is always an aspirant, never an absolute monarch. On p. 168 he
calls Lolita “My Frigid Princess.”
1/8 noble-wmged seraphs, envied: a pastiche composed of a phrase from
line II of “Annabel Lee” and a verb from line 22. “Seraphs” are the
highest of the nine orders of angels; in the Bible they have six wings,
as well as hands and feet, and a human voice (Isaiah, 6:2). “The seraph
with his six flamingo wings” is invoked by John Shade in Pale Fire (line
225 of the poem).
!i/9 tangle of thorns: another H.H., the penitent, confessor, and martyr
to love, calls attention to his thorns, the immodest reference to so sacred
an image suggesting that the reader would do well to judge H.H.’s tone
I rather than his deeds. When H.H. addresses the “Ladies and gentlemen
of the jury,” as he will do so often, he summarizes the judicial proclivi-
I ties of those literal-minded and moralistic readers who, having soberly
! considered what John Ray, Jr., has said, already hate “Humbert the Hor-
rible.”
Chapter 2
2/ 1 Jerome Dunn, the alpinist: in a novel so allusive as Lolita it is only
natural to be suspicious of the most innocuous references, and to search
for allusions under every bush. Anticipating the efforts of future exe-
' getes, I will occasionally offer non-notes — “anti-annotations” which sim-
ply state that Nabokov intends no allusion whatsoever. Thus, “Jerome
j Dunn” is non-allusive, as are “Clarence Choate Clark,” H.H.’s lawyer
• (p. 5), and John Ray’s residence of “Widworth, Mass.” (p. 8). For im-
portant caveats in Nabokov’s own words, see 58/1 and 223/2.
[ 335 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 1 2-1 4
12/2 paleopedotogy and Aeolian harps: respectively, the branch of pedol-
ogy concerned with the soils of past geological ages, and a box-shapec
musical instrument on which the wind produces varying harmonies (af-
ter Aeolus, Greek god of the winds). A favorite Romantic metaphor foi
the poet’s sensibility.
12/3 midge: a gnat-like insect. For entomological allusions, see 8/i.
12/4 Sybil: or sibyl, from the Greek; any of several prophetesses creditec
to widely separate parts of the ancient world. H.H.’s aunt is well-named
since she predicts her own death.
12/5 Mirana: a heat-shimmer blend of “mirage,” “rc mirer" (French; tc
look at oneself; admire oneself), “Mirabella,” and “Fata Morgana” (::'
kind of mirage most frequently seen in the Strait of Messina, and for
merly considered the work of fairies who would thus lure sailori'i
aground). Bewitching Lolita is often characterized as a fairy (see 33/3)'
the latter word is derived from the Latin word jatum (fate, destiny)
and H. H. is pursued by bedeviling “Aubrey McFate” (see 58/1). I
12/6 Mon... papa: French; my dear little Daddy. 1
12/7 Don Quixote: the famous novel (1605, 1615) by Miguel Cervante;
(1547-1616); see 253/10. Les Miserables (1862) is by Victor Hugo (1802-
1885), French novelist, playwright, and poet; see 258/3.
1 3/ 1 rose garden: see 54/5 and 58/1. 1
1
13/2 La Beaute Humaine: French; “The Human Beauty.” The book is in
vented, as is its author, whose name is a play on ‘‘‘'nichon" a Frencl
(slang) epithet for the female breast.
13/3 lycee: the basic institution of French secondary education; a studen
attends a Lycee for seven years (from age eleven to eighteen).
Chapter 3 ,
14/ 1 powdered Mrs. Leigh ... Vanessa van Ness: Poe’s “Annabel Lee”l
on p. 169 it is spelled Lee. The Red Admirable (or Admiral) butterfly
which figures throughout Nabokov, is Vanessa atalanta, family Nympha
lidae (for more on “nymph,” see 18/6); and butterflies, as well as women;
are “powdered.” H.H. is also alluding to Jonathan Swift’s (1667-
1745) “Vanessa,” as he called the young woman whose passion he awak j
ened (for the Swift allusion, see also Keys, p. 96). Nabokov expands th<j
dual allusion in Pale Fire. John Shade addresses “My dark Vanessa, Grim;
[ 336 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 1 4 - 1 5
son-barred, my blest / My Admirable butterfly!...” (lines 270-271);
and, in his note to these lines, Charles Kinbote quotes from Swift’s
“Cadenus and Vanessa,” though he doesn’t identify it by name; “When,
lo! Vanessa in her bloom / Advanced like Atalanta's star.” He also al-
ludes to “Vanessa” ’s actual name thusly: “Fawhomrigh, Erther!” (p. 172)
— thereby underscoring at least the alphabetical arrangement of Swift’s
^ anagramour (let me laugh a little, too, gentlemen, as H.H. says on p.
j-|252). But in his succinct way, H.H. has already anticipated Kinbote
1 . (“van Ness”). A Red Admirable lands on Shade’s arm the minute before
: he is killed (see lines 993-995 and Kinbote ’s note for them) and the insect
I appears in King, Queen, Knave just after Nabokov has withdrawn his
I' omniscience (p. 44). In the final chapter of Speak, Memory Nabokov re-
calls having seen in a Paris park, just before the war, a live Red Admirable
r being promenaded on a leash of thread by a little girl; “there was some
^ vaguely repulsive symbolism about her sullen sport,” he writes (p. 306).
k! When Van Veen casually mentions Ada’s having pointed out “some ac-
(' cursed insect,” the offended heroine parenthetically and angrily adds,
' “Accursed? Accursed? It was the newly described, fantastically rare
vanessian, Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white
foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon
r College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the
Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch’s best known imita-
tors” (p. 158). See 8/1.
4/2 solipsism: a central word in Lolita. An epistemological theory that
the self knows only its present state and is the only existent thing, and
I, that “reality” is subjective; concern with the self at the expense of social
^ relationships. See 62/1.
4/3 plage: French; beach.
5/1 chocolat glace: French; in those days, an iced chocolate drink with
whipped cream (today it means “chocolate ice cream”).
5/2 red rocks: see 41/3 and 58/1.
5/ 3 lost pair of sunglasses: the sunglasses image connects Annabel and
, Lolita. H.H. first perceives her as his “Riviera love peering at me over
dark glasses” (see 41/1). See also Keys, p. 43 and p. i43n.
5/4 point of possessing: for a comment on the “traumatic” nature of this
experience, see 21 1/3. “My darling” echoes line 39 of “Annabel Lee”
(see 49/4 for the entire line, and 11/2 for the poem itself).
5/5 Corfu: Greek island.
[ 337 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I7-18
Chapter 4
17/ 1 haze of stars: see 6/8. In one sense, the novel begins and ends in “Gray
Star.” '
17/2 her spell: “spells” and “enchantments” are fundamental in Lolita. See
18/6, 47/3, and 262/2.
Chapter 5
17/3 manque: French; unfulfilled.
18/ 1 uranists: H.H.’s own variant of the uncommon English word, uran-
ism, derived from a Greek word for “spiritual” and meaning “homO"
sexual.” Havelock Ellis uses it in Chapter Five of Psychology of Sex
(1938), and claims the term was invented by the nineteenth-century
legal official Karl Ulrichs.
18/2 Deux Magots: the famous Left Bank cafe in Paris, where intellectualsj'
congregate. Magot is a kind of monkey, but “magots de Saxe” meanS;
“statuettes of saxe [porcelain]” (eighteenth-century). Nabokov purposely'
seats his uranists in this particular cafe, because he wants to invoke
the simian association and the image of the grotesque Chinese porcelain,
figures.
18/3 pastiches: the “quotation” is an assemblage including bits and pieces,
of “Gerontion” (1920), by T.S. Eliot, the Anglo-American poet (1888-
1965): “. . . Fraulein von Kulp / Who turned in the hall, one hand on
the door” (lines 27-28); “. . . De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel,
whirled...” (line 66); “...Gull against the wind, in the windy straits/:
Of Belle Isle...” (lines 69-70). See 260/3 and 301/1 for other allusions
to Eliot. Having small sympathy with some of Eliot’s social prejudices.
Nabokov ironically describes in Ada a “Mr. Eliot, a Jewish businessman”!
(p. 5), who later meets the late-blooming banker (Eliot’s early vocation):
Kithar Sween (=Eliot’s “Sweeney”), author of “The Waistline, a satire,
in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin'
[^Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality”], an overtly subtle yarn extolling
the Roman faith” (p. 506). For The Four Quartets, see Pale Fire, lines
368-379. Nabokov says, “I was never exposed in the ’twenties and ’thirtiesj
as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of Eliot and Pound. I
read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an Ameri-
can friend’s house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them.
[ 338 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE I 8
but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I
suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as dis-
covered them at an earlier age than I did” (Playboy interview).
3/4 ^Troustia?i theme ... Bailey’’’’: the letters of the English poet John
Keats (1795-1821) to his close friend Benjamin Bailey (1791-1853) are
among the important statements of Keats’s poetic theory. In Pale Fire,
Kinbote measures the progress of poetry “from the caveman to Keats”
(p. 289). H.H.’s “Proustian theme” is no doubt on the nature of time
and memory. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) — the great French novelist,
the first half of whose A la Recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance
of Thmgs Past, 1913-1927) is to Nabokov one of the four “greatest
masterpieces of twentieth century prose” (see 209/3) — is also mentioned
on pp. 79 and 184, and as noted 255/2 and 266/4. appears too in
Pale Fire, pp. 87, 161-163, and 248, as well as in line 224 of Shade’s
poem (p. 41), where he envisions eternity, and “... talks / With Soc-
rates and Proust in cypress walks.” In T he Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
Knight’s hack biographer, Mr. Goodman, mentions “the French author
M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied” (p.
1 16); and Knight himself parenthetically remarks in a letter, “I am
[not] apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis” (p. 54) — a device H.H.
consciously indulges, as when he parenthetically “prolong[s] these
Proustian intonations” (p. 79). There are also many allusions to Proust
in Ada (see pp. 9, 55-56, 66, 73, 168-169, 254, and 541).
8/5 “Histoire . . . anglaise’”: French; “A Short History of English Poetry.”
8/6 not huma?!, but nymphic: like Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” (Babbitt,
1922), Nabokov’s “nymphet” has entered the language, though the lat-
est dictionary entries which Lolita has inspired are as inelegant as they
are inaccurate: nymph: “a woman of loose morals” (Webster's Third
New International, echoed by the Random House Dictionary). The
Penguin English Dictionary , G. N. Garmonsway, ed., gives under nym-
phet: “(coll.) very young but sexually attractive girl” (H.H., who strives
so desperately to expropriate idiomatic English, would appreciate that
“colloquial”). As for nymph, the mythological and zoological defini-
tions are primary. In Greek and Roman mythology, a nymph is “One
of the inferior divinities of nature represented as beautiful maidens
dwelling in the mountains, waters, forests, etc.” Nympholepsy, H.H.’s
malady (hence, “nympholept” [p. 19]), is “a species of demoniac en-
thusiasm supposed to seize one bewitched by a nymph; a frenzy of
emotion, as for some unattainable ideal” (more specifically, in Blakistotfs
1 339 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 1 8
New Gould Medical Dictionary, it is defined as “ecstasy of an eroti(
type”). Under the entry for “The Nymphs” in The Book of Imaginary
Beings (1969), Jorge Luis Borges notes that “Paracelsus limited thei
dominion to water, but the ancients thought the world was full o
Nymphs . . . [some] Nymphs were held to be immortal or, as Plutarc)
obscurely intimates, lived for above 9,720 years . . . The exact number o
the Nymphs is unknown; Hesiod gives us the figure three thousand . .
Glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death
A line of Propertius affirms this.” H.H. echoes these definitions. Her
and on the following pages he alludes to “spells,” “magic,” “fantasth
powers,” and “deadly demons” (for various enchantments, see i 2/5 [Fat
Morgana], 22/2 [Lilith], 33/3 [elves], 47/3 [Carmenf, 73/1 [an incubus]
and 242/2 [king of the elves]). Lolita’s “inhuman” and “bewitchin]
charms” suggest that she is Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819
in bobby socks (Nabokov translated the poem into Russian in The Em
pyrean Path, 1923), and that the novel is in part a unique variant of th
archetypal tale of a mortal destroyed by his love for a supernatural femm
fatale, “The Lovely Lady Without Pity” of ballad, folk tale, and fair;
tale. Nabokov has called Lolita a “fairy tale,” and his nymph a “fair;
princess” (p. 54); see 33/3.
One of Nabokov’s lepidopterological finds is known as “Nabokov’
Wood-Nymph” (belonging to the family Nymphalidae; see 14/1), am
he is not unaware that a “nymph” is also defined as “a pupa,” or “th
young of an insect undergoing incomplete metamorphosis.” Crucial ti
an understanding of Lolita is some sense of the various but simultaneou
metamorphoses undergone by Lolita, H.H., the book, the author, ani
the reader, who is manipulated by the novel’s game-element and illu
sionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to becomt
at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations — an ex
perience which is bound to change him. The butterfly is thus a con
trolling metaphor that enriches Lolita in a more fundamental and or
ganic manner than, say, the Odyssey does Joyce’s Ulysses. Just as th
nymph undergoes a metamorphosis in becoming the butterfly, so every
thing in Lolita is constantly in the process of metamorphosis, includin
the novel itself — a set of “notes” being compiled by an imprisoned ma
during a fifty-six-day period for possible use at his trial, emerging a
a book after his death, and then only after it has passed through yd
another stage, the nominal “editorship” of John Ray, Jr. As Lolita turn
from a girl into a woman, so H.H.’s lust becomes love. His sense of j
“safely solipsized” Lolita (p. 62) is replaced by his awareness that sh
was his “own creation” with “no will, no consciousness — indeed, no lif
[ 340 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I9-2O
of her own” (p. 64), that he did not know her (p. 286), and that their
sexual intimacy only isolated him more completely from the helpless
girl. These “metamorphoses” enable H.H. to transform a “crime” into
a redeeming work of art, and the reader watches the chrysalis come to
life. “And a metamorphosis is a thing always exciting to watch,” says
Nabokov in Gogol (p. 43), referring to etymological rather than en-
tomological phenomena (see 120/3 and 214/2; also follow the multi-
farious permutations of “Humbert”).
On his first night with Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, H.H.
iexperiences “a confusion of perception metamorphosing her into eye-
spots of moonlight or a fluffy flowering bush” (p. 134), and, anticipating
the design and progression of Lolita, the narrator of The Real Life of
\Sebastian Knight (1941) mentions the readers who “felt baffled by [The
Prismatic Bezel's] habit of metamorphosis” (p. 95; for the complete pas-
sage, see the epigraph to the Introduction). When Nabokov in his lec-
tures at Cornell discussed “the theme of transformation” in R.L.
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Gogol’s The Overcoat, and Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis, he said that Stevenson’s tale is a “thriller and mys-
tery only in respect to artistic creativity. It is a phenomenon of style,
a transformation through the art of writing.” He likened the Jekyll-
Hyde transformation to the metamorphosis of the larva into the pupa
' into the butterfly, and imagined Jekyll’s final emergence from the melt-
ing and blackened features of the evil Hyde as “the rush of panic” which
’ must accompany “the feeling of hatching.” Once again, as in his book
on Gogol, Nabokov has described his own performance by defining the
art of another. As a metaphor for the artistic process, the nymph’s cycle
suggests a transcendent design. See Introduction, p. xxii. For entomolog-
ical allusions, see 8/1.
)/ 1 bubble of hot poison: see 306/1; the bubble breaks.
9/2 faunlet: in mythology, the faun is a woodland deity represented as
a man having the ears, horns, tail, and hind legs of a goat; a satyr. The
diminutive form is H.H.’s coinage. See Nabokov’s letter in Hevo States-
! man, Nov. 17, 1967, p. 680.
d/ I fateful elf: see 33/3.
0/2 pollutive: H.H.’s variant of pollution; the less common meaning,
“emission of semen at other times than in coitus.”
0/3 pseudolibidoes: H.H.’s usage (see p. 56 for “libidream”) of libido:
• the sexual impulse; to Freud, the instinctual drive behind all human ac-
tivities.
[ 341 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 2 1
2i/i Children ... the Act actually reads: “‘Child’ means a perso i
under the age of fourteen years . . . ‘Young Person’ means a person wh j
has attained the age of fourteen years and is under the age of seventeeij j
years.” From Children m 7 d Young Persons Act of 23 & 24 Gee'!
5, c. 12, §107 (i). No specific definition of girl-child is given; but, eveif)
if H.H.’s quotation is wrong, he is a sound legal scholar, for a child,
must be eight years old to incur criminal liability. Sec p. 137. |
21/2 Massachusetts .. .“a wayward child" ... humoral persons: an accurat ,
transcription; the parenthetical phrase is also a direct quotation fron
Mass. Anno. Laws ch. 119 §52 (1957).
i
21/3 Hugh Brotighton: controversial Puritan divine and pamphleteer (i549!j
1612). The allusion is to his A Consent of Scripture (1588), an eccentru*
discourse on Biblical chronology. I
21/4 Rahab: the Canaanite prostitute of Joshua 2; 1-21. i
2i,/5 Virgil ... perineum: the Latin poet (70-19 b.c.). The perinetim inj
eludes the urinogenital passages and the rectum. In the 1958 edition if
read peritonium (the double serous membrane which lines the cavit)|!
of the abdomen). Although H.H.’s grotesque error is intentional on Na
bokov’s part, he decided to correct it here because the mistake, if dis
cerned, might be taken for the author’s, or remain ambiguous. '
21/6 Kmg Akhnaten’ s . . . N He daughters: Akhnaten of Egypt (reigneej
1375-1358 B.c.) and Nefertiti had a total of seven daughters. On hi;
monuments, the king is shown with six. H.H. also loses a “daughter.” j|
21/7 fascinum: Latin; a penis of ivory used in certain ancient erotic ritesjj
21/8 East India?! provinces: the Lepchas are a Mongoloid people of Sikkin;;
and the Darjeeling district of India. What H.H. says is true, and Na^!
bokov thinks H.H. may have got it from somewhere in Havelock Ellis’:
monumental, many-volumed Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1891).
j
21/9 Dante . . .month of May: Dante was born between May 15 and June
15, 1265. He was therefore nine years old when he met Beatrice in 1274
and she was supposedly eight. There was no romance.
21/10 Petrarch . . . Laureen: Petrarch was born July 20, 1304. He was there-
fore twenty-three when he met Laura on April 6, 1327. She remains un-
known to this day, and all attempts to identify her with historical perj
sons are purely speculative. Her age therefore can not be determined
21/11 hills of V aucluse: an area in Southeastern France, the capital oi
[ 342 ] I
NOTES FOR PAGES 22-24
: which is Avignon. It was Petrarch’s favorite home, but he found that
( , natural beauty there only added to the sense of his loss of Laura.
2/1 “enfa 77 t . . . fo2irbe'\ French; “sly and lovely child.”
2/2 it was Lilith: in Jewish legend, Lilith was Adam’s wife before Eve.
Also a female demon who attacked children and a famous witch in
the demonolog}’ of the Middle Ages. In Pale Fire, a Zemblan “society
sculptor” finds in Charles the Beloved’s sister “what he sought and . . .
' used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Callmg Back Ada?)!" (p. io8). See
18/6 for more on enchantments.
2/ 3 tiddles: “trifles”; from tiddle, an obsolete verb except in dialect or
slang; to fondle, to fuss or trifle.
2/4 this is 077 ly a gaiiie: in the Wisconsin Studies interview, Nabokov says
“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” The pun on H.H.’s name includes
the game of ombre (see 5/3), which is played in Canto III of Alexander
Pope’s The Rape of the Lock ( 1714); see lines 87-100. Also see the games
H.H. plays on pp. 184-185, 204-205, and 235.
2/5 metro: the Paris subway.
Chapter 6
3/ 1 voluptas: Latin; sensual pleasures.
3/2 the Madeleine: a church in Paris (a very prominent landmark).
3/ 3 frhilleitient: French; a wiggle.
3/4 ''''Cent": French; one hundred (francs).
3/5 "'Taitt pis": French; “Too bad!”
4/ 1 petit cadeau: French; small gift.
4/2 "dix-huit": French; “eighteen” (years old).
4/ 3 '''Oui, ce ti’est pas biett": French; “Yes, that is not nice.”
4/4 grues: French; slang word for prostitutes.
;4/5 “11 hait 777 alm . . . truc-la": French; “The man who invented this trick
was a smart one.”
4/6 poser im lapi 77 : French; to stand someone up.
;4/7 “Tm es . . . de dire fa": French; “You are very nice to say that.”
[ 343 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 24-28
24/8 avant qu'on se couche: French; before we go to bed.
25/ 1 “/e vais m'acheter des has”: French; “I am going to buy myself son
stockings.”
25/2 ‘■'Regardez-vwi . . . brune": French; “Take a look at this beautif,
brunette.” The 1958 edition omitted the period after the parenthesis.
25/3 qui pourrah arranger la chose: French; who could fix it.
26/ 1 son argent: French; her money.
26/2 lui: French; himself (pronoun which is redundant and serves to en
phasize a noun).
26/ 3 Marie . . . stellar name: derived from the Virgin’s name; to Biblic
commentators, it means stellamaris, star of the sea. H.H. has more fti
with “stellar” later (see 291/ 1). !
Chapter 7 ■
27/1 tachycardia: a term from pathology; abnormal rapidity of the heart
action. '
27/2 mes malheurs: French; my misfortunes.
27/3 jrangais moyen: French; the average Frenchman, the man in the streej
Chapter 8 |
27/4 pot-au-feu: French; a common stew, containing meat, vegetables, an^
almost anything else.
27/5 merkin: an artificial female pudendum, or its false hair.
27/6 d la gamine: French; in imitation of a cute young girl.
28/1 mairie: French; town hall.
28/2 melanic: pigmented; hence, black or dark. i
28/ 3 baba: although it is Franco-Russian for a ring-shaped pastry imbue
with rum, Nabokov intends it otherwise: “ ‘Baba’ colloquially means i
Russian any female on the common side; a blousy, vulgar woman. It
also used metaphorically for certain thick, sturdy, columellar, menhi^
like, compact things, such as the pastry romovaya baba (but this h:
nothing to do with its meaning here). Originally, baba meant a peasar
woman.”
[ 344 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 28-33
8/4 I felt like Marat... stab me: Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793), French
revolutionist stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday; the sub-
ject of a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, Marat assassine (1793).
The “original” tub can be seen at both Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works in
i London and at Paris’s wax museum, Musee Grevin. In Pale Fire, John
Shade imagines how his biographer would describe him shaving in his
bath: . . he’d / Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed” (lines 893-
894). On his travels, student Van Veen is shown “the peasant-bare foot-
print of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where
he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s
bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool” (Ada, p. 171) — a com-
bination of Murad (from Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad), General Murat (Na-
poleon’s brother-in-law and king of Naples), and Marat.
8/5 Paris-Soir: a sensationalistic daily newspaper; now France-Soir.
9/1 mon oncle d'Amerique: French; the proverbial rich American uncle
who dies, leaving one a fortune; a curtain line in many old-fashioned
melodramas.
9/ 2 Nansen . . . passport: the special passport issued to emigres in Europe
before World War II; the document figures prominently in the story,
“‘That in Aleppo Once...’” in Nabokov's Dozen (1958).
9/3 prefecture: French; police headquarters.
o/i “Mais qui est-ce?": French; “But who is it?”
0/2 quite a scholar: the ten-volume Jean Christophe (1904-1912), by the
Frenchman Romain Rolland (1866-1944), is a panoramic novel of so-
ciety, admired no more by Nabokov than by H.H. (see Pnin, p. 142).
i/i j'ai demannde pardonne: French; “I beg your pardon.” The tense is
incorrect (should be “je"); and the wrong spelling — an extra n in both
words — indicates a Russian accent.
1/2 gredin: French; scoundrel, villain.
2/ 1 Maximovich . . . taxies back to me: see bottom of p. 30.
3/ 1 fructuate: rare; to bear fruit, to fructify.
3/2 Agatha Christie: A Murder Is Announced is the actual title of a 1950
' novel by Agatha Christie (1891- ), the well-known English mystery
‘ writer. A murder is announced on the next page (Clare Quilty’s; see
34/5)-
[ 345 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 33
33/3 Percy Elphinstone: Elphinstone and his books are also genuine, ac
cording to Nabokov, though it has been impossible to document thi
Nabokov recalls finding A Vagabond in Italy “in a hospital library, th
nearest thing to a prison library.” But the town of Elphinstone (pj
240-249) is invented. H.H. calls Annabel “the initial fateful elf in m
life” (p. 20); and Lolita’s original home town in the Midwest Wc
“Pisky,” another form of pixie or elf (p. 48). When H.H. deposit
Lolita in the Elphinstone Hospital, it is the last time he will see th
nymphic incarnation of his initial “elf” (p. 248); for him, the “fair
tale” (and he imagines himself a “fairy-tale nurse” [p. 41]) ends i
Elph’s Stone just as it had begun in the town of “elf.” Quilty in pui
suit is seen as the “Erlkonig,” the king of the elves in Goethe’s poei
of that name (see 242/2). At The Enchanted Hunters hotel, on the nigl
that H.H. first possesses Lolita, he notes, “Nothing could have been moi
childish than . . . the purplish spot on her naked neck where a fairy tal
vampire had feasted” (p. 141). Quilty’s Pavor [Latin: fear, panic] Mane
turns out to be on Grimm Road (p. 293), and when H.H. goes to ki
him, the door “swung open as in a medieval fairy tale” (p. 296). As
birthday present, H.H. gives Lolita a de luxe edition of Hans Christia
Andersen’s The Little Merrtiaid (176/5); and allusions are made to Ha?
sel and Gretel, The Sleeping Beauty, The Emperor's New Clotht
(203/1), and Bluebeard (245/3). The simplicity of Lolita's “story,” sue
as it is — “plot,” in the conventional sense, may be paraphrased in thre
sentences — and the themes of deception, enchantment, and metamorphos
are akin to the fairy tale (see 18/6); while the recurrence of places an
motifs and the presence of three principal characters recall the forma
istic design and symmetry of those archetypal tales (see 267/2). But th
fate of Nabokov’s “fairy princess” (p. 54) and the novel’s denouemer
reverse the fairy-tale process, even though H.H. offers Lolita the oj
portunity of a formulaic fairy-tale ending: “we shall live happily evei
after” (p. 280).
The fairy-tale element has a significance far greater than its local in
portance to Lolita. Several of Nabokov’s novels, stories, and poems at
“fairy tales” in the sense that they are set in imaginary lands. The?
lands extend from five of his untranslated Russian works (1924-1940
to Bend Sinister's Padukgrad (1947), to Pale Fire's kingdom of Zemb
(1962), culminating in Ada (1969), where the entire universe has bee
reimagined. Held captive in his own Zemblan palace. King Charl(|
helplessly looks down upon “lithe youths diving into the swimming pof
of a fairy tale sport club” (p. 119); after making his escape, he stops \
a warm farmhouse where he is “given a fairy-tale meal of bread ari
[ 346 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 33
cheese” (p. 140). Because it is Nabokov’s most extensive fantasia, Ada
naturally abounds in fairy-tale references (see pp. 5 [“Lake Kitezh”], 87,
143, 164, 180, 191, 228 [“Cendrillon”: Cinderella: “Ashette” on pp. 114
and 397], 281, and 287). God is called “Log” in Ada, and Hermann in
Despair (1934) says that he cannot believe in God because “the fairy tale
about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men . .
' (p. III). When in Invitation to a Beheading (1936) Cincinnatus extolls
the powers of the imagination, M’sieur Pierre answers, “Only in fairy
tales do people escape from prison” (p. 114). “The Fairy’s Daughter,” an
untranslated fantasy in verse for children, is collected in The Empyrean
Path (1923, the same year that Nabokov translated Alice in Wonderland
into Russian [see 133/1]); and the untranslated story “A Fairytale”
(1926) tells of a timid, erotically obsessed man who imagines a harem for
himself. He makes an arrangement with a woman who turns out to be the
devil. She offers him a choice of as many women as he desires, so long as
the total number is odd. But his hopes are dashed when he chooses the
same girl twice (a nymphet), for a total of twelve instead of thirteen (the
story is summarized from Andrew Field, op. cit., pp. 333-334). Before
describing Hazel Shade’s final poltergeist vigil, as imagined in his playlet
The Haunted Barn, Kinbote notes “There are always ‘three nights’ in
fairy tales, and in this sad fairy tale there was a third one too” (Pale
Fire, p. 190). “Speaking of novels,” Kinbote says to Sybil Shade, “you
remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough
masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale” (pp. 161-162); and men-
tioned in Ada are “the pretentious fairy tales” of “Osberg” (Borges; an
anagram [p. 344]).
At Cornell (where the annotator was his student in 1953-1954), Na-
bokov would begin his first class by saying, “Great novels are above all
great fairy tales. . . . Literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.
It is said that literature was born with the fable of the boy crying, ‘Wolf!
Wolf!’ as he was being chased by the animal. This was not the birth of
literature; it happened instead the day the lad cried ‘Wolf!’ and the
tricked hunters saw no wolf . . . the magic of art is manifested in the
dream about the wolf, in the shadow of the invented wolf.” As suggested
in the Introduction, Nabokov goes to great lengths to show the reader
that the boy has been crying “Wolf!” all along, and that the subject of
Nabokov’s art is in part the relationship between the old boy and the
nonexistent wolf. See 34/7.
3/4 dazzling coincidences . . . poets love: evident everywhere in Nabokov’s
work is his “poet’s love” of coincidence. The verbal figurations and
[ 347 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 33
“coincidences” limned in Who's Who in the Limelight are of great con-
sequence, for H.H. alludes to “actors, producers, playwrights, and shots
of static scenes” which prefigure the action of the novel. The three en-
tries in this imaginary yearbook represent H.H., Lolita, and, obviously,
Quilty. Although no “producer” is listed, it will shortly be seen that he
reveals his name covertly (33/12), and shows his hand throughout. The
importance of Who's Who in the Limelight is also discussed in Part Two
of my 1967 New Republic article, op. cit., p. 27, included in the Intro-
duction, pp. xxvii-xxviii.
33/5 Pym, Roland: Pym is the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s The
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838); he is also mentioned in Nabokov’s
poem, “The Refrigerator Awakes” (1942), in Poems (p. 12). The name
suits H.H. well, because, like Pym’s, his is a first-person narrative that
begins in the spirit of hoax but evolves into something very different.
See 253/3 for “Hoaxton.” As for “Roland,” Nabokov intends no allu-
sions to the medieval Chanson de Roland, to the character in Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso, or to Browning’s Childe Roland. For Poe, see 11/12.
33/6 Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y.: both exist. The former, invoking
Hamlet’s castle, is a common name for a theater. Hamlet is often re-
ferred to in Nabokov. In Invitation to a Beheading, M’sieur Pierre and
Cincinnatus are “identically clad in Elsinore jackets” (p. 182); in Ada,,,
a reviewer of Van Veen’s first book is called “the First Clown in £/-i
sinore, a distinguished London weekly” (p. 343); and in Gogol, ‘‘‘'Hamlet
is the wild dream of a neurotic scholar” (p. 140). Nabokov’s own con-
siderable Shakespearean scholarship is evident in Chapter Seven of Bend
Sinister, which offers a totalitarian state version of the play. Nabokov
himself has glossed this chapter in his valuable Introduction to the Time
Reading Program edition (reprinted in Nabokov's Congeries, Page Steg-
ner, ed. [New York, 1968], and in my own Twentieth Century Views
edition, Nabokov: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs.
1970]). The narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, who is Se-|
bastian’s half-brother, demolishes a biography of Knight by demonstrat-'
ing that the biographer, Mr. Goodman, has incorporated several bogus
stories into his book, simply because the leg-pulling Sebastian had said
they were so: “Third story: Sebastian speaking of his very first novel
(unpublished and destroyed) explained that it was about a fat young
student who travels home to find his mother married to his uncle; this
uncle, an ear-specialist, had murdered the student’s father. Mr. Good-
man misses the joke” (p. 64). Recognizing that Sebastian’s trap telescopes
Nabokov’s methods, some readers will no doubt sympathize with hapless
[ 348 ] j
NOTES FOR PAGE 33
Mr. Goodman. For another Ha?nlet allusion in Lolita, see 152/2. For
further Shakespeare allusions, see pp. 179, 193 (The Taming of the
Shrew), 245 (Romeo and Juliet), and 267 (King Lear), as well as 159/3,
253/14, 303/3 (Macbeth), and, for a summary note, 286/4.
3/7 Made debut in Sunburst: see p. 92, where H.H. refers to Charlotte
Haze’s impending death as “the ultimate sunburst,” for it will indeed
allow him to make his debut with her daughter. Unless they are an-
notated, the titles in the Who's Who entries are non-allusive and of no
significance.
53/8 The Strange Mushroom: it is a “dazzling coincidence” that “Pym”
' should appear in a play authored by Quilty (see next entry). As for
' the specific origin of the “mushroom” image, literary history may be
served by the strange fact related by Nabokov: “Somewhere, in a col-
‘ lection of ‘cases,’ I found a little girl who referred to her uncle’s organ
as ‘his mushroom.’ ” The plant is in fact a sex symbol in many cultures.
13/9 Quilty, Clare: although alluded to by John Ray, Jr., in the “Fore-
word” (see 6/9), this is the first time that the omnipresent Quilty will
be identified by his complete name (Quilty’s role is discussed in the In-
troduction, p. Ixiii ff. ). H.H. withholds Quilty’s identity until almost
the end of Lolita, and adducing it by virtue of the trail of clues is one
of the novel’s special pleasures. His importance is most vividly demon-
strated by gathering together all the Quilty references and hints as fol-
lows: pp. 6, 33, 34, 45, 65, 66, 71, 80, 91, 1 19, 123, 128-129, 132. 140, 141;
[Part Two] 154, 161, 165, 172, 188, 198, 202-204, 205, 209-211, 213, 215,
217, 219-225, 226, 228-230, 234, 237, 238-240, 242, 243-245, 248-254, 264,
273-279, 281, 284, 292-294, 295-307, 308, and 3 1 1. Each appearance or
allusion to Quilty will be duly noted below, but a reader armed only
with this telescopic list should be able to identify Quilty whenever he
appears or is evoked on a page. This compilation also appears in mv 1967
Wisconsin Studies article, “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody” (p. 225),
and there is more on Quilty in my 1968 Denver Quarterly article, “The
Art of Nabokov’s Artifice” (see bibliography). See also Keys, pp. 57-78.
An excellent ancillary text is Stories of the Double, Albert J. Guerard, ed.
The killing of Quilty (pp. 295-307) was written well out of sequence,
early in the composition of Lolita. “His death had to be clear in my
mind in order to control his earlier appearances,” says Nabokov. Na-
bokov removed from the final version of Lolita three scenes in which
Quilty figured conspicuously: a talk before Charlotte Haze’s club (see
80/1); a meeting with Lolita’s friend Mona; and an appearance at a re-
NOTES FOR PAGE 33
hearsal of his own play, featuring Lolita. All three scenes were omittec
because such foreground appearances interrupted the structure anc'
rhythm of Quilty’s pursuit of Lolita, and undermined the mystery sur
rounding his identity. Moreover, the latter two scenes created a mos
awkward narrative problem. Since H.H. couldn’t narrate these scenes
Nabokov had to wait and let Lolita do it during their important con-
frontation scene (pp. 271 ff.), and that proved unwieldy. See 37/3 foj
mention of another omitted scene.
33/10 The Little Nymph: like Fatherly Love (in the same entry), this is
an appropriate work for H.H.’s sinister alter ego to have authored.
33/11 The Lady Who Loved Lightning: Nabokov confirms the deductior''
that this is the unnamed play which H.H. and Lolita attend in Wace
pp. 222-223. See p. 222; Lolita says, “I am not a lady and do not like
lightning” (see also my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, op. cit., p. 216)
Although H.H.’s mother was killed by lightning (p. 12), Nabokov in-
tends no cross reference; he grants, however, that “the connection i;
cozy and tempting.” The Who in the play’s title was not capitalized in|
the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected.
33/12 in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom: at the very least she must
be called Quilty’s collaborator, since “she” is an anagram of “Vladimii
Nabokov” (6/9).
33/13 T>ark Age: see 264/7, where H.H. alludes to its author.
33/14 The Strange Mushroom: see above, 33/8.
33/15 traveled 14, 000... New York: H.H. “doubles” Quilty for a changeJ
for he will travel some 27,000 miles with the little nymph (see p. 177).
while Quilty’s “play” of that name consumes virtually half of that dis-,
tance.
33/16 Hobbies .. .pets: the three “hobbies” prefigure Quilty’s pursuit of
H.H. and Lolita (“fast cars”), his love of dogs (see 248/1), and the|
pornographic movies he will force his favorite “pet” to act in (see 278/2).!
33/17 Quine, Dolores: “Dolores” is Lolita’s given name (see ii/s), while
“Quine” echoes Quilty, sets up an internal rhyme which condemns him;
(34/6), and is French for two fives at a game of tric-trac (a form of
backgammon). Although Nabokov says he did not intend any allusion,'
“t 722 e quine a la loterie” is a bid prize, an advantage, which describes the
way H.H. and Quilty variously bid for Lolita, und the way the book’s|
game-element manipulates the reader (see p. 301); Quilty reads aloud
from H.H.’s poem, “because you took advantage of my disadvantage”.!
[ 350 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 34
\/ \ Never Talk to Strangers: this is no idle title. See p. 140 (“I would
not talk to strangers,” H.H. advises Lolita) and 311/1, where he repeats
and expands upon this excellent fatherly advice: “Be true to your [hus-
band]. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers.”
I./2 Has disappeared: see next note, and p. 255, where H.H. says, “I have
reached the part which ... might be called ‘Do/orer Disparue' " (a play
on Albertine disparue, the title of the penultimate volume of the original
French edition of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu). An
error in the 1958 edition has been corrected (the transposing of the con-
cluding bracket and period after “follows”).
4/ 3 I notice . . . in the preceding paragraph: the “slip” refers to “Has dis-
appeared” instead of “Has appeared,” another foreshadowing of his loss.
Lolita will be cast in a play by Quilty, The Enchanted Hunters. See pp.
202-204. It is central to a full sense of the novel.
4/4 Clarence: H.H.’s lawyer, to whom the manuscript of this “unrevised”
draft is entrusted. See p. 5.
4/5 The Murdered Playwright: the prefiguration of the murder an-
nounced above is completed here (33/2). H.H. now explicitly refers
to his killing of Quilty (pp. 295-307), which is prefigured several more
times (see 47/4 and 49/6). By strategically placing Who^s Who in the
Limelight early in Lolita — like Black Guinea’s list of the avatars of the
confidence man in Chapter Three of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-
Man: His Masquerade (1857) — Nabokov gives the reader an opportunity
to make at least some of these connections as the novel unfolds.
4/6 Quine the Swine . . . my Lolita: Quilty, and for “my Lolita,” see 47/ 1
and 194/2.
4/7 / have only words to play with: even if H.H. has only words, the
reader must consider the implications of his extraordinary control of
them. The interlacements which lead in and out of this veritable nerve
center reveal a capacity for design and order that, given the conditions
under which his narrative has allegedly been composed, is only within
the reach of the manipulative author above the book. By no accident is
Who^s Who in the Limelight a theatrical yearbook, for the involutions
which spiral out of it demonstrate that playwright Quilty, H.H., and
Lolita, as well as the actor and actress who serve as their stand-ins in
Who'’s Who, are all performing in another of Nabokov’s puppet shows.
“Guess again. Punch,” H.H. tells Quilty (p. 298); and, of their fight,
H.H. says, “He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cot-
ton and rags” (p. 301). The novel’s first reference to Quilty thus offers
a summary phrase (6/9); for the countless involuted verbal figurations
[ 351 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 35-36
and cross references in Lolita all represent “Vivian Darkbloom” ’s “cue,’
and suggest that the authorial consciousness is somehow profoundly in
volved in a tale that in every literal way is surely separate from it.
Having recognized the novel’s verisimilar disguise, the reader is af
forded a global view of the book qua book, whose dappled surface nov
reveals patterns that seem almost visual. In the Foreword to the i<) 6 (
version of Speak, Memory, Nabokov says that in looking for a title foj
the first edition, he “toyed with The Anthevnon which is the name oi
a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and ex-
panding clusters, but nobody liked it”; it would be a fitting, if precious
subtitle for Lolita (as well as for several other Nabokov works). A grant
anthemion entwines H.H.’s narrative, like some vast authorial watermark
and its outlines are traced by the elegantly ordered networks of allitera-
tion, “coincidences,” narrative “inconsistencies,” lepidopterological refer-
ences, “cryptocolors,” and shadows and glimpses of Quilty.
Chapter 9
35/1 charming ... chap: the cascade of alliterations in this paragraph, sc
carefully controlled, underscores the significance of Who's Who, as doe;
a remark on the next page (36/3). Compare the often comic alliteration;
of Lolita with the stately and sonorous effects achieved in Speak, Memory
(as in the opening and closing paragraphs of Chapter Six).
35/2 Pierre Point in Melville Sound: H.H.’s invention, from Pierre (1852)
by Herman Melville (1819-1891).
36/1 gremlin: a mischievous little gnome reported by World War II air-
men as causing mechanical trouble in airplanes. “Drumlins” (bottom oi
p. 35) is H.H.’s diminutive of drum.
36/2 kremlin: the name of the governing center of Russia completes thi;
sequence of phonological pairings. The best example is found in Pale
Fire (note to line 803). Nabokov continually manipulates the basic lin-
guistic devices — auditory, morphological, and alphabetical, the latter most
conspicuously. In Pale Fire, Zemblan is “the tongue of the mirror” (p
242); and the fragmentation or total annihilation of the self reverberate;
in the verbal distortions in Bend Sinister'^ police state, “where everybody
is merely an anagram of everybody else,” as well as in the alphabetical
and psychic inversions and reversals of Pale Fire — such as Botkin-Kinbott
and the Index references to W^ord Golf and “Sudarg of Bokay, a mirroi
maker of genius,” the latter an anagrammatic reflection and poetic de-
scription of omnipresent death, represented in Pale Fire by the Zemblar
[ 35 ^ ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 36-37
assassin J[y]akob Gradus, who throws his shadow across the entire novel,
I its creations, creator, and readers.
6/3 The reader will regret to learn . . .1 had another bout with insanity:
'• H.H. is right, readers do regret to hear this from a narrator; and H.H.
' virtually encloses his narrative within reminders of this “unreliability,”
' for, toward the end (p. 257), he casually says he retired to another sana-
' torium (“I felt I was merely losing contact with reality” [merely ! —
A.A.]). Several of Nabokov’s narrators are mad. Among other things,
■ their madness functions as a parody of critical dogma about fiction, and a
telling parody of the reader’s own delusory “contact with reality.” Of
course H.H.’s is not a credible point of view in the terms laid down by
' Henry James, refined by Percy Lubbock, put into practice by Ford Ma-
* dox Ford and Joseph Conrad, institutionalized by two generations of crit-
' ics, and enforced by thousands of creative writing instructors — and the
involuted, patterned surface of Lolita makes this even clearer. H.H.’s copy
of Who'’s Who and QuUty’s “cryptogrammic paper chase” (pp. 252-253),
the two most important concentrations of authorial inlays, typical in
method and effect, are thus symmetrically located at the beginning and
near the end of the novel, almost next to those declarations of insanity
which seem to frame it, though these symmetries cannot hope to be as
exact as the one formed by the first and final words of the novel (“Lo-
' lita”). See Notes 53/1 through 54/3 for another concentration of involu-
tions.
Chapter 10
7/1 patients . . . had witnessed their own conception: Nabokov’s attacks
! on Freud are consistent. Kinbote includes in his Commentary lines deleted
I in the draft of the poem Pale Fire:
* ... Your modern architect
1' Is in collusion with psychanalysts:
When planning parents’ bedrooms, he insists
' On lockless doors so that, when looking back.
The future patient of the future quack
; May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene, [p. 94]
■ In Speak, Memory, Nabokov similarly “reiect[s] completely the vulgar,
' shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest
‘for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in
I Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their
' natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents” (p. 20); while in Ada
: [ 353 ]
1
NOTES FOR PAGES 37-38
he notes the “pale pencil which poor [public] speakers are obsessed wit
in familiar dreams (attributed by Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondie
to the dreamer’s having read in infancy his adulterous parents’ love le
ters)” (p. 549). For Freud, see 7/6.
37/2 Humbertish: H.H.’s coinage; after any language ending in the -h
suffix (Finnish, English, Lettish).
37/3 house . . . burned dow?7: Nabokov omitted from the last draft of Loli
a hilarious scene describing H.H.’s arrival by taxi at the charred-out, b(
puddled, roped-off ruins of the McCoo residence. A large crowd aj
plauds H.H. as he grandly alights from the cab; only an encycloped
has survived the holocaust. He recognizes that the lost opportunity 1
coach “the enigmatic [McCoo] nymphet” is no loss at all (see p. 43
Nabokov reinstated the scene in his screenplay of Lolita, but directc
Stanley Kubrick dropped it from the final version. It eventually will f
seen when Nabokov publishes the complete original screenplay, a “pro
ect I have been nursing for some time,” he says. “Although there are ju
enough borrowings from it in [Kubrick’s] version to justify my leg,
position as author of the script, the final product is only a blurred skimp
glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by seer
during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wis
to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rat
but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlost [see Introduction, pp. xlix
1] is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in i
crooked glass. Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but
shall never understand why he did not follow my directions and dream,
It is a great pity; but at least I shall be able to have people read m
Lolita play in its original form” (Paris Review interview, 1967). Speakin
more positively three years earlier, Nabokov said, “The four main acto
deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tra
or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car — these are moments c
unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty [Peter Sellers
is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze [Shelley WinteT
James Mason was H.H.]. I must point out, though, that I had nothin
to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted 0
stressing certain things that were not stressed — for example, the differei
motels at which they stopped” (Playboy interview). The highways an
motels were so little in evidence because the film, released in 1962, w;
shot in England.
37/4 ^42: for “coincidences,” see 120/3 250/2- ,
38/ 1 suburban dog: a foreshadowing of Charlotte Haze’s death, for M
[ 354 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 38-42
Beale will run over her when he swerves to avoid hitting what may well
' be this dog (see p. 104). See also Keys, p. 6.
38/2 van Gogh: the “Arlesienne” (1888) is a famous portrait of a woman
from the town of Arles in Provence, by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).
Mass-produced reproductions of it are quite popular in America. H.H.’s
low opinion of van Gogh is shared by other Nabokov characters. In
Pnin, the art teacher Lake thinks “That van Gogh is second-rate and
Picasso supreme, despite his commercial foibles” (p. 96); and Victor
Wind acknowledges “with a nod of ironic recognition” a framed repro-
duction of van Gogh’s “La Berceuse” (p. 108).
39/1 Marlene Dietrich: see 11/4. Also pp. 53 and 103.
40/ 1 Rene Prinet: “The Kreutzer Sonata” was dedicated by Beethoven to
Rodolphe Kreutzer in 1805 (Nabokov intends no allusion to Tolstoy’s
story of that name). Prinet’s painting (1898) today illustrates the Tabu
perfume advertisement, often found in The New Yorker and chic ladies’
magazines. It shows, in Nabokov’s words, an “ill-groomed girl pianist
rising like a wave from her stool after completing the duo, and being
kissed by a hirsute violinist. Very unappetizing and clammy, but has
‘camp’ charm.”
41/ 1 Riviera love... over dark glasses: the confluence of sunglasses and
H.H.’s Riviera love suggest that H.H. has stumbled upon a veritable
Lost-and-Found Department (see 15/3).
41/2 fairy-tale: see 18/6 and 33/3.
41/3 “Roches Roses'\ the “red rocks” of p. 15. See 58/1. Both H.H.’s and
Poe’s “Annabel Lee” are alluded to on this and the next page.
42/1 nouvelle: French; new one. For “this Lolita, my Lolita, see 47/ 1.
42/2 rtmmmery: the performance of an actor in a dumb show; muinmer
is obsolete slang for a play-actor.
42/3 fruit vert: “green fruit”; French (dated) slang for “‘unripe’ females
attractive to ripe gentlemen,” notes Nabokov.
42/4 Au fond, ga m'est bien egal: French; “Really, I don’t care at all.”
Chapter 11
42/5 en escalier: set-up in an oblique typography; French for “staircase
style.”
[ 355 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 42-45
42/6 Blank ... Blafikton, Mass.: there is no such town. The “blanks” mak(
fun of the “authenticity” of the pages of both the diary and the entin
novel, H.H.’s “photographic memory” notwithstanding. Thus Lolita’;
parodic design also includes the literary journal or diary. Nabokov re-
gards with profound skepticism the possibilities of complete autobio-
graphical revelation. When Fyodor shaves himself in The Gift, “A palt
self-portrait looked out of the mirror with the serious eyes of all self-
portraits” (p. 120); Nabokov does not abide such portraits. “Manifolc
self-awareness” (as he calls it in Speak, Memory) is not to be achievec
through solemn introspection, certainly not through the diarist’s com-
pulsive egotism, candid but totally self-conscious self-analysis, carefully
created “honesty,” willful irony, and studied self-deprecation. Nabokov
has been burlesquing the literary diary since as far back as 1934. Neai
the end of Despair, Hermann’s first-person narrative “degenerates intc
a diary” — “the lowest form of literature” (p. 218) — and this early parody
is fully realized in Lolita, especially in the present chapter. For more or
the confessional mode, see 72/ 3.
42/7 phoenix: a legendary bird represented by the ancient Egyptians as liv-
ing for five or six centuries, being consumed in fire by its own act, and
then rising from its ashes; an emblem of resurrection and immortality.
43/1 sebum: the material secreted by the sebaceous glands.
43/2 Humbert le Bel: Humbert the Fair; a kingly epithet (e.g., Charles le
Bel of France).
44/1 entree: appearance on a stage; grand entrance.
44/2 favonian: of or pertaining to the west wind; thus, gentle.
44/3 phocine: pertaining to the zoological sub-family which includes the
common seal, the image against which H.H. measures “the seaside of
[Lolita’s] schoolgirl thighs” — an allusion to the lost “kingdom” of Anna-
bel (see 1 1/2).
44/4 Priap: son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, Priapus was the Greco-Romar
god of procreation and fertility, usually portrayed in a manly state. Alsc
mentioned on pp. 161, 239, and less mythically, on p. 215. See 11/5.
44/5 predator . . . prey: H.H. often characterizes himself as a predator, most
often as an ape or spider (prominent among the butterfly’s natural ene-
mies). For further discussion, see my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, op':
cit., pp. 222 and 228.
45/1 stippled: engraved, by means of dots rather than lines; in painting.
[ 356 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 45-47
refers to the use of small touches which coalesce to produce gradations
of light and shade. See 286/2.
1.5/2 Delectatio morosa . . . dolors: Latin; morose pleasure, a monastic term.
In the next sentence, as on p. 55, H.H. toys with the Latin etymology
of “Dolores” (see 11/5).
^5/3 Our Glass Lake: see 83/2.
1.5/4 nacreous: having a pearly iridescence.
35/5 Virginia ... Edgar: Poe was born January 19, 1809. He was therefore
twenty-seven when in 1836 he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Vir-
ginia Clemm, who died of a lingering disease in 1847. She was the in-
spiration for many of his poems. For his first conjugal night with Lolita,
H.H. appropriately registers as “Edgar” (see 120/2). He also employs
the name on pp. 77 and 191 (see also Keys, p. 37). For a summary of the
Poe allusions, see 11/2.
35/6 Je ni'imagine cela: French; 1 can imagine that.
^5/7 “Monsieur Poe-poe": H.H. puns on “poet,” but the schoolboy had in
mind “popo" (or “popotin"), French slang for the posterior.
^5/8 resemble . . . actor chap: Clare Quilty. They do resemble one another.
For a summary of Quilty allusions, see 33/9.
^5/9 nictating: rare; winking.
136/1 “ne montrez pas vos zhambes”: French; “don’t show your legs”
(jambes is misspelled to indicate an American accent). See 19 1/2.
36/ 2 a mes heures: French; when in the right mood.
37/ 1 the writer's ancient lust: H.H. sees himself in a line descending from
the great Roman love poets, and he frequently imitates their locutions.
The intonational stresses of “this Lolita, my Lolita” are borrowed from
a donnish English translation of a Latin poem (see pp. 42, 67-68, 153,
279, 280, 295). H.H.’s “ancient” models include Propertius (c. 50-16
B.c.) on Cynthia, Tibullus (c. 55-19 b.c.) on Delia, and Horace (65-
8 B.c.) on any of the sixteen women to whom he wrote poems. See 194/ 2.
37/2 Our Glass Lake: a “mistake”; see 83/2.
37/3 “Little Carmen": a pun: little [trainjmen, or “Dwarf Conductors”
(see also Keys, p. 1440). The allusions to Carmen have nothing to do
with Bizet’s opera. They refer only to the novella ( 1 845 ) by Prosper
Merimee (1803-1870). For a pun on his name, see 253/7. Like H.H.,
[ 357 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 47-49
Jose Lizzarrabengoa, Carmen’s abandoned and ill-fated lover (see 241/3),
tells his story from prison (but not until the third chapter, when the
narrative frame is withdrawn). The story of love, loss, and revenge is
appropriate. The Carmen allusions also serve as a trap for the sophisti-
cated reader who is misled into believing that H.H., like Jose, will mur-
der his treacherous Carmen; see p. 282, where H.H. springs the trap,
H.H. quotes Merimee (245/4, ^80/2, 280/4) ^^d frequently calls Lolita
“Carmen,” the traditional name of a bewitching woman (pp. 61, 62, 63.
244-245, 253, 258, 280, 282). Carl R. Proffer discusses the Carmen allu-
sions in Keys, pp. 45-53. In Latin, carmen means song, poetry, and charm,.
“My charmin’, my Carmen,” says H.H. (p. 62), thus demonstrating that
he knows its etymology and original English meaning: the chanting of
a verse having magic power; “to bewitch, enchant, subdue by magic
power.” See 18/6. H.H. calls himself “an enchanted hunter,” takes Lolita
to the hotel of that name, speaks of an “enchanted island of time” (p.
20), and so forth. Nabokov told his lecture classes at Cornell that a great
writer was at once a storyteller, a teacher, and, most supremely, an en-
chanter. See 1 10/2.
47/4 I shot . . . said: Ah!: a prevision of Quilty’s death; see 89/ 1 and 305/ 1
48/1 Fishy: “Pixie”; see 33/3. The town is invented. Also means “moth’
in rural England. For entomological allusions, see 8/1.
49/1 le mot juste: French; the right word; a phrase made famous by the
French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), who often took a week
to find le mot juste. For other allusions to Flaubert, see 147 / 3 , 204/2, and
267/2.
49/2 Ronsard's ‘da vermeillette fente": Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), the
greatest poet of the French Renaissance. H.H. alludes to a sonnet entitled
L.M.F., and its first line, “Je te salue, 0 vermeillette fante” {“jente" is
the modern spelling): “I salute [or hail] you, oh little red slit” {“Blaso%
du sexe jeminin,'’’ Edition Pleiade, II, 775). A “blason" is a short poen"
in praise or criticism of a certain subject. For another allusion to Ron-
sard, see 216/1. During his emigre period in Germany in the ’twenties
and early ’thirties, Nabokov published Russian translations of many of
the writers alluded to by H.H., including Ronsard, Verlaine, Byron
Keats, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Goethe, Pushkin, Carroll, anc
Romain Rolland.
49/3 Remy Belleau's “un petit ... escarlatte”: Belleau (1528-1577), Ron-
sard’s colleague in the Pleiade group, also writes a “blason" in praise of
[ 358 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 49-53
the external female genitalia; “the hillock velveted with delicate moss, /
traced in the middle with a little scarlet thread [labia].” For obvious
reasons, the poem is rarely anthologized and is difficult to find. It ap-
pears in the Leyden reprint (1865) of the rare anthology Recueil de
pieces choisies rassernblees par les sows du cosmopolite, due d’Aiguillon,
ed. (1735). The Cornell Library owns a copy, notes Nabokov.
j/4 of my darling ... my bride: line 39 of Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” See 11/2
for the poem.
p/5 Mystery of the Menarche: the menarche is the initial menstrual period.
In Ireland it is called “The Curse of the Irish.”
p/6 kill in my dreams: another prevision of Quilty’s death scene; see p.
299.
o/i toothbrush mustache: Quilty has one too; see p. 220. Poe also had
one, but Nabokov says that no allusion is intended here.
0/2 ape-ear: H.H. several times characterizes himself this way. See p.
313 for a most resonant ape image.
1/ 1 Ces matins gris si doux: French; “Those gray mornings, so soft . . .”
2/1 rumor, roomer: a homophone. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
the narrator speaks of “mad Sebastian, struggling in a naughty world of
Juggernauts, and aeronauts, and naughts, and what-nots” (p. 65).
2/2 Is it Fate: “McFate” is quietly introduced; see 54/3 and 58/1.
2/ 3 “And behold’’’': Lolita completes her mother’s “Lo,” and H.H. later
twists the epithet (225/4).
3/ 1 her class at . . . school: in Pnin, young Victor Wind sees in the glass
headlight or chrome plating of a car “a view of the street and himself
comparable to the microcosmic version of a room (with a dorsal view
of diminutive people) in that very special and very magical small con-
vex mirror that, half a millennium ago. Van Eyck and Petrus Chrisms
and Memling used to paint into their detailed interiors, behind the sour
merchant or the domestic madonna” (pp. 97-98). Like Who’’s Who in
the Limelight (pp. 33-34) and the “cryptogrammic paper chase” (pp.
252-253), the “poetic” class list serves as a kind of magical mirror. The
list is printed on the back of an unfinished map of the U.S., drawn by
Lolita, suggesting the scale of the gameboard on which the action is
played. The image of the map secreted in the Young People’s Encyclo-
[ 359 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 53-54
pedia prefigures their journeys (on which H.H. will “finish” the map
by showing Lolita the country), just as the class list prefigures and mir-
rors an extraordinary number of other things.
53/2 Beale: the Beales’ father kills Charlotte Haze (p. loo), and they arei
the first of no less than four sets of twins in Lolita’s class (the Cowans,
the Talbots, and the incestuous Mirandas [see p. 138]), a microscopic,
vision of the doubling (H.H. and Quilty) and mirroring that occurs in j
the roomy interior of the entire book (including Ray’s Foreword),
where even cars have their twins (p. 229); “the long hairy arm of
coincidence” is said to have its unpredictable “twin limb” (p. 107); and 1
obscure women of science mirror one another in spite of the almost '
300 pages separating them (Blanche Schwarzmann: “White Blackman,”
and Melanie Weiss: “Black White”; see p. 304). ;
Double names, initials, and phonetic effects prevail throughout Lolita,
whether the twinning is literal (Humbert Humbert, Vanessa van Ness,
Quilty’s Duk Duk Ranch, and H.H.’s alternate pseudonyms of “Otto '
Otto,” “Mesmer Mesmer,” and “Lambert Lambert”); or alliterative
(Clare Quilty, Gaston Godin, Harold Haze, Bill Brown, and Clarence;
[Choate] Clark); or trickily alphabetical (John Ray, Jr.: J.R., Jr.). The
double consonants of the almost infinite succession of humorously al-
literative place names and points of interest H.H. visits are thus the-
matically consistent (Pierre Point, Hobby House, Hazy Hills, Kumfy ,
Kabins, Raspberry Room, Chestnut Court, and so forth). Numbers even
adhere to the pattern; H.H. imagines Lolita’s unborn child “dreaming
already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 a.d.” (p.
279). The name of “Harold D. Doublename” represents a summary
phrase (p. 184), but the annotator’s double initials are only a happy
coincidence. For more on mirrors, see 12 1/2. |
53/3 Carmine, Rose: see 58/1.
54/ 1 Falter: German; butterfly — and a companion of “Miss Phalen”
(phalene: moth [58/2]) and the playwright “Schmetterling” (butterfly;
[303/5]). For a summary of the entomological allusions, see 8/1.
54/2 Fantasia: a corrected misprint {s instead of z in the 1958 edition).!
She is married on p. 291 (the “Murphy-Fantasia” wedding party).
54/3 McFate, Aubrey: a vagrant auditor, rather than a member of the;
class (see 58/1), though the reader may not realize it for four more'
pages. McFate’s appearance in the middle of the class list undercuts the
inviolable “reality” of much more than just the list. By placing the ;
McFate allusions back-to-back on pp. 54 and 58, Nabokov gives the 1
[ 360 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 54-57
reader a fighting chance to make the association, and to realize its im-
j plications. It would be “easier” on the reader, of course, if the class list
> came after p. 58 (notes 253/1 and 255/1 limn similar effects). McFate’s
I first name suggests Aubrey Beardsley (see 253/5), the “decadent” Art
’ Nouveau artist (1872-1898) quite out of fashion when Lolita was writ-
I ten, and reveals another mother lode of verbal figurations: the invented
town of “Beardsley,” its school and college, and Gaston Godin (see
183/1).
, 54/4 Windmuller: Louise and her father appear on p. 6; he on p. 292.
i 54/ 5 bodyguard of roses: classmates “Rose” and “Rosaline” serve as Lolita’s
rosy page-girls. The rose is of course the flower traditionally associated
j with gems, decorations, wine, perfume, and women of great charm and /
‘ or virtue. Lolita is continually linked with the flower. See 58/1. See also
Keys, p. 1 18.
55/ 1 Is “mask” the keyword?: yes, because the masked author has just been
mirrored, as it were, in the class list; see the Introduction and Chapter
Twenty-six (iii/i).
55/2 charshaf: a veil worn by Turkish women.
' 55 / 3 Irving: the reader may wonder why H.H. is sorry for “Flashman,
Irving” (p. 54). “Poor Irving,” says Nabokov, “he is the only Jew among
all those Gentiles.” See 263/4.
55/4 ullulations: or ululation; a loud, mournful, rhythmical howl.
55/5 ribald sea monsters: the intrusive bearded bathers of p. 15. “Annabel”
and H.H.’s seasickness refers to Poe’s poem. See 11/2.
55/6 “Mais allez-y, allez-y!”: French; “But go ahead, go!”
56/1 Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann: mentioned by John Ray. See 7/3.
56/ 2 libidream: H.H.’s portmanteau of “libido” and “dream.”
56/3 Dorsal: belonging to, or situated on or near the back of an animal.
57/1 manege: French; tactics.
Chapter 12
, 57/ 2 pederosis: H.H.’s description of his condition. Although rare, the
term exists; from the Greek paid-, meaning “child,” plus erds, “sexual
love” (akin to erasthai: “to love, desire ardently”), plus Latin suffix,
[ 361 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 58
from Greek, -osis, an “abnormal or diseased condition” (e.g., sclerosis).
Pedophilia is the more common word for H.H.’s malaise.
58/ 1 Aubrey McFate . . . devil of mine: the devilish “force” responsible for ;
H.H.’s misfortunes is invoked on pp. 54, 109, 118, 212, 213, 258. When
H.H. perceives Quilty — the worst aspect of his McFate — as a “red-beast”
or “red fiend,” Nabokov is parodying that archetypal Double, the Devil. |
Red is Quilty ’s color, just as rose is associated with Annabel (41/3) and |
Lolita; her classmate’s name, “Rose Carmine” (p. 53), defines the two j
motifs nicely. Its significance, however, has nothing to do with “sym-
bolism”; the red and rose stipplings are the work of the author, rather
than McFate, and add some vivid touches of color to the anthemion (see '
34/7). Once pointed out, the color motif need not be identified further; ^
but the reader is reminded again that Nabokov is no “symbolist.” After i
reading the first draft of these Notes, Nabokov thought that this point
had not been made clear enough, and, moved too by the annotator’s
loose play with some “red” images, wrote the following for my informa- |
tion, under the heading “A Note about Symbols and Colors re ‘Anno- :
rated Lolita.' ” It is included here because I think it is one of the most \
significant statements Nabokov has made about his own art. He writes: i
(
There exist novelists and poets, and ecclesiastic writers, who de-
liberately use color terms, or numbers, in a strictly symbolic sense.
The type of writer 1 am, half-painter, half-naturalist, finds the use
of symbols hateful because it substitutes a dead general idea for a
live specific impression. I am therefore puzzled and distressed by
the significance you lend to the general idea of “red” in my book.
When the intellect limits itself to the general notion, or primitive
notion, of a certain color it deprives the senses of its shades. In dif-
ferent languages different colors were used in a general sense before
shades were distinguished. (In French, for example, the “redness” of
hair is now expressed by “roux" meaning rufous, or russet, or fulvous
with a reddish cast.) For me the shades, or rather colors, of, say,
a fox, a ruby, a carrot, a pink rose, a dark cherry, a flushed cheek,
are as different as blue is from green or the royal purple of blood
(Fr. “pourpre") from the English sense of violet blue. I think your
students, your readers, should be taught to see things, to discriminate
between visual shades as the author does, and not to lump them un-
der such arbitrary labels as “red” (using it, moreover, as a sexual sym-
bol, though actually the dominant shades in males are mauve — to
bright blue, in certain monkeys). ... Roses may be white, and even '
black-red. Only cartoonists, having three colors at their disposal, use
red for hair, cheek and blood.
See 223/2 for further remarks on color.
[ 362 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 58-66
58/2 Miss Phalen: from the French phalene: moth. For the entomological
allusions, see 8/ 1.
Chapter 13
6i/i friable: easily crumbled or pulverized.
61/2 parkled: H.H.’s coinage.
62/1 safely solipsized: see 14/2. An important phrase (see second half of
18/6). The verbal form of solipsist is of course H.H.’s coinage — a most
significant portmanteau suggesting that Lolita has been reduced in more
than size, as H.H. comes to realize.
62/2 corpuscles of Krause: after the German anatomist: minute sensory
particles occurring in the mucous membranes of the genitalia. An au-
thor’s error has been corrected (r in Krause instead of z in the 1958
edition).
62/ 3 seraglio: the portion of a Moslem house reserved for the wives and
harem.
64/ 1 Drew his .52; the revenge murder of Lolita which doesn't take place;
see p. 282.
Chapter 14
64/2 loan God: from a cultural sequence (e.g., Greek-Roman, Hebrew-
Christian); “lone” in the paperback edition, and thus an “existential
image” to one critic.
65/1 Dr. Quilty: the “playwright” is his nephew (or cousin), Clare Quilty.
For a summary of Quilty allusions, see 33/9.
66/1 Shirley Holmes: after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859-1930) famous
detective hero, Sherlock Holmes (see 252/5). Between the ages of ten
and fifteen, Nabokov was a Holmes devotee. That enthusiasm has faded,
though traces remain. “I spent a poor night in a charming, airy, prettily
furnished room where neither window nor door closed properly, and
where an omnibus edition of Sherlock Holmes which had pursued me for
years supported a bedside lamp,” writes the narrator of Fnin, at the end
of the novel (p. 190). The narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
“use[s] an old Sherlock Holmes stratagem” (p. 153); and, in Despair,
Hermann addresses Conan Doyle directly: “What an opportunity, what
[ 363 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 66-68
a subject you missed! For you could have written one last tale conclud-
ing the whole Sherlock Holmes epic; one last episode beautifully setting
off the rest; the murderer in that tale should have turned out to be
not the one-legged bookkeeper, not the Chinaman Ching and not the
woman in crimson, but the very chronicler of the crime stories. Dr.
Watson himself — Watson, who, so to speak, knew what was Whatson.
A staggering surprise for the reader” (pp. 1 31-132) — and a figurative
description of several of Nabokov’s own narrative strategies. “Was he
in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose / Tracks pointed back when he
reversed his shoes?” wonders John Shade in Canto One of Fale Fire
(lines 27-28). After identifying Holmes in the Commentary, Kinbote
says he “suspect [s] that our poet simply made up this Case of the Re-
versed Footprints” (p. 78). Right or wrong, his suspicion summarizes
the way that Nabokov frequently parodies and transmutes the methods
and themes of that genre, just as “Shirley Holmes” is a jocular reminder
that Lolita is, among other things, a kind of mystery story demanding
a considerable amount of armchair detection. See the remarks on Poe
and the detective story, 11/2. For the penultimate moment in this “tale of
ratiocination,” see 274/1; and for a telling allusion to Holmes, drawn
from The Defense, see 274/2.
Chapter 15
66/2 Camp Q: “Cue” is Quilty’s nickname. “The ‘Q,’ ” notes Nabokov,
“had to be changed to ‘Kilt’ in the French translation because of the
awful pun, Q = cuir
66/ T, Botticellian pink: Sandro Botticelli (1444 or 1445-15 10), master of
the early Italian Renaissance, known for his tender renderings of sensual
but melancholy femininity. That pink is most manifest in the vision of
the three graces in his painting “Primavera,” while the “wet, matted eye-
lashes” suggest his famous “The Birth of Venus,” which H.H. invokes
on pp. 272 and 276.
67/1 her coccyx: the end of the vertebral column.
67/2 iliac: anatomical word; pertaining to the ilium, “the dorsal and upper
one of the three bones composing either lateral half of the pelvis.”
68/1 Catullus .. .forever: Gains Valerius Catullus (c. 84-54 b.c.), Roman
lyric, erotic, and epigrammatic poet. H.H.’s ‘‘^that Lolita, my Lolita”
(p. 67) echoes Catullus’ evocation of his enchanting Lesbia, as well as
imitations such as “My sweetest Lesbia” (1601), by Thomas Campion
(1567-1620), English poet. See 47/1 and 153/1-
[ 364 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 68-72
68/2 D.P.: during and shortly after World War II, refugees were officially
described as “Displaced Persons”; hence “D.P.”s.
68/3 Berthe au Grand Pied: Bertha (or Bertrade) with the Big Feet (or
Bigfoot Bertha); the epithet is not pejorative. A French historical figure
(d. 783), she was Pepin le Bref’s wife and Charlemagne’s mother, and is
alluded to by Francois Villon in his ballad with the refrain ‘^Mais ou
sont les neiges d'antan?'’’
68/4 mais rien: French; but nothing.
Chapter 16
69/1 mon cher, cher monsieur: French; my dear, dear sir.
69/2 Departez: the wrong French for “leave!” Correct: Partez!
70/ 1 cheri: French; darling.
70/2 mon tres, tres cher: French; my very, very dear.
71/ 1 Morell: Thomas Morell (1703-1784), an English classical scholar,
wrote the song “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” George Frederick
Handel (1685-1759) used it in his oratorios Joshua and Judas Maccabeus.
Sung by a Chorus of Youths in Joshua, it begins, “See the conquering hero
comes! Sound the trumpet, beat the drums” (Act III, scene 2). It was
also used in later versions of Nathaniel Lee’s (1653-1692) tragedy. The
Rival Queens (1677), ^^d is quoted in Joyce’s Ulysses in reference to
Molly’s seducer. Blazes Boylan (1961 Random House edition, p. 264).
It is apt that the “conquering hero” should be above Quilty’s picture,
since that motto predicts his victory. For Joyce, see 6/1 1.
71/2 A distinguished playwright .. .Drome: Quilty. A dromedary is a
one-humped camel, and H.H. is both playing with the familiar brand
name and correcting the manufacturer’s error: the beast on the cigarette
wrapper is not a camel, stricdy speaking. H.H.’s aside, “The resemblance
was slight,” refers to 45/8, where he is said to resemble Quilty. Note,
too, that “Lo’s chaste bed” is under Quilty. See 33/9 for a summary of
Quilty allusions.
Chapter 17
72/ 1 pavor nocturnus: Latin; night panic. Quilty lives in “Pavor Manor”
(p. 295).
72/ 2 peine forte et dure: French; strong and hard torture.
[ 3*55 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 72
72/3 Dostoevskian grin: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), the famous Rus-
sian novelist, has long been one of Nabokov’s primary targets. In the
Playboy interview he says, “Non-Russian readers do not realize two
things; that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do,
and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and
not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash
comedian. I admiit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farci-
cal rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and
soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment — by this reader
anyway.” “Heart-to-heart talks, confessions in the Dostoevskian manner
are also not in my line,” he writes in Speak, Memory (p. 284). But H.H.
is the ultimate in “sensitive murderers,” and by casting his tale as a “con-
fession,” Nabokov lets Dostoevsky lay down the rules and then beats
“old Dusty” at his own game. See 42/6 for remarks on another conven-
tion allied with the confession- — the literary diary.
72/4 Well-read Humbert: the lines he quotes are from Canto III, stanza
1 16 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812, 1816, 1818), by George Gordon,
Lord Byron (1788-1824), English poet. These lines occur almost at the
end of the Canto (lines io8o-io8i), and are addressed to Ada, Harold’s
absent daughter. Byron was in Italy at this time, estranged from the
wife he had married for the sake of tranquility and respectability — a ges-
ture H.H. would no doubt appreciate, as he would sympathize with the
difficulties occasioned by the amorous poet’s incestuous relationship with
his half sister. Dr. Byron is the Haze family physician, and he too has
a daughter (see 96/2). But, as an unwitting accomplice to a seduction,
he belies his name, for the sleeping pills he dispenses prove ineffective
at The Enchanted Hunters hotel (see p. 130). Byron’s works and Byron’s
Augusta Ada, a gifted girl in her own right, resonate in Nabokov’s latest
novel, as does the “Byronic” (and Chateaubriandesque) theme of incest;
Ada Veen even has a bit part in a film called Don Juan's Last Fling. Na-
bokov’s deep knowledge of Byron is made evident throughout his Eugene
Onegin Commentary (see the “Byron” entry in the Index, Vol. IV).
72/5 Charlotte: the name of Werther’s tragic love in The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
The choice of a name is clearly ironic, since Goethe’s Charlotte marries
another. Weepy Werther, an artist of sorts, remains hopelessly in love
with her and eventually takes his own life. “A faded charm still clings
about this novel, which artistically is greatly inferior to Chateaubriand’s
Rene and even to Constant’s Adolphe," writes Nabokov in his Eugene
Onegin Commentary (Vol. II, p. 345). See 78/1. Goethe is also invoked
on 242/2. For Chateaubriand, see 147/4.
[ 366 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES ~j 2 -’}’]
"ji /6 quel mot: French; what a word.
73/ 1 incubus: an evil spirit or demon, originally in personified representa-
tions of the nightmare, supposed to descend upon persons in their sleep,
and especially to seek sexual intercourse with women. In the Middle Ages
their existence was recognized by ecclesiastical and civil law. The epithet
“Humbert the Cubus” is of course his own variant. For more on enchant-
ments, see 18/6.
73/2 mauvemail: H.H.’s coinage; mauve is pale pinkish purple.
74/1 “Tfie orange ... grave’'': a parody of a “poetic” quotation.
74/2 raree-show, a show carried about in a box; a peep show.
74/3 Une petite attention: a nice thought (a favor).
75/ 1 Incarnadine: flesh-colored or bright pink. This word appears in a
stanza from The Rubaiyat; see 264/8.
75/2 eructations: violent belches.
75/3 by Pan!: H.H.’s “by God!” In Greek mythology, a god of forests,
flocks, and shepherds, having the horns and hoofs of a goat.
Chapter 18
76/1 soi-disant: French; so-called (also used on p. 149).
-j-j/i a Turk: Charlotte is not quite sure of H.H.’s “racial purity.” Neither
is Jean Farlow, who intercepts an anti-Semitic remark (p. 81), nor The
Enchanted Hunters’ management (p. 120). See 260/2 and 263/4.
77/ 2 contretemps: French; an embarrassing or awkward occurrence.
77/ 3 rattles: the sound-producing organs on a rattlesnake’s tail.
77/4 rubrique: a newspaper section.
77/5 “EdgaP’ .. ."^writer and explorer’’’: Edgar A. Poe, whose Narrative
of A. Gordon Pym was the product of an alleged polar expedition (see
33/5). For the Poe allusions, see 11/2.
77/6 Peacock, Rainbow: Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), English poet
and novelist, whose name recalls the “Rainbow,” or Arthur Rimbaud
(1854-1891), Erench poet. After abandoning literature at the age of
eighteen, Rimbaud traveled widely. In 1888 in Abyssinia, where he sold
guns, the English called the ex-poet “trader Rainbow,” as Nabokov notes
[ 367 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 78-83
in his Eugene Onegin Commentary (Vol. Ill, p. 412). For further allu-
sions, see 165/6, 174/1, 252/7, and 280/1.
78/ 1 Lottelita, LoUtchen: H.H. toys with “Lotte,” a diminutive of “Char-
lotte,” and discerns Lolita in Lotte (“Lottelita”), which is also a phonetic
transcription of American idiom and diction (Lot of {Lo~\lita). LoUtchen
is formed with the German diminutive ending -chen. H.H. no doubt re-
calls that Goethe’s Werther calls his Charlotte “Lotte” and “Lottchen.”
See 72/5.
79/1 ecru and ocher: ecru is a grayish yellow that is greener and paler than
chamois or old ivory. Ocher is a dark yellow color derived from or re-
sembling ocher, a hydrated iron oxide.
80/1 the jovial dentist: Clare Quilty’s Uncle Ivor. Much later H.H. will
learn from Lolita herself that Quilty met her through this association.
On p. 274, H.H. recapitulates their confrontation; “Well, did 1 know
that he was practically an old friend? That he had visited with his
uncle in Ramsdale? — oh, years ago^ — and spoken at Mother’s club, and
had tugged and pulled her, Dolly . . . onto his lap . . .” An earlier draft
of the novel contained Quilty’s appearance before the ladies. See 33/9
for a summary of his appearances.
80/2 arriere-pensee: French; hidden thoughts, ulterior motives.
81/1 interrupted Jean: John is about to say “Jews,” and Jean, suspecting
that H.H. may be Jewfsh, tactfully interrupts. See 263/4.
Chapter 19
83/1 A Guide to . . . Development: the titles H.H. mentions are by turns
invented (Who's Who in the Limelight [p. 33]; Clowns and Columbines
[244/1]), actual (the other titles on p. 244; Brute Force [264/4]),
close approximations of existing works, as in this instance. A plethora
of actual titles circle about this “fool’s book” (e.g.. Guide to Child De-
velopment through the Beginning School Years [1946]), and Nabokov
seems to have created a central, summary title (though the exact title
may yet exist). See 176/4.
Chapter 20
83/2 Hourglass Lake ... spelled: earlier it was “Our Glass Lake” (see 45/3
and 47/2). H.H. doesn’t correct “errors” in his “unrevised” draft.
[ 368 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 85-92
Whether right or wrong, both the names are significant, underscoring
H.H.’s solipsism (the circumscribing mirror of “our glass”) and obses-
sion with time (“hourglass”).
85/1 the gesture: it inspires the mock quotation, “look. Lord . . .” as if to
demonstrate one’s chains.
85/ 2 c'est mot qui decide: French; it is I who decide.
88/ 1 acrosonic: a noise reaching to or past the sonic barrier. It would seem
to be H.H.’s own word.
89/1 shooting her lover ... making him say “akh!”: a preview of Quilty’s
death. See 47/4 and 305/1. He may indeed have been “her lover,” how-
ever fleetingly; “I knew your dear wife slightly,” Quilty later admits to
H.H. (p. 304).
89/2 at first wince: H.H.’s variant of “at first glance.”
90/1 Krestovski: to give them one kind of scare or another; see 218/1.
91/1 Cavall and Melampus: the Farlows’ dogs. “Cavall” comes from cavallo
(a horse), and “Melampus” from the seer in Greek mythology who un-
derstood the tongue of dogs and introduced the worship of Dionysus.
More specifically, notes Nabokov, the dogs are named after those of a
famous person, though he is not certain who owned them. He thinks it
was Lord Byron, who had many bizarrely named dogs. In any event,
these allusions are hardly within the cultural reach of the Farlows.
91/2 Waterproof: the wristwatch. See 274/1, where H.H. offers this inter-
lude as a central clue to Quilty’s identity.
91/3 old Ivor ...his nephew: Clare Quilty. For a summary of allusions to
Quilty, see 33/9.
Chapter 21
91/4 “Ce qui . . . comme ga": French; “What drives me crazy is the fact
that I do not know what you are thinking about when you are like
this.”
92/1 the ultimate sunburst: in Who's Who in the Limelight, “Roland Pym”
is said to have “Made debut in Sunburst" (see 33/7).
92/2 Beaver Eaters: a portmanteau of “Beefeaters” (the yeomen of the
British royal guard ) and their beaver hats.
[ 369 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 95-IO9
Chapter 22
95/ 1 Euphe?nia: from the Greek euphhnos; auspicious, sounding good.
96/ 1 olisbos: the leather phallos worn by participants in the Greek Dionysia.
96/2 child of Dolly's age: “Byron, Marguerite” (see p. 53). For Dr. Byron’s
namesake, see 72/4.
Chapter 23
104/1 savoir vivre: French; good manners, good breeding.
105/ 1 alembic: anything used to distill or refine.
105/2 Adieu, Marlene: Dietrich; see 11/4.
Chapter 24
106/1 simian: monkey- or apelike.
Chapter 25
107/1 Eh bien, pas du tout!: French; Well, not at all!
107/2 Climax: however broad the joke may be, there happen to be seven
towns in the United States by this name (as well as a Lolita, Texas).
Demon Veen, the father of Ada's hero, retreats to his “aunt’s ranch
near Lolita, Texas” (p. 16), a town which doubtless boasts no bookstore
or library.
108/ 1 stylized blood: everything red is “stylized.”
108/2 argent: archaic; silver, silvery, shining — as in French.
109/1 Vee ...and Bea: see 45/5 and 21/9. For a summary of Poe allusions,
see 1 1/2.
109/2 glans: anatomical word; the conical vascular body which forms the
extremity of the penis.
109/3 oolala black: pseudo-French epithet for “sexy” black frills.
109/4 anthropometric entry: anthropometry is the science of measuring the
human body and its parts.
[ 370 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES IIO-II2
cio/i glaucous: a pale yellowish-green hue.
|i
[ [10/2 The Enchained Hunters: note the plural (H.H., Quilty, and, in an-
other sense, the author). For “enchantment,” see 47/3. Quilty names his
: play after the hotel (pp. 202-204) adapts an anagram of it for one of
■ his many pseudonyms (253/13); the married Lolita ends up living on
i “Hunter Road” (p. 270). See also my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article,
• op. c/i., p. 2 10.
' Chapter 26
iii/i Heart, head — everything: “Is ‘mask’ the keyword?” H.H. asked on
p. 55 (see 6/4). As his narrative approaches the first conjugal night with
Lolita, H.H. is overcome by anguish, and in the bare six lines of Chapter
Twenty-six — the shortest “chapter” in the book — he loses control, and
for a moment the mask drops. Not until the very end of the passage does
the voice again sound like our Hum the Hummer, when the desperation
of “Heart, head — everything” suddenly gives way to the resiliently comic
command to the printer. In that one instant H.H.’s masking takes place
before the reader, who gets a fleeting look into those “two hypnotic
eyes” (to quote John Ray [p. 5]) and sees the pain in them. Lolita is
so deeply moving a novel because of our sharp awareness of the great
tension sustained between H.H.’s mute despair and his compensatory
jollity. “Crime and Pun” is one of the titles the murderous narrator of
Despair considers for his manuscript, and it would serve H.H. just as
well, for language is as much a defense to him as chess is to Grandmaster
Luzhin. But even when H.H. lets the mask slip, one glimpses only his
desperation, not the “real” H.H. or the manipulative author. As Nabokov
says in Chapter Five of Gogol, analogously discussing Akaky Akakyevich
and the “holes” and “gaps” in the narrative texture of The Overcoat: “We
did not expect that, amid the whirling masks, one mask would mrn out
to be a real face, or at least the place where that face ought to be"
[italics mine — A.A.].
Chapter 27
1 1 2/1 redheaded .. .lad: Charlie Holmes turns out to be Lolita’s first lover
(p. 139).
1 1 2/2 moth or butterfly: a reminder that H.H. is no entomologist. See 8/1.
Nabokov stresses “Humbert’s complete incapacity to differentiate be-
tween Rhopalocera and Heterocera.”
[ 371 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES II3-II9
1 1 3/ 1 lentigo: a freckly skin pigmentation.
1 1 3/2 aux yeux battus: French; with circles round one’s eyes.
113/3 plumbaceous umbrae: Latin; leaden shadows.
113/4 rnagdlein: German; little girl.
114/1 Lepingville ... nineteenth century: as to the “identity” of this poet.
Nabokov responded, “That poet was evidently Leping who used to go
lepping (i.e. lepidoptera hunting) but that’s about all anybody knows
about him.” See 143/1.
1 1 5/ 1 backfisch: German; an immature, adolescent girl; a teenager.
1 1 5/2 simulacrum: a sham; an unreal semblance.
1 15/3 psychotherapist .. .rapist: H.H. calls our attention to the rapist in
the therapist. Nabokov similarly employs semantic constituents in Des-
pair, when he poses a sensible question: “What is this jest in majesty?
This ass in passion?” (p. 56).
1 1 5/4 what shadow . . . after?: in traditional Doppelgdnger fiction the re-
prehensible self is often imagined as a shadow, as in Hans Christian
Andersen’s “The Shadow.” H.H. constantly toys with the convention.
1 1 6/1 Ensuite?: French; then?
116/2 shadowgraphs: amateur X-ray pictures. The girls made pictures of
each other’s bones; not invented, but actual “educational” recreation at
“progressive” camps c. 1950.
1 1 7/1 “C’m bien tout?": “Is that all?” The answer “C’eit” (“It is”) is
incorrect French, a direct translation from English syntax.
1 1 8/ 1 carbuncles: medical; “a painful local inflammation of the subcu-
taneous tissue, larger and more serious than a boil; a pimple or red spot, ;
due to intemperance.” Originally, a jewel such as a ruby. H.H. is of
course referring to the truck’s parking lights.
119/1 magic .. .rubious: a corrected misprint (“robous” in the 1958 edi-
tion). The ruby-like convertible is Quilty’s, a dark red shining in the
rain and the night. His appearances are summarized in 33/9.
1 19/2 frock-fold .. .Browning: not a quotation, but an allusion to Pippa
Passes (1842), a verse drama by Robert Browning,, the English poet 1
(1812-1889): ’
[ 372 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES II 9 -I 21
On every side occurred suggestive germs
Of that — the tree, the flower — or take the fruit —
Some rosy shape, continuing the peach.
Curved beewise o’er its bough; as rosy limbs.
Depending, nestled in the leaves; and just
From a cleft rose-peach the whole Dryad sprang, [lines 87-92]
See 209/2. A Dryad is a wood nymph (see 123/2). For nymph, see 18/6.
119/3 cocker spaniel: the old lady’s dog (p. 120). See 248/1 and 263/4.
1 19/4 porcine: swinelike; the pig image is introduced in the first sentence
of the previous paragraph.
1 20/ 1 not Humber g: H.H. corrects the desk clerk, who has coldly bestowed
on him a Jewish-sounding name. The hotel is euphemistically restrictive
(see 263/4). “Professor Hamburg” finds them “full up” (p. 263).
120/2 Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter: H.H.’s nom de registration
is in deference to Edgar A. Poe and his child bride (see 45/5). H.H. also
uses the “Edgar” elsewhere (see 77/5 and 191/3). For the Poe allusions,
see 1 1/2.
120/3 although H.H. is trying not to lose control of the
language, as he did on p. iii, he (or someone else) is here managing to
tell how H.H. was served by Mr. Swine, who is assisted by Mr. Potts,
who can’t find any cots, because Swine has dispatched them to the
Swoons (see 214/2). A “key” to the meaning of this extraordinary verbal
control is immediately provided by another “coincidence”: the room
number is the same as the Haze house number. H.H. will shortly offer
a figurative key by placing the number within quotation marks, which is
of course the only proper way to treat a fiction (p. 125). “McFate” pro-
duces “342” once more; see 250/2. Such coincidences serve a two-fold
purpose: they at once point to the authorial consciousness that has plot-
ted them, and can also be imagined as coordinates situated in time and
space, marking the labyrinth from which a character cannot escape. The
“342” confluence is also discussed in my article, “Nabokov’s Puppet Show
— Part 11 ,” The New Republic, CL VI (January 21, 1967), 27, included
above; see Introduction, p. xxvii.
121/1 Parody of a hotel corridor ... and death: parody to H.H. because
nothing seems “real” to him on this most crucial of nights; parody to
Nabokov because the world within a work of art is “unreal” (see Intro-
duction, ibid.). But to repeat Marianne Moore’s well-known line, poetry
[ 373 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I2I-I22
is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and Nabokov’s novel is
a parody of death with real suffering in it — H.H.’s and Lolita’s.
1 2 1/2 a mirror: the room is a little prison of mirrors, a metaphor for his
solipsism and circumscribing obsession. “ ‘So that’s the dead end’ (the
mirror you break your nose against),” an overwrought H.H. tells Lolita
after catching her in a lie (p. 227). See 53/2 and 296/2. “In our earthly
house, windows are replaced by mirrors,” writes Nabokov in The Gift
(p. 322). His characters continually confront mirrors where they had
hoped to find windows, and the attempt to transcend solipsism is one of
Nabokov’s major themes. As a literal image and overriding metaphor,
the mirror is central to the form and content of Nabokov’s novels; in
Ada, it describes the universe, for Antiterra’s sibling planet Terra is
imagined as a “distortive glass of our distorted glebe” (p. 18). If one
perceives Pale Fire spatially, with John Shade’s poem on the “left” and
Charles Kinbote’s Commentary on the “right,” the poem is seen as an
object to be perceived, and the Commentary becomes the world seen
through the distorting prism of a mind — a monstrous concave mirror
held up to an objective “reality.” The narrator of Despair loathes mir-
rors, avoids them, and comments on those “monsters of mirrors,” the
“crooked ones,” in which a man is stripped, squashed, or “pulled out like
dough and then torn in two” (p. 31). Nabokov has placed these crooked
reflectors everywhere in his fiction: Doubles and mock-Doubles, parodies
and self-parodies (literature trapped in a prison of amusement-park mir-
rors), works within works, worlds refracting worlds, and words distort-
ing words — that is, translations (art’s “crazy-mirror,” says Nabokov)
and language games (see 36/2). Pale Fire's invented language is “the
tongue of the mirror,” and the portmantoid pun is the principal mirror-
language of Lolita. See 5/3.
1 2 1/3 Enfin seuls: French for “alone at last,” the trite phrase of the honey-
mooner.
1 2 2/ 1 lentor: archaic; slowness.
122/2 Spooner ette: a spoonerism is the accidental transposition of sounds in
two or more words (“wight ray”). By acknowledging his spoonerisms,
H.H. reminds us what a wordsmith he is (in Pale Fire John Shade
teaches at Wordsmith University). The affectionate suffix -ette may re-
call majorette, as well as the slang meaning of Spooner, one who “necks”
(or, as one dictionary archly puts it, “act[s] with silly and demonstrative
fondness”). The suffix also parodies a recognizable and overused pre-
ciosite of Ronsard’s, who in fact employed “nymphette" in one of his
poems. See “vermeillette” (49/2) and Quilty’s “barroomette” (p. 298).
[ 374 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I 2 2- 1 24
122/3 kitzelans: lusting; from the German kitzel, “inordinate desire,” and
kitzler, “clitoris.” See 252/11.
122/4 seva ascendes . . . quidquam: the language of Horace, Catullus, et al.
(see 47/1) is appropriate to this modern, if hysterical, elegiast, whose
“Latin” here turns out to be a curious mishmash of Latin, English, French,
German, and Italian; “The sap ascendeth, pulsates, burning \brulans,
from the French bruler, “to burn”], itching, most insane, elevator clat-
tering, pausing, clattering, people in the corridor. No one but death
would take this one [Lolita] away from me! Slender little girl, I thought
most fondly, observing nothing at all.” At moments of extreme crisis,
H.H. croaks incomprehensibly, losing more than his expropriated En-
glish; for his attempts “to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets”
(p. 136) almost resist language altogether, carrying him close to the edge
of non-language and a figurative silence. Thus H.H. significantly an-
nounces this scene as a “Parody of silence” (p. 121), and, far from being
nonsensical, the ensuing “Latin” is a parodic stream-of-consciousness
affording a brief critical comment on a technique Nabokov finds un-
satisfactory, even in the novels of Joyce, whom he reveres (“poor Stream
of Consciousness, maree noire by now,” writes Nabokov toward the end
of a similar parody in Ada [p. 300]). “We think not in words but in
shadows of words,” Nabokov says. “James Joyce’s mistake in those
otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives
too much verbal body to thoughts” (Playboy interview). To Nabokov, the
unconnected impressions and associations that impinge on the mind are
irrational until they are consciously ordered and to order them in art is
to fulfill virtually a moral obligation, for without rational language man
has “grown a very / landfish, languageless, / a monster,” as Thersites says
of Ajax in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Even the imprisoned Cin-
cinnatus, under sentence of death, is “already thinking of how to set up
an alphabet” which might humanize the dystopian world of Invitation
to a Beheading (p. 139). See the second half of 11/2.
123/1 nota bene: Latin; mark well. The 1958 edition incorrectly ran the
two words together.
123/2 dryads and trees: see 119/2.
123/3 writer fellow . . . ad: Clare Quilty (see 71/2). “Dromes” is a corrected
misprint (“Droms” in the 1958 edition). For allusions to Quilty, see 33/9.
123/4 hemina: Latin; woman.
1 24/1 Pur pills: a contraction of “Papa’s Purple Pills” from the previous
paragraph.
[ 375 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 1 2 5- 1 29
Chapter 28
125/ 1 le grand moment: French; the great moment.
125/2 hot hairy fist: Quilty also has conspicuously hairy hands (p. 297).
125/3 richer ist sicher: German; sure is sure.
125/4 '^y uncle Gustave: Gustave Trapp, sometimes a “cousin,” whom
H.H. mistakes for Quilty (see p. 141). A cousin of one’s mother is both
one’s cousin and, in a sense, uncle.
126/1 Jean-Jacques Humbert: after Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778),
Swiss-born French philosopher and author of the famous Confessions.
1 27/1 one^s dungeon ... some rival devil: Quilty, H.H.’s “rival devil,” is
staying at The Enchanted Hunters, and appears on the next page. The
lust figuratively emanating from H.H.’s “dungeon” is objectified much
later; “I had been keeping Clare Quilty ’s face masked in my dark dun-
geon” (see 292/2).
127/2 comme on dit: French; as they say. ;
127/3 King Sigmund: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of psycho-
analysis. See 7/6 and 37/1.
128/1 antiphony: a musical response; a musical piece alternately sung by a
choir divided into two parts.
128/2 powdered bugs: Nabokov says “The ‘powdered bugs’ wheeling
around the lamps are noctuids and other moths which look floury on the
wing (hence ‘millers,’ which, however, may also come from the verb),
as they mill in the electric light against the damp night’s background.
‘Bugs’ is an Americanism for any insect. In England, it means generally
bedbugs.” For entomological allusions, see 8/1.
128/3 somebody sitting ... porch: Quilty. Their verbal sparring on p. 129
telescopes their pursuit of one another and prefigures the physical struggle
of pp. 295-307. The allusions to Quilty are summarized in 33/9.
1 29/1 a rose, as the Persians say: the fatidic flower and an allusion to The''
Rubaiyat (see 264/8).
129/2 a blinding flash ... can be deemed immortal: for the photograph in
question, see 265/ 1. H.H. was not immortalized.
[ 376 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 13O-I33
Chapter 29
1 30/ 1 entre nous soil dit: French; just between you and me.
1 31/ 1 grand Dieu: French; good God!
1 3 1/2 La Petite . . .Ridicule: The Sleeping Maiden or the Ridiculous Lover.
There is no picture by this name. The mock-title and subject matter
parody eighteenth-century genre engravings.
132/1 sotneone ... beyond our bathroom: Clare Quilty (see 250/4). Quilty
also creates a “waterfall” on 296/4. For a summary of his appearances,
see 33/9.
133/1 A breeze from wonderland: there are several references to Alice in
Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles L.
Dodgson (1832-1898), English writer, mathematician, and nympholept
(see 266/1). “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll,” says Nabokov,
“because he was the first Humbert Humbert.” Nabokov translated Alice
into Russian (Berlin, 1923). “I got five dollars (quite a sum during the
inflation in Germany),” he recalls (Speak, Memory, p. 283). In The Real
Life of Sebastian Ktiight, a character speaks “in the elenctic tones of
Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar” (p. 123), while in Nabokov’s latest novel,
“Ada in Wonderland” (p. 129), “Ada’s adventures in Adaland” (p. 568),
and the “titles” Palace in Wonderland (p. 53) and Alice in the Camera
Ob s cur a (p. 547) are variously invoked (the latter a play on the original
title of Laughter in the Dark). “In common with many other English
children (I was an English child) I have been always very fond of
Carroll,” he says in the Wisconsin Studies interview. “No, I do not think
his invented language shares any roots with mine [in Bend Sinister and
Pale Fire]. He has a pathetic affinity with H.H. but some odd scruple
prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to
those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with
it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympho-
lepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-un-
dressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and
dreadful charade.” But it might seem as though Nabokov did allude to
Carroll in Lolita, through what might be called “the photography theme”:
H.H. cherishes his worn old photograph of Annabel, has in a sense been
living with this “still,” tries to make Lolita conform to it, and often
laments his failure to capture her on film. Quilty’s hobby is announced as
“photography,” and the unspeakable films he produces at the Duk Duk
[ 377 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 134-I37
Ranch would seem to answer Carroll’s wildest needs. Asked about this
Nabokov replied, “I did not consciously think of Carroll’s hobby wheil
I referred to the use of photography in Lo/iru.”
“I have only words to play wuth,” moans H.H. (p. 34), and severa
readers have been tempted to call the ensuing wordplay “Joycean”—
loosely enough, since “Carrollian” might do almost as well, given Na
bokov’s fondness for auditory wordplay and portmanteau words, anc
the fact that the latter usage was coined by Carroll. The family line i
nicely established on Sebastian Knight’s neatest book shelf, where AIic>
in W onderland and Ulysses stand side by side, along with works bj
some of Nabokov’s other favorite writers (Stevenson, Chekhov, Flaubert
Proust, Wells, and Shakespeare, who encloses the shelf at either em
with Hamlet and King Lear [p. 41]). For Shakespeare, see 286/4.
1 34/1 metamorphosing: see 18/6.
Chapter 30
136/ 1 emeritus read to by a boy: an echo of the opening of Eliot’s “Geron
tion”: “Here I am, an old man in a dry month,/Being read to by a boy . . .
See 18/3.
136/2 a young pig; a hog. |
1 36/3 callypygean slave . . . onyx: or callipygmt; “having shapely buttocks,!
Onyx is a variety of agate, a semiprecious stone. H.H. is no doubt henj
referring to onyx marble (alabaster). See 139/1. j
136/4 gonadal glow: a gonad is a sexual gland; an ovary or testis.
136/5 canoeing, Coranting: the latter is the participle of H.H.’s variant c
courant, “a dance of Italian origin marked by quick running steps,” anc
also dialectal English for “romping” and “carousing.” H.H. is still ii;
Volume C of the Girls’’ Encyclopedia (see p. 94).
Chapter 3 1 ‘
137/1 Roman law ... girl may marry at twelve: the legal opinions offereij
in this paragraph move from fact to fiction (see 21/1). The first is trucj
though the legal question and its history are far more complex than H.H
would suggest. See Corbett, The Roman Law of Marriage (1930), pfj
51-52. I
137/2 adopted by the Clnirch: also true; see Bouscaren and Ellis, Cano
Law: A Text and Commentary (1957), p. 513.
137/3 still preserved ... in some of the United States: only in ten state
(Colorado, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Virj
[ 378 ] !
NOTES FOR PAGES I37-I4O
' ginia, Idaho, Kansas, and Louisiana). See Vernier, American Family
\ La-ivs (1931), pp. 115-117.
37/4 fifteen is lawful everywhere: not in Alaska, Arizona, California,
. Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana,
Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or
I Wyoming, where the age is sixteen, or in New Hampshire or New
I Jersey, where it is eighteen. But there are exceptions granted if the girl
, is pregnant or if she is willing, over twelve, and the marriage has been
1 consummated. Since none of these (save the consummation) apply to
I Lolita, it seems that H.H.’s confident legal scholarship has given way to
I dissembling. See Vernier, ibid., pp. ii6-ii8.
57/5 die Kleine: German; the little one.
!
■57/6 moue: grimace, facial contraction.
iS/i sapphic diversions: reference to the reputed lesbianism of the group
^associated with Sappho, Greek lyric poetess of Lesbos (c. 600 b.c.).
jS/A Miranda twins: in Lolita’s class list, p. 54 (see 53/2).
19/ 1 boat to Onyx or Eryx: there are no such lakes. Onyx is often used
for cameos, while Eryx refers to the ancient cult of Aphrodite (Venus)
of Eryx, an Elymian settlement on a mountain above Drepana in western
Sicily, built below their temple of Aphrodite (the goddess of love and
beauty, to whom Lolita is often compared; “Venus came and went,” says
H.H. on p. 170; and the magazine picture of a surrealistic “plaster replica
of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand” metaphorically projects Lolita’s
life with him [p. 60]). See 252/11, where scholarly H.H. obliquely in-
forms the reader that the priestesses at the Temple of Eryx were prosti-
( tutes.
.0/ 1 1 would not talk to strangers: see 34/ 1 and 31 i/i.
.0/2 saturnalia: the festival of Saturn in ancient Rome, celebrated with
feasting and revelry; a licentious spectacle.
.0/3 A fellow of my age: Quilty (see 33/9); the “blood-red armchair”
should alert the reader. H.H. stresses their similar ages; see 220/1.
.0/4 SchwaEs drugstore: an author’s error has been corrected {a instead
of o in the 1958 edition). The Schwab’s chain drugstores in Hollywood
[ 379 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I4I-147
are a meeting place for film people and young aspirants. In the ’thirties
and ’forties several subsequent stars were discovered there, some — accord-
ing to folklore — while eating sundaes or drinking sodas. |
141/1 a fairytale vampire: for the fairy tale theme, see 33/3.
141/2 le decouvert: French; the nude. ;
1 4 1/3 immortal daemon . . . child: see 18/6. ‘
141/4 Aunt Clare'’s place: by mentioning Quilty’s first name, H.H., a sly
teaser, throws the reader something more than a hint. See 33/9 for aj
summary of Quilty allusions.
1 4 1/5 hypothetical hospital: “hypothetical” is the best word to use, since
its name would be whatever H.H. chose to make it. ,i
1 '
Chapter 3 3 I
143/1 gay . . . Lepingville: see 114/1. H.H.’s “lepping” is over; the town’s,
name and gaiety mark the fact that, as Part One ends, H.H. secures his
capture. I
1 44/ 1 swooners: H.H.’s variant of the noun, its meaning expanded to in-:
elude some garment that evokes a swoon. I
I
PART TWO I
Chapter 1
I
,1
1 47/ 1 Pharisaic: self-righteous and censorious; resembling the Pharisees, aj
sect of the ancient Jews famed for its strict observance of ceremonies]'
rites, and traditions.
!
147/2 earvoitness: H.H.’s coinage.
147/3 ttous connumes: Flaubert uses the verb connaitre in the literary tense||
passe simple when in Madatne Bovary (1857) he is describing her un-i>
happy experiments with all kinds of diversions, especially her lovers anc
their activities together. For other allusions, see 49/1, 204/2 and 267/2
Nabokov intends no allusion to Frederic Moreau’s travels in UEducatiot
sentimentale (1869); “Not the education of the senses,” he says, “a pool
novel which I only vaguely remember.” Bovary is funned in King':
[ 380 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I47-15O
Queen, Knave and “Floeberg” burlesqued briefly in Ada (p. 128). Al-
though Kinbote synchronizes Gradus’ travels through space and time
and the stages of Shade’s composition of the poem Pale Fire, he never-
theless complains when Shade similarly alternates two themes: “the
synchronization device has been already worked to death by Flaubert
and Joyce” (p. 196).
{.7/4 Chateaubriandesque trees: the first European writers and painters
who visited America were impressed by its great trees, and FI.H. no
doubt drew the image from Atala (1801), a separately published episode
from Le Genie du christianisme (1802) by Frangois-Rene de Chateau-
briand (1768-1848), whose arrival in America is mentioned in Pale Fire
(p. 274). In the Eugene Onegin Commentary, Nabokov calls Rene, an-
other episode from Le Genie, “a work of genius by the greatest French
writer of his time” (Vol. Ill, p. 98). See 72/5. Though unlabeled, there
are many “Chateaubriandesque trees” in Ada's, Ardis Park, and by design,
for Chateaubriand is to Ada what Poe and Merimee are to Lolita. Van
Veen reads Ada’s copy of Atala (p. 89), and Rene, with its “subtle per-
fume of incest” {Onegin Commentary, Vol. Ill, p. 100), is alluded to
directly (pp. 13 1 and 133). Mile. Lariviere, the Veens’ grotesque gov-
erness, writes a novel and film scenario whose hero is named “Rene” (see
pp. 198-199, 217, 249, and 424), and since “incest” and “insect” are ana-
gramma tically linked (p. 85), a mosquito is named after Chateaubriand
— Charles Chateaubriand, that is, “not related to the great poet and mem-
oirist” (p. 106). For further discussion of Chateaubriand and Ada, see
my article, '^''Ada described,” TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970). For
another Chateaubriand allusion in Lolita, see 21 2/1.
48/1 non-Laodicean: in Revelation hi, 14-16, the Laodicean church is
characterized as “lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold” in matters of
religion.
48/2 madamic: H.H.’s coinage, referring to the madam, or proprietress,
of a brothel.
48/ 3 instars: an insect or other anthropod in one of the forms assumed
between molts. The pupa of a butterfly is an instar.
49/ 1 do you remember, Miranda: an echo of the opening lines and refrain
of “Tarantella” (1923), a poem by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953); “Do you
remember an Inn,/ Miranda? / Do you remember an Inn?” See p. 187.
50/ 1 the nasal voices: because “this book is being read, I assume, in the
first years of 2000 a.d.” (as H.H. says [p. 301]), readers not having had
the benefit of a 1947-1952 adolescence may not be able to complete the
[ 381 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 15O-154
names of the “invisibles” who serenaded Lolita. They include Jo Staffori 1
(date of birth a secret), Edwin Jack “Eddie” Fisher (1928- ), Ton |
Bennett (1926- ), Peggy Lee (born Norma Egstrom: 1920-
Guy Mitchell (1925- ), and Patti Page (1927- ), whose most
successful recording, “The Tennessee Waltz” (c. 1950), is commemorate f
in Ada with the mention of “a progressive poet in residence at Tennesse f
Waltz College” (p. 134). As Joyce says in Finnegans Wake, “Wipe you
glosses with what you know.”
150/2 Starasil: an actual ointment. \
150/3 trochaic lilt: in prosody, a trochee is a foot of two syllables, th
first stressed or half-stressed, and the second unstressed.
150/4 Huncan Dines: the spoonerism hardly conceals Duncan Hines (i88a
1959), author of such guidebooks as Adventures in Good Eating, Lodgin,,
for a Night, and Duncan Hines' Food Odyssey.
1 51/ 1 chere Dolores: French; dear Dolores.
1 5 1/2 comme . . . gentille: French; as you know too well, my sweet one,
152/1 rapist ... therapist: a slight variation of earlier wordplay; see 115/3'
In Ada, thinkers who speculate on the existence of Terra are called “ter
rapists” (p. 341).
152/2 by Polonius: the talkative and complacent old man of Hamlet. Th''l
reference is probably to the warnings he gives his daughter, Ophelia
about the slippery ways of men. See 33/6.
152/3 Mann Act: the obvious “dreadful pun” is Mann: man. “Act” was no
capitalized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected here.
1 53/1 my Lolita... her Catullus: the Latin love-poem motif; see 68/1.
153/2 c'est tout: French; that is all. !
1 54/ 1 crazy quilt of forty-eight states: it is appropriate that Part Two’;
first allusion to Quilty should be this geographic metaphor, since H.H
and his nemesis pursue each other back and forth across “the craz) j
quilt.” When all the journeys are ended, he is “quilted Quilty” (p. 308) |
154/2 inutile: French; useless, unprofitable. q
154/3 Lorrain clouds: Claude Gelee, known as Claude Lorrain (i6oo-i682)l
French painter who settled in Rome and established landscape paintinfj
as a respectable form. His open vistas and lyrical evocations of light an^
[ 382 ] :
NOTES FOR PAGES I54-158
atmosphere influenced Poussin, among others. A character in King,
Queen, Knave (1928) points at something “with the air of Rembrandt
indicating a Claude Lorrain” (p. 91), a reminder of the consistency of
Nabokov’s vision.
^54/4 El Greco horizon: the famous painter ( I54i?-i6i4? ), bom in Greece,
, schooled in Italy, resident of Spain. H.H. discovers in Kansas the turbu-
lent Toledo landscapes of Greco. Since many readers, especially the
British and French, think Lolita is resolutely “anti-American,” one should
note the book’s tender landscape details, and the tribute paid to “the
lovely, trustful, enormous country” (p. 178).
[55/ 1 samara: a dry, winged fruit, usually one-seeded, as in the ash or elm.
156/1 ce qu'on appelle: French; what one calls.
Chapter 2
156/2 partie de plaisir: French; outing, picnic.
156/3 raison d'etre: French; the reason for being, the justification.
156/4 John Galsworthy: English novelist (1867-1933), author of The
Forsyte Saga (1922).
1 5 7/ 1 canthus: the inner corner of the eye where the upper and lower eye-
lids meet.
157/2 ^^Kurort" type: German; health resort, watering place.
157/3 Toan back: a color: chestnut interspersed with gray or white — said
of a horse; also a low-grade sheepskin tanned and colored to imitate un-
grained Morocco.
157/4 author of ‘‘^Trees'': Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), American poet, best
known for the sentimental poem which H.H. refers to here.
158/1 bronzed owner of an expensive car: although Quilty-hunters may find
this man suspect, Nabokov says it is definitely not Quilty.
158/2 lousy with .. .flies: notes Nabokov: “The insects that poor Hum-
bert mistakes for ‘creeping white flies’ are the biologically fascinating
little moths of the genus Fronuba whose amiable and indispensable fe-
males transport the pollen that fertilizes the yucca flowers (see, what
Humbert failed to do, ‘Yucca Moth’ in any good encyclopedia).” For
entomological allusions, see 8/ 1.
[ 383 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I58-160
158/3 Independence . . .Abilene: also a juxtaposition of the “starting points”
of successive American presidents: Harry S Truman (1884- ) and
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969).
158/4 lilac . . . phallic: H.H. continually reminds us that he has “only words
to play with” (p. 34). His phallic is built on the semantic constituents of
lilac and Pharaonic (of or pertaining to Pharaoh, the title of the sov-
ereigns of ancient Egypt).
158/5 lanugo: anatomical word; in a restricted sense, the downy growth
which covers the young of otherwise non-hairy animals.
158/6 Tujous: a bright russet or brownish-orange hue.
158/7 lucerne: a deep-rooted European herb with bluish-purple flowers;
in the U.S. usually called alfalfa.
1 59/ 1 comme on dit: French; as they say.
159/2 hundreds of .. .hummingbirds: these are not birds, notes Nabokov,
“but hawkmoths which do move exactly like hummingbirds (which are
neither gray nor nocturnal).” For entomological allusions, see 8/1.
159/3 Shakespeare .. .N ew Mexico: not invented; a mining town founded
c. 1870 on property that had previously been involved in one of the
largest unsuccessful mining speculations of the period in the Southwest.
Now a “ghost town,” it is no longer listed in any atlas.
159/4 Florentine Bea's ... contemporary: Dante’s Beatrice (see 21/9). A
thirteenth-century mummy.
159/5 F)ur twentieth HeWs Canyon: see 298/5.
159/6 winery in Calif or nia .. .wine barrel: it exists. Crossing over into
Death Valley from Nevada, H.H. and Lolita travel down to Los Angeles
and then wend their way northward up the California coast to Oregon
(Crater Lake, p. 160). These Notes seldom comment on H.H.’s topo-
graphical observations; the field remains wide-open. A generous grant
from the Guggenheim Foundation or the American Council of Learned
Societies will no doubt one day enable some gentle don to retrace meticu-
lously H.H.’s foul footsteps.
159/7 Scotty's Castle: an enormous and grotesque structure built in the
’twenties by Waiter (“Death Valley”) Scott, formerly with Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West Show.
160/1 R.L. Stevenson's footprint on an extinct volcano: the Scottish writer
(1850-1895) followed the woman he loved to California, where he lived
[ 384 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 160-161
for a year (1879-1880). In From Scotland to Silverado, James D. Hart,
■ ed. (1966), collects his writing about the state. Stevenson is buried on
the volcanic Mount Vaea in Samoa; but H.H., who may or may not
know that, is here referring to his honeymoon stay on Mount St. Helena,
California, generally thought to be an extinct volcano (it is in fact not
one). There is a Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial there, but he left no
acmal footprint. H.H., having just noted “The ugly villas of handsome
actresses,” was no doubt more impressed by the footprints and handprints
of movie stars immortalized in the cement pavements outside Grauman’s
Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. For further Stevenson allusions, see
186/2 and 208/3.
[60/2 Mission Dolores: good title for book: this book, of course. The
mission observed by H.H. exists, in San Francisco.
160/3 festoons: in architecture, a molded or carved ornament representing
a festoon (a garland or wreath hanging in a curve). H.H. is observing
the coastline of Monterey.
160/4 Russian Gulch State Park: in Sonoma, California; named by Russian
colonists.
160/5 Little Rock, near a school: rereading this passage in 1968, Nabokov
called it “nicely prophetic” (the larger “row” over school desegregation,
September 1957). For further “prophecy,” see 228/3.
160/6 a propos de rien: French; not in relation to anything else; casually.
i6i/ 1 town . . . first name: “his” refers to QuUty. Clare, Michigan; an ac-
tual town.
161/2 species ... Homo pollex: H.H. combines the familiar Latin homo,
“the genus of mammals consisting of mankind,” with pollex, or “thumb.”
161/3 'viatic: H.H. sustains his “scientific” vocabulary; a coinage from the
Latin root via. Viaticum is English — an allowance for traveling expenses
— but H.H. has gone back to the Latin word viaticus, which specifically
refers to the road.
161/4 priapically: from Priapus, the god of procreation; see 44/4.
161/5 of my age... face a claques: Quilty, with a “face that deserves
to be slapped; an ugly, mischievous face.” For an index to his appear-
ances, see 33/9.
161/6 concupiscence: lustfulness.
[ 385 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I 6 I- I 64
161/7 coulant un regard: French; casting a sly glance.
162/1 slow truck .. .road: see 231/2; after an encounter with “Trapp”
(Quilty), H.H. finds himself behind such a truck.
163/1 natatoriums: swimming pools.
163/2 matitudinal: H.H.’s coinage, from matin, an ecclesiastical duty per-
formed early in the morning; or, though its usage is rare, a morning
call or song (of birds).
163/3 “tnais je divague: French; but I am wandering away from the point;
rambling.
164/ 1 les yeux perdus: YrtncW, a lost look in the eyes.
164/2 oh Baudelaire!: Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet. The
image of the dream and the French phrases, ‘‘“'brun adolescent'’’ (“dark
[brown-haired] adolescent”) and “re tordre" (“to undergo contortions” 1
[erotic]), are drawn from Baudelaire’s Le Crepuscule du matin, or
“Morning Twilight” (1852): ‘'^C'etait I'heure ou I'essaim des reves mal-
faisants / Tord sur leurs oreillers les bruns adolescents" (“It was the hour''
when a swarm of evil dreams contorts [or twists] dark [or swarthy] j
adolescents on their pillows”). For other Baudelaire allusions, see 264/1
and 286/3. “Poor Baudelaire” is evoked in a variant from Shade’s poem
in Pale Fire (p. 167); and Kinbote’s gardener aspires “to read in the I
original Baudelaire and Dumas” (p. 291). The title of Invitation to a
Beheading is drawn from Baudelaire’s L'lnvitation au voyage, and the
poem’s opening lines are quoted and toyed with in Ada (p. 106).
164/3 ^ jamous coach .. .with a harem of ball boys: a tennis star of the
’twenties (1893-1953), as famous in his sport as Red Grange and Babe
Ruth were in theirs; winner of the American championship seven times,
the Wimbledon title three times, and the U.S. doubles championship five
times. In 1946 he was jailed on a morals charge, and H.H. and Lolita
meet him after his tragic double life has become public knowledge, and
only a few years before his death. Given the context, the prosaic phrase
and vocation of “ball boy” becomes a pun. When asked if the deceased
player should be identified by name, Nabokov imagined him now “con-
sorting with ball boys . . . on Elysian turf. Shall we spare his shade?”
164/4 Gobbert: a corrected author’s error (one b in the 1958 edition).
Andre H. Gobbert was a French tennis champion c. World War I. “I
saw him beaten by Patterson in 1919 or 1920 at Wimbledon,” recalls
Nabokov. “He had a tremendous (old-fashioned) serve, but would
[ 386 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I 64- I 67
double fault up to four times in a game. Big dark fellow, doubled with
Decugis against Brookes and Patterson, I think” (see 236/1).
64/5 ange gauche: French; awkward angel.
65/1 simulacrum: an unreal semblance (a favorite word of H.H.’s; see
pp. 1 15 and 177).
65/2 a tall man: a mirage of Quilty. The subsequent teasing ambiguity
as to whether H.H.’s pursuer is “real” or an autoscopic hallucination
(see p. 219) parodies Golyadkin, Jr., and the central problem of Dos-
toevsky’s The Double (the narrator of Despair considers The Double as
a title for his book, “But Russian literature possessed one already,” he
says [p. 21 1]). For Quilty, see 33/9.
65/3 diaphanous: delicate to the extent of being transparent or translucent.
65/4 pavonine: like a peacock; iridescent.
65/5 oculate: eye-spotted.
65/6 ramparts of ancient Europe: translation and paraphrase of line 84 of
Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre (“The Drunken Boat” [1871]); “/c regrette
VEurope aux Anciens parapets” (“I long for Europe with its ancient
quays” [ramparts]). Rimbaud’s use of “parapets” is shortly reinforced
in an echo of the phrase (174/1). See for another allusion to this
poem. Nabokov translated it into Russian in The Rudder, December 16,
1928. Rimbaud’s poem is transmuted, along with almost everything else,
in Ada's antiworld; Van Veen receives a message “in the Louvre right
in front of Bosch’s Bateau Ivre, the one with a jester drinking in the
riggings (poor old Dan [Veen] thought that it had something to do
with Brant’s satirical poem!)” (p. 331). Ada and Van know by heart
Rimbaud’s Memoire, and it is one of two texts they use for their
coded letters (p. 161). For more on Rimbaud, see 77/6.
166/ 1 caravansaries: from a Persian word; in the East, an inn in the form
of a bare building surrounding a court, where caravans stop for the night.
167/ 1 well-drawn . . . bobby-soxer: Fenny, the comic strip created by Harry
Haenigsen in 1943. For other allusions to comic strips, see 219/5,
and 256/6. As responsive as he is scholarly, Nabokov the literary anatom-
ist is also amused and delighted by “lower” forms of art, and is not above
making selective use of such materials in his writing. No one, he laments
in the Foreword to the revised Speak, Memory, “discovered the name
[in the first edition] of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him in the
[ 387 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I 67- I 68
last sentence of Section Two, Chapter Eleven. It is most embarrassing
for a writer to have to point out such things himself” (p. 15). The
tribute is to Otto Soglow, creator of The Little King: “The ranks of
words I reviewed were again so glowing, with their puffed-out little
chests and trim uniforms ... [italics mine — A.A.]” (p. 219). “Who will
bother to notice,” wonders Nabokov in the Introduction to the Time
Reading Program edition of Bend Sinister, “that the urchins in the yard
(Chapter Seven) have been drawn by Saul Steinberg” (p. xvii). In Ada,
an 1871 Sunday supplement of the Kaluga Gazette “feature[s] on its
funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimper-
nella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed)” — based, in reality, on
an old French comic strip (p. 6). At the end of Ada, ninety-seven-year-
old Van Veen describes how he “look[s] forward with juvenile zest to the
delightful effect of a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water
that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons
in the ‘funnies’ of his boyhood” (p. 570).
167/2 areolas: the more-or-Iess shaded narrow areas around the nipples.
167/3 recedent: a heraldic term, to match pursuant.
167/4 ^^We...in this bottle'^: the “quip” derives from the fact that the
mariners could not possibly know they lived in the Middle Ages, just
as the reader of this annotation has no idea what the twenty-sixth cen-
tury will call our epoch.
Chapter 3
168/1 umber ... Humberland: the pun (see 5/3) turns on the not-uncom-
mon place name of Northumberland (England; New Hampshire; Vir-
ginia; Pennsylvania).
168/2 Frigid Queen .. .Frincess: the actual name of a milk bar, recorded
by Nabokov in a little black notebook. The “Princess” alludes to “Anna-
bel Lee” (11/7), who, fused with Freud, is once more in the novel’s
foreground: “the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera,
or whamot” (p. 169).
168/3 hors cone ours: out of the competition: when something is exhibited
at a show (e.g., livestock, tulips) but is so superior to the rest of the ex-
hibition that it is barred from receiving the awards or prizes.
168/4 leporine fascination: like a hare. The “able psychiatrist” is being
hypnotized as a rabbit is by a serpent (H.H.).
[ 388 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 1 69- 1 76
69/1 manatee: any of several aquatic mammals, such as the sea cow.
70/1 Arcadian .. .wilds: from Arcadia, the idyllic rural region of Greece
and the classic image of pastoral simplicity. “Even in Arcady am I, says
Death in the tombal scripture,” notes Kinbote in Fale Fire (p. 174).
70/2 rill: a very small brook.
70/3 cabanes: huts; simple dwellings.
70/4 que dis-je: French; what am I saying?
70/5 ?narmot: any rodent of the genus Marmota, such as the woodchuck.
70/6 Venus came and went: H.H. is being verbally playful about a sexual
climax.
71/1 un monsieur tres bien: French; a proper gentleman (a very pomp-
ous and bourgeois expression).
72/1 hospitalized . . . by now: reference to H.H.’s Western-style fight with
Quilty on p. 301.
73/ 1 strumstring: H.H.’s coinage; the crooner is Gene Autry ( 1907- ).
73/2 harpies: from classical mythology; foul creatures, part woman, part
bird, that stole the souls of the dead, or defiled or seized their victims’
food.
73/3 orchideous ?msculinity: belonging to the natural order of plants akin
to genus Orchis. Its Greek etymology adds a comic dimension, for orchis
means “testicle” as well as the plant. The hideous increases the humor.
74/1 parapets of Europe: a Rimbaud echo; see 165/6.
75/ 1 Oriental tale: invented by Nabokov.
75/2 Beardsley: after Aubrey Beardsley; see 54/3.
75/3 WoerneFs Treatise: it exists.
75/4 A Girl of the Limberlost: by Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924), it
was once a great favorite of schoolgirls (published 1914). Little Women
(1869), by Louisa May Alcott (1832-1882), continues to be read.
76/ 1 ganglia: plural of ganglion, an anatomical and zoological word; “a
mass of nerve tissue containing nerve cells, a nerve center”; a center of
strength and energy.
[ 389 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 176-177
176/2 dans . . . Page: French; in a mature age (when he is most robust).
176/3 vieillard encore vert: French; literally, “an old man still green”-
that is, sexually potent.
176/4 Know Your Own Daughter: the “biblical title” is real, says Nabokov
although it has been impossible to document. Many similar titles exist
all lending themselves to double-entendre: Frances K. Martin, Kno%
Your Child (1946); C. Lewis, How Well Can We Know Our Children:
(1947); C.W. Young, Know Your Pupil (1945); and E.D. Adlerblum
Know Your Child Through His Play (1947). See 83/1.
176/5 The Little Mermaid: anyone familiar with this fairy tale by Han;
Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the Danish fabulist, knows that H.H.’;
gift has been carefully chosen, and that there are several ironies involved
The little mermaid longs to “enchant a mortal heart” — namely, the princt
— and thus win an immortal soul. Lolita has succeeded all too well; bu'
neither H.H., Quilty, nor her husband Dick Schiller, who will carry hej
' off to Alaska, qualifies as prince in the fairy tale Lolita. At the end ol
Andersen’s tale, the mermaid has been transposed into one of the freel)'
circulating children of the air, who must float for three hundred yean
before they are admitted into the kingdom of heaven. But they can get
in earlier, as one explains as the tale concludes: “Unseen we float intc
the houses of mortals where there are children, and for every day that
we find a good child who makes his parents happy and deserves theii
love, God shortens our period of trial. The child does not know when
we fly through the room, and when we smile over it with joy a year
is taken from the three hundred. But if we see a naughty and wicked
child, we must weep tears of sorrow, and each tear adds a day to oui
period of trial” (from The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Other Fairy
Tales, Alfred and Mary Elizabeth David, eds.. New York, 1964, p. 274).
H.H., who later sheds “merman tears” (257/1), no doubt hopes that:
Lolita will take this to heart. See also Keys, p. 1340. For the fairy tale
theme, see 33/3.
176/6 case: settled.
1 77/ 1 2-1,000 miles: see 33/15.
177/2 rentier: a man who lives from the interest of his invested capital!
(generally applies to an old, retired man).
177/3 bi-iliac: the two most prominent points of the crests of the iliac
bones.
[ 390 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I78-183
Chapter 4
78/1 habitus: a not uncommon Latin noun meaning moral condition, state,
disposition, character, etc.
,79/1 Miss Cormorant: she is named after the voracious sea bird.
179/2 recueillement: self-communion, “collectedness.”
f 8 o/i harems and slaves: of course she can care, and H.H. has compared
her lot to theirs.
Chapter 5
181/1 Lester .. .Fabian: their respective first and final syllables form “les-
bian” (see also Keys, p. 96). See 197/2 for a similar effect.
Chapter 6
183/1 Gaston Godin: his “Beardsley existence” (p. 185) is also figurative,
for he might well have been drawn by Aubrey Beardsley. H.H.’s carica-
ture resembles the famous cover drawing of “Ali Baba” (for a projected
edition of The Forty Thieves, never undertaken [1897]), as well as
Oscar Wilde, whose post-prison alias is bestowed on H.H.’s car (see
229/4). Gaston is iin de siecle in many ways, as pp. 183-184 make clear.
183/2 mes gouts: French; my tastes.
183/3 always wore black: H.H.’s attire; see p. 297.
183/4 itirge photographs: they constitute a veritable pantheon of homo-
sexual artists: Andre Gide (1869-1951), French writer, author of Les
Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1925), winner of the Nobel
prize in 1947; Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), Russian composer,
whose “vile” and “silly” opera Eugene Onegin Nabokov cannot abide
(Gogol, p. 145; Onegin Commentary, Vol. II, p. 333); Norman Douglas
(1868-1952), English writer, author of South Wind (1917); Waslaw Ni-
jinsky (1890-1950), Russian ballet dancer of Polish descent (see p. 304),
afflicted with insanity, and an associate of Diaghilev (who in Ada is the
ballet master Dangleleaf [p. 430]); and Marcel Proust (see 18/4).
183/5 other .. .writers: one of whom, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-
1965), author of Of Human Bondage (1915), would have been named
had he not been still alive, says Nabokov.
[ 391 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I 84- I 89
184/1 Out, ih sont gentUs: French; Yes, they are nice.
184/2 toiles: French; canvasses (paintings).
184/3 ‘‘‘'PfBnez . . . savourer”: “Please take one of these pears. The good lady
who lives across the street gives me more than I can relish” (Gaston’s
French is pedantic and his prose properly decadent, especially in the
following).
184/4 ‘‘‘‘Mississe Taille Lore . . . fexecre'': “Mrs. Taylor [phonetically ren-
dered to indicate Gaston’s foreign accent] has just given me these beau- 1
tiful flowers which I abhor.”
184/5 roil: check! '
185/1 “Et toutes . . . Men?": “How about all your little girls? Are they all ,
right? ”
185/2 sale histoire: compromising episode (sexual in nature). ^
Chapter 7
186/1 painted roses: the smallest details cohere; see 54/5.
186/2 Treasure Island: the children’s classic (published 1883) by Robert
Louis Stevenson. See 160/1.
186/3 Whistler: James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), Anglo-American
painter and etcher. The famous painting of his mother is actually titled
“Arrangement in Grey and Black.”
187/1 cars ... bars ... barmen: the fripperous internal rhymes burlesque
Belloc’s “Tarantella” (149/1): “And the cheers and the jeers of the
young muleteers . . H.H. is paraphrasing his own verse; a complete
version appears, in all its majesty, on pp. 257-259.
Chapter 8
187/2 Star: the newspaper’s name was not italicized in the 1958 edition;
the error has been corrected.
1 88/ 1 time leaks: spent with Quilty. For an index to his appearances, see
33/9-
189/1 sly quip ... Rigger: The Right Reverend Rigger (in some versions
“Reverend MacTrigger”) figures in an old limerick that begins, “There
[ 392 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 19 O-I 94
was a right royal old nigger.” “His five hundred wives / Had the time
of their lives,” and the rest is too obscene to appear here. But see Joyce’s
Ulysses, where Bloom quotes it (1961 Random House ed., pp. 171-172).
For a summary of Joyce allusions, see 6/1 1.
190/1 Argiis-eyed: “observant”; from the hundred-eyed monster of Greek
mythology, who was set to watch lo, a maiden loved by Zeus. In Laugh-
ter in the Dark, Albinus meets his fatal love in the Argus cinema, where
she is an usher (p. 22). “My back is Argus-eyed,” says the speaker in
“An Evening of Russian Poetry” (see 5/3). In Pale Fire, one of the
aliases of the assassin Gradus is “d’Argus”; Hermann in Despair envi-
sions “argus-eyed angels” ( p. 1 1 1 ) ; the title character in T he Real Life
of Sebastian Knight “seems argus-eyed” (p. 97); Ada and Van dread
“traveling together to Argus-eyed destinations” (Ada, p. 425), and Van,
in search of the nature and meaning of Time, drives an “Argus” car (p.
550-
191/1 celebrated actress: an allusion to her resemblance to Marlene Die-
trich; p. 105.
19 1/2 ne montrez pas vos zhambes: French; do not show your legs (jambes
phonetically spelled to indicate an American accent — a recollection of
Charlotte; see 46/1).
191/3 Edgar: in honor of Poe; see 77/5 and 120/2. For a summary of Poe
allusions, see 11/2.
191/4 hygienic evening in Providence: at that time Providence, R.I., pos-
sessed a large redlight district.
Chapter 9
191/5 Avis Chapman: “When naming incidental characters,” says Na-
bokov, “I like to give them some mnemonic handle, a private tag: thus
‘Avis Chapman’ which I mentally attached to the South-European but-
terfly Callophrys avis Chapman (where Chapman, of course, is the name
of that butterfly’s original describer).” For entomological allusions, see
8/1.
192/ 1 save one . . . names are approximations: Mona Dahl. Because she was
Lolita’s accomplice in deceit, a cover (or quilt! ) for Quilty, H.H. takes
his vengeance by revealing Mona’s name to the world.
194/1 Ball Zack: Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), French novelist.
[ 393 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES I94-2OO
Chapter 10
194/2 my Lolita: this brief chapter sounds an urgent chord in what might
be called the “true love” theme. The succinct “Latin” locution (see 47/1)
is sounded on pp. 34, 46, 55, 68, 81, 82, 94, 113, 117, 130, 136, 156, 168, 169,
178, 192, 200, 201, 209, 233, 243, 249, 269, 279, 280, 286, 295, 31 1. “My lone
light Lolita” (p. 287) and “my conventional Lolita” (p. 289) vary the pat-
tern.
Chapter 11
195/1 “Why, no,” 1 said: the comma after no was omitted in the 1958 edi-
tion; the error has been corrected.
197/1 teachers^: the apostrophe was omitted in the 1958 edition. ,
197/2 Miss Horn . . . Miss Cole: the first letters of the teachers’ names have
been transposed. “Corrected,” the names combine to form an obscene*
verb. For their anagrammatic colleagues, see 181/1.
198/1 The Hunted Enchanters: “the author” is Quilty (see p. 202), though
Pratt has the title wrong {The Enchanted Hunters, after the hotel and
the nympholepts, common and uncommon varieties [see 110/2]). She/
is figuratively correct, however, since Quilty is hunting the enchanter
(Lolita), and it is apt that Pratt, her keeper, should make this accurate
“error.” For a summary of Quilty allusions, see 33/9. j
1 99/ 1 She is in Mushroom: the very astute reader of Who's Who in the
Limelight knows this already; see 33/8.
199/2 girls': the apostrophe was omitted in the 1958 edition.
200/1 Reynolds: Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), English painter. “The Age
of Innocence” portrays a very young girl alone under a tree.
200/2 Baker: George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) gave a famous course in
playwrighting at Harvard, and his Dramatic Technique (1919) was a
popular text.
Chapter 12
200/3 Tristramson: Tristram[n] was the famous hero of Celtic
legend, and the love of Tristram and Iseult has often been celebrated. '
The story of Tristram is in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur (1485),:
Books Ten through Twelve. Matthew Arnold treated the theme in “Tris-
tram and Iseult” (1852), Swinburne in “Tristram of Lyonesse” (1871),'
and Tennyson in “The Last Tournament” (1871). “Tristram in movie-
[ 394 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 200-202
love,” notes H.H. (p. 256). The punning name of the physician who ex-
amines Lolita is in the spirit of a novel that is both a love story and a
parody of love stories; but, more than that, it acknowledges Laurence
Sterne, whose involuted and a-realistic Tristra?n Shandy (1767) might be
called the first modern novel (for the Shandy reference, see also Keys, p.
: 96). The aesthetic kinship of Sterne and Joyce and Nabokov, which has
nothing to do with “literary influence,” is strong enough to call both
Ulysses and Lolita “Tristram’s sons.” “I love Sterne but had not read
him in my Russian period,” says Nabokov (Wisconsm Sttidies inter-
view). See 257/4 for another Sterne allusion.
'00/4 caloricity: “the physiological ability to develop and maintain bodily
heat.”
’00/5 Ve?2us febriculosa: Latin; “slightly feverish Venus.” Lolita’s malady
in mock medicalese. See 139/1 for other references to the Roman god-
dess of love and beauty. See pp. 272 and 276 for allusions to Botticelli’s
famous painting of her.
201/1 Doris Lee .. .Frederick Waugh: the Doris Lee (1905- ) painting
under discussion is called “Noon.” It shows a man with his hat over his
face, asleep on a haystack, while in the foreground a girl and another
man are making love beside a haystack (reproduced in Life, III, Sep-
tember 20, 1937). All of these artists are realistic painters. Grant Wood
(1892-1942) is w'ell-known for his meticulous renderings of eminently
American subjects, especially for “American Gothic” (1930) — “good title
for book”- — the coolly sardonic portrait of a Midwestern farm couple.
The subject matter of Peter Hurd (1904- ) is primarily Southwest-
ern, including his portrait painting (his name became legend in 1967
when President Lyndon B. Johnson refused a Hurd portrait of him, call-
ing it the “ugliest thing I ever saw”). Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) in-
defatigably chronicled the common (if not low) life of New York City,
in a Style more graphic than painterly (a misprint in his name has been
corrected [r instead of c in the 1958 edition]). Frederick Waugh (1861-
1940) concentrated on marine subjects. Like their maker (see 265/3),
Nabokov’s characters usually know a good deal about art and express
their opinions freely (see Fnin, pp. 95-99).
Chapter 13
202/ 1 Elizabethan: that epoch’s play-within-the-play is relevant here, for
The Enchanted Hunters functions in the same manner (as do other “play-
[ 395 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 202-203
lets” mentioned on p. 203, though the latter are of less significance). See
53/1 and the Introduction, pp. xxix-xxx.
202/ 2 Diana: Roman moon goddess, patroness of hunting and virginity;
identified with the Greek Artemis.
202/ 3 suggested the play's title: the title was of course suggested by Lolita’s
enchantment of H.H. and Quilty; their conversation at the hotel is on
pp. 128-129. As happens so often in the universe of Nabokov’s fiction,
the title reflects or refracts a motif distant in time but not in space, in-
sofar as “the poet . . . is the nucleus” of everything (Speak, Memory, p.
218). The year of his death, Sebastian Knight “is said to have been three
times to see the same film — a perfectly insipid one called The Enchanted
Garden" (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight [1941], p. 184). See In-
troduction, p. xxviii, and, for typical examples, 5/3, 14/1, 190/1, and
242/1.
203/ 1 Hansel and Gretel: the three “playlets” are adaptations of fairy tales
that have to do with deception or enchantment.
203/ 2 Richard Roe: a party to legal proceedings whose real name is un-
known; the second party when two are unknown, just as “John Doe”J
is the first party. Dorothy Doe is an alliterative party of no legal sig-
nificance.
203/3 Maurice Vermont ... Rumpelmeyer: Nabokov says, “I vaguely but
persistently feel that both Vermont and Rumpelmeyer exist!” (prob-
ably culled from a telephone directory). Whether “real” or not, these
names were chosen because they are a play on (and with) the emperor’s
old clothes: to rumple (to form irregular folds) and the Vermont, a ,
merino sheep having greatly exaggerated skin folds. Maurice points be- '
low to Maeterlinck, a purveyor of more pretentious fairy tales; while
Rumpelmeyer also suggests Rumpelstiltskin, a fairy tale that is resolved
only when the fair protagonist discovers the grotesque villain’s name. For ,
a similar moment in Lolita, see p. 274.
203/4 Lenormand: Henri Rene Lenormand (1882-1951). In the period be-
tween the two world wars, he was the center of those French drama- i
tists concerned with subconscious motivation. He was regarded as a
Freudian, but he claimed that his plays were based on emotional con-
flicts rather than on intellectual systems. Lenormand believed that all
altruistic action was motivated by egoistic impulses. In his plays man
is set in physical nature and climatic conditions are considered as a shap-
ing force in human behavior. Le Temps est un songe (1919) and
[ 396 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 203-205
rOmbre du mal ( 1924) are among his best-known works. The allusion
to Lenormand is generalized, says Nabokov. Although some of them
are a parodist’s delight, Nabokov had no specific Lenormand works in
mind. Lenormand’s play. La Maison des Remparts, features a girl named
Lolita, but Nabokov has never seen or read it.
>03/5 Maeterlinck: the reputation of Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
was at its height in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade
of this century, when the Belgian-born writer’s anti-naturalistic sym-
bolist plays exerted a wide influence. In an effort to communicate the
mysteries of man’s inner life and his relation to the universe, he created
a theater of stasis, rich in atmosphere and short in action. He won the
Nobel prize for literature in 1911. Among his most famous plays are
Pelleas et Melisande (1892) and L'Oiseau bleu (1909); see 252/7 and
303/5-
103/6 British dreamers: Nabokov has in mind Sir James M. Barrie (1860-
1937), Scottish novelist and dramatist who wrote Feter Fan (1904) and
A Kiss for Cinderella (1916), and Lewis Carroll (see 133/3 and 266/1).
103/7 seventh Hunter: see 251/2 and the Introduction, p. xxx.
".03/8 elves: for “elves” and the fairy tale theme, see 33/3, which under-
scores the fact that the entertainment is indeed “the poet’s invention.”
104/ 1 Was it?: her euphoria is caused by the realization that Quilty has
named his play in her honor.
Chapter 14
.04/2 Miss Emperor: Mile. Lempereur is Emma Bovary’s music teacher.
By pretending to go to lessons Emma is able to meet Leon in Rouen
and deceive her husband (Part III, Chapter 5). See also Keys, p. 25.
See 147/3 for Flaubert.
04/3 Gustave's: because Lolita has followed Emma’s example, Flaubert
(not Trapp) is still on H.H.’s mind.
05/ 1 mon pauvre ami . . . saluent: French; my poor fellow, I have never
seen you again and although there is little likelihood of your seeing my
book, allow me to tell you that I give you a very cordial handshake and
that all my little girls send you greetings.
05/ 2 d'un . . . contrit: French; a look of contrived mortification.
NOTES FOR PAGES 2O5-209
205/3 rehearsing .. .with Mona: she meets Quilty here. See 33/9 for £
summary of his appearances.
206/ 1 pommettes: cheekbones. A corrected author’s error (not italicizec
in 1958 edition).
208/1 haddocky: fishy (akin to the cod); the adjectival use is H.H.’s.
208/2 dackel: German; a dachshund.
208/ 3 Mr. Hyde: in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydt
(1886), Hyde similarly knocks over a little girl. Note that H.H. identi
fies himself with the evil self of Stevenson’s Doppelgdnger tale. Foi
Stevenson, see 160/1 and the Introduction, pp. Ixiv and Ixvi. 1
209/ 1 hurriedly hung up: the conversation was with Quilty. 1
209/2 Pirn . . .Pippa: an allusion to the play Mr. Pirn Passes By (1919)1
by A.A. Milne (1882-1956), and to Browning’s Pippa Passes. See alsc
Keys, p. 20. See 119/2 for another reference to Pippa Passes, and Pali
Fire, p. 186. For My Last Duchess's Fra Pandolf, see Pale Fire, p. 246. j
209/3 toujours . . . Dublinois: “I have always admired the [ormonde'l
work of the sublime Dubliner.” The sublime one is James Joyce, but or
monde does not exist in French; it refers to Dublin’s Hotel Ormonc
(no e), whose restaurant provides the setting for the so-called “Sirens’
episode of Ulysses, and whose name is a most Joycean pun — hors [d<
cc] monde (“out-of-this-world,” a further tribute). (See also Keys, p
20.) The reverential allusion is delivered obliquely in the requisitt
Joycean manner. Also in the Dubliner’s spirit is the “jolls-joyce” cai
in which the hero of Ada rides in one scene (p. 473). See 6/1 1. In i
1966 National Educational Television network interview, Nabokov sak
the “greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order
Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Bely’s St. Petersburg; and thf;
first half of Proust’s fairy tale. In Search of Lost Time." “On fait sot \
grand Joyce after doing one’s petit Proust," reads a parenthetical state-; ;
ment in Ada, added to the “manuscript” by gently derisive Ada herself '
“In [her] lovely hand” (p. 169). When Vera Nabokov saw some of tht |
opened pages of the annotator’s copy of Lolita, the typeface barely visibli I
beneath an overlay of comments in several colors of pencil and ink, sh(-
turned to her husband and said, “Darling, it looks like your copy o; ,
Ulysses." Although there are strong artistic affinities between Joyce anq j
Nabokov, he dismisses the possibility of formal “influence”: “My firs j
real contact with Ulysses, after a leering glimpse in the early ’twenties j
[ 398 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 2O9
vas in the ’thirties at a time when I was definitely formed as a writer
,nd immune to any literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only
nuch later, in the ’fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses. That was
he best part of the education 1 received at Cornell” (Wisconsin Studies
nterview). See 223/1.
In addition to admiring Joyce, Nabokov also knew him. “I saw
Joyce] a few times in Paris in the late ’thirties,” recalls Nabokov. “Paul
ind Lucie Leon, close friends of his, were also old friends of mine. One
light they brought him to a French lecture I had been asked to deliver
in Pushkin under the auspices of Gabriel Marcel (it was later published
n the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise). I had happened to replace at the very
ast moment a Hungarian woman writer, very famous that winter, au-
:hor of a bestselling novel, I remember its title. La Rue du Chat qui
^eche, but not the lady’s name. A number of personal friends of mine,
earing that the sudden illness of the lady and a sudden discourse on
?ushkin might result in a suddenly empty house, had done their best
;o round up the kind of audience they knew I would like to have. The
louse had, however, a pied aspect since some confusion had occurred
imong the lady’s fans. The Hungarian consul mistook me for her hus-
land and, as I entered, dashed towards me with the froth of condolence
in his lips. Some people left as soon as I started to speak. A source of
inforgettable consolation was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and
glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team. Another
ime my wife and I had dinner with him at the Leons’ followed by a
ong friendly evening of talk. I do not recall one word of it but my
vife remembers that Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod,
he Russian ‘mead,’ and everybody gave him a different answer.”
Nabokov makes a Joycean appearance in Gisele Freund and V.B.
/arleton’s James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years (New York, 1965).
Pictured on pp. 44-45 is a meeting of the editorial board of the Parisian
■ournal Mesures. Nine literati are shown gathered around a garden table,
ind a caption identifies the group, which includes Sylvia Beach, Adri-
;nne Monnier, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan — and Jacques Audiberti,
i tall, thin man standing in the back, looking down, his face in shadows,
a trace of a smile suggesting some miraculous foreknowledge of the cap-
ion that twenty-eight years later would mistakenly identify him as
‘Audiberti,” and in thus denying the existence of the already pseudony-
nous V. Sirin, would summarize the vicissitudes and spectral qualities of
Russian emigre life, and cast him as The Mystery Man in the Garden,
!i role based on the nameless man in the brown macintosh, the mystery
nan of Ulysses, the “lankylooking galoot” (as Bloom calls him) whose
[ 399 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 209-212
name is misunderstood by a newspaper reporter as “M’Intosh,” unde
which name he is immortalized. The photo is also included in TriQuar
terly 17 (Winter 1970).
209/4 C'est enteyidu?: French; that’s agreed? !
209/5 l^enore: although Poe wrote a poem thusly titled, the primary allu
sion is to the title character in one of the most popular dramatic ballad
of Gottfried August Burger (1747-1794), German poet of the Stum
und Drang period. H.H. echoes the best-known line, in which Lenon
and her ghostly lover ride off: '‘‘‘Und hurre, hurre, hop, hop, hop
hop! . . y (line 149). See also Keys, p. 1410. The allusion is ironic, sinc(
Lenore grieves over her lover. Nabokov discusses the poem in the Com
mentary to his Eugene Onegin translation (Vol. Ill, pp. 153-154).
209/6 qui . . .te?nps: French; who was taking his time.
Chapter 15
210/1 Professor Chem: for “Chemistry.”
210/2 edusively (placed!): a portmanteau word; from educible (educe ;
“to draw forth; elicit”; see Edusa, p. 21 1), coined to rhyme with effu-
sively. By punning on Edusa’s name he manages to place her.
210/3 author: Quilty. See 33/9.
2ii/i Edusa Gold: named after the Clouded Yellow, a golden-orange
European butterfly known at one time as Colias edusa. See 233/1. Foj
entomological allusions, see 8/1.
2 1 1/2 Some old woman: Quilty; Lolita’s diversionary ploy is successful
see 275/1.
2 1 1/3 natural climax: an echo of the “traumatic” experience; 15/3.
Chapter 16
2 1 2/ 1 le montagnard emigre: “the exiled mountaineer,” the legend undei
a picture of Chateaubriand and the title of one of his romances (a sentii
mental ballad or song). An emigre is an expatriate; the word originall)
referred to Royalist fugitives from the French Revolution (such a:
Chateaubriand). Le Montagnard emigre was first published in 180C
and later included in Chateaubriand’s story Les Aventures du dernia 1
Abencerage, where the untitled verses are sung by a young Frencl ,
[ 400 ] ,
NOTES FOR PAGES 2 I 2-2 1 4
prisoner of war. Several of its lines are important in Ada, and appear
literally at the center of the Ardis section; see pp. 138-139 and 141 (also
see pp. 106, 192, 241, 342, 428, and 530). For more on Chateaubriand, see
147/4-
12/2 Felis tigris goldsmithi: taxonomic Latin: “Goldsmith’s tiger” (Felis:
genus; tigris: species; goldsmithi: subspecies), an allusion to line 356 of
“The Deserted Village” (1770), by Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1730-1774);
“where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey” (the animal is in fact
a cougar rather than a tiger). “I found it and I named it, being versed/
in taxonomic Latin,” writes Nabokov in his poem “A Discovery” (8/1).
Surely the same cannot be said of H.H., who is completely unversed in
such matters (see Nabokov’s remarks, 8/1).
12/3 catalpas: botanical term; “any of a small genus of American and
Asiatic trees of the trumpet-creeper family.”
12/4 Nebraska .. .first whiff of the West: a parody of the state’s omni-
present pre-1960 slogan, “Nebraska — Where the West Begins!”
12/5 Red Rock: the initial rock is on p. 15.
12/6 caravansary : see 166/1.
13/1 detective tale: one of the works of Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941),
who was a kind of French Conan Doyle. See 25 V5-
13/2 persons unknown: Quilty. For a summary of allusions to him, see
33/9-
13/3 sign of Pegasus: trademark of Mobil Oil; in Greek mythology, Pega-
sus is the winged horse sprung from Medusa at her death. Because a
blow of his hoof brought forth Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses,
he is an emblem of poetic inspiration.
13/4 that bug: according to Nabokov, “this ‘patient bug’ is not necessarily
a moth — it could be some clumsy big fly or miserable beetle.” For ento-
mological allusions, see 8/1.
14/1 the Conche: Shell Oil’s trademark; in Greek mythology, the sea
demigod Triton, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, played a trumpet made
of a conch. See 229/2.
14/2 Chestnut Court: throughout the novel, the smallest verbal units are
undergoing a kind of metamorphosis (see 120/3). The chestnut trees
below the motel are said to be “toylike,” and H.H. is indeed toying with
[ 401 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 2 1 4-2 I 7
“Chestnuts.” On p. 215, “Chestnut Court” becomes “Chestnut Castle,
five lines later turns into “Chestnut Crest,” and on p. 217 it returns t(
its “Chestnut Court” form; given a new context on p. 218, it becomes ;
horse. See 253/12, by which time it has become “Chestnut Lodge.” A
happens so often, Nabokov himself has described the process best: “Thi!
names Gogol invents are really nicknames which we surprise in the ven
act of turning into family names — and a metamorphosis is a thing alway
exciting to watch” (Gogol, p. 43).
214/3 elf-like girl on an insect-like bicycle: H.H. has just mentione*
that they are near Lolita’s home town of Pisky (“pixie”; see 48/1); elve
are thus indigenous to the region, and Nabokov has blended the fairy
tale theme with the entomological motif.
2 1 5/1 Chestnut Castle: see 214/2.
215/2 “Bertoldo'” ... comedy: the famous clown of Italian popular legend
who was the subject of a sixteenth-century collection of witty tales
Vita di Bertoldo, by Giulio Ceasare Croce. Bertoldo is planted here u
show that H.H. could easily understand Quilty’s later allusion to Italiai
comedy (p. 250).
215/3 red hood: Quilty; the devil’s presence is more than fleeting; see 216/2
His appearances are summarized in 33/9.
215/4 eod-piece fashion: in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a flap o
bag, often ornamental, concealing an opening in the front of men’
breeches; cod-piece is archaic for “penis” (often used by such writers a
Frangois Rabelais [c. 1490-1553], author of Gargantua).
216/1 adolori . . . langueur: “affected by love’s languor.” The phrase “d
amour euse langueur" appears several times, with slight variations, ii
Ronsard’s Amours. “Adolori,” a punning tribute to Lolita (d Dolores)
is of course H.H.’s addition. See also Keys, p. 1370. See 49/2 for anothe
Ronsard allusion.
216/2 diabolical glow: Quilty. She was with him at about the time H.H
was having his hair cut by the grotesque barber ( p. 215).
217/1 the shadow: Quilty is continually identified as such.
217/2 Gros: French; fat.
[ 402 ]
Chapter 17
NOTES FOR PAGES 2 I 7 - 2 2 2
217/3 “luizetta" : H.H.’s invention; from louis d'or, the French gold coin.
>17/4 the . . . life we all had rigged: that “we all” ( = H.H., Quilty, McFate,
and Nabokov) involutes the narrative once more. See 34/7.
218/1 hurley ... Krestovski: see 90/1. The punning adjective summarizes
his essence: burly (sturdy, stout) plus hurley (an American tobacco,
, used in cigarettes and plugs).
Chapter 1 8
>18/2 Chestnuts and Colts: freed from all modifiers (see 214/2), the trees,
motels, and unstated brand names of tbe above pistols are here able to
frolic together briefly as horses. “We are faced by the remarkable phe-
nomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures,”
as Nabokov says of Dead Souls (Gogol, p. 78).
219/1 Aztec Red: Quilty’s “red shadow” and “red beast” (p. 221), charac-
I terized below as a “Red Yak.”
^19/2 Jovia??: in Roman mythology, Jove (or Jupiter) is god of the sky.
219/3 done: French; therefore.
219/4 crepitating: crackling.
219/5 Jutting Chin .. .funnies: the comic strip Dick Tracy, created by
Chester Gould (1900- ) in 1931.
220/1 of niy age . . . rosebud . . . mouth: Quilty; the fact and the motif are
familiar. H.H. had thought of growing such a mustache (50/1), and they
also own similar bathrobes (p. 296).
'22i/i O lente . . . equi: “O slowly run, horses of the night”; H.H.’s adjacent
' “translation” puns on the literal Latin (night mares). Less one lente,
this line is from The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor
'■ Faustus (V, ii, 140), by Christopher Marlowe ( 1564-1593). With only one
hour left before eternal damnation, Faustus hopes for more time. H.H.
. does not try to “outspeed” Quilty, that latter-day Mephistopheles. See
also Keys, pp. 31-32. For a similar pun — nightmares and stallions — see
Ada, p. 214.
221/2 viatic: see 161/3.
222/ 1 lady . . . lightning: see 33/ ii. The allusions to The Lady Who Loved
Lightnmg and “Fatface” anticipate the next passage, in which H.H. and
‘ Lolita attend Quilty’s play. He and his collaborator are mentioned by
name on p. 223 and even appear on stage.
[ 403 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 222-223
222/2 Soda, pop. 1001: there is in California a Lake Soda, pop. unknown.
The magical “looi” is well chosen. It is simultaneously a numerical mir-
roring (see 53/2) and an allusion to the fairy-tale theme (see 33/3)
via another vertiginously involuted work, The Thousand and One Nights.
222/3 flatus: gas generated in the bowels or stomach.
222/4 kurortish: Kurort is German for “health resort” (see p. 157); the
usage is H.H.’s own.
223/1 children-colors . . . a passage in James Joyce: the colors of the spec-
trum; the “living rainbow” mimed by the “seven little graces” on p. 222.
It is from Finnegans Wake. The theme of the diversity and unity of all
things is central to the constantly metamorphosing dream world of Fin-
negans Wake. The seven colors of the spectrum represent diversity and
are most frequently personified by seven “rainbow girls” who oppose the
archetypal mother, Anna Livia Plurabelle. The book opens with a reversed
rainbow; the seven clauses in the second paragraph each contain a color,
shifting from violet to red. Although not wrong, H.H.’s mention of a
single “passage” is misleading because the motif is sustained throughout
the Wake. To have the hateful Quilty “lift” from Finnegans Wake^
rather than Ulysses constitutes a rather private and thus thoroughly;
Joycean joke, based on Nabokov’s low opinion of the book he calls
Punnigans Wake, or, in Bend Sinister, keeping its vast liquidity in mind,
'‘‘‘Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition” (p. 103). “Ulysses
towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings,” says Nabokov, “and in com-
parison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style
the unfortunate Finnegan's Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass,
of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the
next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am. . . . Finnegans Wake'&
fa9ade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only
the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter:
insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronounce-i
ment” {Wisconsin Studies interview). Charles Kinbote sustains his mak-i
er’s negative opinion: “it would have been unseemly for a monarch toj
appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to
rosy youths Finnigan's [sic — A.A.] Wake as a monstrous extension of
Angus MacDiarmid’s ‘incoherent transactions’ and of Southey’s Lingo-
Grande (‘Dear Stumparumper,’ etc.) . . .” (Pale Fire, p. 76).
Joyce himself helped to introduce Nabokov to Finnegans Wake. Ini
Paris in 1937 or 1938, he gave Nabokov Haveth Childers Everywhere
(1930), one of the fragments published before the Wake was completed.
Future commentators will no doubt find several echoes of Finnegans]
[ 404 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 223
Wake in Lolita; but it could hardly be otherwise, since Joyce’s book is
so inclusive, so monstrously allusive (Phineas Quimby appears on p. 536
of the Wake [standard American edition], and on p. 252 of Lolita — but
who doesn't appear in Finnegans Wake?). Moreover, Joyce’s punning
mutations anticipate and echo sentences which are yet to be written.
The hero of Finnegans Wake is HCE — Here Comes Everybody, Hum-
phrey Chimpden Earwicker, usually just Humphrey (with a humped
back). Since he is “Everyman,” there are some forty humming variations
of his name, and, “influences” aside, there is statistically reason enough
for some of Nabokov’s humorously distorted forms of “Humbert” to
coincide with a few of Joyce’s punning phonetic variants. Thus Na-
bokov’s sartorially splendid “Homburg” (p. m) complements Joyce’s
“Humborg” (p. 72), and Joyce’s “Humfries” (p. 97) should surely be
I served with Nabokov’s “Hamburg[s]” (pp. iii and 263) — but these are
all coincidences, says Nabokov, for, “Generally speaking, FW is a very
small and blurry smudge on the mirror of my memory.” The only per-
sistent “smudge” is a trace of Anna Livia Plurabelle. In Bend Sinister,
■ Ophelia is imagined “wrestling — or, as another rivermaid’s father would
have said, ‘wrustling’ — with the willow” (p. 102); and in Ada, the title
character alludes to the music of the self-contained A.L.P. section: “Did
! he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen?” she wonders (p.
54). The “children-colors,” however, constitute the only intentional
allusion to Finnegans Wake in Lolita. For a summary of Joyce allusions,
see 6/ 1 1.
>3/2 Orange . . . and Emerald: when I asked Nabokov if he chose these
particular colors because they are also the common names of a butterfly
and a moth, respectively, Nabokov responded: “The Dubliner’s rain-
bow of children on p. 223 would have been a meaningless muddying of
metaphors had I tried to smuggle in a Pierid of the Southern States and
a European moth. My only purpose here was to render a prismatic effect.
May I point out (at the risk of being pretentious) that I do not see the
■ colors of lepidoptera as I do those of less familiar things — girls, gardens,
garbage (similarly, a chessplayer does not see white and black as white
and black), and that, for instance, if I use ‘morpho blue’ I am thinking
not of one of the many species of variously blue Morpho butterflies of
South America, but of the ornaments made of bits of the showy wings
of the commoner species. When a lepidopterist uses ‘Blues,’ a slangy but
handy term, for a certain group of Lycaenids, he does not see that word
' in any color connection because he knows that the diagnostic undersides
: of their wings are not blue but dun, tan, grayish, etc., and that many
NOTES FOR PAGES 225-229
Blues, especially in the female, are brown, not blue. In my case, th(
differentiation in artistic and scientific vision is particularly strong be
cause I was really born a landscape painter, not a landless escape novelis
as some think.” For more on “blue,” see 265/3; for ^ more generalizec
discussion of color, see 58/1.
Chapter 19
224/1 P. O. Wace and P. O. Elphinstone: = P.O.W. and Poe, and the im
prisonment theme.
225/1 Ne manque ... Qu' il t'y: an allusion to Quilty and a parody of thi
classical alexandrine verse of seventeenth-century France, specifically o
Le Cid (1636), by Pierre Corneille (1606-1684): “Do not fail to tell youi,
suitor, Chimene, how beautiful the lake is, because he should take yot
there.” Chimene is from Le Cid, but the line itself is invented. See also
Keys, p. 71. For an index to Quilty references, see 33/9.
225/2 the mysterious nastiness: Mona knew all about Quilty and injectec
his name. H.H. is not supposed to understand, at the time, the plante(
“qu'’il t'y,” though he suspects some nasty trick.
225/3 a titre documentaire: French; just for the record.
225/4 behold: H.H. toys with the worn interjection, “Lo and be
hold,” as Lolita did much earlier (52/3).
226/1 detective: Trapp (Quilty).
227/1 Browns: “Browns” reappear on pp. 247, 253, and 255.
227/2 Cokes: the 1958 edition did not capitalize the trademark; the erro
has been corrected.
228/1 intacta: H.H. uses the Latin form of the common word “intact,” bu
invokes its less common meaning, “untouched virgin.”
228/2 boy friend: Quilty.
228/3 bearded scholar: “Another little bit of prophecy” (see 160/5), ^^ 7 '
Nabokov. “Lots of bearded young scholars around these days.”
228/4 la pomme de sa canne: French; the round knob of a cane.
229/1 Mirana: H.H.’s father had owned a Mirana hotel; see 12/5.
Ill
229/2 Proteus of the highway: Quilty; from Greek mythology; a prophet!
sea-god in Poseidon’s service, who would assume different shapes whe
seized.
[ 406 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 2 2 9-2 3 I
9/3 remises: carriage houses.
9/4 Mehnoth: a triple allusion. There is no such car; it is named after
the four-volume Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer ( 1820), by Charles
Robert Maturin (1782-1824), Irish clergyman and writer (also identified
in Keys, p. 31). In his Eugene Onegin Commentary, Nabokov calls Ma-
turin’s Melmoth a “gloomy vagabond” (Vol. II, p. 352). “The book, al-
though superior to [Monk] Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe, is essentially
second-rate, and Pushkin’s high regard for it (in the French version)
is the echo of a French fashion,” writes Nabokov {ibid., p. 353). Na-
bokov’s paraphrase of the “action” of Mehnoth the Wanderer (ibid.)
underscores the humor of naming H.H.’s car after it:
[John Melmoth] and his uncle are descendants of the diabolical
Melmoth the Traveler (“’Where he treads, the earth is parched!
' Where he breathes, the air is fire! Where he feeds, the food is
poison! Where he turns his glance, is lightning. . . . His presence
converts bread and wine into matter as viperous as the suicide foam
of the dying Judas...”). John discovers a moldering manuscript.
What follows is a long tale full of tales within tales — shipwrecks,
madhouses, Spanish cloisters — and here I begin to nod.
Melmoth’s nature is marked by pride, intellectual glorying, “a
boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge,” and a sarcastic
levity that makes of him “a Harlequin of the infernal regions.”
Maturin used up all the platitudes of Satanism, while remaining on
the side of the conventional angels. His hero enters into an agree-
ment with a Certain Person who grants him power over time, space,
and matter (that Lesser Trinity) under the condition that he tempt
wretches in their hour of extremity with deliverance if they ex-
change situations with him.
Maturin’s novel most likely supplied Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) with his
post-prison pseudonym of “Sebastian Melmoth.” In addition, adds Na-
bokov, “Melmoth may come from Mellonella Moth (which breeds in
beehives) or, more likely, from Meal Moth (which breeds in grain).”
For entomological allusions, see 8/1.
9/5 grays ... his favorite cryptochromism: a coinage; “secret colors.” It
is also an authorial favorite, in view of the puns on Haze, shadow, and
ombre.
t/i ‘’’'ordeal of the orb": changing the tire.
1/2 gigantic truck . . . impossible to pass: a fear confirmed; see 162/1.
[ 407 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 23 1-2 3 5
Chapter 20
231/3 “Love Under the Lindens'’’: planted between famous plays by Henr
Ibsen (1828-1906) and Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) is a combination (
Desire Under the Elms (1924), by Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), an
Unter den Linden (a boulevard in Berlin). See also Keys, p. 1500. T 1
portmanteau title, credited to “Eelmann” (O’Neill plus Thomas Mann
is mentioned in Ada (p. 403). Nabokov’s low opinion of O’Neill
Mourning Becomes Electra is expressed in Gogol (p. 55).
232/1 flashlight: a corrected author’s error (instead of “torchlight” in tl
1958 edition). The quotation marks which enclosed this extract in tl
1958 edition have also been corrected.
232/2 Cyrano ... sleeping stranger: after rereading this passage in 196
Nabokov belatedly put words in H.H.’s mouth: “Cyrano’s big nos
Cyranose. Sorry myself to have missed that portmantoid pun. ‘A sleepin
stranger,’ ” he added, “is enchanting and haunting.” Edmond Rostand
famous play (1897) is based on the life of Cyrano de Bergerac (1615
1655), French writer and soldier. “Cyraniana” in Ada (p. 339) alludes 1
his most famous work, Histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lm
(1656; modern edition: A Voyage to the Moon).
232/3 petit rat: a young ballet student at the Paris Opera (ages nine
fourteen).
233/1 Electra: “The name is based on that of a close ally of the Cloude 1
Yellow butterfly,” says Nabokov, “and has nothing to do with the Gree >
Electra.” See 211/1. For entomological allusions, see 8/1. '
234/1 Ned Litam: the anagrammatic (it reads backwards) pseudonyr
under which the great tennis player William T. (Bill) Tilden II wrot
fiction. See 164/3.
234/2 endorsing a Dromedary: like Quilty; see 71/2. Note how H.H.
continually providing oblique clues; see 33/9 for a summary of Quilt
allusions.
234/3 fifty -three: the 1958 edition omitted the hyphen; the error has bee
corrected.
235/1 susceptible to the magic of games . . .1 saw the board: H.H. is speal
ing for his maker, who would hope that the reader shares this limpi
view of the gameboard that is Lolita.
[ 408 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 235-237
25/2 stratagems: “beautiful word, stratagem — a treasure in a cave,” writes
Nabokov in Gogol (p. 59).
25/3 tessellated: laid with checkered work or adorned with mosaic.
26/ 1 Decugis or Borman: Max Decugis was a great European tennis player
who often teamed with Gobbert (see 164/4). They were Wimbledon
men’s doubles champions in 19 ii. Paul de Borman was the Belgian cham-
pion in the first decade of this century. Nabokov recalls, “He was left-
handed, and one of the first Europeans to use a sliced (or twist) service.
There is a photograph of him in the Wallis Myers book on tennis (c.
1913).” I could not find the Myers book, but Decugis and Borman are
discussed in George W. Beldman and P.A. Vaile’s Great Lawn Tennis
Players (New York, 1907). Beldman deplores Borman’s lack of aggres-
siveness and poor position (resulting from the way he used his body to
achieve his spins and cut shots), and writes of him, inimitably, “I do not
know that he has a single perfect stroke, yet in every shot he made there
was education for him who was able to take it” (pp. 350-351). Nabokov
took it, and immortalized Borman in Lolita. At first wince (to quote
H.H.), such minutiae may seem no better than Kinbotisms, but they are
calmly offered as an example of the precise manner in which Nabokov’s
memory speaks to him and, as well, to suggest how he does indeed stock
his “imaginary garden with real toads” (see 121/1).
25/2 butter-fly: although Nabokov intends no “symbolism,” it appears
after H.H. has come as close to capturing Lolita’s grace as he ever will.
Nabokov only comments, “Butterflies are indeed inquisitive, and the dip-
ping motion is characteristic of a number of genera.” See 8/ 1.
i
25/3 wimbles: any of several instruments for boring holes.
25/4 syncope in the series: an elision or loss of one or more letters or
sounds from the middle of a word.
25/5 Maffy On Say: phonetic American pronunciation of fiancee."
27/ 1 purling: gently murmuring, as a brook.
27/2 three horrible Boschian cripples: one of whom is Quilty. Hierony-
Tious Bosch (c. 1450-1516), the great Elemish master of the grotesque,
whose paintings abound in moral and physiological cripples. “And Elem-
sh hells with porcupines and things” is a brief Boschian vision in the
ooem Pale Fire (line 226). On his deathbed, in Ada, Daniel Veen, an art
collector and Bosch devotee, imagines that he is being put-upon by
:reatures from a Bosch painting, and dies “an odd Boschean death” (pp.
[ 409 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 238-242
435-43^)- Nabokov then comments at length on the butterfly rendere
at the center of Bosch’s “Garden of Delights.”
238/ 1 That . . . intruder .. .a double: Quilty; a pun: a double at tennis an
a Doppelgdnger. See 245/7.
Chapter 21
238/2 red ball: rolled by Quilty, who reappears on p. 239.
239/1 Aztec Red: H.H. remembers the color of Quilty’s car. See 219/1.
239/2 padded shield: like the olisbos of 96/1; Quilty is seen as a grotesqu
Priapus who in this passage transforms nature into a veritable forest c
phalli. Priaps (below) is H.H.’s usage.
Chapter 22
240/1 Elphinstone: where H.H. will lose his “elf”; see 33/3.
240/2 Soyons logiques: French; Let us be logical.
241/1 saguaro: a giant cactus with a thick stem and white flowers. 1
241/2 fatamorganas: mirages: see 12/5. A display in the fabulous depar
ment store in King, Queen, Knave offers “a Fata Morgana of coat
(p. 68).
241/3 Jose Lizzarrabengoa: Carmen’s abandoned lover. See 47/3, 245/4, ar
280/2.
241/4 Etats Unis: French; U.S.A.
241/5 Mrs. Hays: H.H. found Lo at Mrs. Haze’s house, and will now lo:
her at the motor court of Mrs. Hays, also a widow.
242/ 1 Blue: from the common German name, “Blau.” Dr. Starov, fro:
the last chapter of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and D
Blue combine in Pale Fire (1962) to form “The great Starover BIi
[who] reviewed the role / Planets had played as landfalls of the sou
(lines 627-628). See 202/3. '
242/2 heterosexual Erlkonig in pursuit: Quilty; an allusion to Goethe
poem Erlkonig (“Erlking”; king of the elves), in which spectral incai
nations of the Erlking pursue a little boy who rides with his fath^
through the dark and windy forest. Unable to possess the beloved bo
the Erlking wills his death. When the father arrives “safely” at the farn
house, the child is dead in his arms. In Pale Fire, the Zemblan woj
^^alfear” (Nabokov’s coinage) is defined as “uncontrollable fear caus(
by elves” (p. 143); and a passage of John Shade’s (lines 653-664) allud
[ 410 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 242-245
. to Goethe’s poem, especially line 662, which Charles Kinbote likes enough
to scan and then translate into Zemblan (p. 239). See the Onegin Com-
mentary (Vol. II, p. 235). See also Keys, p. 1380. For “elf,” see 33/3.
32/3 '"'’ague": a violent chill.
33/ 1 haute montagne: French; above-timberline pastures.
33/2 Lore . . . Rolas: the importation of Basques and their vicious sheep
dogs, and the place names (Lore, etc.) are “real,” Nabokov having en-
countered them both in the Pyrenees and the Rockies. “Que sais-jeL’
is a French cliche (“and so forth,” “or whatever”).
43/3 French perfume: the Soleil Vert of p. 258.
43/4 secret agent ... or hallucination: Quilty.
43/5 Aurora: the dawn, as personified by the Romans (Eos for the
Greeks). The image of the “warmed hands” means the sun had hardly
risen high enough to warm the hillside.
43/6 lavender: a mint cultivated on hillsides in Southern France, used for
its fragrant oil.
44/1 Clowns and Columbines: H.H.’s invention (the other titles exist).
In the commedia delVarte (see 215/2 and 250/6), the clown Pulcinella
had a dual nature: witty, iroruc, somewhat cruel, yet also silly, fawning,
and timid. Columbine was the eternal coquette whose keen wit allows
her to manipulate the most complex intrigues. She is the constant com-
panion of Harlequin, the volatile, elusive character associated with Mer-
■ cury as the patron of merchants, panderers, and thieves. The analogy
with H.H., Lolita, and Quilty is clear.
44/2 fundament jigging: buttocks.
.44/3 a crumpled envelope: the letter was from Quilty.
44/4 chasse-croise: side stepping and re-side stepping each other.
,45/1 “/e croyais . . . doux”: “I thought that it was a bill — not a love-note”
1 (a pun on bill and billet doux).
'45/2 Deseret News: an actual newspaper in Utah.
I .
145/3 sister Ann: it will be clear in a moment that H.H. is alluding to
] Charles Perrault’s (1628-1703) fairy tale about Bluebeard, who murdered
j six wives. Hoping to be rescued by her two brothers, his seventh wife
I posts her sister Ann as sentinel; “Sister Ann, do you see anyone coming?”
[ 411 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 245-246
is her constant refrain. She finally does, and the “brntal brothers” sk'
Bluebeard. See also Keys, p. 48. When I was writing this note, I calki'i
to my wife in the adjacent room, asking her if she remembered all th'
details in Bluebeard. “I know the story,” replied Karen, my seven-year'
old daughter, running into the room. I showed her the passage in Loliu
and, after helpfully identifying Sister Ann, she read H.H.’s dirge fo
Bluebeard. “Poor Bluebeard,” she quoted, “Poor Bluebeard? He wa
awful! What kind of book is this?” For allusions to Bluebeard in Adc j
see pp. 164 and 180, and in King, Queen, Knave, pp. 263-264. See 33/3
245/4 Est~ce que . . . Carmen: “Do you not love me any more, my Carmen?
Jose says this to Carmen in their penultimate confrontation (Chapte
Three). Jose’s very next beseechment is also quoted by H.H. (280/2)!
For Merimee, see 47/3.
245/5 plotting in Basque: Carmen and Jose plot in Basque in the presence O '
her rich, uncomprehending English lover, whom Jose kills. i
245/6 'Lemfirian: “gypsy”; H.H.’s coinage, from the heroine of The Gypsie'i ^
(1824, published 1827), the long poem by Russia’s greatest poet, Alek;
sandr Pushkin (1799-1837). Another “Carmen” story, its hero Aleko killf
both the treacherous Zemfira and her lover (also see Keys, p. 49). Thj'i
poem is also an affirmation of a gypsy’s freedom, which is another reasoi! i
why H.H. says that the conspiratorial girls are speaking “Zemfirian,” i
well as Basque. Carmen is a gypsy too, and in her last moments proclaim:
this freedom; Ada is cast as Dolores, the fatal gypsy dancing girl in th'i
film Don Juanas Last Fling (Ada, pp. 488-490). /
245/7 double game: a pun; Nabokov is also playing it by leading the readeji
on with a Doppelginger situation that parodies itself. See Introductiorlii
1 :|
245/8 father-substitute: Quilty; a parody of the Freudian “transference:;;
theory, whereby the daughter transfers her affections from her father fij
another, similar man, thus exorcising her Oedipal tension.
246/1 gitanilla: a diminutive of gitana, Spanish for “Gypsy girl,” used ofte]||
in Merimee’s Carmen. In Ada, “Osberg” (Borges) is the author of Th'x
Gitanilla, a novel reminiscent of Lolita (see ii/i), and several allusion'
to Osberg and his influence on Van Veen are jokes aimed at the critic; i
who yoke Nabokov and Borges. A revolving paperback stand (p. 371 j-i
offers The Gitanilla along with several volumes no doubt as racy (Oall
Laddies, Clichy Cliches). j,
246/2 une belle ... en bleu: a beautif”’
the Virgin). “Visionary” nurse
Hautes-^renees of her ancestors is in the same departement (state) a
NOTES FOR PAGES 247-249
..ourdes, where many little French girls have experienced visions of the
)lue-garbed Virgin, phenomena duly celebrated in the press and popu-
ar literature. Nabokov mocks a best-selling romance on the subject in
3 end Sinister, Chapter Three: . . that remarkable cross between a cer-
;ain kind of wafer and a lollipop, Louis Sontag’s Annunciata, which
Jtarted so well in the Caves of St. Barthelemy and ended in the funnies”
|the object of this parody is Franz Werfel’s Song of Bernadette).
27/1 a saint: the lines which follow parody the first half of the fourth
itanza of Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842):
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories.
Steeping tresses in the tank . . .
The lines describe the washing of linen. For more on this passage, see my
1968 Denver Quarterly article, p. 31. For Browning, see 119/2 and 209/2.
27/2 a great holiday: Fourth of July, 1949. “Independence Day — for
Lolita,” says Nabokov.
i
28/1 Mr. Gustave . . . spaniel pup: Lolita has told Quilty that Ff.H. has
uistaken him for his uncle (or cousin), Gustave Trapp; Quilty has
mown this for some time (see 253/4). Lolita liked the old lady’s cocker
spaniel at The Enchanted Hunters (pp. 1 19-120; commented upon by
H.H., 263/4), which eavesdropper Quilty may have recalled and thus
nought her this pup. But one of his three hobbies is “pets” (p. 33). For
references to him, see 33/9.
28/2 Caddy Lack: an obvious pun, but young readers, especially in
2000 A.D., may not know that in the 1947-1952 period the Cadillac was
oy far the most luxurious American car, and a “status symbol,” though
H.H. uses its vulgar diminutive (“Caddy”) to suggest otherwise.
28/3 maquette: a small, preliminary model of something planned, such
IS a stage set.
28/4 telestically: with the projection of a purpose, with a definite end in
v^iew, inwardly expressed.
28/5 hemazed: archaic; bewildered, stupefied.
27/1 "tny brother: Quilty; see 251/1 and 253/13-
Chapter 23
2^/2 fiend's spoor: Quilty’s trail; a “spoor” is the track of a wild animal.
[ 413 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 249-252
249/3 comme il jaut: French; good manners, decorum.
250/1 Kawtagain: “Caught again.” Needless to say, there is no such tow
250/2 542; see 37/4 and 120/3.
250/3 N. Petit ... III.: abbreviated title of the illustrated French dictionar
Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustre. Lucette’s “Little Larousse” in Ada is'i
pun on the French rousse, “red hair” (p. 368).
250/4 a few paces from Lolita's pillow: see 132/1.
250/5 Ponderosa Lodge: the return address on the letter received on p. 24 ;
250/6 Dr. Gratiano . . . Mirandola, N.Y.: in the commedia dell' arte, DoctJ
Gratiano is a philosopher, astronomer, man of letters, cabalist, barriste
grammarian, diplomat, and physician. When the doctor speaks one ca
not tell whether it is Latin or Low Breton, and he frequently deliveij
badly mangled quotations in Latin and Greek. His audiences usual'i
must interrupt and thrash him in order to arrest the tide of “eloquence;
The nonexistent “town” Mirandola has nothing to do with Pico, tlL
Italian humanist, Nabokov says; like Forbeson, he was a minor charactj|
in Italian comedy. Nor, says Nabokov, does he intend any allusion 1 )
Mirandolina, the heroine of Mine Hostess, by Carlo Goldoni, Itali,
playwright. See 244/1.
251/ 1 your brother: H.H. has already said this of Quilty.
251/2 an impossible balance: a very important passage. The verbal figui,
tions throughout Lolita demonstrate how Nabokov appears everywhe]
in the texture but never in the text, though the impersonator “come[j
damn close to it” (see 203/7), especially in the “cryptogrammic papj
chase” on the next two pages. “Trapp” ’s balancing act lucidly descrit]
the performance of both the narrator and his creator, while the “thrasj
ing anguish” also belongs to John Ray’s “old-fashioned readers.”
252/1 logodaedaly [p. 251] and logomancy: to prove that he is versed I
logodaedaly (the arbitrary or capricious coining of words), H.H. tj
logomachist creates his own word from logo (word) plus the suri
-mancy (“divination in a [specified] manner”). |i
252/2 Quelquepart: French; somewhere. Quilty must be there. See 253)?
• P
252/3 fountain pen ... repressed undinist .. .water nymphs in the S/iij-
a most liquid passage. An undine is a female water spirit who could t
quire a soul by marrying a mortal. “But,” adds Nabokov, “the
point here is that ‘undinist’ is a person (generally male) who is erotij
ally excited by another person’s (generally female) making water (H^t
[ 414 ] I
NOTES FOR PAGE 252
lock Ellis was an ‘undinist,’ or ‘fountainist,’ and so was Leopold Bloom).”
Ellis was the first to use the word this way, and H.H. — like Quilty, “an
amateur of sex lore” — no doubt has read the section on “Undinism” in
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VII. In Greek mythology, the
Styx is the main river of the lower world.
22/4 passion . . . cryptogrammic paper chase: Quilty is indeed a tease, but
so is H.H., who punningly alludes to the “melancholy truth” about
Quilty’s virtual impotence (p. 300). Thus H.H. refers to Cue’s “teasing,”
his “passion for tantalization” (that is, his main passion), and the “ejacu-
lat[ion]” of “his fiendish conundrum.” The summary word “crypto-
grammic” includes “cryptogamic” (“belonging or relating to the non-
flowering plants”), which alludes to his sexuality, as well as his crvpto-
games. These games may be more gratifying than some, since Quilty’s
literary sources are so broadly hinted at in the text.
22/5 Arsine Lupin: the creation of Maurice Leblanc (see 21 3/1). See also
Keys, p. 12. Most of the allusions in the two-page “paper chase” are
also identified in Keys, pp. 12-19. Arsine Lupin contre Sherlock Holmes
(1908) and Les Confidences d' Arsine Lupin (1914) are typical of the
many Lupin volumes. For Conan Doyle, see 66/1. Hermann, the narrator
of Despair, wonders, “But what are they — Doyle, Dostoevsky, Leblanc,
Wallace— what are all the great novelists who wrote of nimble criminals
... in comparison with me? Blundering fools!” (p. 132).
■.2/6 A. Person, Porlock: in the note which he affixed to “Kubla Khan”
(1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the English poet, explains
how his dream was interrupted: “At this moment he was unfortunately
called out by a person on business from Porlock. . . .” H.H.’s “dream”
has been interrupted with equal finality by Quilty. In “The Vane Sis-
ters” (1959; in Nabokov's Quartet and Nabokov's Congeries), a story
about psychic phenomena, there is an eccentric librarian named Porlock,
“who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining
old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of ‘1’ for the
.second ‘h’ in the word ‘hither.’ ”
2/7 touche, reader!: H.H. grants that the reader “got” these “easy”
pokes; Rimbaud’s poem Le Bateau ivre (see 165/6 and 174/1) and
Maurice Maeterlinck’s play L'Oiseau bleu have been transposed (see
203/5). H.H. has written a book on “Rainbow” (see 77/6 for the garbled
newspaper report, which Quilty has evidently read). Schmetterling is
German for butterfly (see p. 303), and Maeterlinck was in fact an
amateur entomologist.
2/8 D. Orgon, Elmira, NY: Orgon is the husband of Elmire in Tartuffe
[ 415 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 252-253
(1664), by Moliere (Jean Baptiste Poquelin [1622-1673]), French play^ jj;
wright and actor. The title character tries to seduce her. “Elmira” is o 1
course an actual town, and the location of a college for women. Quilt) 1
was born in New Jersey and educated in New York (p. 33), and “Dj 1
Orgon” is an accurately transcribed phonetic rendering of the regiona s
accent. 1
252/9 Bumper, Sheridan: Bumper is a character in The School for Scanda ij:
( 1777), by Richard Sheridan ( 1751-1816), Irish playwright. | I
252/10 Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH: in mythology, Phineas provider '
Jason the directions to find the Golden Fleece; while Phineas Quimbji '
(1802-1866) was an American pioneer in the field of mental healing ‘
born in Lebanon, N.H. He initially specialized in mesmerism, and fo) ,j
several years gave public hypnotic exhibitions (1838-1847). H.H.’s co ,
ercion of both Lolita and the reader make him a latter-day specialist, ant |
on p. 310 he says that “Mesmer Mesmer” was one of the possible pseudo ^
nyms he had considered for his narrative.
252/11 Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.: for Kitzler — H.H.’s tag, miraculousl)!
picked up by Quilty — see 122/3; for Eryx, the cult of Aphrodite, wheni *)■
“religious prostitution” was indeed practiced, see 139/1. The abbreviatec '
form of Mississippi adds to the pun cluster an incongruous note of formal'. ;j;
ity; “translated,” it reads “Dr. Clitoris, Venus, Miss” — and “Miss Venus’
is the archetypal if not the ultimate beauty contest winner.
253/1 living vacationists: “Johnny Randall of Ramble was a real person ,
I think (as was also Cecilia Dalrymple Ramble, p. 254),” says Nabokov, |
but the two are linked to form another verbal “coincidence.” ! ,
253/2 N. S. Aristoff ... NY: Catagela is the comic name of a town in th(^
play The Acharnians (425 b.c.), by Aristophanes (445-385 b.c.). It is fronj
a Greek word meaning “to deride.” 1 ,
253/3 J times . . . Hoaxton: James Mavor Morell is one of the main characters j
in Candida ( 1894), a play by George Bernard Shaw ( 1856-1950). Hoxtot
(Shaw’s spelling) is a place name therein. The additional a is well it,
the spirit of this “cryptogrammic paper chase,” since Quilty is a perj
manent resident of “hoax town,” and his maker has passed through tha!
town more than once. Dreyer reads Candida in King, Queen, KnaVi^^ j
(p. 263). I ^
253/4 G. Trapp, Geneva, NY.: H.H.’s relative is Swiss, so nationalistk ,
Quilty chooses a city found in America as well as in Switzerland. |
253/5 Aubrey Beardsley: “Aubrey McFate” (58/1) and the Beardsleyai (
motif (54/3; 183/1) are finally united by Quilty in “Quelquepart”^ — tha, I
is, “somewhere.” ; f
[ 416 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 253
53/6 Lucas Ficador: in Merimee’s novella, Lucas the picador is Carmen’s
last lover; Jose, tired of killing her lovers, kills Carmen (see 47/3). In
bullfighting, the picador is the member of the company who uses a lance
to annoy and weaken the bull just prior to the kill. Although Quilty
seems to cast himself as the picador, it is the tired bull who will ulti-
mately make the kill.
53/7 Merrymay, Fa....viy Carmen: a pun; Merimee. The abbreviated
Fennsylvania is a pun that nicely capsules Lolita’s insulting, mock-familiar
tone, as though she were saying, “the merry May festival is now being
celebrated by Quilty, Dad” H.H.’s betrayed “pathetic endearments”
are his frequent epithets from Carmen.
53/8 Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.: Quilty echoes H.H., whose “forsooth”
acknowledges the “coincidence”; see 247/1 ('"Saint, forsooth! While
brown Dolores”) and 255/1 (for more on this see my 1968 Denver
Quarterly article, p. 31). For “Dolores, Colo.,” see 11/5 and 298/4.
53/9 Harold Haze: Lolita’s deceased father.
53/10 Donald Quix: this pseudonym is appropriate to the Sierras, because
they constitute so elevated a target for a windmill-tilter such as Quixote.
53/11 bodkin: a stiletto or dagger.
53/12 Chestnut Lodge: although H.H. is very sensitive to numerical and
verbal “combinations,” he is no match for Quilty, who is acute enough
to have had miraculous access to H.H.’s previous pages: “Chesmut
Lodge” completes H.H.’s cycle of changes on “Chestnut” (see 214/2 and
218/2); the key to the Lodge is held by Nabokov.
53/13 Ted Hunter, Cane, NH.: an anagram of “Enchanted Hunter” (see
1 10/2), it is as expertly done as “Vivian Darkbloom.” Quilty’s punning
allusion to Cain is appropriate and indeed perceptive, since H.H. has
just referred to him as his brother (see 249/ 1 ).
53/14 interrelated combinations: the letters and numerals on the first two
license plates offer William Shakespeare’s monograms and dates of birth
and death (1564-1616). For Shakespeare, see 33/6 and 286/4. The letters
on the second set of plates refer to Quilty and his nickname (“Cue”).
Less obvious and most literally “cryptogrammic” are the numbers,
which add up to a highly significant fifty-two. H.H. and Lolita spent
a year on the road — that is, fifty-two weeks — and there are as many
lines in the poem addressed to her on pp. 257-258. Ray’s Foreword in-
dicates that Lolita, H.H., and Quilty all die in 1952 (see p. 6). There are
I fifty-two cards in a deck, and the author of King, Queen, Knave still
has a few up his sleeve, as he demonstrates here.
[ 417 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 253-256
253/15 cunningly contrived ... a common denominator: cunning or n(' i
it is revealed, for it is quite impossible that either H.H. or Quilty coui
realize the full significance of the number fifty-two; only one person ca
and the “common denominator” points to the author. The “paper chaS'
is contrived in the same spirit as Ray’s Foreword (see 6/4), the ent'
mological motif (see 8/1), the opening chapter (see ii/i and 11/6.
Who's Who in the Limelight (see 34/7 and 36/3), and the Ramsda,
class list (see 53/1 and 54/3)- — to name only the main clusters and inte
lacements of Nabokov’s grand anthemion. Of course, many of the all'
sions are within Quilty’s reach, and there are plausible explanations fi I
his knowing certain things. But other details are extraordinary, and it'
not simply a matter of Quilty’s brain having “affinities with my own,” 1
H.H. says (p. 251). How could Quilty know that earlier in these pag|
H.H. had used ’’"Kitzler," identified “Aubrey” as his “McFate,” toys,
with Chestnuts, alluded to Eryx (and Venus), and quoted “While brov
Dolores”? Quilty knows all this — and everything else — because NaboW:
wants him to know it, and because Quilty and H.H. can be said ■'
“exist” only insofar as they have been created by the same man. In i'
concentrated effect, the “paper chase” is to the last part of the nov
what Who's Who is to the first. ;
Chapter 24
254/1 gargoni French; fellow.
255/1 Bill Brown ... Dolores: see 247/1 and 253/8. The imbecilic detectii
has been hired for the benefit of the literal-minded reader, since H.Ii
himself plainly considers the material “nonsense data.” The “informatior
provides a non-solution that parodies the reader’s need for a solutic
and our belief that either literature or life will ever reveal one, in tl
largest sense. A hyphen, omitted in 1958, has been added to Bill’s ag.
Chapter 25 |
255/2 Dolores Disparue: see 34/2. In the first French edition of Prousii
great novel, Albertine disparue is the next-to-last volume. The definite
Pleiade edition (1954) has restored Proust’s own tide for it, La Fugitn,
(it is called The Sweet Cheat Gone in the Moncrieff translation). Si
18/4.
256/1 daymares: H.H.’s coinage.
256/2 chambres garnies: French; furnished rooms.
[ 418 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 256
2*1/3 auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac: Freudian trappings, secondhand
■ymbols. See 7/6 and 276/4.
2 '/4 que . . . cela: French; how far away all this was!
2 1/5 Comics: the first two are generalized and invented comic strips.
2 )/6 gagoon . . . kiddoid gnotnide: on a visit to Montreux in 1968, I men-
ioned to Nabokov that I had been unable to identify that “repulsive
trip” for this edition. Nabokov could not remember its name, but, ex-
)anding upon H.H.’s description, he dated it (the late nineteen-forties),
ioted that the strip “had science-fiction overtones,” and vividly recalled
^a big gangster, and his very small, big-eyed, lemur-like dwarf wife
vearing a lot of jewelry.” Because even that failed to awaken this an-
Totator’s memory, the author provided the following drawing:
The question remains unanswered, a challenge to future scholarship. For
other comic strip allusions, see 166/1 and 219/5.
[ 419 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 256-257
Gagoon is a portmanteau of gag, goon, and baboon, while gnomu
draws on the common meaning of gnome (dwarf) and combines i j
original meaning (from the Greek: a general maxim, a saying) with tl
nearly synonymous bromide (a tiresome, commonplace person; a hac
neyed expression). Kiddoid is also H.H.’s coinage. Because the -oid sufi
(resembling, having the form of) is used in scientific terms formed c
Greek words, its incongruous usage here becomes humorous (e.g., w,
thropoid; H.H.’s word is defined as “genus of kid”). See hypnotoi
p. 276. 1 ,
256/7 Et moi... genie: “And I was offering you my genius!” A bog'; -
quotation, echoing any French Romantic poet (e.g., Alfred de Muss
[1810-1857]). :
, !
257/1 merman: a fabled marine male creature; the mermaid’s counterpai I
See 176/5. In Pale Fire, Odon, Zemblan actor and patriot, appears |
The Merman, “a fine old melodrama” (p. 129). j
257/2 losing contact with reality: for an earlier incarceration, see 36/3.
257/3 something I composed: H.H.’s “something” is generally light enougi
especially in its humorously blatant rhymes, but its fifty -two lines a' j
truly “composed” in the way they cohere with a larger pattern: tl
fifty-two weeks H.H. and Lo spend together on the road (August 194 |
August 1948), the year of their deaths, and so forth (see 253/14).
257/4 ^ cannot ... starling: a quotation from Laurence Sterne’s A Sen: \
mental Journey through France and Italy (1768). On a visit to Par,
Yorick the narrator takes lightly the infamous Bastille. But his attentic
is drawn to a caged talking starling: “ ‘I can’t get out,’ said the starling
He is unable to free the bird, whose constant refrain moves him deeply
It becomes a symbol of all enslavement and confinement, and, returnif
to his room, he imagines at length a solitary captive in the Bastille. F
next explains how the starling was given to him and subsequently chang(|
hands countless times; the reader has perhaps seen the bird, suggeijii
Yorick. From that time, he adds, he has borne the starling as the ere:
to his coat of arms, which he includes in the text. It bears an uncage
bird (see the Penguin English Library edition [1967], pp. 94-100). Tl;
starling that had learned only those “four simple words” is most impo:
tant because it partakes of Lolita's origin, and its lament is at the boolSi
center. Lolita's initial inspiration, writes Nabokov, was “prompted by:i
newspaper story about an ape [in the Paris zoo] who, after months |;
coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled k
an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage” (.
[ 420 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 258-260
313). H.H., the “aging ape” writing from prison, whose impossible love
metaphorically connects him with that imprisoned animal, learns the
language, in his fashion, and records his “imprisonment.” His narrative
is the “picture” of the bars of the poor creature’s cage — and an orchestra-
tion of the starling’s four simple words.
]
8/1 vair: gray; the pale color of miniver fur.
8/2 Soleil Vert: French; Green Sun.
8/3 L'autre soir . . . de ta vie?: “The other night, a cold air [italics mine
— A.A.] from the opera forced me to take to my bed; / Broken note —
he who puts his trust in it is quite foolish! / It is snowing, the decor col-
lapses, Lolita! / Lolita, what have I done with your life?” The four lines
are a splendid parody and pastiche of various kinds of French verse. The
alexandrine verse of line one (see 225/1) scans perfectly in French. The
air froid is an untranslatable pun (air: melody; draft or wind). Line two
is a traditional saying, originating with Virgil, though it is in fact drawn
here from Le Roi s'artmse (1832), a play by Victor Hugo:
Souvent jemme varie,
Bien fol est qui s'y fie!
Une femme souvent
N'est qu'une plume au vent.
These lines are sung by the King, first in Act IV, scene ii, in a cabaret.
The first turn lines are repeated from off stage in Act V, scene iii, which
informs Triboulet (or Rigoletto) that the King is still alive (he had
planned to murder the King, but kills his daughter instead). The play
was performed only once before being banned by royal decree. It is the
source of Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851); Piave adapted the words and Verdi
;was responsible only for the music. The French version, which H.H.
undoubtedly knows, is Rigoletto, ou Le Buffon du prince. Rigoletto is
appropriate, since, figuratively speaking, H.H. is in his own right a
grotesque clown. For Hugo, see 12/7. Line three of H.H.’s pastiche is
overly sonorous, but the burlesqued entreaty of line four manages to
express both the “truth and a caricature of it” ( the artistic intention of
Tyodor in The Gift, p. 212).
1:9/ 1 pederosis: see 57/2.
I
' Chapter 26
')o/ 1 ensellure: French; the concave curve formed by the spine; in a wo-
' man, the lumbar incurvation.
[ 421 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 260-262
260/ 2 Babylonian blood: H.H. is very coy in “racial” matters, and enjo'
using euphemisms (e.g., “Turk,” p. 77) in the manner of the Victoriar
with their “Mediterranean types.” See 263/4.
260/3 depraved May: echo of a well-known line in T.S. Eliot’s “Geroi
tion”: “In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas” (Hr
20). See 18/3.
260/4 Blake: after the English poet and engraver William Blake (175'
1827). The invented Toylestown is a pun commemorating his “Londor
(1794) — toil’s town.
260/5 burning .. .Tigermoth: a play on Blake’s “The Tiger” (1794)-
“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright” — and a reference to the actual Tige
moth (“an Arctid,” notes Nabokov). For entomological allusions, see 8/
260/6 cavalier servant: a knight who is vassal to his fair lady; a mediev
archetype of courtly love.
261/1 mulberry moth: writes Nabokov; “Rita’s phrase ‘Going round at
round like a mulberry moth’ combines rather pleasingly the ‘round ar
round the mulberry tree’ of the maypole song and the silk moth of Chii
which breeds on mulberry.” See 8/1. ^
261/2 Valechka: like Ritochka (p. 262), a Russian diminutive.
261/3 Schlegel ... Hegel: Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and Georg Wi '
helm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the German philosophers, form
nonsense rhyme.
261/4 shams and shamans: H.H. enjoys the fact that while shamans (coi
jurers, witch doctors) may be shams, the semantic similarities are ah
illusory; the former is Anglo-Saxon in origin, the latter Tungusic ar
Sanskritic. Columbine (two lines above in the text) was misspelled ’
the 1958 edition (o instead of m); it has been corrected.
261/5 tmcilla: accessory, aid; literally, in Latin, “maidservant.”
261/6 Tartary: from Tartarus, the infernal regions of mythology; ar
region, usually in European Russia and Asia, inhabited by the violei .
Tatar (or Tartar) tribes or hordes, who are mostly Turkic. The Tart
empire is restored in Ada's Antiterra.
262/1 Mnemosyne: in Greek mythology, a Titaness, daughter of Uram
and Gaea. She is associated with memory or remembrance. The nii '
Muses resulted from her union with Zeus. In the Foreword to the r ’
[ 422 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 262-263
vised Speak, Me?nory, Nabokov says, “I had planned to entitle the British
edition Speak, Mnemosyne but was told that ‘little old ladies would not
want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce.’ ”
52/2 Cantrip ... Mhnir: a cantrip is a charm or spell, while Mimir is a
' giant in Norse mythology who lived by the well at the root of Yggdra-
sill, the great tree symbolizing the universe. By drinking its water, he
knew the past and future.
52/3 travaux: French; works.
53/1 ires digtie: French; very dignified.
53/2 souvenir . . . veux-tu?: “memory, memory, what do you want of me?’’
The opening line (minus ''Tautomne,''' the last word) of “Nevermore”
(title in English), by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). H.H. begins his next
sentence with that last word. Memories awakened by The Enchanted
Hunters bring this line to mind. Verlaine’s poem ends with the poet
telling his beloved that his most perfect day was when she charmingly
murmured “Le premier oui” — her first yes (see also Keys, p. 33). Eor
further Verlaine allusions, see 266/2 and 280/1. In Pale Fire, Kinbote
recalls a visit to Nice, and “an old bearded bum . . . who stood like a
statue of Verlaine with an unfastidious sea gull perched in profile on his
matted hair” (p. 170). Ada and Van Veen are touched by “the long
sobs of the violins,” the opening lines of Verlaine’s Chanson d'automne
(1866), translated and quietly absorbed into the text of Ada (p. 41 1).
Van’s “assassin pun” (p. 541) puns on “/a Pointe assassine" line seventeen
of Verlaine’s Art poetique (1882). “Verlaine had been also a teacher
■ ! somewhere / In England. And what about Baudelaire, / Alone in his
- Belgian hell?” writes Nabokov in “Exile,” an uncollected poem {The
!■ New Yorker, October 24, 1942, p. 26). Eor Baudelaire, see 164/2.
63/ 3 petite . . . accroupie: nymphet crouching.
1
163/4 spaniel ... baptized: the old lady’s dog, with which Lolita had
played (119/3). H.H. wonders if the hotel’s policy of “NO DOGS”
i had been broken to accommodate Christian dogs, because “NEAR
I' CHURCHES” was commonly used (c. 1940-1960) as a code sign, a
!' discreet indication that only Gentiles were accepted. A similar quid
' pro quo occurs in the same hotel when “Humbert” is misunderstood
[ and distorted into a Jewish-sounding “Humberg” (p. 120), just as “Pro-
1^ fessor Hamburg” now finds the hotel full. “Refugee” H.H. is often mis-
/ taken for a Jew; see p. 81, where John Farlow is on the point of making
an anti-Semitic remark and is interrupted by sensitive Jean. Quilty
[ 423 ]
I
NOTES FOR PAGE 264
thinks H.H. may be a “German refugee,” and reminds him, “This is ;
Gentile’s house, you know” (299/2).
Nabokov’s father was an outspoken foe of anti-Semitism. He wroti
“The Blood Bath of Kishinev,” a famous protest against the 1903 po
grom, and was fined by the Tsarist government for the fiery articles h(
wrote about the Beiliss trial (Maurice Samuel mentions him several time i
in his book on the Beiliss case. Blood Accusation [1966] — coincidental!)
published at the same time as Bernard Malamud’s novel based on it, Tht
Fixer — and quotes from Nabokov’s reportage). Nabokov fils is also out
raged by anti-Semitism, and, because his wife is Jewish, is sensitive tc i
it in a most acutely personal way (wimess the empathy for “poor Irving’
[55/3])- Nabokov recalls going into a New England inn several year:
ago, accompanied by his son and his son’s friend. Opening the menu
Nabokov noticed therein the succinct stipulation “Gentiles Only.” He
called over the waitress and asked her what the management would dc^
if there appeared at the door that very moment a bearded and berobed
man, leading a mule bearing his pregnant wife, all of them dusty and
tired from a long journey. “What ... what are you talking about?” the
waitress stammered. “I am talking about Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Na-
bokov, as he pointed to the phrase in question, rose from the table, and
led his party from the restaurant. “My son was very proud of me,” says
Nabokov. In Pale Fire, Kinbote and Shade discuss prejudice at length
(note to line 470; pp. 216-218).
264/ 1 Reader! Bruderl: German; “brother.” An echo of the last line of
Au Lecteur, the prefatory poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal,
(1857): “ — Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frere!” (“Hypo-,
crite reader — my fellow man — my brother.”). See 164/2.
264/2 the Gazette's . . . Dr. Braddock and his group: see p. 129. Gazette was
not italicized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected.
264/3 portrait . . . as a . . . brute: an obvious play on Joyce’s A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In searching for a title for his manu-.
script, the narrator of Despair considers “Portrait of the Artist in a
Mirror,” but rejects it as “too jejune, too d la mode" (p. 21 1). For Joyce,,
see 6/1 1.
264/4 Brute Force: the actual title of a movie released by Universal Pic-I
tures in 1947, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Burt LancasterJ
Charles Bickford, and Yvonne De Carlo. Possessed was released in 1947I
by Warner Brothers, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, and starring Joanj
Crawford, Van Heflin, and Raymond Massey. |
[ 424 ] I
NOTES FOR PAGES 264-265
64/5 Omen Faustum: Latin; Lucky Omen, or Lucky Strike cigarettes
(pointed out to me by the philologist and Latinist, Professor F. Colson
Robinson), a companion to “Dromes” (p. 71); related to dies jaustus,
1 “a day of favorable omen,” or, specifically, “a day on which Roman
religious law permitted secular activities.”
'64/6 ^8 Inchkeith Ave.: obsolete for “inchworm” (or Looper), the last
thing that should be used for the name of an avenue, since inchworms
(the larvae of certain moths) destroy shade trees. For entomological al-
lusions, see 8/1. Fifty-eight inches was Lolita’s height at the outset of
the novel (see 11/3).
'64/7 Dark Age: the author is Quilty; see 33/13. Dark Age was not itali-
, cized in the 1958 edition. The misprint has been corrected.
64/8 Wine, wine . . . for roses: see 129/1. Quilty is toying with lines from
the sixth stanza of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat
(1879), by Omar Khayyam (d. 1123?), Persian poet and mathematician:
And David’s lips are locked; but in divine
High-piping Pehlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!
Red Wine!” — the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That sallow cheek of hers to incarnadine.
The latter word was used earlier by H.H. (see 75/1), demonstrating once
more that “the tone of [Quilty’s] brain had affinities with my own” (p.
251).
65/1 nothing of myself: see 129/2; but Quilty’s “spectral shoulder” has
been immortahzed. For a summary of allusions to Quilty, see 33/9.
65/2 vin triste: French; melancholy intoxication.
65/3 Why blue: when I asked Nabokov “why blue?” and whether it had
anything to do with the butterflies commonly known as the “Blues,” he
replied: “What Rita does not understand is that a white surface, the
chalk of that hotel, does look blue in a wash of light and shade on a
vivid fall day, amid red foliage. H.H. is merely paying a tribute to
French impressionist painters. He notes an optical miracle as E.B. White
does somewhere when referring to the divine combination of ‘red barn
and blue snow.’ It is the shock of color, not an intellectual blueprint or
the shadow of a hobby ... I was really born a landscape painter.” See
223/2.
[ 425 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 266-269
Chapter 27
266/1 Alice-in-Wonderland: for Lewis Carroll, see 133/1.
266/ 2 Mes fenetres: French; “My windows,” a mock title that parallel
Mes Hopitaux (“My Hospitals” [1892]) by Paul Verlaine, and in genera
parodies the traditional use of the possessive in autobiographical writ
ing. See 263/2.
266/3 ^^Savez . . . de vous?”: French; “Do you know that, when she wa
ten, my little daughter was madly in love with you?”
266/4 Proustianized and Procrusteanized: from Procrustean; vioientlV
forced into conformity or inflexibly adapted to a system or idea. Pro
crustes was the legendary robber who made his victims fit a certair
bed by stretching or cutting off their legs. Proust is also alluded to 01
pp. 18, 184, and 255. Similar wordplay occurs in Ada when Van Veef
discusses Space and Time: “avoid the Proustian bed and the assassii;
pun” (p. 541); the latter phrase is also an allusion to Verlaine (see 263/2),
266/5 late: a corrected author’s error (instead of “early” in the 1958 edi-
tion ) .
267/1 tankard: a tall, one-handled drinking vessel with a lid.
267/2 Never will Emma rally . . . timely tear: a reference to Madam.
Bovary, Part III, Chapter Eight, where Homais the pharmacist anc
Emma’s two physicians, Bovary and Carnivet, frantically try to save
her life. They summon the very distinguished Dr. Lariviere, but ht
cannot do anything for her (“He was the Third Doctor,” adds Na-'
bokov, “but that fairy tale Third did not work” [see 33/3]). Old Roualti
Emma’s father (“Flaubert’s father,” because the author said “Emmt
Bovary? c'est moil”), arrives after she has died; his subsequent tears ar^
not too “timely” (III, Chapter Nine). See 147/3. :
I
268/1 honeymonsoon: a portmanteau; honeymoon plus monsoon, the per-'
iodic wind and rainy season of Southern Asia.
268/2 thenv. Lolita and her kidnaper.
Chapter 28
269/1 Pas tout a fait: French; not quite.
[ 426 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 27O-274
20/1 handkerchief . . .from my sleeve: an English fad of the ’twenties and
’thirties. Affected rarely today, even among the pseudo-sophisticated.
-.0/2 Ah-ah-ah: simply the sound of a three-folding “harmonica” door.
'20/3 Dick Skiller: a phonetic rendering of the pronunciation of “Schiller,”
and a blending of “Dick’s killer” and the street name.
20/4 Hunter Road: a streamlined Enchanted Hunters; see no/2.
Chapter 29
: i/i Fersonne . . .Repersonne: French; a humorous alliteration; “Nobody.
I re-rang the bell. Re-nobody.”
'2/1 russet Venus: “The Birth of Venus”; see 66/3 and 276/1.
'4/1 Waterproof: see 91/2; Jean Farlow almost mentions Clare Quilty’s
name as the chapter concludes. For further discussion, see my 1967 Wis-
consin Studies article, op. cit., pp. 232-233, included in the Introduction,
p. Ixvii ff. For allusions to QuUty, see 33/9.
74/2 everything fell into order . . . the pattern of branches . . . the satisfac-
tion of logical recognition: this passage, and the novel’s crystalline pro-
gression, are prefigured in The Defense (1930) when Nabokov describes
the two books with which chessplayer Luzhin
had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as
if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that
twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a
dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdis-
tanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained. But
it was not a thirst for distant peregrinations that forced him to
follow on the heels of Phileas Fogg, nor was it a boyish inclination
for mysterious adventures that drew him to that house on Baker
Street, where the lanky detective with the hawk profile, having given
himself an injection of cocaine, would dreamily play the violin. Only
much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had
thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relent-
lessly unfolding pattern: Phileas, the dummy in the top hat, wend-
ing his complex elegant way with its justifiable sacrifices, now on an
elephant bought for a million, now on a ship of which half has to
be burned for fuel; and Sherlock endowing logic with the glamour
of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all
known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a talisman progress-
[ 427 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 274-278
ing through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one
radiant conclusion, [pp. 33-34]
For more on Holmes, see 66/1.
274/3 'valetudinarian: a person having a sick or weakly constitution.
274/4 'visited with his uncle . . . Mothers club: see 80/1.
275/ 1 sidetrack . . . female: see 21 1/2.
275/2 frileux: chilly; susceptible of cold.
276/1 Florentine: Botticelli’s Venus (p. 272).
276/2 French .. .Dorset yokel ... Austrian tailor: the “salad of rack
genes” mentioned on pp. ii and 12, where a Swiss and “Danubian
dash is added. “I have carefully kept Russians out if it,” notes Nabokm i
“though I think his first wife had some Russian blood mixed wit ■,
Polish.” Similarly, there are very few specific allusions to Russian writ j
ers in Lolita.
276/3 beast’s lair: Quilty. '
276/4 Viennese medicine man: Freud. See 7/6. ^
276/ 5 hypnotoid: a variant of “hypnoid,” of or pertaining to hypnosis.
277/ 1 Streng verboten: German; strictly forbidden.
277/2 like her mother: “Lolita’s smoking manners were those of he
mother,” emphasizes Nabokov. “I remember being very pleased wit!
that little vision when composing it.”
277/3 Cue: Quilty’s nickname; see 6/9.
278/1 Curious coincidence: “Camp Q” (p. 66). It’s no “coincidence” a
all; someone in the know has planned it this way.
278/2 Duk Duk: an obscene Oriental word for copulation, sometimes ren
dered in English as dak or dok, from the Persian dakk (vice, evil condi;
tion) and dokhtan (to pierce). No less “an amateur of sex lore” (p. 252;
than Quilty, H.H. gleaned this from a sixteenth-century work, The Pen
fumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui, a Manual of Arabian Erotology
(1886), translated by Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), the British eX;
plorer and Orientalist (the treatise is mentioned by name in Ada, pp;
351-352). Such recondite material reminds one of Lolita’s reputation^'
among non-readers, as a “pornographic novel,” and also underscore!
how Nabokov has had the last laugh, in more ways than one. In Speak'
[ 428 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 278
Memory, Nabokov writes about the “delusive opening moves, false
scents, [and] specious lines of play” which characterize the chess prob-
lem. The subject matter of Lolita is in itself a bravura and “delusive
opening move” — a withdrawn promise of pornography (see 5/1). The
first one hundred or so pages of Lolita are often erotic — Lolita on H.H.’s
lap, for instance — but starting with the seduction scene, Nabokov with-
holds explicit sexual descriptions, while H.H., trying to draw the reader
into the vortex of the parody, exhorts us to “Imagine me: I shall not
exist if you do not imagine me” (p. 13 1). “I am not concerned with
so-called ‘sex’ at all,” H.H. says (p. 136); Nabokov, on the contrary, is
very much concerned with it, but with the reader’s expectations rather
than H.H.’s machinations.
“Anybody can imagine those elements of animality,” he says, and yet
a great many readers wished that he had done it for them — enough to
have kept Lolita at the top of the best-seller list for almost a year, al-
though librarians reported that many readers never finished the novel.
The critics and remedial readers who complain that the second half of
Lolita is less interesting are not aware of the possible significance of
their admission. Their desire for highbrow pornography is “doubled”
in Clare Quilty, whose main hobby is making pornographic films. When
Lolita tells H.H. that Quilty forced her to star in one of his unspeakable
“sexcapades,” more than one voyeuristic reader has unconsciously wished
that Quilty had been the narrator, his unseen movie the novel. But the
novel’s “habit of metamorphosis” is consistent, for the erotica which
seemed to be there and turned out not to be was in fact present all
along, most modestly; and it is Nabokov’s final joke on the subject,
achieved at the expense of the very common reader. Although the
requisite “copulation of cliches” (p. 314) doesn’t occur in the novel
proper, its substratum reveals some racy stuff indeed: “Duk Duk”;
“Undinist” (252/3); “Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.” (252/11); the quotations
in French from Ronsard and Belleau (49/2 and 49/3); anagrammatic
obscenities (197/2), and so forth — erotica under lock and key, buried
deep in the library stacks. Until now, only a few furtive “amateur[s]
of sex lore,” law-abiding linguists, and quiet scholars — good family men,
all — have had exclusive access to this realm.
278/3 redhaired guy: see p. 236.
278/4 Sade's ... start: Justine, or. The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), by
the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), “French soldier and pervert” (as
Webster's Second defines him). Like Lolita, Justine is prefaced by a
Foreword resolutely “moral” in tone (in some editions, however, these
[ 429 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 279-282
initial paragraphs are not formally identified as a “Foreword”). The
title character is an extraordinarily resilient young girl who exists solely
for the pleasures of an infinite succession of sadistic libertines. She un-
dergoes an array of rapes, beatings, and tortures as monstrously imagina-
tive as they are frequent. Quilty has done a screenplay of Justine (300/3).
279/1 souffler: to “blow.”
279/2 my Lolita: the “Latin” tag (see 47/1 and 194/2) appropriately
concludes this important paragraph (p. 280), as it will the entire novel
(311/3)-
279/ 3 dreaming . . . of . . . 2020 a.d.: “2020” because he has perfect prevision;
also a numerical reflection of the doubling that occurs throughout the
novel (see 53/2).
280/ 1 mon . . . radieux: “my great radiant sin,” a line from Verlaine’s
Lunes (“Moons”), part of the sequence titled Laeti et errabundi, in
which the poet celebrates his liaison and travels with Rimbaud. For
Rimbaud, see 77/6, 165/6, and 252/7; for more on Verlaine, 263/2.
280/2 Changeons . . . separes: “Let’s change [our] life, my Carmen, let us
go live in some place where we shall never be separated”; from Merimee
(see 245/4) — Jose and Carmen’s next-to-last interview. He has roman-
tically offered America as the place where they will be able “to lead a
quiet life.” H.H. is more specific in matters of geography. For Merimee,
see 47/3.
280/3 happily ever after: H.H. holds out to Lolita the
possibility of a stereotyped fairy-tale ending, even though the tale seems
already to have ended in “Elphinstone” (240/1). For more on the fairy
tale, see 33/3.
2,80/4 Carmen . . . moi: “Carmen, do you want to come with me? ” A quota-
tion from Merimee; a most dramatic moment at the end of the novella
(see also Keys, p. 51). Carmen does go with Jose, but after they ride
off she says that she will never live with him again, and will only follow
him to death. A tearful imploration fails, and he kills her.
281/1 mon petit cadeau: French; my little gift, the little something. His
“4000 bucks” in 1952 meant a great deal more than in today’s money.
“For some odd reason,” says Nabokov, “this paragraph, top of p. 281,
is the most pathetic in the whole book; stings the canthus, or should
sting it.”
282/1 fly to Jupiter: they are going to Juneau, but to H.H. it might as
well be the planet. Jupiter is veiled by haze, and Lolita dies in “Gray
Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest” (see -6/8).
[ 430 1
NOTES FOR PAGES 282-286
282/2 Carmencita . . . -je: “my little Carmen [in Spanish], I asked her”; an-
other quotation from Merimee.
282/3 fool thing a reader . . . suppose: especially the learned reader who has
kept Carmen in mind. The several Carmen allusions on nearby pages
serve as very fresh bait. See 47/3. See also Keys, p. 52.
282/4 my American ... dead love: “One of the few real, lyrical, heartfelt
outbursts on H.H.’s part,” says Nabokov.
Chapter 30
283/ 1 pulled on . . . sweater: H.H. dons Quilty’s fate, as it were.
284/1 genuflexion lubricity: worshipful lasciviousness or lewdness.
284/2 he: Quilty. For allusions to him, see 33/9.
284/3 shadowgraphs: see 116/2.
Chapter 31
285/1 lithophanic: lithophane is porcelain impressed with figures made dis-
tinct by light (e.g., a lampshade).
285/2 To quote an old poet: he is invented.
Chapter 32
286/1 a garden and... a palace gate: one of those rare moments when
H.H. is “so tired of being cynical” (p. iii). He contemplates the hidden
beauties of Lolita’s soul, and the mood prefigures his realization of Lolita’s
loss, expressed on p. 310.
286/2 stippled Hopkins: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English
poet. Stippled: dotted (see 45/1). Its use refers to Hopkins’ “Pied
Beauty” (1877); “Glory be to God for dappled things — ... / For rose-
moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.”
286/3 shorn baudelaire: H.H. is referring to what might be called the poet’s
dramatic baldness. In the self-portrait c. i860 and in Carjat’s photograph
of 1863, his hair seems to have been torn from the head; and the sculp-
ture by Raymond Duchamp Villon (1911) and the etched portrait by
his brother Jacques Villon ( 1920) accentuate the great forehead and
cranium. See 164/2.
[ 431 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 286-290
286/4 God or Shakespeare: an echo of Stephen Dedalus’ invocation ol
“God, the sun, Shakespeare,” in the Nighttown section of Ulysse:
(1961 Random House edition, p. 505). For Joyce, see 6/11. “The verbal
poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and
is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays,” says Na-
bokov. “With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the
play” (Wisconsin Studies interview). Although the problem has not yet
been submitted to a computer, Shakespeare would seem to be the writer
Nabokov invokes most frequently in his novels in English. Part of Chap-
ter Ten of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and all of Chapter Seven
of Bend Sinister are devoted to Shakespeare; he informs the center of
Pale Fire, where streets of the Zemblan capital city are named Coriolanus
Lane and Timon Alley. “Help me, Will,” calls John Shade, searching
for a title for his poem — and he does help, providing a passage from
Timon of Athens. Nabokov has translated into Russian Shakespeare’s
Sonnets XVII and XXVII (The Rudder, September 18, 1927), two ex-
cerpts from Hamlet (Act IV, scene vii, and Act V, scene i [The Rudder,
October 19, 1930]), and Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy (Act III, scene i
[The Rudder, November 23, 1930]). Regarding Hamlet, see 33/6.
286/ 5 pentapod: counting as fifth the monster’s “foot of engorged brawn”
(p. 285).
286/6 turpid: rare; foul, disgraceful.
286/7 mais . . . t'aimais: French; but I loved you, I loved you!
287/1 azure-barred: the motel’s neon lights reaching their bed from the
window.
287/2 Avis: Avis Byrd: a pun, since “Avis” is Latin for bird.
289/1 above Moulinet: in the Alpes-Maritimes.
Chapter 33
289/2 scintillas: sparks.
289/3 Bonzhur: (bonjour) “good day,” phonetically spelled to mimic
Charlotte’s poor French accent; see 46/ 1.
289/4 Edward Grammar . . . had just been arrayed: an actual crime, notes
Nabokov, drawn from a newspaper, as was the case of Frank LaSalle on
p. 291. By saying that Ed had been arrayed, instead of arraigned, H.H.
punningly describes the imposing display.
290/1 Turgenev: Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), Russian writer. H.H. is al-
[ 432 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 290-295
lading to the sonata of love that pours out the window near the end of
his novel A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859).
>90/2 plashed: to plash is to form a wave so convex that it splashes over
(maritime term).
>91/1 Murphy -Fantasia: the marriage of Lolita’s classmate Stella Fantasia
(p. 54). Note the verbal play on “moon-faced” and “stellar [Stella]
care” (see also Keys, p. 8). See 26/3 for more stellar play.
:9i/2 mille graces: French; a thousand affectations.
192/1 vient de: French; just (for the immediate past).
>92/2 “Reveillez-vous . . . mourir" : French; “Wake-up, Laqueue [La Que:
Cue; Quilty], it is now time to die!” A fake quotation, significant only
for its reference to Quilty. The image of his residence in H.H.’s “dark
dungeon” was introduced, in a more generalized way, at The Enchanted
Hunters hotel (see 127/1).
292/3 toad of a face: a favorite pejorative image in Nabokov (see also
Keys, p. 1530). “Toad” is the boyhood nickname of the dictator in Bend
Sinister.
293/ 1 Dr. Molnar: the dentist’s name aptly contains a molar; it is not, says
Nabokov, an allusion to Ferenc Molnar, Hungarian playwright.
293/2 six hundred: at that time $600 was a huge sum for dentures.
294/1 Full Blued: simply a reference to its finish (p. 218).
Chapter 34
294/2 Favor: Latin; panic, terror. The Manor on Grimm Road burlesques
the Gothic castles of fairy tales, Poe’s mouldering House of Usher, and
the medieval settings in Maeterlinck.
295/1 penele: a coined adjective; “penis-like” {penes is a plural form).
295/2 My Lolita!: the penultimate elegiac “Latin” intonation. See 47/ 1.
295/3 selenian: of or relating to the moon.
295/4 taised a gun: a foreshadowing of Quilty’s death; an echo of the
murder prefiguration in Chapter Two of Laughter in the Dark.
[ 433 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 295-298
Chapter 3 5
295/5 Insomnia Lodge: Nabokov’s bravura reading of this chapter is not
to be missed (Spoken Arts LP 902; Side Two includes seven poems,
one in Russian). The recording is especially recommended for class-
room use. The nuances of Nabokov’s accent — Cambridge by way of old
St. Petersburg, the French in perfect pitch — are a striking aural equiva-
lent to the theme of exile in his work and the international nature of
that art; and the gusto of his reading communicates vividly a sense of
the man, as well as underscoring the comic tone of the novel. Sad ex-
perience has suggested that the latter is not always sufficiently appre-
ciated by solemn students who, though they learn quickly, are often not
ready enough to laugh at a novel supposedly about perversion.
296/ 1 fairy tale: the fairy-tale opening is appropriate, for this is the most
fantastic chapter in the novel, as wimessed by the uncommon velocities
and trajectories of the bullets H.H. will fire, and the extraordinary be-
havior of their target. H.H. inspects three bedrooms because that is the
fairy-tale number. For more on the fairy tale, see 18/6, 33/3, and 305/2.
296/2 deep mirrors: Quilty literally lives in a house of mirrors, just as
H.H. is figuratively imprisoned in one; see 53/2, 12 1/2, and below, where
the mirror is held up to him and he sees a familiar bathrobe. For an index
to Quilty ’s appearances, see 33/9.
296/3 keys . . . locks . . . left hand: the keys don’t work because magic and i
terror prevail in the special world of Pavor Manor. See 305/2.
296/4 brief waterfall: Quilty has once before flushed the toilet thusly; see j
132/1. j
297/ 1 Je suis . . . Brustere: “I am Mr. Brewster,” spelled in phonetic French. I
298/1 Flinch: the hook-nosed and hunchbacked principal character in the '
traditional “Punch and Judy” show (see Introduction and 34/7). Used
here in the sense of “clown.”
298/2 vaterre: “water,” with a phonetic French spelling; slang for “water
closer” (lavatory).
298/3 Patagonia: an actual town in Arizona. ;
298/4 Dolores, Colo.: see 11/5 and 253/8. I
298/5 Hell Canyon: see 159/5. !
[ 434 ] !
NOTES FOR PAGES 298-303
298/6 La .. .Chair: The Pride of the Flesh, not a noteworthy translation
of Proud Flesh, which in French would be Tissu bourgeonnant or Fon-
gosite.
298/7 Wooly- . . . -are?: a phonetic burlesque of American pronunciation:
‘^Voulez-vous boire?" (French; “Do you want a drink?”).
299/ 1 une fermne . . . cigarette: “a woman is a woman but a Caporal is a
cigarette.” Quilty has made nonsense out of “The Betrothed,” by Rud-
yard Kipling (1865-1936): “A million surplus Maggies are willing to
bear the yoke / And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a
smoke” (see also Keys, p. 1360). The pun is on corporal (military rank)
and Caporal (the brand name of a French cigarette).
299/2 a Gentile's house: for a summary of what could be termed “the anti-
Semitism theme,” see 263/4.
300/1 ‘‘‘'V ous . . . vieux" : French; “You are in a fine mess, my friend.”
300/2 “Alors . . . -on?": French; “What do we do then?”
300/3 Justine: see 278/4.
301/1 Because... a sinner: a parody of T.S. Eliot’s “Ash M^ednesday”
(1930): “Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope/
Because I do not hope to turn. . . .” H.H.’s structural use of “Because” in
the remainder of the poem echoes Eliot’s. For Eliot, see 18/3.
302/ 1 moulting: animals and insects moult; to cast off hair, feathers, skin,
etc., which is replaced by new growth.
302/2 flavid: yellowish or tawny-colored.
303/1 rencotitre: French; meeting (duel).
303/ 2 soyons raisonnables: French; let us be reasonable.
303/3 as the Bard said: in Macbeth (V, vii, 19); and for this pun Quilty
deserves to die.
303/4 Vibrissa: one of the stiff, bristly hairs which many animals have
about their mouths (a cat’s whiskers); also the similar feathers on a bird.
303/ 5 Schmetterling: German; butterfly. During a conversation with Na-
bokov, I singled out this moment in the H.H.-Quilty confrontation as a
good example of the kind of humorous but telling detail whose signifi-
cance critics often miss. Nabokov nodded and with complete seriousness
said, “Yes. That’s the most important phrase in the chapter.” At first
[ 435 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 304-308
this may seem to be an extreme statement or leg-pull; but in the con- ^
text of the involuted patterning it is perfectly just (see 34/7), for by •
mentioning the German word for butterfly Quilty has superimposed
the author’s watermark on the scene, and it is the sole butterfly refer- ;
ence in the chapter. For Maeterlinck, see 203/5. For the entomologicaL \
allusions, see 8/1.
I
304/ 1 herculanita: a very potent South American variety of heroin. j
304/2 Melanie Weiss: “Black White”; from melanin (“black [pigmented]”) I
and the German for “white” — and she does measure reality in black-and- I
white terms. Her work burlesques the researches of a famous woman I
anthropologist who also favored far Pacific isles. See 7/ 3 for the sisterly ■ {
mirror reversal “Blanche Schwarzmann” (“White Blackman”), a verbal |
relationship that once again reveals the author’s hand.
304/ 3 Bagration . . . Barda Sea: many islands in the Pacific were discovered
by Russians, and named by them, but neither of these places exists. The
first is after Prince Petr Ivanovich Bagration (1765-1812), the Russian |
General who fought with distinction against Napoleon at Borodino,
where he was fatally wounded, in 1812. Barda is a vodka-distilling sop
given to cattle in Russia. The “geographic” names offer an ironic tribute
to Miss Weiss’s heroic efforts.
304/4 Feu: French; Fire. |
304/5 ImpredictaUe: a portmanteau word; unpredictable plus impredicable |
(from predicated): “incapable of being categorized.” ^
305/1 a feminine ‘'^ahP'': see 47/4 and 89/1. .j
305/2 trudging from room to room: the keys jangling in H.H.’s pocket j
have not locked the rooms (see 296/3); a fairy tale and nightmare t
blended. ;
306/1 pink bubble: see 19/1 for the original, figurative bubble. '
307/1 purple heap: the color of his bathrobe and his prose.
307/2 staged for me by Quilty: see 33/8. '
Chapter 36
308/1 Thomas had something: Thomas the Apostle, the “doubting” dis- ^
ciple of John 20:24, who refused to believe in the resurrection of Christ t
until he himself had touched the nail wounds. Asked if an allusion to
[ 43*5 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 309-3 1 1
Thomas Mann might also be intended here, Nabokov replied, “The
other Tom had nothing.”
309/1 Hegelian synthesis: the death of Charlotte is remembered here (the
killer’s car going up the slope; p. 99), blending with the whole story of
Lolita, from the cows on the slope (p. 114) to her assumed death (if the
reader reads the book, Lolita must be dead; see pp. 6, 282, and 311).
309/2 fold of the valley: see Nabokov’s comment on this, p. 318.
3 10/ 1 Otto Otto: queried about this name, Nabokov answered, “a doubled
neutrality with something owlish about it.”
310/2 Mesmer: after Franz or Friedrich Mesmer (1734-1815), the Austrian
physician who established hypnotism. See 252/ 10.
310/3 Lambert: a step away from Humbert. No literary allusions intended.
310/4 fifty-six days ago: in the concluding paragraphs of Lolita, H.H. re-
asserts the verisimilar basis that has been belied everywhere in the pre-
ceding pages, linking the last three paragraphs of his manuscript with the
first three paragraphs of “editor” John Ray’s Foreword, creating an ele-
gant pairing and extraordinary equipoise for which neither H.H. nor Ray
is responsible (see 6/4).
311/1 Do not talk to strangers: in Who's Who in the Limelight, “Quine,
Dolores” is said to have made her debut in Never Talk to Strangers, and
on p. 140 H.H. advises Lolita similarly (see 34/1).
3 1 1/2 Aurochs: The Etiropean bison, now virtually extinct, as is this
definition, thanks to Webster’s 3rd.
3 1 1/3 do not pity C.Q.... my Lolita: “C.Q.” is Clare Quilty. H.H.’s
tone turns an unfamiliar shade. Although the narrative surface is sdl!
intact, the masked narrator does speak in a newly impersonal way. When
asked if one is now supposed to “hear” a different voice, as at “the end”
of so many of his novels (see Introduction), Nabokov said, “No, I did
not mean to introduce a different voice. I did want, however, to convey
a constriction of the narrator’s sick heart, a warning spasm causing him
to abridge names and hasten to conclude his tale before it was too late.
I am glad I managed to achieve this remoteness of tone at the end” {Wis-
consin Studies interview). This “remoteness” is appropriate, for Hum-
bert’s love and Nabokov’s labors have become one. The final phrase sounds
the “Latin” locution that has echoed through the narrative (see 47/ 1 and
194/2), and the last word of the novel, that fatal constriction, repeats
the first: “Lolita.” It is a fitting and final symmetry for this Byzantine
edifice.
[ 437 1
NOTES FOR PAGES 3 I 3-3 1 6
ON A BOOK ENTITLED LOLITA
313/1 ON ... ENTITLED LOLITA: this Afterword was written to ac-
company the generous excerpts from Lolita which appeared in the 1957
edition of The Anchor Review, the novel’s American debut, made pos-
sible mainly by Jason Epstein and the review’s editor, Melvin J. Lasky.
It was appended to the Putnam’s edition in 1958, and has since been in-
cluded in the twenty-five or so translations.
313/2 the poor creature's cage: see 257/4. Iri Fire, Kinbote tells John
Shade, “with no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk,
on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and
cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws, and a personality
consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars” (pp. 226-227).
Writing about Sirin — himself — in Conclusive Evidence (1951), in a sen-
tence omitted from the second edition (Speak, Memory), Nabokov says,
“His best works are those in which he condemns his people to the soli-
tary confinement of their souls” (p. 217). Nabokov has employed the
prison trope in many ways. See my Introduction, pp. xx-xxi and lii.
313/3 best... are not translated: this of course is no longer true.
314/1 destroyed it ... after ... 1^40: nor is this true. The story, entitled
“The Magician,” unexpectedly turned up among his papers in 1964, a
fifty-four-page typescript rather than the thirty pages of memory. Two
passages were made available to Andrew Field for use in his study Na-
bokov: His Life in Art (Boston, 1967). They are quoted in the Introduc-
tion, p. xxxvii ff. Nabokov informs me that he will never publish this re-
claimed story.
314/2 The book developed slowly: its design and order of events, however,
were clearly in mind early in its composition, says Nabokov, although
various sections were written well out of sequence, as is customary with
him. See Introduction, p. xxxix.
314/3 '’‘’reality" (one of the few words which mean nothing without
quotes): in Ada, Nabokov writes, “It would not be sufficient to say that
in his love-making with Ada [Van] discovered the pang, the ogon', the
agony of supreme ‘reality.’ Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore
like claws . . .” (pp. 219-220).
316/1 America: a corrected misprint (“American” in the 1958 edition).
[ 438 ]
NOTES FOR PAGES 3 I 7-3 1 8
3 1 7/ 1 Falearctic . . . Nearctic: one of the four world faunal regions, the Hol-
arctic (arctic and temperate zones), is subdivided into Falearctic (Europe
and Asia) and Nearctic (North America). The “suburban lawn” and
“mountain meadow” above are open country for a lepidopterist, notes
Diana Butler in “Lolita Lepidoptera,” New World Writing i 6 , p. 6i.
See 8/1 for a summary of all the entomological allusions.
318/1 spring of 19^$: a corrected author’s error (instead of “winter of
1954” in the 1958 edition).
318/2 Air. Taxovich: Maximovich, the ex-White Russian colonel reduced
to driving a taxi, is totally infatuated with H.H.’s first wife, Valeria. H.H.
graciously lets her go. See pp. 30-32.
318/3 class list of Ramsdale School: it is most notable for the way it mir-
rors the artist who created it (see 53/1 ff.), and for “Flashman, Irving,”
who suffers quietly, the only Jew in a class of Gentiles, (see 55/3).
318/4 ‘‘^waterproof": When Jean Farlow notices that H.H. has gone swim-
ming with his watch on, Charlotte reassures her, and dreamily relishes
a miracle of modern technology: “ ‘Waterproof,’ said Charlotte softly,
making a fish mouth” (see p. 91). The word is also the clue H.H. uses
to torment the reader who strains to learn the identity of Lolita’s ab-
ductor (see 274/ 1), and one is thus reminded that Lolita is a very special
kind of detective story ( see 1 1 /2 ) .
318/5 in slow motion .. .Humbert's gifts: Lolita is remembered as an il-
lusory creature in a dream, rather than as the object of H.H.’s lust (see
p. 122), and the allusion to his gifts recalls his desperate bribery as well
as its results.
318/6 the pictures ... of Gaston Godin: furtive love is invoked; like the
artists whose portraits dominate his garret, Gaston is clearly homosexual.
See 183/4.
318/7 the Kasbeam barber: he talks of his son, dead for thirty years, as
though he were still alive (see p. 215).
318/8 Lolita playing tennis: if ever H.H. succeeds in “fix[ing] once for
all the perilous magic of nymphets” (p. 136), it is in this scene (see pp.
234-236).
318/9 the hospital at Elphinstone ... irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in
Gray Star: Nabokov is referring to Lolita by her married name (see p.
6). Twin deaths are recorded: Lolita “dies” for H.H. when Quilty steals
[ 439 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 318
her from the hospital (pp. 240-249) and “dies” for Nabokov when the
book is completed, and her image is irretrievable. But Lolita does not
die in the book; as H.H. says, “I wish this memoir to be published only
when Lolita is no longer alive” (p. 310). Her creator points beyond the
novel’s Active time into the future, for he would agree with H.H.’s clos-
ing statement that art “is the only immortality you and I may share, my
Lolita.” It is important to note that none of these “secret points” is ex-
clusively sexual. Rather, the images and characters all formulate varying
states of isolation, loss, obsession, and ecstasy which generalize H.H.’s
consuming passion; the concluding “co-ordinate,” after all, places in their
midst the author, butterfly net firmly in hand.
318/10 tinkling sounds .. .Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov: the final “co-or-
dinates” form a most interesting progression. The last “nerve of the
novel” is in fact outside the novel and extends from the lepidopterist
to the nympholept, who almost seem to bypass one another on the same
trail. H.H. also experiences a most pleasing unity of sounds coming from
a valley town (pp. 309-310); and the butterfly in question was captured
by Nabokov near Dolores, Colorado (see 11/5 and 298/4). Nabokov
comments; “This Coloradian member of the subgenus Lycaeides (which
I now place in the genus Plebejus, a grouping corresponding exactly in
scope to my former concept of Plebejinae) was described by me as a
subspecies of Tutt’s ‘'argyrognomon' (now known as idas L.), but is, in
my present opinion, a distinct species.” See 8/1.
318/11 My private tragedy . . .my natural idiotn: the narrator of The Real
Life of Sebastian Knight (Nabokov’s first novel in English) says some-
thing very similar about Knight:
I know, I know as definitely as I know we had the same father, 1
know Sebastian’s Russian was better and more natural to him than
his English. I quite believe that by not speaking Russian for five
years he may have forced himself into thinking he had forgotten
it. But a language is a live physical thing which cannot be so easily
dismissed. It should moreover be remembered that five years before
his first book — that is, at the time he left Russia, — his English was
as thin as mine. I have improved mine artificially years later (by
dint of hard study abroad); he tried to let his thrive naturally in its
own surroundings. It did thrive wonderfully but still I maintain that
had he started to write in Russian, those particular linguistic throes
would have been spared him. Let me add that I have in my posses-
sion a letter written by him not long before his death. And that
short letter is couched in a Russian purer and richer than his Eng-
lish ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in
his books, [pp. 84-85]
[ 440 ]
NOTES FOR PAGE 319
Nabokov’s “private tragedy” is our concern, for in varying degrees it
involves us all. Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to Lolita is
H.H.’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a repre-
sentative search, a heightened emblem of all of our attempts to com-
municate. “ ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her
palm at once” (p. 210). It is the almost insuperable distance between
those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately
and so movingly in Lolita: the distance between people, the distance
separating love from love-making, mirage from reality — the desperate
extent of all human need and desire. “I have only words to play with,”
says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf suggested by Lolita’s
palm. H.H. has failed once — “She would mail her vulnerability in trite
brashness and boredom, whereas I use[d] for my desperately detached
comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own teeth on edge”
(p. 286) — but it is a necessary act of love to try, and perhaps Nabokov
succeeds with the reader where H.H. failed with Lolita.
19/ 1 frac-tails: Nabokov wittily demonstrates that the “native illusionist”
is now an internationalist; frac is French for “dress coat.” It is just that
Nabokov (and this edition) should conclude with a joke, however small,
for, from behind “the bars of the poor creature’s cage” (p. 313), des-
perate Humbert also exults. In Gogol, Nabokov notes how “one likes
to recall that the difference between the comic side of things, and their
cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant” (p. 142), a juxtaposition implicit
in the early title. Laughter in the Dark. The title goes two ways: it re-
cords the laughter of the cosmic joker who has made a pawn of Al-
binus, blinding and tormenting him, but it also summarizes Nabokov’s
response to life, his course for survival. Toward the end of Lolita, the
sick and despairing Humbert has finally tracked down Lolita, who is
now the pregnant Mrs. Richard Schiller. He recalls how he rang the
doorbell, ready to kill Dick. The bell seems to vibrate through his whole
exhausted system, but suddenly Humbert takes his automatic French re-
sponse to the sound and playfully twists it into verbal nonsense: “Per-
sonne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense?” he
wonders (p. 271). It sounds from the depths of Vladimir Nabokov’s pro-
foundly humane comic vision, and the gusto of Humbert’s narration, his
punning language, his abundant delight in digressions, parodies, and
games all attest to a comic vision that overrides the circumscribing sad-
ness, absurdity, and terror of everyday life.
[ 441 ]
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