CHAPTER 10
patients … had witnessed their own conception: Nabokov’s attacks on Freud are consistent. Kinbote includes in his Commentary lines deleted in the draft of the poem Pale Fire:
… Your modern architect
Is in collusion with psychanalysts:
When planning parents’ bedrooms, he insists
On lockless doors so that, when looking hack,
The future patient of the future quack
May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene. [p. 94]
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov similarly “reject[s] completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in 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 he notes the “pale pencil which poor [public] speakers are obsessed with in familiar dreams (attributed by Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu to the dreamer’s having read in infancy his adulterous parents’ love letters)” (p. 549). For Freud, see a case history.
Humbertish: H.H.’s coinage; after any language ending in the -ish suffix (Finnish, English, Lettish).
house … burned down: Nabokov omitted from the last draft of Lolita a hilarious scene describing H.H.’s arrival by taxi at the charred-out, bepuddled, roped-off ruins of the McCoo residence. A large crowd applauds H.H. as he grandly alights from the cab; only an encyclopedia has survived the holocaust. He recognizes that the lost opportunity to coach “the enigmatic [McCoo] nymphet” is no loss at all (see p. 41). Nabokov reinstated the scene in his published screenplay of Lolita (Stanley Kubrick had dropped it from the film). “Although there are just enough borrowings from [my Lolita script in Kubrick’s] version to justify my legal position as author of the script, the final product is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wish to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlust [see Introduction, here] is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass. Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but I shall never understand why he did not follow my directions and dreams. It is a great pity; but at least I shall be able to have people read my Lolita play in its original form” (Paris Review interview, 1967). Speaking more positively three years earlier, Nabokov said, “The four main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car—these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty [Peter Sellers] is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze [Shelley Winters; James Mason was H.H.]. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on stressing certain things that were not stressed—for example, the different motels at which they stopped” (Playboy interview). The highways and motels were so little in evidence because the film, released in 1962, was shot in England.
342: for “coincidences,” see A key (342!) and 342.
A lady who lived opposite: and she is subsequently referred to as “Miss Opposite” on pp. 52 ff.
suburban dog: a foreshadowing of Charlotte Haze’s death, for Mr. Beale will run over her when he swerves to avoid hitting what may well be this dog (see here). See also Keys, p. 6.
van Gogh: the “Arlésienne” (1888) is a famous portrait of a woman from the town of Aries 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 reproduction of van Gogh’s “La Berceuse” (p. 108).
Marlene Dietrich: see Lola. Also here and here.
René Prinet: “The Kreutzer Sonata” was dedicated by Beethoven to Rodolphe Kreutzer in 1805 (Nabokov intended no allusion to Tolstoy’s story of that name). Prinet’s painting (1898) has long illustrated the Tabu perfume advertisement 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.” For a scented version, see and smell Glamour, December 1990, p. 49.
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 lost pair of sunglasses).
fairy-tale: see not human, but nymphic and Percy Elphinstone.
“Roches Roses”: the “red rocks.” See Aubrey McFate … devil of mine. Both H.H.’s and Poe’s “Annabel Lee” are alluded to on this and the next page.
nouvelle: French; new one. For the literary importance of “this Lolita, my Lolita, see the writer’s ancient lust.
mummery: the performance of an actor in a dumb show; mummer is obsolete slang for a play-actor.
fruit vert: “green fruit”; French (dated) slang for “ ‘unripe’ females attractive to ripe gentlemen,” noted Nabokov.
Au fond, ça m’est bien égal: French; “Really, I don’t care at all.”
CHAPTER 11
en escalier: set-up in an oblique typography; French for “staircase style.”
Blank … Blankton, Mass.: there is no such town. The “blanks” make fun of the “authenticity” of the pages of both the diary and the entire novel, H.H.’s “photographic memory” notwithstanding. Thus Lolita’s parodic design also includes the literary journal or diary. Nabokov regarded with profound skepticism the possibilities of complete autobiographical revelation. “Manifold self-awareness” (as he calls it in Speak, Memory) is not to be achieved through solemn introspection, certainly not through the diarist’s compulsive egotism, candid but totally self-conscious self-analysis, carefully created “honesty,” willful irony, and studied self-deprecation. Nabokov burlesqued the literary diary as far back as 1934. Near the end of Despair, Hermann’s first-person narrative “degenerates into a diary”—“the lowest form of literature” (p. 208)—and this early parody is fully realized in Lolita, especially in the present chapter. For more on the confessional mode, see Dostoevskian grin.
phoenix: a legendary bird represented by the ancient Egyptians as living 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.
sebum: the material secreted by the sebaceous glands.
Humbert le Bel: Humbert the Fair; a kingly epithet (e.g., Charles le Bel of France).
entrée: appearance on a stage; grand entrance.
favonian: of or pertaining to the west wind; thus, gentle.
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 Annabel (see Lo-lee-ta).
Priap: son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, Priapus was the Greco-Roman god of procreation and fertility, usually portrayed in a manly state. Also mentioned here, here, and less mythically, here. See Dolores.
predator … prey: H.H. often characterizes himself as a predator, most often as an ape or spider (prominent among the butterfly’s natural enemies). For further discussion, see my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, op. cit., pp. 222 and 228.
stippled: engraved, by means of dots rather than lines; in painting, refers to the use of small touches which coalesce to produce gradations of light and shade. See stippled Hopkins.
Delectatio morosa … dolors: Latin; morose pleasure, a monastic term. In the next sentence, as on p. 53, H.H. toys with the Latin etymology of “Dolores” (see Dolores).
Our
Glass Lake: see Hourglass Lake … spelled.
nacreous: having a pearly iridescence.
Virginia … Edgar: Poe was born January 19, 1809. He was therefore twenty-seven when in 1836 he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who died of a lingering disease in 1847. She was the inspiration for many of his poems. For his first conjugal night with Lolita, H.H. appropriately registers as “Edgar” (see Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter). He also employs the name here and here (see also Keys, p. 37). Nabokov told me that he originally intended to call Lolita “Virginia” and title the book Ginny. For a summary of the Poe allusions, see Lo-lee-ta.
Je m’imagine cela: French; I can imagine that.
“Monsieur Poe-poe”: H.H. puns on “poet,” but the schoolboy had in mind “popo” (or “popotin”), French slang for the posterior.
resemble … actor chap: Clare Quilty. They do resemble one another. For a summary of Quilty allusions, see Quilty, Clare.
nictating: rare; winking.
“ne montrez pas vos zhambes”: French; “don’t show your legs” (jambes is misspelled to indicate an American accent). See ne montrez pas vos zhambes.
à mes heures: French; when in the right mood.
lady writer: H.H.’s characterization and caricature are not “sexist.” He’s referring to the kind of deathless trite prose long produced by women for women (e.g., the Harlequin romances, whose male authors adopt female pseudonyms to be “credible”).
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 [PART ONE] c11.1, c15.1, [PART TWO] c01.1, c29.1, c29.2, c35.1). 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 my Lolita.
Our Glass Lake: a “mistake”; see Hourglass Lake … spelled.
“Little Carmen”: a pun: little [train]men, or “Dwarf Conductors” (see also Keys, p. 144n). The allusions to Carmen have nothing to do with Bizet’s opera. They refer only to the novella (1845) by Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870). For a pun on his name, see Merrymay, Pa.… my Carmen. Like H.H., José Lizzarrabengoa, Carmen’s abandoned and ill-fated lover (see José Lizzarrabengoa), 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 sophisticated reader who is misled into believing that H.H., like José, will murder his treacherous Carmen; see here, where H.H. springs the trap. H.H. quotes Mérimée (Est-ce que … Carmen, Changeons … séparés, Carmen … moi) and frequently calls Lolita “Carmen,” the traditional name of a bewitching woman ([PART ONE] c13.1, c13.2, c13.3, [PART TWO] c22.1, c22.2, c24.1, c29.1, c29.2). Carl R. Proffer discusses the Carmen allusions in Keys, pp. 43–51. In Latin, carmen means song, poetry, and charm. “My charmin’, my Carmen,” says H.H., 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 not human, but nymphic. H.H. calls himself “an enchanted hunter,” takes Lolita to the hotel of that name, speaks of an “enchanted island of time”, 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 enchanter. See The Enchanted Hunters.
I shot … said: Ah.’: a prevision of Quilty’s death; see shooting her lover … making him say “akh!” and a feminine.
Pisky: “Pixie”; see Percy Elphinstone. The town is invented. Also means “moth” in rural England. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..
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 nous connûmes, Miss Emperor, and Never will Emma rally … timely tear.
Ronsard’s “la 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, o vermeillette fante” (“fente” is the modern spelling): “I salute [or hail] you, oh little red slit” (“Blason du sexe feminin,” Edition Pléiade, II, 775). A “Blason” is a short poem in praise or criticism of a certain subject. For another allusion to Ronsard, see adolori … langueur. During his émigré 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, and Romain Rolland.
Remy Belleau’s “un petit … escarlatte”: Belleau (1528–1577), Ronsard’s colleague in the Pléiade group, also writes a “blason” in praise of 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 appears in the Leyden reprint (1865) of the rare anthology Recueil de pièces choisies rassemblées par les soins du cosmopolite, duc d’Aiguillon, éd. (1735). The Cornell Library owns a copy, noted Nabokov.
of my darling … my bride: line 39 of Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” See Lo-lee-ta for the poem.
Mystery of the Menarche: the menarche is the initial menstrual period. In Ireland it is called “The Curse of the Irish.”
kill in my dreams: another prevision of Quilty’s death scene.
toothbrush mustache: Quilty has one too. Poe also had one, but Nabokov said that no allusion was intended here.
ape-ear: H.H. several times characterizes himself this way. See here for a most resonant ape image.
coltish subteens … (all New England for a lady-writer’s pen!): this diary entry opens with a burst of cheap-fiction clichés—prose as ready-made as “the black ready-made bow and bobby pins holding [Lo’s] hair in place.” H.H.’s dead language and reference to a colt sets-up a parenthetical echo of the battlefield lamentation of Richard III when his horse is slain: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (Richard III, V, iv, 19). Shakespeare, the king of English, is deposed and truly in parentheses at this turn of Lolita, hemmed-in by the stock epithets of “a lady writer.” For Shakespeare, see God or Shakespeare.
Ces matins gris si doux: French; “Those gray mornings, so soft …”
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. 63).
Is it Fate: “McFate” is quietly introduced; see McFate, Aubrey and Aubrey McFate … devil of mine.
“And behold”: Lolita completes her mother’s “Lo,” and H.H. later twists the epithet (Lo to behold).
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 convex mirror that, half a millennium ago, Van Eyck and Petrus Christus 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. 31–32) and the “cryptogrammic paper chase” (pp. 250–51), the “poetic” class list serves as a kind of magical mirror. The list is printed on the back of an unfinished map of the United States, 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 Encyclopedia prefigures their journeys (on which H.H. will “finish” the map by showing Lolita the country), just as the class list prefigures and mirrors an extraordinary number of other things.
Beale: the Beales’ father kills Charlotte Haze, and they are the first of no less than five sets
of twins or twinned names in Lolita’s class (the Beales, the Cowans, the Talbots, and the incestuous Mirandas), a microscopic vision of the doubling (H.H. and Quilty) and mirroring that occurs in the roomy interior of the entire book (including Ray’s Foreword), where even cars have their twins; “the long hairy arm of coincidence” is said to have its unpredictable “twin limb”; Mrs. Haze is echoed by the widow Mrs. Hays; and 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 here).
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 alliterative place names and points of interest H.H. visits are thus thematically 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.” (here). The name of “Harold D. Doublename” represents a summary phrase, but the annotator’s double initials are only a happy coincidence. For more on mirrors, see a mirror.
Carmine, Rose: see Aubrey McFate … devil of mine.
Falter: German; butterfly—and a companion of “Miss Phalen” (phalène: moth [Miss Phalen]) and the playwright “Schmetterling” (butterfly [Schmetterling]). For a summary of the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Page 48
