The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  Fantasia: a corrected misprint (s instead of z in the 1958 edition). She is married here (the “Murphy-Fantasia” wedding party).

  McFate, Aubrey: a vagrant auditor, rather than a member of the class (see Aubrey McFate … devil of mine), 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 here and here, Nabokov gives the reader a fighting chance to make the association, and to realize its implications. It would be “easier” on the reader, of course, if the class list came after the second instance (notes living vacationists and Bill Brown … Dolores limn similar effects). McFate’s first name suggests Aubrey Beardsley (see Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island), the “decadent” Art Nouveau artist (1872–1898) quite out of fashion when Lolita was written, and reveals another mother lode of verbal figurations: the invented town of “Beardsley,” its school and college, and Gaston Godin (see Gaston Godin). The self-reflexive authorial identification with Beardsley is, among other things, a serious literary joke aimed at the unfriendly critics, then and now, who consign Nabokov the gilt-edged prose stylist to Aubrey’s party—the artistic dandies, the guilt-free Decadent School.

  The Beardsley schools themselves may reflect and refract three actual institutions of learning in Wellesley, Mass. Professor Patrick F. Quinn, who taught English at Wellesley College (1949–1985), points to several links between Beardsley and the three women’s schools in town (letter to the annotator, June 30, 1975). Dana Hall, a private secondary school, was for many years exclusively female, as was Pine Manor Junior College (it moved, c. 1970), and could be the prototypes for the Beardsley School. Wellesley College, where Nabokov taught in the forties, has a Founders Hall, which is “Maker Hall” in Lolita. For about eighty years, Wellesley offered a required, yearlong Bible course, an unusual feature for an elite college; in Lolita, the course offering has been transposed to the Beardsley School. Professor Quinn, by the way, is a distinguished Poe scholar. For Poe, see Lo-lee-ta.

  Windmuller: Louise and her father appear here; he here.

  bodyguard of roses: classmates “Rose” and “Rosaline” serve as Lolita’s rosy page-girls. The rose is of course the flower traditionally associated with gems, decorations, wine, perfume, and women of great charm and / or virtue. Lolita is continually linked with the flower. See Aubrey McFate … devil of mine. See also Keys, p. 118.

  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 (Heart, head—everything).

  charshaf: a veil worn by Turkish women.

  Irving: the reader may wonder why H.H. is sorry for “Flashman, Irving.” “Poor Irving,” said Nabokov, “he is the only Jew among all those Gentiles. Humbert identifies with the persecuted.” See spaniel … baptized.

  ullulations: or ululation; a loud, mournful, rhythmical howl.

  ribald sea monsters: the intrusive bearded bathers. “Annabel” and H.H.’s seasickness refer to Poe’s poem. See Lo-lee-ta.

  “Mais allez-y, allez-y!”: French; “But go ahead, go!”

  Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann: mentioned by John Ray. See Blanche Schwarzmann: schwarz.

  libidream: H.H.’s portmanteau of “libido” and “dream.”

  Dorsal view: belonging to, or situated on or near the back of an animal. The phrase is not a sentence, and it is followed by several other fragments. Style is definitely at issue here, in a chapter that deliberately mocks a jejune or degenerating prose—the clichés of popular “feminine” fiction; the half-baked writing of the diarist; verbal laziness of any kind that figuratively places Shakespeare in parentheses.

  manège: French; tactics.

  tennis ball … my … darling: Nabokov pairs the Poe allusion with a tennis ball because it is in the tennis scene that H.H. best captures her beauty—Shakespeare out of parentheses, if you will and so to speak.

  CHAPTER 12

  pederosis: H.H.’s description of his condition. Although rare, the term exists; from the Greek paid-, meaning “child,” plus erōs, “sexual love” (akin to erastbai: “to love, desire ardently”), plus Latin suffix, from Greek, -ōsis, an “abnormal or diseased condition” (e.g., sclerosis). Pedophilia is the more common word for H.H.’s malaise.

  Aubrey McFate … devil of mine: the devilish “force” responsible for H.H.’s misfortunes is invoked in locations [PART ONE] c11.1, c25.1, c27.1, [PART TWO] c16.1, c16.2, c25.1. 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 (Roches Roses) and Lolita; her classmate’s name, “Rose Carmine”, defines the two motifs nicely. Its significance, however, has nothing to do with “symbolism”; 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 I have only words to play with). Once pointed out, the color motif need not be identified further; but the reader is reminded again that Nabokov is no “symbolist.” After 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 information, under the heading “A Note about Symbols and Colors re ‘Annotated Lolita.’ ” It is included here because I think it is one of the most significant statements Nabokov made about his own art. He writes:

  There exist novelists and poets, and ecclesiastic writers, who deliberately use color terms, or numbers, in a strictly symbolic sense. The type of writer I 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 different 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 under such arbitrary labels as “red” (using it, moreover, as a sexual symbol, 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 Orange … and Emerald for further remarks on color.

  Miss Phalen: from the French phalène: moth. For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

  CHAPTER 13

  friable: easily crumbled or pulverized.

  parkled: H.H.’s coinage.

  safely solipsized: see solipsism. An important phrase (see second half of not human, but nymphic). 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. Although H.H.’s “moral apotheosis” is expressed at the end of Lolita, hints of it are fleetingly glimpsed early on, shortly, when H.H. addresses the nymphet’s solipsized condition: “What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own.”

  corpuscles of Krause: after the German anatomist: minute sensory particles occurring in the mucous membranes of the genitalia. An author’s error has been correcte
d (s in Krause instead of z in the 1958 edition).

  seraglio: the portion of a Moslem house reserved for the wives and harem.

  Drew his .32: the revenge murder of Lolita which doesn’t take place; see here.

  CHAPTER 14

  loan God: from a cultural sequence (e.g., Greek-Roman, Hebrew-Christian); “lone” in the first mass paperback edition, and thus an “existential image” to one critic.

  Dr. Quilty: the “playwright” is his nephew (or cousin), Clare Quilty. For a summary of Quilty allusions, see Quilty, Clare.

  Shirley Holmes: after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1850–1930) famous detective hero, Sherlock Holmes (see Arsène Lupin). Between the ages of ten and fifteen, Nabokov was a Holmes devotee. That enthusiasm 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 Pnin, 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. 151); and, in Despair, Hermann addresses Conan Doyle directly: “What an opportunity, what a subject you missed! For you could have written one last tale concluding 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. 121–122)—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 Pale 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 Reversed Footprints” (p. 78), alluding to The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). He is wrong, but 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, Lo-lee-ta. For the penultimate moment in this “tale of ratiocination,” see Waterproof; and for a telling allusion to Holmes, drawn from The Defense, see everything fell into order … the pattern of branches … the satisfaction of logical recognition.

  CHAPTER 15

  Camp Q: “Cue” is Quilty’s nickname. “The ‘Q,’ ” noted Nabokov, “had to be changed to ‘Kilt’ in the French translation because of the awful pun, Q = cul!” (which means “ass”).

  Botticellian pink: Sandro Botticelli (1444 or 1445–1510), 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 eyelashes” suggest his famous “The Birth of Venus,” which H.H. invokes here and here. In Laughter in the Dark, blind Albinus tries to transform incoherent sounds into colors: “It was the opposite of trying to imagine the kind of voices which Botticelli’s angels had” (p. 242).

  her coccyx: the end of the vertebral column.

  iliac: anatomical word; pertaining to the ilium, “the dorsal and upper one of the three bones composing either lateral half of the pelvis.”

  Catullus … forever: Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84–54 B.C.), Roman lyric, erotic, and epigrammatic poet. H.H.’s “that Lolita, my Lolita” echoes Catullus’s evocation of his enchanting Lesbia, as well as imitations such as “My sweetest Lesbia” (1601), by Thomas Campion (1567–1620), English poet. See the writer’s ancient lust and my Lolita … her Catullus.

  D.P.: during and shortly after World War II, refugees were officially described as “Displaced Persons”; hence “D.P.”s.

  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 Pépin le Bref’s wife and Charlemagne’s mother, and is alluded to by François Villon in his ballad with the refrain “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”

  mais rien: French; but nothing.

  CHAPTER 16

  mon cher, cher monsieur: French; my dear, dear sir.

  Départez: the wrong French for “leave!” Correct: Partez!

  chéri: French; darling.

  mon très, très cher: French; my very, very dear.

  crooner’s mug: many younger readers of the rock-and-roll persuasion do not know that to croon is to “sing in half voice especially into a closely held microphone” (Webster’s 3rd), a poor definition of the romantic style of ballad singing best represented by the oeuvre of Harry Lillis (Bing) Crosby (1904–1977), known affectionately as “The Groaner”; Frank Sinatra (1915–      ); and Mel Tormé (1925–      ). They are not mentioned by H.H. when he complains about pop singers (the nasal voices). Nabokov’s high standards prevailed quite instinctively, even on such foreign ground.

  Morell … “conquering hero”: 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), and 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. As for the c. 1949 magazine ad which is said to resemble H.H., his description of it is quite accurate. The ad is for Viyella robes, and is of some interest. It’s reproduced in color in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1983), p. 86. See the following page. For Joyce, see outspoken book: Ulysses.

  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, strictly speaking. H.H.’s aside, “The resemblance was slight,” refers to resemble … actor chap, where he is said to resemble Quilty. Note, too, that “Lo’s chaste bed” is under Quilty. See Quilty, Clare for a summary of Quilty allusions.

  CHAPTER 17

  pavor nocturnus: Latin; night panic. Quilty lives in “Pavor Manor.”

  peine forte et dure: French; strong and hard torture.

  Dostoevskian grin: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), the famous Russian novelist, was long one of Nabokov’s primary targets. In the Playboy interview he said, “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 admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical 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. 286). But H.H. is the ultimate in “sensitive murderers,” and by casting his tale as a “confession,” Nabokov lets Dostoevsky lay down the rules and then beats “old Dusty” at his own game. See Blank … Blankton, Mass. for remarks on another convention allied with the confession—the literary diary.

  Well-read Humbert: the lines he quotes are from Canto III, stanza 116 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 1080–1081), 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 gesture 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 child of Dolly’s age). 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 here). Byron’s works and Byron’s Augusta Ada, a gifted girl in her own right, resonate in Nabokov’s longest novel, Ada, 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. Nabokov’s deep knowledge of Byron is made evident throughout his Eugene Onegin Commentary (see the “Byron” entry in the Index, Vol. IV).

  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 René and even to Constant’s Adolphe,” writes Nabokov in his Eugene Onegin Commentary (Vol. II, p. 345). See Lottelita, Lolitchen. Goethe is also invoked on heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit. For Chateaubriand, see Chateaubriandesque trees.

  quel mot: French; what a word.

  incubus: an evil spirit or demon, originally in personified representations 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 enchantments, see not human, but nymphic.