The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  Joyce himself helped to introduce Nabokov to Finnegans Wake. In 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 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 here in 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, Humphrey 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 Nabokov’s sartorially splendid “Homburg” (here) complements Joyce’s “Humborg” (p. 72, standard American edition), and Joyce’s “Humfries” (p. 97) should surely be served with Nabokov’s “Hamburg[s]” (here and here)—but these are all coincidences, said Nabokov, for, “Generally speaking, FW is a very small and blurry smudge on the mirror of my memory.” The only persistent “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. 113); 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 outspoken book: Ulysses.

  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 rainbow of children on p. 221 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 Blues, especially in the female, are brown, not blue. In my case, the differentiation in artistic and scientific vision is particularly strong because I was really born a landscape painter, not a landless escape novelist as some think.” For more on “blue,” see Why blue; for a more generalized discussion of color, see Aubrey McFate … devil of mine.

  CHAPTER 19

  P.O. Wace and P.O. Elphinstone: = P.O.W. and Poe, and the imprisonment theme.

  Ne manque … Qu’il t’y: an allusion to Quilty and a parody of the classical alexandrine verse of seventeenth-century France, specifically of Le Cid (1636), by Pierre Corneille (1606–1684): “Do not fail to tell your suitor, Chimène, how beautiful the lake is, because he should take you there.” Chimène is from Le Cid, but the line itself is invented. See also Keys, p. 71. For an index to Quilty references, see Quilty, Clare.

  the mysterious nastiness: Mona knew all about Quilty and injected his name. H.H. is not supposed to understand, at the time, the planted “qu ’il t’y,” though he suspects some nasty trick.

  à titre documentaire: French; just for the record.

  Lo to behold: H.H. toys with the worn interjection, “Lo and behold,” as Lolita did much earlier (And behold).

  detective: Trapp (Quilty).

  un ricanement: French, a sneer.

  Alice Adams: the title of a 1921 novel by Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) about a small-town girl who pines for better things.

  Browns: “Browns” reappear here, here, and here.

  Cokes: the 1958 edition did not capitalize the trademark; the error has been corrected.

  intacta: H.H. uses the Latin form of the common word “intact,” but invokes its less common meaning, “untouched virgin.”

  boy friend: Quilty.

  bearded scholar: “Another little bit of prophecy” (see The Bearded Woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single), said Nabokov. “Lots of bearded young scholars around these days.”

  la pomme de sa canne: French; the round knob of a cane.

  Mirana: H.H.’s father had owned a Mirana hotel; see Mirana.

  Proteus of the highway: Quilty; from Greek mythology; a prophetic sea-god in Poseidon’s service, who would assume different shapes when seized.

  remises: carriage houses.

  Melmoth: 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 Maturin’s Melmoth a “gloomy vagabond” (Vol. II, p. 352). “The book, although 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). Nabokov’s paraphrase of the “action” of Melmoth 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 agreement 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 exchange situations with him.

  Maturin’s novel most likely supplied Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) with his post-prison pseudonym of “Sebastian Melmoth.” In addition, added Nabokov, “Melmoth may come from Mellonella Moth (which breeds in beehives) or, more likely, from Meal Moth (which breeds in grain).” For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

  grays … his favorite cryptochromism: a coinage; “secret colors.” It is also an authorial favorite, in view of the puns on Haze, shadow, and ombre.

  “ordeal of the orb”: changing the tire.

  gigantic truck … impossible to pass: a fear confirmed; see slow truck … road.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Love Under the Lindens”: planted between famous plays by Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) is a combination of Desire Under the Elms (1924), by Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953), and Unter den Linden (a boulevard in Berlin). See also Keys, p. 15on. The portmanteau title, credited to “Eelmann” (O’Neill plus Thomas Mann), is mentioned in Ada (p. 403). Nabokov’s low opinion of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra is expressed in Gogol (p. 55).

  flashlight: a corrected author’s error (instead of “torchlight” in the 1958 edition). The quotation marks which enclosed this extract in the 195
8 edition have also been corrected.

  Cyrano … sleeping stranger: after rereading this passage in 1968, Nabokov belatedly put words in H.H.’s mouth: “Cyrano’s big nose. Cyranose. Sorry myself to have missed that portmantoid pun. ‘A sleeping stranger,’ ” he added, “is enchanting and haunting.” Edmond Rostand’s famous play (1897) is based on the life of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), French writer and soldier. “Cyraniana” in Ada (p. 339) alludes to his most famous work, Histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune (1656; modern edition: A Voyage to the Moon).

  petit rat: a young ballet student at the Paris Opera (ages nine to fourteen).

  Electra: “The name is based on that of a close ally of the Clouded Yellow butterfly,” said Nabokov, “and has nothing to do with the Greek Electra.” See Edusa Gold. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

  Ned Litam: the anagrammatic (it reads backwards) pseudonym under which the great tennis player William T. (Bill) Tilden II wrote fiction. See a famous coach … with a harem of ball boys, where Lolita takes lessons from him.

  endorsing a Dromedary: like Quilty; see Morell … “conquering hero”. Note how H.H. is continually providing oblique clues; see Quilty, Clare for a summary of Quilty allusions.

  fifty-three: the 1958 edition omitted the hyphen; the error has been corrected.

  susceptible to the magic of games … I saw the board: H.H. is speaking for his maker, who would hope that the reader shares this limpid view of the gameboard that is Lolita.

  stratagems: “beautiful word, stratagem—a treasure in a cave,” writes Nabokov in Gogol (p. 59).

  tessellated: laid with checkered work or adorned with mosaic.

  Champion, Colorado: an actual town, chosen by Nabokov because this is a championship game—H.H.’s attempts to fix in prose the beauty of the nymphet.

  Decugis or Borman: Max Decugis was a great European tennis player who often teamed with Gobbert (see Gobbert). They were Wimbledon men’s doubles champions in 1911. Paul de Borman was the Belgian champion in the first decade of this century. Nabokov recalled, “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 aggressiveness 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 Parody of a hotel corridor … and death). He was in fact a life-long tennis enthusiast and supplemented his meagre income as an émigré by giving tennis lessons to wealthy Berliners. Not by chance does he have H.H. poeticize Lolita’s tennis game, on a court invested with the geometric perfection that the painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) brought to rigorous abstractions that sometimes look like overviews of tennis courts.

  butterfly: although Nabokov intended no “symbolism,” it appears after H.H. has come as close to capturing Lolita’s grace as he ever will. Nabokov only commented, “Butterflies are indeed inquisitive, and the dipping motion is characteristic of a number of genera.” See John Ray, Jr..

  wimbles: any of several instruments for boring holes.

  a syncope in the series: an elision or loss of one or more letters or sounds from the middle of a word.

  Maffy On Say: phonetic American pronunciation of “ma fiancée.”

  purling: gently murmuring, as a brook.

  three horrible Boschian cripples: one of whom is Quilty. Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450–1516), the great Flemish master of the grotesque, whose paintings abound in moral and physiological cripples. “And Flemish hells with porcupines and things” is a brief Boschian vision in the poem 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 creatures from a Bosch painting, and dies “an odd Boschean death” (pp. 435–436). Nabokov then comments at length on the butterfly rendered at the center of Bosch’s “Garden of Delights.”

  That … intruder … a double: Quilty; a pun: a double at tennis and a Doppelgänger. See double game.

  CHAPTER 21

  red ball: rolled by Quilty, who reappears here.

  Aztec Red: H.H. remembers the color of Quilty’s car. See Aztec Red.

  padded shield: like the olisbos of olisbos; Quilty is seen as a grotesque Priapus who in this passage transforms nature into a veritable forest of phalli. Priaps (below) is H.H.’s usage.

  CHAPTER 22

  Elphinstone: where H.H. will lose his “elf”; see Percy Elphinstone.

  Soyons logiques: French; Let us be logical.

  saguaro: a giant cactus with a thick stem and white flowers.

  fatamorganas: mirages: see Mirana. A display in the fabulous department store in King, Queen, Knave offers “a Fata Morgana of coats” (p. 68).

  José Lizzarrabengoa: Carmen’s abandoned lover. See Little Carmen, Est-ce que … Carmen, and Changeons … séparés.

  Etats Unis: French; U.S.A.

  Mrs. Hays: H.H. found Lo at Mrs. Haze’s house, and will now lose her at the motor court of Mrs. Hays, also a widow.

  Blue: from the common German name, “Blau.” Dr. Starov, from the last chapter of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and Dr. Blue combine in Pale Fire (1962) to form “The great Starover Blue [who] reviewed the role / Planets had played as landfalls of the soul” (lines 627–628). See suggested the play’s title.

  heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit: Quilty; an allusion to Goethe’s poem Erlkönig (“Erlking”; king of the elves), in which spectral incarnations of the Erlking pursue a little boy who rides with his father through the dark and windy forest. Unable to possess the beloved boy, the Erlking wills his death. When the father arrives “safely” at the farmhouse, the child is dead in his arms. In Pale Fire, the Zemblan word “alfear” (Nabokov’s coinage) is defined as “uncontrollable fear caused by elves” (p. 143); and a passage of John Shade’s (lines 653–664) alludes to Goethe’s poem, especially line 662, which Charles Kinbote likes enough to scan and then translate into Zemblan (p. 239). See the Onegin Commentary (Vol. II, p. 235). See also Keys, p. 138n. For “elf,” see Percy Elphinstone.

  “ague”: a violent chill.

  haute montagne: French; above-timberline pastures.

  Lore … Rolas: the importation of Basques and their vicious sheep dogs, and the place names (Lore, etc.) are “real,” Nabokov having encountered them both in the Pyrenees and the Rockies. “Que sais-je!” is a French cliché (“and so forth,” “or whatever”).

  French perfume: the Soleil Vert of this passage.

  secret agent … or hallucination: Quilty.

  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.

  lavender: a mint cultivated on hillsides in Southern France, used for its fragrant oil.

  Clowns and Columbines … Tennis: the first title is H.H.’s invention (the other titles exist). In the commedia dell’arte (see “Bertoldo” … comedy and Dr. Gratiano … Mirandola, N.Y.), the clown Pulcinella had a dual nature: witty, ironic, 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 companion of Harlequin, the volatile, elusive character associated with Mercury as the patron of merchants, panderers, and thieves. The analogy with H.H., Lolita, and Quilty is clear. Helen Wills (1905–   �
��  ) was the greatest woman tennis player of the twenties and thirties, and her youthful championship and 1928 book, Tennis, are obviously meant to inspire Lolita further. The dance volumes are evidently there to inspire a new program of instruction and state of grace that H.H. will never get to see. The volume of Browning must contain Pippa Passes (see frock-fold … Browning and Pim … Pippa). The title character, a perambulating mill girl, is so good-natured that she keeps on singing, no matter what she sees.