CHAPTER 34
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.
penele: a coined adjective; “penis-like” (penes is a plural form).
My Lolita!: the penultimate elegiac “Latin” intonation. See the writer’s ancient lust.
selenian: of or relating to the moon.
raised a gun: a foreshadowing of Quilty’s death; an echo of the murder prefiguration in Chapter Two of Laughter in the Dark.
CHAPTER 35
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 classroom use. The nuances of Nabokov’s accent—Cambridge by way of old St. Petersburg, the French in perfect pitch—are a striking aural equivalent 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. Experience has suggested that the latter is not always sufficiently appreciated by students who have grown up with TV, and don’t always “get” the tone of a printed page. Where’s the laugh-track when you need it?
fairy tale: the fairy-tale opening is appropriate, for this is the most fantastic chapter in the novel, as witnessed by the uncommon velocities and trajectories of the bullets H.H. will fire, and the extraordinary behavior of their target. H.H. inspects three bedrooms because that is the fairy-tale number. For more on the fairy tale, see not human, but nymphic, Percy Elphinstone, and trudging from room to room.
deep mirrors: Quilty literally lives in a house of mirrors, just as H.H. is figuratively imprisoned in one; see Beale, a mirror, and below, where the mirror is held up to him and he sees a familiar bathrobe. For an index to Quilty’s appearances, see Quilty, Clare.
keys … locks … left hand: the keys don’t work because magic and terror prevail in the special world of Pavor Manor. See trudging from room to room.
brief waterfall: Quilty has once before flushed the toilet thusly; see someone … beyond our bathroom.
Je suis … Brustère: “I am Mr. Brewster,” spelled in phonetic French.
Punch: the hook-nosed and hunchbacked principal character in the traditional “Punch and Judy” show (see Introduction and I have only words to play with). Used here in the sense of “clown.”
vaterre: “water,” with a phonetic French spelling; slang for “water closet” (lavatory).
Patagonia: an actual town in Arizona.
Dolores, Colo.: Nabokov, the enchanted butterfly hunter, made one of his most important captures at Telluride, near Dolores, Colo., which is why he finally chose Dolores rather than Virginia as the proper name of his nymphet. Did you ever hear of a girl named “Telluride”? For Dolores, see Dolores. For a mordant blending of Proust and Dolores, see Dolorès Disparue. For the butterfly in question, see from my lofty slope and tinkling sounds … Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov.
those calls: but H.H. has in mind the fake call Quilty made here.
La … Chair: The Pride of the Flesh, not a noteworthy translation of Proud Flesh, which in French would be Tissu bourgeonnant or Fongosité.
Wooly- … -are?: a phonetic burlesque of American pronunciation: “Voulez-vous boire?” (French; “Do you want a drink?”).
une femme … cigarette: “a woman is a woman but a Caporal is a cigarette.” Quilty has made nonsense out of “The Betrothed,” by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936): “A million surplus Maggie are willing to bear the yoke / And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke” (see also Keys, p. 136n). The pun is on corporal (military rank) and Caporal (the brand name of a French cigarette).
a Gentile’s house: for a summary of what could be termed “the anti-Semitism theme,” see spaniel … baptized.
“Vous … vieux”: French; “You are in a fine mess, my friend.”
“Alors … -on?”: French; “What do we do then?”
Justine: see Sade’s … start: Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue.
Because … a sinner: a parody of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” (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 pastiches.
moulting: animals and insects moult; to cast off hair, feathers, skin, etc., which is replaced by new growth.
flavid: yellowish or tawny-colored.
rencontre: French; meeting (duel).
soyons raisonnables: French; let us be reasonable.
as the Bard said: in Macbeth (V, vii, 19); and for this pun Quilty deserves to die.
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.
Schmetterling: German; butterfly. During a conversation with Nabokov, I singled out this moment in the H.H.-Quilty confrontation as a good example of the kind of humorous but telling detail whose significance critics often miss. Nabokov nodded and with complete seriousness said, “Yes. That’s the most important phrase in the chapter.” At first this may seem to be an extreme statement or leg-pull; but in the context of the involuted patterning it is perfectly just (see I have only words to play with), for by mentioning the German word for butterfly Quilty has superimposed the author’s watermark on the scene. Like the mention of Dolores, Colorado (Dolores, Colo.), this reference—the only butterfly in the chapter—points to the lawful obsession with Lepidoptera that makes Nabokov a fellow traveler with enchanted hunters as unsavory as H.H. and Quilty. This tack is summarized in the hospital at Elphinstone … irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star. For Maeterlinck, the heavy-handed symbolist, see Maeterlinck. For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..
herculanita: a very potent South American variety of heroin.
Melanie Weiss: “Black White”; from melanin (“black [pigmented]”) and the German for “white”—and she does measure reality in black- and-white terms. Her work burlesques the researches of a famous woman anthropologist who also favored far Pacific isles. See Blanche Schwarzmann: schwarz for the sisterly mirror reversal “Blanche Schwarzmann” (“White Blackman”), a verbal relationship that once again reveals the author’s hand.
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 Pëtr 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.
Feu: French; Fire.
Impredictable: a portmanteau word; unpredictable plus impredicable (from predicated): “incapable of being categorized.”
a feminine “ah!”: see I shot … said: Ah.’ and shooting her lover … making him say “akh!”.
trudging from room to room: the keys jangling in H.H.’s pocket have not locked the rooms (see keys … locks … left hand); a fairy tale and nightmare blended. Quilty’s refusal to die mocks the Double story, and the idea that evil can be exorcized so easily.
pink bubble: see bubble of hot poison for the original, figurative bubble.
purple heap: the color of his bathrobe and his prose.
staged for me by Quilty: see The Strange Mushroom.
CHAPTER 36
Thomas had something: Thomas the Apostle, the “doubting” disciple of John 20:24, who refused to believe in the resurrection of Christ until he himself had touched the nail wounds. Asked if an allusion to Thomas Mann might also be intended here, Nabokov replied, “The other Tom had nothing.”
Hegelian synthesis: the death of Charlotte is remembered here (the killer’s car going up the slope; here), blending with the
whole story of Lolita, from the cows on the slope (here) to her assumed death (if the reader reads the book, Lolita must be dead; see here, here, and here). This “Hegelian synthesis” realizes Quilty’s “Elizabethan” play-within-the-novel, The Enchanted Hunters, which featured Lolita as a bewitching “farmer’s daughter who imagines herself to be a woodland witch, or Diana,”, and seven hunters, six of them “red-capped, uniformly attired.” A “last-minute kiss was to enforce the play’s profound message, namely, that mirage and reality merge in love.” When Humbert asks a pregnant and veiny-armed Lolita to go away with him, he demonstrates that the mirage of the past (the nymphic Lolita as his lost “Annabel”) and the reality of the present (the Charlotte-like woman Lolita is becoming) have merged in love, a “synthesis linking up two dead women.”
heavenlogged system.… crisscrossing the crazy quilt: Part Two’s final reference to Quilty by name mirrors the section’s first entry, “crazy quilt.” We’ve seen that such “coincidences” limn H.H.’s entrapment, his particular obsessional McFate—“I cannot get out, said the starling”—and, of course, the author’s presence. The book-length system of planned coincidences and harmonious authorial patterning can also stand as a metaphor for evidence of the cosmic Author’s work, divine Revelation of some “heavenlogged system” (logged here means “to enter in a logbook,” “any record of progress”). As for Nabokov’s specific “system,” pantheism is a just word—lofty, but hardly reductive.
from my lofty slope: Here, H.H. realizes that the sounds emanating from the mining town below were of one nature—children at play. “One could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clutter of a toy wagon.… And then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord,” and with these words, it is clear that H.H. has transcended his solipsism. “The rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump” pinpoints happy metamorphoses, especially H.H.’s progression as an ethical being. The pretty but two-dimensional “pregnant” landscape (reread the passage) has given birth to the concord of children, a three-dimensional conception because it includes people. Aesthetic, moral, and communal perspectives have cohered, as ideally they should. The image of the “heavenlogged system” posits a fourth–dimension, ail of which is at a considerable remove from the one–dimensional landscape represented in the conventional “ancient American estampe.” Humbert’s is indeed a lofty perch.
The personal dimension of this signal passage is documented by a letter that Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson in September 1951, from Ithaca, N.Y., describing a successful quest for butterflies in Telluride, where, in July, he had caught the first identified female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov, though his letter isn’t taxonomically specific about his finds. He does mention “a steep slope high above Telluride—quite an enchanted slope,” and the mining town, “full of most helpful, charming people—and when you hike from there, which is 9000’, to 10000’, with the town and its tin roofs and self–conscious poplars lying toylike at the flat bottom of a cul-de-sac valley running into giant granite mountains, all you hear are the voices of children playing in the streets—delightful!” (The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1977 [1979], p. 265). The passage of Lolita here, which clearly echoes many of these words, may well have been composed shortly after this letter; the end of the novel was written at the outset. In any event, two kinds of wonder are conflated in Lolita’s version of the letter’s lofty vision.
Otto Otto: queried about this name, Nabokov answered, “a doubled neutrality with something owlish about it.”
Mesmer: after Franz or Friedrich Mesmer (1734–1815), the Austrian physician who established hypnotism. See Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH.
Lambert: a step away from Humbert. No literary allusions intended.
fifty-six days ago: in the concluding paragraphs of Lolita, H.H. reasserts the verisimilar basis that has been belied everywhere in the preceding pages, linking the last three paragraphs of his manuscript with the first three paragraphs of “editor” John Ray’s Foreword, creating an elegant pairing and extraordinary equipoise for which neither H.H. nor Ray is responsible (see “real people”).
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 here H.H. advises Lolita similarly (see Never Talk to Strangers). “Coincidence” and design govern in things this small, to paraphrase Robert Frost’s poem “Design” (1936), a bleak reversal of Nabokov’s hopeful pantheistic vision.
do not pity C.Q.…. aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments … my Lolita: “durable pigments” preserve the angels in Old Master paintings. The “auroch” refers to the European bison, now virtually extinct, as is this definition, since it is omitted from Webster’s 3rd. H.H.’s aurochs allude to those delicate and stylized images of bison that still are visible on the cave walls of Spain and France where they were painted ten to twenty thousand years ago. Their “durable pigments” are an inspiring idea and sight, even when the images are poorly reproduced in text books. But I would never have identified the auroch as such if Nabokov himself hadn’t mentioned it to me during a 1974 conversation about the cave paintings of Lascaux. (The beleagured drawing instructor in Nabokov’s 1938 story, “Tyrants Destroyed,” who endures a totalitarian regime, finds some solace in his doctoral dissertation on the cave origins of painting.) But Lolita’s cave painting is too “Joycean,” too obscure; “C.Q.,” the final Quilty reference, is much fairer. With it, H.H.’s tone turns an unfamiliar shade. Although the narrative surface is still 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” (Wisconsin Studies interview). This “remoteness” is appropriate, for Humbert’s love and Nabokov’s labors have become one. The final phrase sounds the “Latin” locution that has echoed through the narrative (see the writer’s ancient lust and my Lolita), 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, this verbal equivalent of an ordered (divinely ordered?) universe. Fyodor, the young poet of The Gift, wonders, on a summer stroll, “what is concealed behind all this, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick, green greasepaint of the foliage? For there really is something, there is something! And one wants to offer thanks but there is no one to thank. The list of donations already made: 10,000 days—from Person Unknown” (p. 340).
ON A BOOK ENTITLED LOLITA
ON … ENTITLED LOLITA: this Afterword was written to accompany the generous excerpts from Lolita which appeared in the 1957 edition of The Anchor Review, the novel’s American debut, made possible 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 included in most of the 25 or so translations.
the poor creature’s cage: see I cannot … starling. In Pale 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 sentence omitted from the second edition (Speak, Memory), Nabokov says, “His best works are those in which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls” (p. 217). Nabokov employed the prison trope in many ways. See my Introduction, here.
best … are not translated: this of course is no longer true.
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br /> destroyed it … after … 1940: nor is this true. The story, titled “The Enchanter,” 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 Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston, 1967). Newly translated versions are quoted in the Introduction, here.
The book developed slowly: its design and order of events, however, were clearly in mind early in its composition, said Nabokov, although various sections were written well out of sequence, as was customary with him. See Introduction, here.
“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. 210–220).
America: a corrected misprint (“American” in the 1958 edition).
Palearctic … Nearctic: one of the four world faunal regions, the Holarctic (arctic and temperate zones), is subdivided into Palearctic (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 16, p. 61. See John Ray, Jr. for a summary of all the entomological allusions.
spring of 1955: a corrected author’s error (instead of “winter of 1954” in the 1958 edition).
Mr. 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.
class list of Ramsdale School: it is most notable for the way it mirrors the artist who created it (see her class at … school ff.), and for “Flashman, Irving,” who suffers quietly, the only Jew in a class of Gentiles (see Irving).
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Page 59
