Divorce proceedings delayed my voyage, and the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe when, after a winter of boredom 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 perfume 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 excruciating insomnias. Knowing me by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty and hot I got, trying to pick up beautiful women in Central Park, and how complexly compelled and 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 flu sent me to a hospital 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 brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead an expedition into arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a "recorder of psychic reactions." With two young botanists and an old carpenter I shared now and then the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita Johnson--who was soon flown back. 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 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--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 of or because of all the fantastic blankness and boredom. Surrounded by such dejected vegetation as willow scrub and lichens; permeated, and, I suppose, 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 women with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked much less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Shaved legs do not occur in polar regions.
I left my betters the task of analyzing glacial drifts, drumlins, 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 matters, such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food-fantasies, 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 report that the reader will find published in he 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 purpose was admirably achieved.
The reader will regret to learn that soon after my return to civilization I had another bout with influenza. I owe my complete restoration to a discovery I made while being treated at that particular very expensive hospital. The life of the patient and the life of the scholar are perfectly identical: lounging, thinking, fighting boredom, inviting distraction. I had my papers brought to me, began working twelve-hour days free of distraction, and did not leave the hospital until a nosy nurse discovered I had made a full recovery.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Chapter 8
Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified vegetable soup, what really attracted me to Valeria was her air of innocence. She gave it not because she had divined something about my desire to be the man in the relationship, 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 circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was in no place to judge. She looked fluffy and frolicsome, showed a generous amount of enthusiasm for the world, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable.
After a brief ceremony at the town hall, I took her to the new apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear a maid’s outfit that I had managed to filch from the linen closet of a charity ball. Am I disclosing too much? I had some fun that nuptial night and, in spite of her claimed lack of experience, Valeria did too. But reality soon asserted itself. The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; presently, instead of a young sexy wife, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba. Or that was how it felt sometimes.
This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her best 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. We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir newspaper, so full of gossip and lies, I working at a rickety table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her intellect very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the cook 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, flamboyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American engraving--a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds.
The peaceful times burst. In the summer of 1939 my American uncle 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 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 I had imagined her to be. 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 husband's solid Swiss citizenship could not easily transcend; and I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the French police headquarters, and 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 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, "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, as a vulgarian might have done, was immoral, though I confess it was a temptation. 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 suffocating me--not because I had any particular fondness for Mme Humbert, but because, in my machismic fury, I felt that 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 announcing plans for an immediate divorce. "But who is it?" 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 cafè 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 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 wardrobe and the books she had read or should read. "I think," - he said, "She will like Jean Christophe?" Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.
I put an end to this gibberish by suggesting Valeria pack up 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 entertained the fantasy of killing her or her lover, or both, all the while knowing he would kill neither. I thought of the one time I had handled an automatic belonging to a fellow student in college. I’d had an aversion to the cold piece of death, which I later learned to tolerate if not overcome. Valechka (as the colonel called her) had very vulnerable ears, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her audibly 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, the more I watched the pitiable mess who was in her last minutes wifedom, unnecessary. I cannot say the man 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, 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, the scoundrel, 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 carrying streetward her luggage. I sat with arms folded, one hip on the windowsill, 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 substitute for the backhand slap I was supposed to give her, 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. I went out into the void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife's departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box.
But no matter. In due time, I was avenged. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich nèe 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 experiment 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 informant, 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 quadrupeds.
I tried to 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 bear fruit. I hope they will be illustrated with 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 eclecticism 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 (useless), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A Vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice 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 page:
Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y. Made debut in Sunburst. Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Woman in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Tomato, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You.
Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The Strange Tomato, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for 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, photography, pets.
Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied 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 daughter’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 in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, readers, I have only words to play with.
After a brief ceremony at the town hall, I took her to the new apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear a maid’s outfit that I had managed to filch from the linen closet of a charity ball. Am I disclosing too much? I had some fun that nuptial night and, in spite of her claimed lack of experience, Valeria did too. But reality soon asserted itself. The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; presently, instead of a young sexy wife, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba. Or that was how it felt sometimes.
This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her best 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. We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir newspaper, so full of gossip and lies, I working at a rickety table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her intellect very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the cook 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, flamboyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American engraving--a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds.
The peaceful times burst. In the summer of 1939 my American uncle 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 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 I had imagined her to be. 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 husband's solid Swiss citizenship could not easily transcend; and I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the French police headquarters, and 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 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, "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, as a vulgarian might have done, was immoral, though I confess it was a temptation. 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 suffocating me--not because I had any particular fondness for Mme Humbert, but because, in my machismic fury, I felt that 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 announcing plans for an immediate divorce. "But who is it?" 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 cafè 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 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 wardrobe and the books she had read or should read. "I think," - he said, "She will like Jean Christophe?" Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.
I put an end to this gibberish by suggesting Valeria pack up 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 entertained the fantasy of killing her or her lover, or both, all the while knowing he would kill neither. I thought of the one time I had handled an automatic belonging to a fellow student in college. I’d had an aversion to the cold piece of death, which I later learned to tolerate if not overcome. Valechka (as the colonel called her) had very vulnerable ears, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her audibly 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, the more I watched the pitiable mess who was in her last minutes wifedom, unnecessary. I cannot say the man 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, 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, the scoundrel, 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 carrying streetward her luggage. I sat with arms folded, one hip on the windowsill, 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 substitute for the backhand slap I was supposed to give her, 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. I went out into the void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife's departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box.
But no matter. In due time, I was avenged. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich nèe 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 experiment 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 informant, 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 quadrupeds.
I tried to 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 bear fruit. I hope they will be illustrated with 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 eclecticism 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 (useless), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A Vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice 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 page:
Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y. Made debut in Sunburst. Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Woman in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Tomato, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You.
Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The Strange Tomato, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for 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, photography, pets.
Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied 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 daughter’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 in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, readers, I have only words to play with.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Chapter 7
My father died. I was devastated, but I had no money to attend the funeral. Only two weeks after his passing did my birthright (nothing very grand--the Mirana had been sold long before) arrive in the mail.
I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous womanizing, at least to keep those distressing drives under control. My striking if somewhat brutal good looks allowed 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 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 my misfortunes, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. 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 to find women, of no effort of my own, toppling, ripe, into my lap. This was the problem marriage was to solve. Had I not been so impatient to fulfill this get-moral-quick scheme, I might have easily found, among the many crazed beauties who batted lashes my grim face, creatures far more fascinating than Valeria. My choice, however, was prompted by considerations whose essence was, as I realized too late, a piteous compromise for the bachelor lifestyle to which I’d become accustomed. All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex.
I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous womanizing, at least to keep those distressing drives under control. My striking if somewhat brutal good looks allowed 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 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 my misfortunes, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. 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 to find women, of no effort of my own, toppling, ripe, into my lap. This was the problem marriage was to solve. Had I not been so impatient to fulfill this get-moral-quick scheme, I might have easily found, among the many crazed beauties who batted lashes my grim face, creatures far more fascinating than Valeria. My choice, however, was prompted by considerations whose essence was, as I realized too late, a piteous compromise for the bachelor lifestyle to which I’d become accustomed. All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Chapter 6
A propos: I have often wondered what became of those lovers later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the rapturous evenings I stole from them did not affect their future? Is it vanity to assume I had possessed them, that they never forgot? All right, all right, I know. Your answer is yes. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with their fate? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.
I remember walking along an animated street on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slim young woman passed me at a 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 face French women so often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her body. I saw her each night for a week, and on the seventh, Monique asked me up to her room.
When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to their grubby fingernails, she said with a naive frown "That isn’t nice, is it," 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 bigger than many; in fact, I do not hesitate to say that among the twenty or so women I bedded in those days, she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. I let myself go with her more completely than I had with any 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 my skills as a lover and she trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake.
As I left Monique’s apartment, I was robbed for the first time in my life. (It was, however, not to be the last time. That privilege went to Quilty alone, and I don’t mind telling you, he paid dearly for it.) As I passed a dimly lit street, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provenãal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, stood in her doorway and urgently ushered me inside. I considered walking on, but feared she might need my help. The woman took me to what was apparently her own home, and there, after explosively and inexplicably kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at most fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. It began to dawn on me that I had been tricked into a den of the worst kind of debauchery, and the realization nearly made me vomit.
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, she demanded money. 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 glasses, said he had served in the police, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to the girl--for that was her stellar 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 indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.
I was so thoroughly horrified by the ordeal that I never again ventured to Monique’s apartment or anywhere near it. And so another woman was scorned by Humbert—not by his own devising, of course, but intentional scorn is rarely the charge against womanizers. We wish no harm. We wish nothing at all.
I remember walking along an animated street on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slim young woman passed me at a 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 face French women so often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her body. I saw her each night for a week, and on the seventh, Monique asked me up to her room.
When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to their grubby fingernails, she said with a naive frown "That isn’t nice, is it," 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 bigger than many; in fact, I do not hesitate to say that among the twenty or so women I bedded in those days, she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. I let myself go with her more completely than I had with any 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 my skills as a lover and she trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake.
As I left Monique’s apartment, I was robbed for the first time in my life. (It was, however, not to be the last time. That privilege went to Quilty alone, and I don’t mind telling you, he paid dearly for it.) As I passed a dimly lit street, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provenãal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, stood in her doorway and urgently ushered me inside. I considered walking on, but feared she might need my help. The woman took me to what was apparently her own home, and there, after explosively and inexplicably kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at most fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. It began to dawn on me that I had been tricked into a den of the worst kind of debauchery, and the realization nearly made me vomit.
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, she demanded money. 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 glasses, said he had served in the police, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to the girl--for that was her stellar 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 indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.
I was so thoroughly horrified by the ordeal that I never again ventured to Monique’s apartment or anywhere near it. And so another woman was scorned by Humbert—not by his own devising, of course, but intentional scorn is rarely the charge against womanizers. We wish no harm. We wish nothing at all.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Chapter 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 morning snow storms of used tissue paper. While a college student, in London and Paris, my studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry; but a peculiar exhaustion set in and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates.
A paper of mine entitled "The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey" was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon a “Short History of English Poetry” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English 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 children ignited my own long-term hopes for fatherhood, but, alas, with no suitable mother in sight.
I still thought often of Annabel, occasionally musing that we had, in our summer of love, been the same age as these pale girls in the schools I visited, with their matted lashes and vacant faces. These children could not conjugate verbs—could they feel passion as I had for Annabel on that enchanted island of time? Even today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful love of my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained open forever.
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 women; inwardly, I was consumed by a hell. The human females I was allowed to date were but palliative agents. All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my desires quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body's every plea. While a voice like my father’s said, “Have fun,” a voice like Sybil’s said, “At what cost?” One moment I was ashamed and frightened for the way I was using and disposing of women, another recklessly optimistic. I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that it was the most natural thing in the world, being moved to distraction by women.
But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. So life went. A shipwreck. An atoll. How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, women strolled freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree's shadow and sheen, and how quickly they noticed me when I was ready to make myself known. Intelligence, wit, are these not the mating dances of our day? Does the scholar not bury himself in books at the prospect of future successes and, thus, encounters?
Once a perfect 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 righten 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 melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. I spoke, she smiled, and so began a three-week affair before I tossed her out of my home without emotion or explanation. I could list a great number of these diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell.
A paper of mine entitled "The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey" was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon a “Short History of English Poetry” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English 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 children ignited my own long-term hopes for fatherhood, but, alas, with no suitable mother in sight.
I still thought often of Annabel, occasionally musing that we had, in our summer of love, been the same age as these pale girls in the schools I visited, with their matted lashes and vacant faces. These children could not conjugate verbs—could they feel passion as I had for Annabel on that enchanted island of time? Even today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful love of my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained open forever.
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 women; inwardly, I was consumed by a hell. The human females I was allowed to date were but palliative agents. All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my desires quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body's every plea. While a voice like my father’s said, “Have fun,” a voice like Sybil’s said, “At what cost?” One moment I was ashamed and frightened for the way I was using and disposing of women, another recklessly optimistic. I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that it was the most natural thing in the world, being moved to distraction by women.
But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. So life went. A shipwreck. An atoll. How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, women strolled freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree's shadow and sheen, and how quickly they noticed me when I was ready to make myself known. Intelligence, wit, are these not the mating dances of our day? Does the scholar not bury himself in books at the prospect of future successes and, thus, encounters?
Once a perfect 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 righten 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 melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. I spoke, she smiled, and so began a three-week affair before I tossed her out of my home without emotion or explanation. I could list a great number of these diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Chapter 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? Every day, people lose loved ones and every day people suffer for it, but not how I suffered. The sympathy with which I had looked upon baby animals, I now turned upon myself. When I try to analyze my own self-absorption, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination 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, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way, the death of Annabel led me to Charlotte, and then, of course, to Lolita.
I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. 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. Coincidence?
I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. 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. Coincidence?
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Chapter 3
Then I met Annabel, that certain initial young lady I mentioned earlier. Annabel was, like me, 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. That’s aging for you. 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 inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors. The latter kind is a young man’s game, unbecoming of a father figure or anyone over, say, thirty-five.
Let me therefore 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 I respected them as I did all her friends. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Thin-haired brown Mr. Leigh and ample, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). 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 molded the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and class, and I doubt if much genius should be assigned to our interest in competitive tennis, the ocean, books 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 spy. A fine job I’ve made of it—caught after a single murder! This is not to imply that these boyhood wishes had anything to do with my adult actions; it was a common enough phase.
All at once Annabel and I were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of first love so overtook us that we were inseparable, linked at the hands and lips. The only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the beach. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to be together. Sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips.
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my 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 chocolate pudding, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified 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 summer together. 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 brief session of passionate kisses. Four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. For many years, I tortured myself with the notion that she and I would have been together, married, grown old and died in each others’ arms, while secretly hoping that someone would come along reignite the passion I had for Annabel my first, lost love; no one did.
Let me therefore 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 I respected them as I did all her friends. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Thin-haired brown Mr. Leigh and ample, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). 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 molded the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and class, and I doubt if much genius should be assigned to our interest in competitive tennis, the ocean, books 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 spy. A fine job I’ve made of it—caught after a single murder! This is not to imply that these boyhood wishes had anything to do with my adult actions; it was a common enough phase.
All at once Annabel and I were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of first love so overtook us that we were inseparable, linked at the hands and lips. The only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the beach. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to be together. Sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips.
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my 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 chocolate pudding, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified 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 summer together. 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 brief session of passionate kisses. Four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. For many years, I tortured myself with the notion that she and I would have been together, married, grown old and died in each others’ arms, while secretly hoping that someone would come along reignite the passion I had for Annabel my first, lost love; no one did.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Chapter 2
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a pasta salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube river in his veins. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels, and silk. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects--paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak lightning accident when I was three, and I don’t remember much of her, except for in a warm pocket in my heart.
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 disgracefully taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. So you see, I have my father to thank for my own womanizing tendencies, both his example and his genes. I was extremely fond of Sybil, 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. We mourned her vigorously. 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 smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Miserables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed 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.
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 disgracefully taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. So you see, I have my father to thank for my own womanizing tendencies, both his example and his genes. I was extremely fond of Sybil, 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. We mourned her vigorously. 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 smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Miserables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed 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.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Chapter 1
Lolita, a light in my life, the daughter of my wife. My friend, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: a slippery trip for the tip of my tongue, tough and rewarding, like our friendship, and fun to say, even in anger. Try it: Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. “You can’t go to school in one sock!” I said, fondly. She was Lola as well. They called her Dolly at school. A little infantile, that name. She was Dolores on the birth certificate. But in my heart she was always Lolita.
Did I ever think of fathering kids myself? I did, indeed I did. In point of fact, I might have had a daughter the old-fashioned way had I not lost the love of my youth, a certain initial young lady. We made such plans in our princedom by the sea. 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.) But if that first love had worked out, why, I’d probably never have met Lolita or her poor sweet mother, I’d certainly never have gone on the road trip, or any of the other riotous happenings I plan to disclose in this thorny tangled whopper of a tale.
But it’s all true, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I promise you that. Exhibit number one: my heart. I may have been a beast at times, to Lolita, to her mother, certainly to Quilty, but as for the fullness in my heart, well—even the seraphs would envy that.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. “You can’t go to school in one sock!” I said, fondly. She was Lola as well. They called her Dolly at school. A little infantile, that name. She was Dolores on the birth certificate. But in my heart she was always Lolita.
Did I ever think of fathering kids myself? I did, indeed I did. In point of fact, I might have had a daughter the old-fashioned way had I not lost the love of my youth, a certain initial young lady. We made such plans in our princedom by the sea. 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.) But if that first love had worked out, why, I’d probably never have met Lolita or her poor sweet mother, I’d certainly never have gone on the road trip, or any of the other riotous happenings I plan to disclose in this thorny tangled whopper of a tale.
But it’s all true, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I promise you that. Exhibit number one: my heart. I may have been a beast at times, to Lolita, to her mother, certainly to Quilty, but as for the fullness in my heart, well—even the seraphs would envy that.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Foreward
Lolita, or the Confession of an Unlikely Killer, such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it discusses. "Humbert Humbert," their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, 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 the 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 ("Eye for an Eye?") wherein bizarre cases of parental and pseudo-parental revenge had been discussed.
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression 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. Its author's bizarre nickname is his own invention; and, of course, this mask--through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow--had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer's wish. While "Haze" only rhymes with the heroine's real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the readers will perceive for themselves) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to "H.H."'s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading lamp.
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. "Windmuller," or "Ramsdale," who desires his identity suppressed so that "the long shadow of this sorry and violent 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 in Florida. Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" 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.
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "violent;" and many a great work of art of course often uncovers a corpse or two. I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is has briefly (though murder is always so relentlessly brief—it is a well-trod irony that our life’s most significant moments are just that, moments, while boredom stretches on endlessly) given in to a rage that clearly prohibits. And yet what parent (or adopted parent) would not at least entertain the idea of such a revenge upon a daughter’s abductor. In “H.H.”’s account, the reader is met with a disturbing mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A defensive honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from his sin of vengeance. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a compassion for his adopted daughter that makes us entranced with the book while questioning its author!
As a case history, Lolita will become, no doubt, a classic among retirees, housewives, and prospective adoptive parents. Even children will be drawn in for the promise of blood, but addicted for the purity of the parent-child relationship found within. I predict that Lolita will be remembered as a gold standard among tales of selfless love and selfless revenge, all the less resistible because it is true. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than 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 vengeful maniac--these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils as well as the way to redemption. 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.
John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.
Widworth, Mass
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression 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. Its author's bizarre nickname is his own invention; and, of course, this mask--through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow--had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer's wish. While "Haze" only rhymes with the heroine's real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the readers will perceive for themselves) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to "H.H."'s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading lamp.
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. "Windmuller," or "Ramsdale," who desires his identity suppressed so that "the long shadow of this sorry and violent 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 in Florida. Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" 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.
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "violent;" and many a great work of art of course often uncovers a corpse or two. I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is has briefly (though murder is always so relentlessly brief—it is a well-trod irony that our life’s most significant moments are just that, moments, while boredom stretches on endlessly) given in to a rage that clearly prohibits. And yet what parent (or adopted parent) would not at least entertain the idea of such a revenge upon a daughter’s abductor. In “H.H.”’s account, the reader is met with a disturbing mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A defensive honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from his sin of vengeance. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a compassion for his adopted daughter that makes us entranced with the book while questioning its author!
As a case history, Lolita will become, no doubt, a classic among retirees, housewives, and prospective adoptive parents. Even children will be drawn in for the promise of blood, but addicted for the purity of the parent-child relationship found within. I predict that Lolita will be remembered as a gold standard among tales of selfless love and selfless revenge, all the less resistible because it is true. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than 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 vengeful maniac--these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils as well as the way to redemption. 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.
John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.
Widworth, Mass
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