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Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita
Spellchecked by M. Avrekh, 21 Dec 1999
FOREWORD
"Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male," such were the
two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange
pages it preambulates. "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 ("Do the Senses make
Sense?") wherein certain morbid states and perversions 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 cognomen 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 reader will
perceive for himself) 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 sordid
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 settlemen in the remotest
Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be
publshed 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.
Viewed simply as a novel, "Lolita" deals with situations and emotions
that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression
been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single
obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine
who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a
lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by
their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, an
editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might
call "aphrodisiac" (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered
December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably
more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of "Lolita"
altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of
sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in
the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than
a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the
same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that "H.H."'s impassioned
confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult
males--a "conservative" estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann
(verbal communication)--enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special
experience "H.H." describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist
gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there
would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this
book.
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 "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original,
and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.
I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, is is
abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and
jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to
attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on
the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty
that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of
diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically
his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that
makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
As a case history, "Lolita" will become, no doubt, a classic in
psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects;
and still more important to us than scientific significance and 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 panting maniac--these are not only vivid
characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point
out potent evils. "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
PART ONE
1
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:
the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap,
at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one
sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on
the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact,
there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a
certain initial girl-child. In a 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.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the
seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this
tangle of thorns.
2
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going
person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and
Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass
around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a
luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold
wine, jewels and silk, respectively. 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 accident (picnic,
lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest
past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over
which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the
sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of
day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly
entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer
dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
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 lightheartedly taken advantage of it
one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was
extremely fond of her, 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. 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 would 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,
a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From
the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me,
everybody petted 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, mon cher petit papa, 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. The only definite sexual events that I
can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is,
before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely
theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school
with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress
whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting
reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and
umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon's sumptuous La Beautи
Humaine that that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound
Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair
manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex;
this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycиe in
Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that
year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody
to complain to, nobody to consult.
3
Annabel was, like the writer, 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, before I knew Lolita. 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," "think 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 (and
this is how I see Lolita).
Let me therefore primly 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 as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from
Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born
Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! 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 turned the way those of
intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if
much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality
of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism 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.
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love
with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual
possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and
assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we
were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an
opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her
garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out
of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage.
There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl
all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every
blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden
in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking
nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious
journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us
sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete
contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of
exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed
at each other, could bring relief.
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 chocolat
glacи, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were
about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) 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 fatal summer and just a few minutes before
we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. 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 avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of
sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of
possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and
his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement,
and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
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; or was my excessive desire for that child only the
first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own
cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of
retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty 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 Lolita began with Annabel.
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. The spiritual and the
physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain
incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters
of today. 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. Oh,
Lolita, had you loved me thus!
I have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account of
our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious
vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the
back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall.
Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of
lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory,
appear to me now like playing cards--presumably because a bridge game was
keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of
her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely
glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant
sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the
sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her
legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand
located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure,
half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than
I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head
would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful,
and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and
her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion,
with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to
relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine;
then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then
again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a
generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my
entrails, I have her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder--I believe she stole
it from her mother's Spanish maid--a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It
mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to
the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from
overflowing--and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins
attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her
mother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note--and Dr. Cooper
ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove--the haze of
stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me,
and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me
ever since--until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by
incarnating her in another.
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 those morning snow storms of used
tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the
observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical,
ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid
ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not
particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry
and many manquи talents do; but I was even more manquи than
that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, 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. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published
tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:
...Frдulen von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull.
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 an "Histoire abregиe de la poиsie anglaise" 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 pale pubescent girls with matted
eyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted
one in dreams.
Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of
nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers,
twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not
human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose
to designate as "nymphets."
It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In
fact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as the
boundaries--the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks--of an enchanted island
haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.
Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not.
Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would
have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity,
or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair
certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty,
soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such
coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of
synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where
Lolita plays with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of true
nymphets is trickingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just
nice, or "cute," or even "sweet" and "attractive," ordinary, plumpish,
formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies and
pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at the
ugly dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed into
stunning stars of the screen). A normal man given a group photograph of
school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will
not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and
a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in
your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle
spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once,
by ineffable signs--the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the
slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and
tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate--the little deadly demon among the
wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious
herself of her fantastic power.
Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the
matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a
gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or
forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to
enable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell. It is a question of focal
adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount,
and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse
delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no
nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same
enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine
years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf
in 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 ever open,
and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of
twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.
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 terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears
for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for
every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach.
The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am
ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were
much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their
normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble
was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an
incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a
thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of
genius or the most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. I
was aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which was mine; both would be
termed female by the anatomist. But to me, through the prism of my senses,
"they were as different as mist and mast." All this I rationalize now. In my
twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my throes quite so
clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body's
every plea. One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly
optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with
pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only object of
amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel's, her handmaids and girl-pages,
appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity. At other times I would
tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really
nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind
my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person
Act in 1933, the term "girl-child" is defined as "a girl who is over eight
but under fourteen years" (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the
statutory definition is "young person"). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the
other hand, a "wayward child" is, technically, one "between seven and
seventeen years of age" (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious
or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of
James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age.
This is all very interesting, and I daresay you see me already frothing at
the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into
a little tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could
the nymphet sing in a single tone, but probably preferred a lad's perineum.
Here are two of King Akhnaten's and Queen Nefertiti's pre-nubile Nile
daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many
necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand
years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes.
Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum,
the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and
cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain
East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of
eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with Beatrice
when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled,
in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in
the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his
Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the
pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from
the hills of Vaucluse.
But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be
good. Really and truly, he id. He had the utmost respect for ordinary
children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances
would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the
least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng,
he espied a demon child, "enfant charmante et fourbe," dim eyes,
bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her.
So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it
was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early
(10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And
the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented
pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles.
A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger's shivering
child. Darling, this is only a game! 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, nymphets played freely, as if he
were a familiar statue or part of an old tree's shadow and sheen. Once a
perfect little 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. Another time a red-haired school girl hung
over me in the metro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained
remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these
one-sided diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell.
It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted
window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of
undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the
vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed
toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern
of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit
bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window
in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night.
Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to
me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost
marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me
alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me
forever. Never grow up.
6
A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In
this wrought-iron would of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that
the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had
possessed her--and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell
sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her
image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and
terrible wonder.
I learned, however, what they looked like, those lovely, maddening,
thin-armed nymphets, when they grew up. I remember walking along an animated
street on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slim
girl 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 little face French girls so
often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress
sheathing in pearl-gray her young body which still retained--and that was
the nymphic echo, the chill of delight, the leap in my loins--a childish
something mingling with the professional fretillement of her small
agile rump. I asked her price, and she promptly replied with melodious
silvery precision (a bird, a very bird!) "Cent." I tried to haggle
but she saw the awful lone longing in my lowered eyes, directed so far down
at her round forehead and rudimentary hat (a band, a posy); and with one
beat of her lashes: "Tant pis," she said, and made as if to move
away. Perhaps only three years earlier I might have seen her coming home
from school! That evocation settled the matter. She led me up the usual
steep stairs, with the usual bell clearing the way for the monsieur
who might not care to meet another monsieur, on the mournful climb to
the abject room, all bed and bidet. As usual, she asked at once for
her petit cadeau, and as usual I asked her name (Monique) and her age
(eighteen). I was pretty well acquainted with the banal way of
streetwalkers. They all answer "dix-huit"--a trim twitter, a note of
finality and wistful deceit which they emit up to ten times per day, the
poor little creatures. But in Monique's case there could be no doubt she
was, if anything, adding one or two years to her age. This I deduced from
many details of her compact, neat, curiously immature body. Having shed her
clothes with fascinating rapidity, she stood for a moment partly wrapped in
the dingy gauze of the window curtain listening with infantile pleasure, as
pat as pat could be, to an organ-grinder in the dust-brimming courtyard
below. When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to their
grubby fingernails, she said with a naive frown "Oui, ce n'est pas
bien," 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 no bigger than those of a
squatting lad; in fact, I do not hesitate to say (and indeed this is the
reason why I linger gratefully in that gauze-gray room of memory with little
Monique) that among the eighty or so grues I had had operate upon me,
she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. "Il иtait
malin, celui qui a inventи ce truc-la," she commented amiably, and got
back into her clothes with the same high-style speed.
I asked for another, more elaborate, assignment later the same evening,
and she said she would meet me at the corner cafe at nine, and swore she had
never pose un lapin in all her young life. We returned to the same
room, and I could not help saying how very pretty she was to which she
answered demurely: "Tu es bien gentil de dire ca" and then, noticing
what I noticed too in the mirror reflecting our small Eden--the dreadful
grimace of clenched-teeth tenderness that distorted my mouth--dutiful little
Monique (oh, she had been a nymphet, all right!) wanted to know if she
should remove the layer of red from her lips avant qu'on se couche in
case I planned to kiss her. Of course, I planned it. I let myself go with
her more completely than I had with any young 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 the bonus of fifty I gave
her as she trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbert
lumbering in her narrow wake. Stopping before a window display she said with
great gusto: "Je vais m'acheter des bas!" and never may I forget the
way her Parisian childish lips exploded on "bas," pronouncing it with
an appetite that all but changed the "a" into a brief buoyant bursting "o"
as in "bot".
I had a date with her next day at 2.15 P.M. in my own rooms, but it was
less successful, she seemed to have grown less juvenile, more of a woman
overnight. A cold I caught from her led me to cancel a fourth assignment,
nor was I sorry to break an emotional series that threatened to burden me
with heart-rending fantasies and peter out in dull disappointment. So let
her remain, sleek, slender Monique, as she was for a minute or two: a
delinquent nymphet shining through the matter-of-fact young whore.
My brief acquaintance with her started a train of thought that may seem
pretty obvious to the reader who knows the ropes. An advertisement in a lewd
magazine landed me, one brave day, in the office of a Mlle Edith who began
by offering me to choose a kindred soul from a collection of rather formal
photographs in a rather soiled album ("Regardez-moi cette belle
brune!". When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to blurt out
my criminal craving, she looked as if about to show me the door; however,
after asking me what price I was prepared to disburse, she condescended to
put me in touch with a person qui pourrait arranger la chose. Next
day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an
almost farcical Provenгal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip,
took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after
explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the
delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, 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 least fifteen with red-ribboned
thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll.
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 son
argent. 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, lui, so that I had better do as I was told.
I went up to Marie--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.
7
I do not know if the pimp's album may not have been another link in
the daisy-chain; but soon after, for my own safety, I decided to marry. It
occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of
marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows,
the eventual flowering of certain moral values, of certain spiritual
substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and
dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control. A little
money that had come my way after my father's death (nothing very grand--the
Mirana had been sold long before), in addition to 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 mes malheurs, an
exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a
gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility
often reflects in the subject's displayable features a sullen and congested
something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case.
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 of not
being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my
cold lap. Had I been a franгais moyen with a taste for flashy ladies,
I might have easily found, among the many crazed beauties that lashed my
grim rock, creatures far more fascinating than Valeria. My choice, however,
was prompted by considerations whose essence was, as I realized too late, a
piteous compromise. All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor
Humbert always was in matters of sex.
8
Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a
glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to
Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because
she had divined something about me; 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 as
naive as only a pervert can be. She looked fluffy and frolicsome, dressed
a la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to
stress the white of a bare instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and
pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short curly
blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable.
After a brief ceremony at the mairie, I tool her to the new
apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear, before I
touched her, a girl's plain nightshirt that I had managed to filch from the
linen closet of an orphanage. I derived some fun from that nuptial night and
had the idiot in hysterics by sunrise. But reality soon asserted itself. The
bleached curl revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a
shaved shin; the mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love,
disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the corresponding part in a
treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama; and presently, instead of a
pale little gutter girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy,
short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba.
This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her only 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, within which I felt like
Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me. We had quite a few cozy
evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir, I working at a rickety
table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to
her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. The
grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow drove me mad; but with
Valeria's help I did find after all some legal outlets to my fantastic
predicament. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu 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 estampe--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.
These burst. In the summer of 1939 mon oncle d'Amиrique 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 fat 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 she was supposed to impersonate. 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 prиfecture, 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
poodle 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 (I
translate from her French which was, I imagine, a translation in its turn of
some Slavic platitude): "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 in the street, there and then, as an honest
vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of secret sufferings had
taught me superhuman self-control. So 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 that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because 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. "Mais qui est-ce?" 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
cafи 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--into me rather than to me; she poured words into this
dignified receptacle 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
...
