Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №2
...transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to another even wiserone; 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 periods, 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 deliberated with Humbert the Small whether Humbert
Humbert should kill her or her lover, or both, or neither. I remember once
handling an automatic belonging to a fellow student, in the days (I have not
spoken of them, I think, but never mind) when I toyed with the idea of
enjoying his little sister, a most diaphanous nymphet with a black hair bow,
and then shooting myself. I now wondered if Valechka (as the colonel called
her) was really worth shooting, or strangling, or drowning. She had very
vulnerable legs, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her very
horribly 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 visions of putting on my mountain
boots and taking a running kick at her rump were of course impossible to put
into execution with the cursed colonel hovering around all the time. I
cannot say he 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 (j'ai demande pardonne--excuse me--est-ce
que j'ai puis--may I--and so forth), 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, le
gredin, 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 window sill, 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 with which I ought to have hit her across
the cheekbone 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; but I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the
former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not
flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny
cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I
wildly looked around for a weapon. Actually I daresay it was nothing but
middle-class Russian courtesy (with an oriental tang, perhaps) that had
prompted the good colonel (Maximovich! his name suddenly taxies back to me),
a very formal person as they all are, to muffle his private need in decorous
silence so as not to underscore the small size of his host's domicile with
the rush of a gross cascade on top of his own hushed trickle. But this did
not enter my mind at the moment, as groaning with rage I ransacked the
kitchen for something better than a broom. Then, canceling my search, I
dashed out of the house with the heroic decision of attacking him
barefisted; despite my natural vigor, I am no pugilist, while the short but
broad-shouldered Maximovich seemed made of pig iron. 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, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little
revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs.
Maximovich nиe 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, selected from indigent and helpless groups. 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 fructuate. 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 (with some
nice photographs of sunshine-haired Girl Scouts in shorts), 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 Girl in Green, Scrambled
Husbands, The Strange Mushroom, 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 Mushroom, 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 love'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 (I notice the slip of my pen in the
preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence) in The
Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my
Lolita, I have only words to play with!
9
Divorce proceedings delayed my voyage, and the gloom of yet another
World War had settled upon the globe when, after a winter of ennui 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 desires and insomnias of which enough has been said. Knowing me
by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty and hot I got, trying to
catch a glimpse of nymphets (alas, always remote) playing in Central Park,
and how 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 breakdown sent me to a sanatorium 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 (never very
successfully) the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita
Johnson--who was soon flown back, I am glad to say. 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 (he, too, had some psychic
troubles)--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 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 girls with their fish smell,
hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than
Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets 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, nocturnal emissions, 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 and very racy 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 insanity (if to melancholia and a sense
of insufferable oppression that cruel term must be applied). I owe my
complete restoration to a discovery I made while being treated at that
particular very expensive sanatorium. I discovered there was an endless
source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading
them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade;
inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make
them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing
them with fake "primal scenes"; and never allowing them the slightest
glimpse of one's real sexual predicament. By bribing a nurse I won access to
some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me "potentially
homosexual" and "totally impotent." The sport was so excellent, its
results--in my case--so ruddy that I stayed on for a whole month
after I was quite well (sleeping admirably and eating like a schoolgirl).
And then I added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a powerful
newcomer, a displaced (and, surely, deranged) celebrity, known for his knack
of making patients believe they had witnessed their own conception.
10
Upon signing out, I cast around for some place in the New England
countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church) where I could spend a
studious summer subsisting on a compact boxful of notes I had accumulated
and bathing in some nearby lake. My work had begun to interest me again--I
mean my scholarly exertions; the other thing, my active participation in my
uncle's posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to a minimum.
One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished family,
suggested I spend a few months in the residence of his impoverished cousins,
a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who wanted to let their upper story
where a late aunt had delicately dwelt. He said they had two little
daughters, one a baby, the other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden,
not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect.
I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was
housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all
possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in
Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new
expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a
distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of
green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned
down--possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging
all night in my veins. His family, he said, had fled to a farm he owned, and
had taken the car, but a friend of his wife's, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of
342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate me. A lady who lived opposite Mrs.
Haze's had lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned,
square-topped affair, manned by a cheerful Negro. Now, since the only reason
for my coming at all had vanished, the aforesaid arrangement seemed
preposterous. All right, his house would have to be completely rebuilt, so
what? Had he not insured it sufficiently? I was angry, disappointed and
bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn
Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an
even more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I saw him scamper away, and
my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En route, I swore to myself
I would not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would
fly that very day to the Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes.
Possibilities of sweetness on technicolor beaches had been trickling through
my spine for some time before, and McCoo's cousin had, in fact, sharply
diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but as it transpired
now absolutely inane suggestion.
Speaking of sharp turns: we almost ran over a meddlesome suburban dog
(one of those who like in wait for cars) as we swerved into Lawn Street. A
little further, the Haze house, a white-frame horror, appeared, looking
dingy and old, more gray than white--the kind of place you know will have a
rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower. I tipped the
chauffeur and hoped he would immediately drive away so that I might double
back unnoticed to my hotel and bag; but the man merely crossed to the other
side of the street where an old lady was calling to him from her porch. What
could I do? I pressed the bell button.
A colored maid let me in--and left me standing on the mat while she
rushed back to the kitchen where something was burning that ought not to
burn.
The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden
thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling of the arty
middle class, van Gogh's "Arlиsienne." A door ajar to the right afforded a
glimpse of a living room, with some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet
and a striped sofa along the wall. There was a staircase at the end of the
hallway, and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how hot it
had been out-of-doors) and staring, to stare at something, at an old gray
tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came from the upper landing the
contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who leaning over the banisters inquired
melodiously, "Is that Monsieur Humbert?" A bit of cigarette ash dropped from
there in addition. Presently, the lady herself--sandals, maroon slacks,
yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order--came down the steps, her
index finger still tapping upon her cigarette.
I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with. The
poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked
eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may
be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich. Patting her bronze-brown
bun, she led me into the parlor and we talked for a minute about the McCoo
fire and the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Her very wide-set sea-green
eyes had a funny way of traveling all over you, carefully avoiding your own
eyes. Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow; and uncoiling
herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept making spasmodic dashes at
three ashtrays and the near fender (where lay the brown core of an apple);
whereupon she would sink back again, one leg folded under her. She was,
obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club
or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul;
women who are completely devoid of humor; women utterly indifferent at heart
to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very
particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny
cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily
distinguished. I was perfectly aware that if by any wild chance I became her
lodger, she would methodically proceed to do in regard to me what taking a
lodger probably meant to her all along, and I would again be enmeshed in one
of those tedious affairs I knew so well.
But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in
that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair and a kind
of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called "functional modern
furniture" and the tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with
dead lamps. I was led upstairs, and to the left--into "my" room. I inspected
it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I did discern above
"my" bed Renи Prinet's "Kreutzer Sonata." And she called that servant maid's
room a "semi-studio"! Let's get out of here at once, I firmly said to myself
as I pretended to deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price
that my wistful hostess was asking for board and bed.
Old-world politeness, however, obliged me to go on with the ordeal. We
crossed the landing to the right side of the house (where "I and Lo have our
rooms"--Lo being presumably the maid), and the lodger-lover could hardly
conceal a shudder when he, a very fastidious male, was granted a preview of
the only bathroom, a tiny oblong between the landing and "Lo's" room, with
limp wet things overhanging the dubious tub (the question mark of a hair
inside); and there were the expected coils of the rubber snake, and its
complement--a pinkish cozy, coyly covering the toilet lid.
"I see you are not too favorably impressed," said the lady letting her
hand rest for a moment upon my sleeve: she combined a cool forwardness--the
overflow of what I think is called "poise"--with a shyness and sadness that
caused her detached way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the
intonation of a professor of "speech." "This is not a neat household, I
confess," the doomed ear continued, "but I assure you [she looked at my
lips], you will be very comfortable, very comfortable, indeed. Let me show
you the garden" (the last more brightly, with a kind of winsome toss of the
voice).
Reluctantly I followed her downstairs again; then through the kitchen
at the end of the hall, on the right side of the house--the side where also
the dining room and the parlor were (under "my" room, on the left, there was
nothing but a garage). In the kitchen, the Negro maid, a plump youngish
woman, said, as she took her large glossy black purse from the knob of the
door leading to the back porch: "I'll go now, Mrs. Haze." "Yes, Louise,"
answered Mrs. Haze with a sigh. "I'll settle with you Friday." We passed on
to a small pantry and entered the dining room, parallel to the parlor we had
already admired. I noticed a white sock on the floor. With a deprecatory
grunt, Mrs. Haze stooped without stopping and threw it into a closet next to
the pantry. We cursorily inspected a mahogany table with a fruit vase in the
middle, containing nothing but the still glistening stone of one plum. I
groped for the timetable I had in my pocket and surreptitiously fished it
out to look as soon as possible for a train. I was still walking behind Mrs.
Haze though the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of
greenery--"the piazza," sang out my leader, and then, without the least
warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of
sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera
love peering at me over dark glasses.
It was the same child--the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same
silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black
kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the
gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day.
And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost,
kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the
king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.
With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the
nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound
mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the
crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts--that last mad immortal
day behind the "Roches Roses." The twenty-five years I had lived since then,
tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.
I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash,
that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the course of the
sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes
blinking over those stern dark spectacles--the little Herr Doktor who was to
cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my adult disguise (a great
big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to
suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the
features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this
nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her
prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal
consequence of that "princedom by the sea" in my tortured past. Everything
between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false
rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them.
I have no illusions, however. My judges will regard all this as a piece
of mummery on the part of a madman with a gross liking for the fruit
vert. Au fond, гa m'est bien иgal. All I know is that while the
Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees
were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like
sand, and--
"That was my Lo," she said, "and these are my lilies."
"Yes," I said, "yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful."
11
Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather,
with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-hand corner.
I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as if
it were really before me. Actually, it was destroyed five years go and what
we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief
materialization, a puny unfledged phoenix.
I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First
I jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and corrections) on
the leaves of what is commercially known as a "typewriter tablet"; then, I
copied it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic, hand
in the little black book just mentioned.
May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the
Carolinas. That day an epidemic of "abdominal flu" (whatever that is) forced
Ramsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check the
weather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before that
I moved into the Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose to
reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he
swallowed) covers most of June.
Thursday. Very warm day. From a vantage point (bathroom window)
saw Dolores taking things off a clothesline in the apple-green light behind
the house. Strolled out. She wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers.
Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and
sensitive chord of my abject body. After a while she sat down next to me on
the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles between
her feet--pebbles, my God, then a curled bit of milk-bottle glass resembling
a snarling lip--and chuck them at a can. Ping. You can't a second
time--you can't hit it--oh, marvelous: tender and tanned, not the least
blemish. Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebum
which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an
irritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne
although they gorge themselves on rich food. God, what agony, that silky
shimmer above her temple grading into bright brown hair. And the little bone
twitching at the side of her dust-powdered ankle. "The McCoo girl? Ginny
McCoo? Oh, she's a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio." Ping.
The glistening tracery of down on her forearm. When she got up to take in
the wash, I had a chance of adoring from afar the faded seat of her
rolled-up jeans. Out of the lawn, bland Mrs. Haze, complete with camera,
grew up like a fakir's fake tree and after some heliotropic fussing--sad
eyes up, glad eyes down--had the cheek of taking my picture as I sat
blinking on the steps, Humbert le Bel.
Friday. Saw her going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose.
Why does the way she walks--a child, mind you, a mere child!--excite me so
abominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind of
wiggly looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall. The
ghost of a drag. Very infantile, infinitely meretricious. Humbert Humbert is
also infinitely moved by the little one's slangy speech, by her harsh high
voice. Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across the fence.
Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. Pause. "I must go now, kiddo."
Saturday. (Beginning perhaps amended.) I know it is madness to
keep this journal but it gives me a strange thrill to do so; and only a
loving wife could decipher my microscopic script. Let me state with a sob
that today my L. was sun-bathing on the so-called "piazza," but her mother
and some other woman were around all the time. Of course, I might have sat
there in the rocker and pretended to read. Playing safe, I kept away, for I
was afraid that the horrible, insane, ridiculous and pitiful tremor that
palsied me might prevent me from making my entrиe with any semblance
of casualness.
Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most favonian week. This
time I took up a strategic position, with obese newspaper and new pipe, in
the piazza rocker before L. arrived. To my intense disappointment she
came with her mother, both in two-piece bathing suits, black, as new as my
pipe. My darling, my sweetheart stood for a moment near me--wanted the
funnies--and she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one,
but more intensely so, with rougher overtones--a torrid odor that at once
set my manhood astir--but she had already yanked out of me the coveted
section and retreated to her mat near her phocine mamma. There my beauty lay
down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my
eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the
incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates
clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, the
seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the loveliest
nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. As I looked on, through
prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightly
under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if properly
concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar's bliss
immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to a
motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with the
various girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as trying
to scratch the middle of her back and revealing a stippled armpit--but fat
Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light,
and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular
fraud.
Monday. Delectatio morosa. I spend my doleful days in dumps and
dolors. We (mother Haze, Dolores and I) were to go to Our Glass Lake this
afternoon, and bathe, and bask; but a nacreous morn degenerated at noon into
rain, and Lo made a scene.
The median age of pubescence for girls has been found to be thirteen
years and nine months in New York and Chicago. The age varies for
individuals from ten, or earlier, to seventeen. Virginia was not quite
fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra.
Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla.
"Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes
in Paris called the poet-poet.
I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex
interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl:
clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover,
I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush.
Tuesday. Rain. Lake of the Rains. Mamma out shopping. L., I
knew, was somewhere quite near. In result of some stealthy maneuvering, I
came across her in her mother's bedroom. Prying her left eye open to get rid
of a speck of something. Checked frock. Although I do love that intoxicating
brown fragrance of hers, I really think she should wash her hair once in a
while. For a moment, we were both in the same warm green bath of the mirror
that reflected the top of a poplar with us in the sky. Held her roughly by
the shoulders, then tenderly by the temples, and turned her about. "It's
right there," she said. "I can feel it." "Swiss peasant would use the top of
her tongue." "Lick it out?" "Yeth. Shly try?" "Sure," she said. Gently I
pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. "Goody-goody,"
she said nictating. "It is gone." "Now the other?" "You dope," she
began, "there is noth--" but here she noticed the pucker of my approaching
lips. "Okay," she said cooperatively, and bending toward her warm upturned
russet face somber Humbert pressed his mouth to her fluttering eyelid. She
laughed, and brushed past me out of the room. My heart seemed everywhere at
once. Never in my life--not even when fondling my child-love in
France--never--
Night. Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to describe
her face, her ways--and I cannot, because my own desire for her blinds me
when she is near. I am not used to being with nymphets, damn it. If I close
my eyes I see but an immobilized fraction of her, a cinematographic still, a
sudden smooth nether loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirt
she sits tying her shoe. "Dolores Haze, ne montrez pas vos zhambes"
(this is her mother who thinks she knows French).
A poet ю mes heures, I composed a madrigal to the soot-black
lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes, to the five asymmetrical freckles on
her bobbed nose, to the blond down of her brown limbs; but I tore it up and
cannot recall it today. Only in the tritest of terms (diary resumed) can I
describe Lo's features: I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red
as licked red candy, the lower one prettily plump--oh, that I were a lady
writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light! But instead I am
lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows
and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow
boyish smile. And neither is she the fragile child of a feminine novel. What
drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet--of every nymphet,
perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind
of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and
magazine pictures, from the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservants in
the Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very young
harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels; and then again, all
this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through
the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And
what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has
individualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everything
there is--Lolita.
Wednesday. "Look, make Mother take you and me to Our Glass Lake
tomorrow." These were the textual words said to me by my twelve-year-old
flame in a voluptuous whisper, as we happened to bump into one another on
the front porch, I out, she in. The reflection of the afternoon sun, a
dazzling white diamond with innumerable iridescent spikes quivered on the
round back of a parked car. The leafage of a voluminous elm played its
mellow shadows upon the clapboard wall of the house. Two poplars shivered
and shook. You could make out the formless sounds of remote traffic; a child
calling "Nancy, Nan-cy!" In the house, Lolita had put on her favorite
"Little Carmen" record which I used to call "Dwarf Conductors," making her
snort with mock derision at my mock wit.
Thursday. Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman,
Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness. The old girl had
finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seen
sometime in the winter. The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met the
good old priest (who had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and could
still slug a sinner). We sat on cushions heaped on the floor, and L. was
between the woman and me (she had squeezed herself in, the pet). In my turn,
I launched upon a hilarious account of my arctic adventures. The muse of
invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said:
Ah! All the while I was acutely aware of L.'s nearness and as I spoke I
gestured in the merciful dark and took advantage of those invisible gestures
of mine to touch her hand, her shoulder and a ballerina of wool and gauze
which she played with and kept sticking into my lap; and finally, when I had
completely enmeshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses, I
dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin, and I
chuckled at my own jokes, and trembled, and concealed my tremors, and once
or twice felt with my rapid lips the warmth of her hair as I treated her to
a quick nuzzling, humorous aside and caressed her plaything. She, too,
fidgeted a good deal so that finally her mother told her sharply to quit it
and sent the doll flying into the dark, and I laughed and addressed myself
to Haze across Lo's legs to let my hand creep up my nymphet's thin back and
feel her skin through her boy's shirt.
But I knew it was all hopeless, and was sick with longing, and my
clothes felt miserably tight, and I was almost glad when her mother's quiet
voice announced in the dark: "And now we all think that Lo should go to
bed." "I think you stink," said Lo. "Which means there will be no picnic
tomorrow," said Haze. "This is a free country," said Lo. When angry Lo with
a Bronx cheer had gone, I stayed on from sheer inertia, while Haze smoked
her tenth cigarette of the evening and complained of Lo.
She had been spiteful, if you please, at the age of one, when she used
to throw her toys out of her crib so that her poor mother should keep
picking them up, the villainous infant! Now, at twelve, she was a regular
pest, said Haze. All she wanted from life was to be one day a strutting and
prancing baton twirler or a jitterbug. Her grades were poor, but she was
better adjusted in her new school than in Pisky (Pisky was the Haze home
town in the Middle West. The Ramsdale house was her late mother-in-law's.
They had moved to Ramsdale less than two years ago). "Why was she unhappy
there?" "Oh," said Haze, "poor me should know, I went through that when
I was a kid: boys twisting one's arm, banging into one with loads of
books, pulling one's hair, hurting one's breasts, flipping one's skirt. Of
course, moodiness is a common concomitant of growing up, but Lo exaggerates.
Sullen and evasive. Rude and defiant. Struck Viola, an Italian schoolmate,
in the seat with a fountain pen. Know what I would like? If you, monsieur,
happened to be still here in the fall, I'd ask you to help her with her
homework--you seem to know everything, geography, mathematics, French." "Oh,
everything," answered monsieur. "That means," said Haze quickly, "you'll
be here!" I wanted to shout that I would stay on eternally if only I
could hope to caress now and then my incipient pupil. But I was wary of
Haze. So I just grunted and stretched my limbs nonconcomitantly (le mot
juste) and presently went up to my room. The woman, however, was
evidently not prepared to call it a day. I was already lying upon my cold
bed both hands pressing to my face Lolita's fragrant ghost when I heard my
indefatigable landlady creeping stealthily up to my door to whisper through
it--just to make sure, she said, I was through with the Glance and Gulp
magazine I had borrowed the other day. From her room Lo yelled she
had it. We are quite a lending library in this house, thunder of God.
Friday. I wonder what my academic publishers would say if I were
to quote in my textbook Ronsard's "la vermeillette fente" or Remy
Belleau's "un petit mont feutrи de mousse dиlicate, tracи sur le milieu
d'un fillet escarlatte" and so forth. I shall probably have another
breakdown if I stay any longer in this house, under the strain of this
intolerable temptation, by the side of my darling--my darling--my life and
my bride. Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of
the Menarche? Bloated feelings. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from the
roof. Grandma is visiting. "Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls' magazine]
starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have to
be bedded down there." The tiny madman in his padded cell.
Incidentally: if I ever commit a serious murder . . . Mark the "if."
The urge should be something more than the kind of thing that happened to me
with Valeria. Carefully mark that then was rather inept. If and when
you wish to sizzle me to death, remember that only a spell of insanity could
ever give me the simple energy to be a brute (all this amended, perhaps).
Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams. But do you know what happens? For
instance I hold a gun. For instance I aim at a bland, quietly interested
enemy. Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one bullet after another
feebly drops on the floor from the sheepish muzzle. In those dreams, my only
thought is to conceal the fiasco from my foe, who is slowly growing annoyed.
At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong gleam of
motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been describing, in a flippant
vein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite decided to
grow): "Better don't if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty." Instantly
Lo pushed her plate of boiled fish away, all but knocking her milk over, and
bounced out of the dining room. "Would it bore you very much," quoth Haze,
"to come with us tomorrow for a swim in Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes for
her manners?"
Later, I heard a great banging of doors and other sounds coming from
quaking caverns where the two rivals were having a ripping row.
She had not apologized. The lake is out. It might have been fun.
Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the door
ajar, while I wrote in my room; but only today did the trap work. With a
good deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scraping--to disguise her
embarrassment at visiting me without having been called--Lo came in and
after pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had
penned on a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a
belle-lettrist's inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the
hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust. As
she bent her brown curs over the desk at which I was sitting, Humbert the
Hoarse put his arm around her in a miserable imitation of
blood-relationship; and still studying, somewhat shortsightedly, the piece
of paper she held, my innocent little visitor slowly sank to a half-sitting
position upon my knee. Her adorable profile, parted lips, warm hair were
some three inches from my bared eyetooth; and I felt the heat of her limbs
through her rough tomboy clothes. All at once I knew I could kiss her throat
or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do
so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches. A double vanilla with hot
fudge--hardly more unusual than that. I cannot tell my learned reader (whose
eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his
bald head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me; perhaps my
ape-ear had unconsciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of her
respiration--for now she was not really looking at my scribble, but waiting
with curiosity and composure--oh, my limpid nymphet!--for the glamorous
lodger to do what he was dying to do. A modern child, an avid reader of
movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too
strange, I guessed, if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend--too
late. The house was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise's voice telling
Mrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead something she and Leslie
Tomson had found in the basement, and little Lolita was not one to miss such
a tale.
Sunday. Changeful, bad-tempered, cheerful, awkward, graceful
with the tart grace of her coltish subteens, excruciatingly desirable from
head to foot (all New England for a lady-writer's pen!), from the black
read-made bow and bobby pins holding her hair in place to the little scar on
the lower part of her neat calf (where a roller-skater kicked her in Pisky),
a couple of inches above her rough white sock. Gone with her mother to the
Hamiltons--a birthday party or something. Full-skirted gingham frock. Her
little doves seem well formed already. Precocious pet!
Monday. Rainy morning. "Ces matins gris si doux . . ." My
white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of those
inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a
luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web
is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a
wily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Just
heard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato sound as it is turned; and
no footfalls has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to her
room. Is she still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo performs
with real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just slammed, so one has to feel
elsewhere about the house for the beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have a
strand of silk descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means that she
is not in the kitchen--not banging the refrigerator door or screeching at
her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing and
subduedly mirthful, telephone conversation of the morning). Well, let us
grope and hope. Ray-like, I glide in through to the parlor and find the
radio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton,
very softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free hand,
denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor, roomer,
whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face to
face talk). So my nymphet is not in the house at all! Gone! What I thought
was a prismatic weave turns out to be but an old gray cobweb, the house is
empty, is dead. And then comes Lolita's soft sweet chuckle through my
half-open door "Don't tell Mother but I've eaten all your bacon."
Gone when I scuttle out of my room. Lolita, where are you? My breakfast
tray, lovingly prepared by my landlady, leers at me toothlessly, ready to be
taken in. Lola, Lolita!
Tuesday. Clouds again interfered with that picnic on that
unattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming? Yesterday I tried on before the
mirror a new pair of bathing trunks.
Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (common-sensical shoes,
tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown to buy a present for a
friend of a friend of hers, and would I please come too because I have such
a wonderful taste in textures and perfumes. "Choose your favorite
seduction," she purred. What could Humbert, being in the perfume business,
do? She had me cornered between the front porch and her car. "Hurry up," she
said as I laboriously doubled up my large body in order to crawl in (still
desperately devising a means of escape). She had started the engine, and was
genteelly swearing at a backing and turning truck in front that had just
brought old invalid Miss Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when my Lolita's
sharp voice came from the parlor window: "You! Where are you going? I'm
coming too! Wait!" "Ignore her," yelped Haze (killing the motor); alas for
my fair driver; Lo was already pulling at the door on my side. "This is
intolerable," began Haze; but Lo had scrambled in, shivering with glee.
"Move your bottom, you," said Lo. "Lo!" cried Haze (sideglancing at me,
hoping I would throw rude Lo out). "And behold," said Lo (not for the first
time), as she jerked back, as I jerked back, as the car leapt forward. "It
is intolerable," said Haze, violently getting into second, "that a child
should be so ill-mannered. And so very persevering. When she knows she is
unwanted. And needs a bath."
My knuckles lay against the child's blue jeans. She was barefooted; her
toenails showed remnants of cherry-red polish ...
