anthropometric entry: anthropometry is the science of measuring the human body and its parts.

glaucous: a pale yellowish-green hue.

The Enchanted Hunters: note the plural (H.H., Quilty, and, in another sense, the author). For "enchantment," see Little Carmen. Quilty names his play after the hotel (here) and adapts an anagram of it for one of his many pseudonyms (Ted Hunter, Cane, NH.); the married Lolita ends up living on "Hunter Road."

CHAPTER 26.

Heart, head-everything: "Is 'mask' the keyword?" H.H. asked (see "real people"). As his narrative approaches the first conjugal night with Lolita, H.H. is overcome by anguish, and in the bare six lines of Chapter Twenty-six-the shortest "chapter" in the book-he loses control, and for a moment the mask drops. Not until the very end of the passage does the voice again sound like our Hum the Hummer, when the desperation of "Heart, head-everything" suddenly gives way to the resiliently comic command to the printer. In that one instant H.H.'s masking takes place before the reader, who gets a fleeting look into those "two hypnotic eyes" (to quote John Ray) and sees the pain in them. Lolita is so deeply moving a novel because of our sharp awareness of the great tension sustained between H.H.'s mute despair and his compensatory jollity. "Crime and Pun" is one of the titles the murderous narrator of Despair considers for his manuscript, and it would serve H.H. just as well, for language is as much a defense to him as chess is to Grandmaster Luzhin. But even when H.H. lets the mask slip, one glimpses only his desperation, not the "real" H.H. or the manipulative author. As Nabokov says in Chapter Five of Gogol, analogously discussing Akaky Akakyevich and the "holes" and "gaps" in the narrative texture of The Overcoat: "We did not expect that, amid the whirling masks, one mask would turn out to be a real face, or at least the place where that face ought to be" [italics mine-A.A.]. If the printer had obeyed H.H.'s request to fill the page with Lo's name, we'd have a twentieth-century equivalent of a totally self-reflexive blank or patterned page in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1767).

CHAPTER 27.

redheaded ... lad: Charlie Holmes turns out to be Lolita's first lover.

moth or butterfly: a reminder that H.H. is no entomologist. See John Ray, Jr.. Nabokov stressed "Humbert's complete incapacity to differentiate between Rhopalocera and Heterocera."

lentigo: a freckly skin pigmentation.

aux yeux battus: French; with circles round one's eyes.

plumbaceous umbrae: Latin; leaden shadows.

magdlein: German; little girl.

Lepingville ... nineteenth century: as to the "identity" of this poet, Nabokov responded, "That poet was evidently Leping who used to go lepping (i.e., lepidoptera hunting) but that's about all anybody knows about him." See gay ... Lepingville.

backfisch: German; an immature, adolescent girl; a teenager.

simulacrum: a sham; an unreal semblance.

psychotherapist ... rapist: H.H. calls our attention to the rapist in the therapist. Nabokov similarly employs semantic constituents in Despair, when he poses a sensible question: "What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion?" (p. 46).

what shadow ... after?: in traditional Doppelganger fiction the reprehensible self is often imagined as a shadow, as in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow." H.H. constantly toys with the convention.

Ensuite?: French; then?

shadowgraphs: amateur X-ray pictures. The girls made pictures of each other's bones; not invented, but actual "educational" recreation at "progressive" camps c. 1950.

"C'est bien tout?": "Is that all?" The answer "C'est" ("It is") is incorrect French, a direct translation from English syntax.

carbuncles: medical; "a painful local inflammation of the subcutaneous tissue, larger and more serious than a boil; a pimple or red spot, due to intemperance." Originally, a jewel such as a ruby. H.H. is of course referring to the truck's parking lights.

magic ... rubious: a corrected misprint ("rubous" in the 1958 edition). The rubylike convertible is Quilty's, a dark red shining in the rain and the night. His appearances are summarized in Quilty, Clare.

frock-fold ... Browning: not a quotation, but an allusion to Pippa Passes (1841), a verse drama by Robert Browning, the English poet (18121889): On every side occurred suggestive germs Of that-the tree, the flower-or take the fruit- Some rosy shape, continuing the peach, Curved beewise o'er its bough; as rosy limbs, Depending, nestled in the leaves; and just From a cleft rose-peach the whole Dryad sprang. [lines 8792]

A Dryad is a wood nymph (see dryads and trees). For nymph, see not human, but nymphic. For Browning, see Pim ... Pippa, Clowns and Columbines ... Tennis, and a saint.

cocker spaniel: the old lady's dog. See Mr. Gustave ... spaniel pup and spaniel ... baptized.

porcine: swinelike; the pig image is introduced in the first sentence of the previous paragraph.

not Humberg: H.H. corrects the desk clerk, who has coldly bestowed on him a Jewish-sounding name. The hotel is euphemistically restrictive (see spaniel ... baptized). "Professor Hamburg" finds them "full up."

Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter: H.H.'s nom de registration is in deference to Edgar A. Poe and his child bride (see Virginia ... Edgar). H.H. also uses the "Edgar" elsewhere (see "Edgar"... "writer and explorer" and Edgar). For the Poe allusions, see Lo-lee-ta.

A key (342!): although H.H. is trying not to lose control of the language, as he did here, he (or someone else) is here managing to tell how H.H. was served by Mr. Swine, who is assisted by Mr. Potts, who can't find any cots, because Swine has dispatched them to the Swoons (see Chestnut Court). A "key" to the meaning of this extraordinary verbal control is immediately provided by another "coincidence": the room number is the same as the Haze house number. H.H. will shortly offer a figurative key by placing the number within quotation marks, which is of course the only proper way to treat a fiction (here). "McFate" produces "342" once more; see 342. Such coincidences serve a two-fold purpose: they at once point to the authorial consciousness that has plotted them, and can also be imagined as coordinates situated in time and space, marking the labyrinth from which a character cannot escape.

Parody of a hotel corridor ... and death: parody to H.H. because nothing seems "real" to him on this most crucial of nights; parody to Nabokov because the world within a work of art is "unreal" (see Introduction). But to repeat Marianne Moore's well-known line, poetry is "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," and Nabokov's novel is a parody of death with real suffering in it-H.H.'s and Lolita's.

a mirror: the room is a little prison of mirrors, a metaphor for his solipsism and circumscribing obsession. " 'So that's the dead end' (the mirror you break your nose against)," an overwrought H.H. tells Lolita after catching her in a lie (here). See Beale and deep mirrors. "In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors," writes Nabokov in The Gift (p. 322). His characters continually confront mirrors where they had hoped to find windows, and the attempt to transcend solipsism is one of Nabokov's major themes. As a literal image and overriding metaphor, the mirror is central to the form and content of Nabokov's novels; in Ada, it describes the universe, for Antiterra's sibling planet Terra is imagined as a "distortive glass of our distorted glebe" (p. 18). If one perceives Pale Fire spatially, with John Shade's poem on the "left" and Charles Kinbote's Commentary on the "right," the poem is seen as an object to be perceived, and the Commentary becomes the world seen through the distorting prism of a mind-a monstrous concave mirror held up to an objective "reality." The narrator of Despair loathes mirrors, avoids them, and comments on those "monsters of mirrors," the "crooked ones," in which a man is stripped, squashed, or "pulled out like dough and then torn in two" (p. 21). Nabokov has placed these crooked reflectors everywhere in his fiction: Doubles and mock-Doubles, parodies and self-parodies (literature trapped in a prison of amusement-park mirrors), works within works, worlds refracting worlds, and words distorting words-that is, translations (art's "crazy-mirror," said Nabokov) and language games (see kremlin). Pale Fire's invented language is "the tongue of the mirror," and the portmantoid pun is the principal mirror-language of Lolita. See "Humbert Humbert".

Enfin seuls: French for "alone at last," the trite phrase of the honeymooner.

lentor: archaic; slowness.

spoonerette: a spoonerism is the accidental transposition of sounds in two or more words ("wight ray"). By acknowledging his spoonerism, H.H. reminds us what a wordsmith he is (in Pale Fire John Shade teaches at Wordsmith University). The affectionate suffix -ette may recall majorette, as well as the slang meaning of spooner, one who "necks" (or, as one dictionary archly puts it, "act[s] with silly and demonstrative fondness"). The suffix also parodies a recognizable and overused preciosite of Ronsard's, who in fact employed "nymphette" in one of his poems. See "vermeillette" (Ronsard's "la vermeillette fente") and Quilty's "barroomette."

kitzelans: lusting; from the German kitzel, "inordinate desire," and kitzler, "clitoris." See Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss..

seva ascendes ... quidquam: the language of Horace, Catullus, et al. (see the writer's ancient lust) is appropriate to this modern, if hysterical, elegiast, whose "Latin" here turns out to be a curious mishmash of Latin, English, French, German, and Italian: "The sap ascendeth, pulsates, burning [brulans, from the French bruler, "to burn"], itching, most insane, elevator clattering, pausing, clattering, people in the corridor. No one but death would take this one [Lolita] away from me! Slender little girl, I thought most fondly, observing nothing at all." At moments of extreme crisis, H.H. croaks incomprehensibly, losing more than his expropriated English; for his attempts "to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets" almost resist language altogether, carrying him close to the edge of non-language and a figurative silence. Thus H.H. significantly announces this scene as a "Parody of silence," and, far from being nonsensical, the ensuing "Latin" is a parodic stream-of-consciousness affording a brief critical comment on a technique Nabokov found unsatisfactory, even in the novels of Joyce, whom he revered ("poor Stream of Consciousness, maree noire by now," writes Nabokov toward the end of a similar parody in Ada [p. 300]). "We think not in words but in shadows of words," Nabokov said. "James Joyce's mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts" (Playboy interview). To Nabokov, the unconnected impressions and associations that impinge on the mind were irrational until they were consciously ordered and to order them in art is to fulfill virtually a moral obligation, for without rational language man has "grown a very / landfish, languageless, / a monster," as Thersites says of Ajax in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Even the imprisoned Cincinnatus, under sentence of death, is "already thinking of how to set up an alphabet" which might humanize the dystopian world of Invitation to a Beheading (p. 139). See the second half of Lo-lee-ta.

nota bene: Latin; mark well. The 1958 edition incorrectly ran the two words together.

dryads and trees: see frock-fold ... Browning.

writer fellow ... ad: Clare Quilty (see Morell ... "conquering hero"). "Dromes" is a corrected misprint ("Droms" in the 1958 edition). For allusions to Quilty, see Quilty, Clare.

Femina: Latin; woman.

Purpills: a contraction of "Papa's Purple Pills" from the previous paragraph.

CHAPTER 28.

le grand moment: French; the great moment.

hot hairy fist: Quilty also has conspicuously hairy hands.

sicher ist sicher: German; sure is sure.

my uncle Gustave: Gustave Trapp, sometimes a "cousin," whom H.H. mistakes for Quilty (see here). A cousin of one's mother is both one's cousin and, in a sense, uncle.

Jean-Jacques Humbert: after Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778), Swiss-born French philosopher and author of the famous Confessions.

one's dungeon ... some rival devil: Quilty, H.H.'s "rival devil," is staying at The Enchanted Hunters, and appears on the next page. The lust figuratively emanating from H.H.'s "dungeon" is objectified much later: "I had been keeping Clare Quilty's face masked in my dark dungeon" (see Reveillez-vous ... mourir).

comme on dit: French; as they say.

King Sigmund: Sigmund Freud (18561939), founder of psychoanalysis. See a case history and patients ... had witnessed their own conception.

antiphony: a musical response; a musical piece alternately sung by a choir divided into two parts.

powdered bugs: Nabokov said, "The 'powdered bugs' wheeling around the lamps are noctuids and other moths which look floury on the wing (hence 'millers,' which, however, may also come from the verb), as they mill in the electric light against the damp night's blackground. 'Bugs' is an Americanism for any insect. In England, it means generally bedbugs." For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

somebody sitting ... porch: Quilty. Their verbal sparring telescopes their pursuit of one another and prefigures the physical struggle. The allusions to Quilty are summarized in Quilty, Clare.

a rose, as the Persians say: the fatidic flower and an allusion to The Rubaiyat (see Wine, wine ... for roses).

a blinding flash ... can be deemed immortal: for the photograph in question, see nothing of myself. H.H. was not immortalized.

CHAPTER 29.

entre nous soit dit: French; just between you and me.

grand Dieu: French; good God!

La Petite ... Ridicule: The Sleeping Maiden or the Ridiculous Lover. There is no picture by this name. The mock-title and subject matter parody eighteenth-century genre engravings.

someone ... beyond our bathroom: Clare Quilty (see a few paces from Lolita's pillow). Quilty also creates a "waterfall" on brief waterfall. For a summary of his appearances, see Quilty, Clare.

A breeze from wonderland: there are several references to Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles L. Dodgson (18321898), English writer, mathematician, and nympholept (see Alice-in-Wonderland). "I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll," said Nabokov, "because he was the first Humbert Humbert." Nabokov translated Alice into Russian (Berlin, 1923). "I got five dollars (quite a sum during the inflation in Germany)," he recalls (Speak, Memory, p. 283). In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a character speaks "in the elenctic tones of Lewis Carroll's caterpillar" (p. 123), while in Ada, "Ada in Wonderland" (p. 129), "Ada's adventures in Adaland" (p. 568), and the "titles" Palace in Wonderland (p. 53) and Alice in the Camera Obscura (p. 547) are variously invoked (the latter a play on the original title of Laughter in the Dark). "In common with many other English children (I was an English child) I have been always very fond of Carroll," he said in the Wisconsin Studies interview. "No, I do not think his invented language shares any roots with mine [in Bend Sinister and Pale Fire]. He has a pathetic affinity with H.H. but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade." But it might seem as though Nabokov did allude to Carroll in Lolita, through what might be called "the photography theme": H.H. cherishes his worn old photograph of Annabel, has in a sense been living with this "still," tries to make Lolita conform to it, and often laments his failure to capture her on film. Quilty's hobby is announced as "photography," and the unspeakable films he produces at the Duk Duk Ranch would seem to answer Carroll's wildest needs. Asked about this, Nabokov replied, "I did not consciously think of Carroll's hobby when I referred to the use of photography in Lolita."

"I have only words to play with," moans H.H., and several readers have been tempted to call the ensuing wordplay "Joycean"-loosely enough, since "Carrollian" might do almost as well, given Nabokov's fondness for auditory wordplay and portmanteau words, and the fact that the latter usage was coined by Carroll. The family line is nicely established on Sebastian. Knight's neatest book shelf, where Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses stand side by side, along with works by some of Nabokov's other favorite writers (Stevenson, Chekhov, Flaubert, Proust, Wells, and Shakespeare, who encloses the shelf at either end with Hamlet and King Lear [p. 41]). For Shakespeare, see God or Shakespeare.

metamorphosing: see not human, but nymphic.

CHAPTER 30.

emeritus read to by a boy: an echo of the opening of Eliot's "Gerontion": "Here I am, an old man in a dry month,/Being read to by a boy ..." See pastiches.

shoat: a young pig; a hog.

callypygean slave ... onyx: or callipygian; "having shapely buttocks." Onyx is a variety of agate, a semiprecious stone. H.H. is no doubt here referring to onyx marble (alabaster). See boat to Onyx or Eryx.

gonadal glow: a gonad is a sexual gland; an ovary or testis. H.H. is evoking the neon tubing on the nether region of a 1947 Wurlitzer jukebox, an expensive "collectible" in 1991.

canoeing, Coranting: the latter is the participle of H.H.'s variant of courant, "a dance of Italian origin marked by quick running steps," and also dialectal English for "romping" and "carousing." H.H. is still in Volume C of the Girl's Encyclopedia (see p. 92).

CHAPTER 31.

Roman law ... girl may marry at twelve: the legal opinions offered in this paragraph move from fact to fiction (see Children ... 1933). The first is true, though the legal question and its history are far more complex than H.H. would suggest. See Corbett, The Roman Law of Marriage (1930), pp. 5152.

adopted by the Church: also true; see Bouscaren and Ellis, Canon Law: A Text and Commentary (1957), p. 513.

still preserved ... in some of the United States: only in ten states (Colorado, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Virginia, Idaho, Kansas, and Louisiana). See Vernier, American Family Laws (1931), pp. 115117.

fifteen is lawful everywhere: not in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or Wyoming, where the age is sixteen, or in New Hampshire or New Jersey, where it is eighteen. But there are exceptions granted if the girl is pregnant or if she is willing, over twelve, and the marriage has been consummated. Since none of these (save the consummation) apply to Lolita, it seems that H.H.'s confident legal scholarship has given way to dissembling. See Vernier, ibid., pp. 116118. Of course these laws pertain to H.H.'s day, and may have changed.