The Annotated Lolita: Revised And Updated - The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Part 26
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The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Part 26

Star: the newspaper's name was not italicized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected.

time leaks: spent with Quilty. For an index to his appearances, see Quilty, Clare.

sly quip ... Rigger: The Right Reverend Rigger (in some versions "Reverend MacTrigger") figures in an old limerick that begins, "There was a right royal old nigger." "His five hundred wives / Had the time of their lives," and the rest is too obscene to appear here. But see Joyce's Ulysses, where Bloom quotes it (1961 Random House ed., pp. 171172). For a summary of Joyce allusions, see outspoken book: Ulysses.

Arguseyed: "observant"; from the hundred-eyed monster of Greek mythology, who was set to watch Io, a maiden loved by Zeus. In Laughter in the Dark, Albinus meets his fatal love in the Argus cinema, where she is an usher (p. 22). "My back is Argus-eyed," says the speaker in "An Evening of Russian Poetry" (see "Humbert Humbert"). In Pale Fire, one of the aliases of the assassin Gradus is "d'Argus"; Hermann in Despair envisions "argus-eyed angels" (p. 101); the title character in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight "seems argus-eyed" (p. 95); Ada and Van dread "traveling together to Argus-eyed destinations" (Ada, p. 425), and Van, in search of the nature and meaning of Time, drives an "Argus" car (p. 551).

celebrated actress: an allusion to her resemblance to Marlene Dietrich; here.

ne montrez pas vos zhambes: French; do not show your legs (jambes phonetically spelled to indicate an American accent-a recollection of Charlotte; see ne montrez pas vos zhambes).

Edgar: in honor of Poe; see "Edgar"... "writer and explorer" and Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter. For a summary of Poe allusions, see Lo-lee-ta.

hygienic evening in Providence: at that time Providence, R.I., possessed a large redlight district.

CHAPTER 9.

Avis Chapman: "When naming incidental characters," said Nabokov, "I like to give them some mnemonic handle, a private tag: thus 'Avis Chapman' which I mentally attached to the South-European butterfly Callophrys avis Chapman (where Chapman, of course, is the name of that butterfly's original describer)." For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

save one ... names are approximations: Mona Dahl. Because she was Lolita's accomplice in deceit, a cover (or quilt!) for Quilty, H.H. takes his vengeance by revealing Mona's name to the world.

Ball Zack: Honore de Balzac (17991850), French novelist.

CHAPTER 10.

my Lolita: this brief chapter sounds an urgent chord in what might be called the "true love" theme. The succinct "Latin" locution (see the writer's ancient lust) is sounded in location [PART ONE] c09.1, c11.1, c11.2, c15.1, c19.1, c19.2, c21.1, c27.1, c27.2, c29.1, c30.1, [PART TWO] c02.1, c03.1, c03.2, c04.1, c09.1, c12.1, c12.2, c14.1, c20.1, c22.1, c23.1, c28.1, c28.2, c28.3, c32.1, c34.1, c36.1, bm1.1. "My unique Lolita," "my lone light Lolita," and "my conventional Lolita" vary the pattern.

CHAPTER 11.

"Why, no," I said: the comma after no was omitted in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected.

teachers': the apostrophe was omitted in the 1958 edition.

Miss Horn ... Miss Cole: the first letters of the teachers' names have been transposed. "Corrected," the names combine to form an obscene verb. For their anagrammatic colleagues, see Lester ... Fabian.

The Hunted Enchanters: "the author" is Quilty (see here), though Pratt has the title wrong (The Enchanted Hunters, after the hotel and the nympholepts, common and uncommon varieties [see The Enchanted Hunters]). She is figuratively correct, however, since Quilty is hunting the enchanter (Lolita), and it is apt that Pratt, her keeper, should make this accurate "error." For a summary of Quilty allusions, see Quilty, Clare.

She is in Mushroom: the very astute reader of Who's Who in the Limelight knows this already; see The Strange Mushroom, where the plant is identified as a phallic symbol.

girls': the apostrophe was omitted in the 1958 edition.

Reynolds: Joshua Reynolds (17231792), English painter. "The Age of Innocence" portrays a very young girl alone under a tree, in the wrong room here ("smelly" Mushroom).

Baker: George Pierce Baker (18661935) gave a famous course in playwriting at Harvard, and his Dramatic Technique (1919) was a popular text.

CHAPTER 12.

Dr. Ilse Tristramson: Tristram[n] was the famous hero of Celtic legend, and the love of Tristram and Iseult has often been celebrated. The story of Tristram is in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'arthur (1485), Books Ten through Twelve. Matthew Arnold treated the theme in "Tristram and Iseult" (1852), Swinburne in "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1871), and Tennyson in "The Last Tournament" (1871). "Tristram in Movielove," notes H.H. Tristram's sons are the poets of love. The punning name of the physician who examines Lolita is in the spirit of a novel that is both a love story and a parody of love stories; but, more than that, it acknowledges Laurence Sterne, whose involuted and a-realistic Tristram Shandy (1767) might be called the first modern novel (for the Shandy reference, see also Keys, p. 96). The aesthetic kinship of Sterne and Joyce and Nabokov, which has nothing to do with "literary influence," is strong enough to call both Ulysses and Lolita "Tristram's sons." "I love Sterne but had not read him in my Russian period," said Nabokov (Wisconsin Studies interview). See I cannot ... starling for another Sterne allusion and Heart, head-everything, where H.H.'s verbal play evokes Sterne.

caloricity: "the physiological ability to develop and maintain bodily heat."

Venus febriculosa: Latin; "slightly feverish Venus." Lolita's malady in mock-medicalese. See boat to Onyx or Eryx for other references to the Roman goddess of love and beauty. See here and here for allusions to Botticelli's famous painting of her.

Doris Lee ... Frederick Waugh: The Doris Lee (19051983) painting under discussion is called "Noon." It shows a man with his hat over his face, asleep on a haystack, while in the foreground a girl and another man are making love beside a haystack (reproduced in Life, III, September 20, 1937). All of these artists are realistic painters, quite out of fashion in the nineteen-fifties. Grant Wood (18921942) is well-known for his meticulous renderings of eminently American subjects, especially for "American Gothic" (1930)-"good title for book"-the coolly sardonic portrait of a Midwestern farm couple. The subject matter of Peter Hurd (19041984) is primarily Southwestern, including his portrait painting (his name became legend in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson refused a Hurd portrait of him, calling it the "ugliest thing I ever saw"). Reginald Marsh (18981954) indefatigably chronicled the common (if not low) life of New York City, in a style more graphic than painterly (a misprint in his name has been corrected [s instead of c in the 1958 edition]). Frederick Waugh (18611940) concentrated on marine subjects. Like their maker (see Why blue), Nabokov's characters usually know a good deal about art and express their opinions freely. As an entomologist, Nabokov valued exactitude, but as a novelist and critic he scorned brilliant technique put to banal use. In Pnin, Mr. Lake thus teaches "That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood" (p. 96).

CHAPTER 13.

Elizabethan: that epoch's play-within-the-play is relevant here, for The Enchanted Hunters functions in the same manner (as do other "playlets" mentioned here, though the latter are of less significance). See her class at ... school and the Introduction, here.

Diana: Roman moon goddess, patroness of hunting and virginity; identified with the Greek Artemis.

suggested the play's title: the title was of course suggested by Lolita's enchantment of H.H. and Quilty; their conversation at the hotel is here. As happens so often in the universe of Nabokov's fiction, the title reflects or refracts a motif distant in time but not in space, insofar as "the poet ... is the nucleus" of everything (Speak, Memory, p. 218). The year of his death, Sebastian Knight "is said to have been three times to see the same film-a perfectly insipid one called The Enchanted Garden" (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight [1941], p. 182). See Introduction, here, here, and, for typical examples, "Humbert Humbert", powdered Mrs. Leigh ... Vanessa van Ness, Argus-eyed, and Blue.

Hansel and Gretel: the three "playlets" are adaptations of fairy tales that have to do with deception or enchantment.

Richard Roe: a party to legal proceedings whose real name is unknown; the second party when two are unknown, just as "John Doe" is the first party. Dorothy Doe is an alliterative party of no legal significance.

Maurice Vermont ... Rumpelmeyer: Nabokov said, "I vaguely but persistently feel that both Vermont and Rumpelmeyer exist!" (probably culled from a telephone directory). Whether "real" or not, these names were chosen because they are a play on (and with) the emperor's old clothes: to rumple (to form irregular folds) and the Vermont, a merino sheep having greatly exaggerated skin folds. Maurice points below to Maeterlinck, a purveyor of more pretentious fairy tales; while Rumpelmeyer also suggests Rumpelstiltskin, a fairy tale that is resolved only when the fair protagonist discovers the grotesque villain's name. For a similar moment in Lolita, see this passage.

Lenormand: Henri Rene Lenormand (18821951). In the period between the two world wars, he was the center of those French dramatists concerned with subconscious motivation. He was regarded as a Freudian, but he claimed that his plays were based on emotional conflicts rather than on intellectual systems. Lenormand believed that all altruistic action was motivated by egoistic impulses. In his plays man is set in physical nature and climatic conditions are considered as a shaping force in human behavior. Le Temps est un songe (1919) and a l'Ombre du mal (1924) are among his best-known works. The allusion to Lenormand is generalized, said Nabokov. Although some of them are a parodist's delight, Nabokov had no specific Lenormand works in mind. Lenormand's play, La Maison des Remparts, features a girl named Lolita, but Nabokov never saw or read it.

Maeterlinck: the reputation of Maurice Maeterlinck (18621949) was at its height in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of this century, when the Belgian-born writer's anti-naturalistic Symbolist plays exerted a wide influence. In an effort to communicate the mysteries of man's inner life and his relation to the universe, he created a theater of stasis, rich in atmosphere and short in action. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911. Among his most famous plays are Pelleas et Melisande (1892) and L'Oiseau bleu (1909): see touche, reader! and Schmetterling. Invited to Hollywood by producer Louis B. Mayer in the thirties, he wrote a Symbolist screenplay. "The hero is a goddamn bee!" proclaimed the horrified Mayer.

British dreamers: Nabokov had in mind Sir James M. Barrie (18601937), Scottish novelist and dramatist who wrote Peter Pan (1904) and A Kiss for Cinderella (1916), and Lewis Carroll (see A breeze from wonderland and Alice-in-Wonderland).

a seventh Hunter: see an impossible balance and the Introduction, here. This Hunter is implicitly the author himself.

elves: for "elves" and the fairy-tale theme, see Percy Elphinstone, which underscores the fact that the entertainment is indeed "the poet's invention."

Was it?: her euphoria is caused by the realization that Quilty has named his play in her honor.

CHAPTER 14.

Miss Emperor: Mlle. Lempereur is Emma Bovary's music teacher. By pretending to go to lessons Emma is able to meet Leon in Rouen and deceive her husband (Part III, Chapter 5). See also Keys, p. 25. See nous connumes for Flaubert.

Gustave's: because Lolita has followed Emma's example, Flaubert (not Trapp) is still on H.H.'s mind.

mon pauvre ami ... saluent: French; my poor fellow, I have never seen you again and although there is little likelihood of your seeing my book, allow me to tell you that I give you a very cordial handshake and that all my little girls send you greetings.

d'un ... contrit: French; a look of contrived mortification.

rehearsing ... with Mona: she meets Quilty here. See Quilty, Clare for a summary of his appearances.

pommettes: cheekbones. A corrected author's error (not italicized in 1958 edition).

haddocky: fishy (akin to the cod); the adjectival use is H.H.'s.

dackel: German; a dachshund.

Mr. Hyde: in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Hyde similarly knocks over a little girl. Note that H.H. identifies himself with the evil self of Stevenson's Doppelganger tale. For Stevenson, see R. L. Stevenson's footprint on an extinct volcano and the Introduction, here and here.

hurriedly hung up: the conversation was with Quilty.

Pim ... Pippa: an allusion to the play Mr. Pim Passes By (1919), by A.A. Milne (18821956), and to Browning's Pippa Passes. See also Keys, p. 20. See frock-fold ... Browning for another reference to Pippa Passes, and Pale Fire, p. 186. For My Last Duchess's Fra Pandolf, see Pale Fire, p. 246.

J'ai toujours ... Dublinois: "I have always admired the [ormonde] work of the sublime Dubliner." The sublime one is James Joyce, but ormonde does not exist in French; it refers to Dublin's Hotel Ormond (no e), whose restaurant provides the setting for the so-called "Sirens" episode of Ulysses, and whose name is a most Joycean pun-hors [de ce] monde ("out-of-this-world," a further tribute). (See also Keys, p. 20.) The reverential allusion is delivered obliquely in the requisite Joycean manner. Also in the Dubliner's spirit is the "jolls-joyce" car in which the hero of Ada rides in one scene (p. 473). See outspoken book: Ulysses. In a 1966 National Educational Television network interview, Nabokov said the "greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses; Kafka's Transformation; Bely's St. Petersburg; and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time." "On fait son grand Joyce after doing one's petit Proust," reads a parenthetical statement in Ada, added to the "manuscript" by gently derisive Ada herself, "In [her] lovely hand" (p. 169). When Vera Nabokov saw some of the opened pages of the annotator's copy of Lolita, the typeface barely visible beneath an overlay of comments in several colors of pencil and ink, she turned to her husband and said, "Darling, it looks like your copy of Ulysses." Although there are strong artistic affinities between Joyce and Nabokov, he dismissed the possibility of formal "influence": "My first real contact with Ulysses, after a leering glimpse in the early 'twenties, was in the 'thirties at a time when I was definitely formed as a writer and immune to any literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only much later, in the 'fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses. That was the best part of the education I received at Cornell" (Wisconsin Studies interview). See children-colors ... a passage in James Joyce.

In addition to admiring Joyce, Nabokov also knew him. "I saw [Joyce] a few times in Paris in the late thirties," recalled Nabokov. "Paul and Lucie Leon, close friends of his, were also old friends of mine. One night they brought him to a French lecture I had been asked to deliver on Pushkin under the auspices of Gabriel Marcel (it was later published in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise). I had happened to replace at the very last moment a Hungarian woman writer, very famous that winter, author of a bestselling novel, I remember its title, La Rue du Chat qui Pche, but not the lady's name. A number of personal friends of mine, fearing that the sudden illness of the lady and a sudden discourse on Pushkin might result in a suddenly empty house, had done their best to round up the kind of audience they knew I would like to have. The house had, however, a pied aspect since some confusion had occurred among the lady's fans. The Hungarian consul mistook me for her husband and, as I entered, dashed towards me with the froth of condolence on his lips. Some people left as soon as I started to speak. A source of unforgettable consolation was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team. Another time my wife and I had dinner with him at the Leons' followed by a long friendly evening of talk. I do not recall one word of it but my wife remembers that Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod, the Russian 'mead,' and everybody gave him a different answer."

Nabokov makes a Joycean appearance in Gisele Freund and V. B. Carleton's James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years (New York, 1965). Pictured on pp. 4445 is a meeting of the editorial board of the Parisian journal Mesures. Nine literati are shown gathered around a garden table, and a caption identifies the group, which includes Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan-and Jacques Audiberti, a tall, thin man standing in the back, looking down, his face in shadows, a trace of a smile suggesting some miraculous foreknowledge of the caption that twenty-eight years later would mistakenly identify him as "Audiberti," and in thus denying the existence of the already pseudonymous V. Sirin, would summarize the vicissitudes and spectral qualities of Russian emigre life, and cast him as The Mystery Man in the Garden, a role based on the nameless man in the brown macintosh, the mystery man of Ulysses, the "lankylooking galoot" (as Bloom calls him) whose name is misunderstood by a newspaper reporter as "M'Intosh," under which name he is immortalized. The photo is also included in TriQuarterly 17 (Winter 1970).

C'est entendu?: French; that's agreed?

Lenore: although Poe wrote a poem thusly titled, the primary allusion is to the title character in one of the most popular dramatic ballads of Gottfried August Burger (17471794), German poet of the Sturm und Drang period. H.H. echoes the best-known line, in which Lenore and her ghostly lover ride off: "Und hurre, hurre, bop, hop, hop, hop! ..." (line 149). See also Keys, p. 141n. The allusion is ironic, since Lenore grieves over her lover. Nabokov discusses the poem in the Commentary to his Eugene Onegin translation (Vol. III, pp. 153154).

qui ... temps: French; who was taking his time.

CHAPTER 15.

Professor Chem: for "Chemistry."

edusively (placed!): a portmanteau word; from educible (educe: "to draw forth; elicit"; see Edusa, p. 209), coined to rhyme with effusively. By punning on Edusa's name he manages to place her.

the author: Quilty. See Quilty, Clare.

Edusa Gold: named after the Clouded Yellow, a golden-orange European butterfly known at one time as Colias edusa. See Electra. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

Some old woman: Quilty; Lolita's diversionary ploy is successful; see sidetrack ... female.

natural climax: an echo of the "traumatic" experience; lost pair of sunglasses.

CHAPTER 16.