The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (57 page)

BOOK: The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

6.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

moral apotheosis
: a just description of H.H.’s realization at the end of the novel: “
the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
”

12%
: such “sextistics” (as H.H. or Quilty might call them) poke fun at the work of Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) and his Indiana University Institute for Sex Research.

Blanche Schwarzmann
:
schwarz
is German for “black”; her name is “White Blackman,” because, to Nabokov, Freudians figuratively see no colors other than black and white (see
a case history
). “White blackman” also describes the attire of a recently “white widowed male” (see
two titles
). For a similarly hued lady, see p. 302 and “Melanie Weiss.”

a mixture of
…
supreme misery
: an accurate description of the pain at the center of H.H.’s playfulness.

his singing violin
: another gap in the texture of Ray’s rhetoric reveals the voice of his maker. In his Foreword to
Invitation to a Beheading
, Nabokov calls the novel a “violin in a void,” and in
Speak, Memory
he
calls the poet Boris Poplavski “a far violin among near balalaikas” (p. 287).

a case history
: among other things,
Lolita
parodies such studies, and Nabokov’s quarrel with psychoanalysis is well-known. No Foreword to his translated novels seems complete unless a few words are addressed to “the Viennese delegation,” who are also invoked frequently throughout the works. Asked in a 1966 National Educational Television interview why he “detest[ed] Dr. Freud,” Nabokov replied: “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
I
don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons” (this half-hour interview may be rented for a nominal fee from the Audio-Visual Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401; the film, notes their catalog, is “available to responsible individuals and groups both in and out of Indiana”). When I queried Nabokov about Freud (by now a trite question), just to see if he could rise to the occasion once more, he obliged me: “Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in
Speak, Memory
. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care” (
Wisconsin Studies
interview).

In
Speak, Memory
, Nabokov recalls having seen from a Biarritz window “a huge custard-colored balloon … being inflated by Sigismond Lejoyeux, a local aeronaut” (p. 156); and “the police state of sexual myth” (p. 300) is in
Ada
called “psykitsch” (p. 29). The good doctor’s paronomastic avatars are “Dr. Sig Heiler” (p. 28), and “A Dr. Froid … who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu” (p. 27). Since no parodist could improve on Erich Fromm’s realization that “The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation” (from
The Forgotten Language
, 1951, p. 240), or Dr. Oskar Pfister’s felicitously expressed thought that “When a youth is all the time sticking his finger through his buttonhole … the analytic teacher knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phantasies” (from
The Psychoanalytical Method
, 1917, p. 79), Nabokov the literary anatomist simply includes these treasures in
Pale Fire
(p. 271). See
Lolita
, [P
ART
O
NE
]
c9.1
, [P
ART
T
WO
]
c3.1
,
c11.1
,
c23.1
, and
c32.1
; and
patients … had witnessed their own conception
,
King Sigmund
,
auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac
, and
Viennese medicine man
.

John Ray, Jr.
: the first John Ray (1627–1705) was an English naturalist famous for his systems of natural classification. His system of plant classification greatly influenced the development of systematic botany (
Historia plantarium
, 1686–1704). He was the first to attempt a definition of what constitutes a species. His system of insects, as set forth in
Methodus insectorum
(1705) and
Historia insectorum
(1713), is based on the concept of metamorphosis (see
not human, but nymphic
). The reference to Ray is no coincidence (it was first pointed out by Diana Butler, in “Lolita Lepidoptera,”
New World Writing
16 [1960], p. 63). Nabokov was a distinguished lepi-dopterist, worked in Lepidoptera as a Research Fellow in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (1942–1948), and published some twenty papers on the subject. While I was visiting him in 1966, he took from the shelf his copy of Alexander B. Klots’s standard work,
A Field Guide to the Butterflies
(1951), and, opening it, pointed to the first sentence of the section on
“Genus
Lycæides
Scudder
: The Orange Margined Blues,” which reads: “The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus” (p. 164). “That’s real fame,” said the author of
Lolita
. “That means more than anything a literary critic could say.” In
Speak, Memory
(Chapter Six), he writes evocatively of his entomological forays, of the fleeting moments of ecstasy he experiences in catching exquisite and rare butterflies. These emotions are perhaps best summarized in his poem “A Discovery” (1943; from
Poems
, p. 15), its twentieth line echoing what he said to me more than two decades later:

I found it in a legendary land

all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,

where it was settled on some sodden sand

hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.

The features it combines mark it as new

to science: shape and shade—the special tinge,

akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,

the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.

My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;

corroded tissues could no longer hide

that priceless mote now dimpling the convex

and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist

two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,

or scales like battledores of amethyst

cross the charmed circle of the microscope.

I found it and I named it, being versed

in taxonomic Latin; thus became

godfather to an insect and its first

describer—and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),

and safe from creeping relatives and rust,

in the secluded stronghold where we keep

type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,

poems that take a thousand years to die

but ape the immortality of this

red label on a little butterfly.

There are many references to butterflies in
Lolita
, but it must be remembered that it is Nabokov, and not H.H., who is the expert. As Nabokov said, “H.H. knows nothing about Lepidoptera. In fact, I went out of my way to indicate [
here
and
here
] that he confuses the hawk-moths visiting flowers at dusk with ‘gray hummingbirds.’ ” The author has implored the unscientific annotator to omit references to Lepidoptera, “a tricky subject.” Only the most specific lepidopterological allusions will be noted, though even this modest trove will make it clear how the butterfly motif enables Nabokov to leave behind on H.H.’s pages a trail of his own phosphorescent fingerprints. For entomological allusions, see
Dolores
,
midge
,
powdered Mrs. Leigh … Vanessa van Ness
,
not human, but nymphic
,
predator … prey
,
Pisky
,
Miss Phalen
,
moth or butterfly
,
Lepingville … nineteenth century
,
powdered bugs
,
gay … Lepingville
,
lousy with … flies
,
hundreds of … hummingbirds
,
Avis Chapman
,
Edusa Gold
,
Felis tigris goldsmithi
,
that bug
,
Melmoth
,
Electra
,
butterfly
,
burning … Tigermoth
,
mulberry moth
,
58 Inchkeith Ave.
,
Schmetterling
,
Palearctic … Nearctic
, and
tinkling sounds … Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov
.

1955
: a corrected author’s error (the date was not included in the 1958 edition).

PART ONE

C
HAPTER
1

Lolita, light of my life
: her name is the first word in the Foreword, as well as the first and last words of the novel. Such symmetries and carefully effected alliterations and rhythms undermine the credibility of H.H.’s “point of view,” since the narrative is presented as an unrevised first draft, mistakes intact, started in a psychiatric ward and completed in a prison cell, the product of the fifty-six frenzied final days of H.H.’s life (see
his reminder
and
I have only words to play with
and
The reader will regret to learn … I had another bout with insanity
). When asked how her name occurred to him, Nabokov replied, “For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is ‘L.’ The suffix ‘-ita’ has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as … most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy ‘L’ and a long ‘O.’ No, the first syllable should be as in ‘lollipop,’ the ‘L’ liquid and delicate, the ‘lee’ not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in ‘Dolores’ [see
Dolores
]. My little girl’s heart-rending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname ‘Haze,’ where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean a small German hare [=
base
]” (
Playboy
interview). Since most everything is in a name, Nabokov both memorializes and instructs in
Ada
: “For the big picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday … the child was permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy [see
Carmen
note,
gitanilla
—A.A.] of that name in Osberg’s novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish ‘t,’ not a thick English one) …” (p. 77). Lolita’s name is lovingly celebrated by Anthony Burgess in his poem, “To Vladimir Nabokov on His Seventieth Birthday,” in
TriQuarterly
, of. 17 (Winter 1970):