The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (62 page)

The Little Nymph
: like
Fatherly Love
(in the same entry), this is an appropriate work for H.H.’s sinister alter ego to have authored.

The Lady Who Loved Lightning
: Nabokov confirmed the deduction that this is the unnamed play which H.H. and Lolita attend in Wace,
here
. Lolita says, “
I am not a lady and do not like lightning.
” Although H.H.’s mother was
killed by lightning
, Nabokov intends no cross-reference; he grants, however, that “the connection is cozy and tempting.” The
Who
in the play’s title was not capitalized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected.

in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom
: at the very least she must be called Quilty’s collaborator, since “she” is an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov” (
“Vivian Darkbloom”
).

Dark Age
: see
Dark Age
, where H.H. alludes to its author.

The Strange Mushroom
: see above,
The Strange Mushroom
.

traveled 14,000 … New York
: H.H. “doubles” Quilty for a change, for he will travel some 27,000 miles with the little nymph (see
here
), while Quilty’s “play” of that name consumes virtually half of that distance.

Hobbies … pets
: the three “hobbies” prefigure Quilty’s pursuit of H.H. and Lolita (“fast cars”), his love of dogs (see
Mr. Gustave … spaniel pup
), and the pornographic movies he will force his favorite “pet” to act in (see
Duk Duk
).

Quine, Dolores
: “Dolores” is Lolita’s given name (see
Dolores
), while “Quine” echoes Quilty, sets up an internal rhyme which condemns him (
Quine the Swine … my Lolita
), and is French for two fives at a game of tric-trac (a form of backgammon).
Although Nabokov said he did not intend any allusion, “
Une quine a la lotérie
” is a bid prize, an advantage, which describes the way H.H. and Quilty variously bid for Lolita, and the way the book’s game-element manipulates the reader (see
here
); Quilty reads aloud from H.H.’s poem, “because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”

Never Talk to Strangers
: this is no idle title. See
here
(“I would not talk to strangers,” H.H. advises Lolita) and
Do not talk to strangers
, where he repeats and expands upon this excellent fatherly advice: “
Be true to your [husband]. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers.
”

Has disappeared
: see next note, and
here
, where H.H. says, “I have reached the part which … might be called ‘
Dolorès Disparue
’ ” (a play on
Albertine disparue
, the title of the penultimate volume of the original French edition of Marcel Proust’s
À la Recherche du temps perdu
). An error in the 1958 edition has been corrected (the transposing of the concluding bracket and period after “follows”).

I notice … in the preceding paragraph
: the “slip” refers to “Has disappeared” instead of “Has appeared,” another foreshadowing of his loss. Lolita will be cast in a play by Quilty,
The Enchanted Hunters.
See
here
. It is central to a full sense of the novel.

Clarence
: H.H.’s lawyer, to whom the manuscript of this “unrevised” draft is entrusted. See
here
.

The Murdered Playwright
: the prefiguration of the murder announced above is completed here (
Agatha
). H.H. now explicitly refers to his killing of Quilty (
here
), which is prefigured several more times (see
I shot … said: Ah.’
and
kill in my dreams
). By strategically placing
Who’s Who in the Limelight
early in
Lolita
— like Black Guinea’s list of the avatars of the confidence man in Chapter Three of Herman Melville’s
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
(1857)—Nabokov gives the reader an opportunity to make at least some of these connections as the novel unfolds.

Quine the Swine … my Lolita
: Quilty, and for “my Lolita,” see
the writer’s ancient lust
and
my Lolita
.

I have only words to play with
: even if H.H. has only words, the reader must consider the implications of his extraordinary control of them. The interlacements which lead in and out of this veritable nerve center reveal a capacity for design and order that, given the conditions under which his narrative has allegedly been composed, is only within the reach of
the manipulative author above the book. By no accident is
Who’s Who in the Limelight
a theatrical yearbook, for the involutions which spiral out of it demonstrate that playwright Quilty, H.H., and Lolita, as well as the actor and actress who serve as their stand-ins in
Who’s Who
, are all performing in another of Nabokov’s puppet shows. “I could not really see him,” says H.H., of Quilty, “but what gave him away [in the dark] was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on”—sounds from the workshop (
here
). “
Guess again, Punch
,” H.H. tells Quilty; and, of their fight, H.H. says, “
He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags.
” The novel’s first reference to Quilty thus offers a summary phrase (
“Vivian Darkbloom”
); for the countless involuted verbal figurations and cross-references in
Lolita
all represent “Vivian Darkbloom” ’s “cue,” and suggest that the authorial consciousness is somehow profoundly involved in a tale that in every literal way is surely separate from it.

Having recognized the novel’s verisimilar disguise, the reader is afforded a global view of the book
qua
book, whose dappled surface now reveals patterns that seem almost visual. In the Foreword to the 1966 version of
Speak, Memory
, Nabokov says that in looking for a title for the first edition, he “toyed with
The Anthemion
which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it”; it would be a fitting, if precious, subtitle for
Lolita
(as well as for several other Nabokov works). A grand anthemion entwines H.H.’s narrative, like some vast authorial watermark, and its outlines are traced by the elegantly ordered networks of alliteration, “coincidences,” narrative “inconsistencies,” lepidopterological references, “cryptocolors,” and shadows and glimpses of Quilty.

charming … chap
: the cascade of alliterations in this paragraph, so carefully controlled, underscores the significance of
Who’s Who
, as does a remark on the next page (
The reader will regret to learn … I had another bout with insanity
).

Pierre Point in Melville Sound
: H.H.’s invention, from
Pierre
(1852) by Herman Melville (1819–1891). An allusion to Book IX’s opening, where a reckless, truth-seeking “Arctic explorer” “loses the directing compass of his mind.… at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points …” Pierre dies in prison, as does H.H. Melville’s gloomy “Byronic” themes are apposite.

gremlin
: a mischievous little gnome reported by World War II airmen as causing mechanical trouble in airplanes. “
Drumlins
” is the plural for “an elongate or oval hill of glacial drift” (Webster’s 2nd).

kremlin
: the name of the governing center of Russia completes this sequence of phonological pairings. The best example is found in
Pale Fire
(note to line 803). Nabokov continually manipulates the basic linguistic devices—auditory, morphological, and alphabetical, the latter most conspicuously. In
Pale Fire
, Zemblan is “the tongue of the mirror” (p. 242); and the fragmentation or total annihilation of the self reverberates in the verbal distortions in
Bend Sinister’s
police state, “where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else,” as well as in the alphabetical and psychic inversions and reversals of
Pale Fire
—such as Botkin-Kinbote and the Index references to Word Golf and “
Sudarg of Bokay
, a mirror maker of genius,” the latter an anagrammatic reflection and poetic description of omnipresent death, represented in
Pale Fire
by the Zemblan assassin J[y]akob Gradus, who throws his shadow across the entire novel, its creations, creator, and readers.

The reader will regret to learn … I had another bout with insanity
: H.H. is right, readers
do
regret to hear this from a narrator; and H.H. virtually encloses his narrative within reminders of this “unreliability,” for, toward the end (
here
), he casually says he retired to another sanatorium (“I felt I was merely losing contact with reality” [
merely!
—A.A.]). Several of Nabokov’s narrators are mad. Among other things, their madness functions as a parody of critical dogma about fiction, and a telling parody of the reader’s own delusory “contact with reality.” Of course H.H.’s is not a credible point of view in the terms laid down by Henry James, refined by Percy Lubbock, put into practice by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, institutionalized by two generations of critics, and enforced by thousands of creative writing instructors—and the involuted, patterned surface of
Lolita
makes this even clearer. H.H.’s copy of
Who’s Who
and Quilty’s “cryptogrammic paper chase” (
here
), the two most important concentrations of authorial inlays, typical in method and effect, are thus symmetrically located at the beginning and near the end of the novel, almost next to those declarations of insanity which seem to frame it, though these symmetries cannot hope to be as exact as the one formed by the first and final words of the novel (“Lolita”). See Notes
her class at … school
through
McFate, Aubrey
for another concentration of self-reflexive involutions.

patients … had witnessed their own conception
: Nabokov’s attacks on Freud are consistent. Kinbote includes in his Commentary lines deleted in the draft of the poem
Pale Fire
:

In
Speak, Memory
, Nabokov similarly “reject[s] completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents” (p. 20); while in
Ada
he notes the “pale pencil which poor [public] speakers are obsessed with in familiar dreams (attributed by Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu to the dreamer’s having read in infancy his adulterous parents’ love letters)” (p. 549). For Freud, see
a case history
.

Humbertish
: H.H.’s coinage; after any language ending in the
-ish
suffix (Finnish, English, Lettish).

house … burned down
: Nabokov omitted from the last draft of
Lolita
a hilarious scene describing H.H.’s arrival by taxi at the charred-out, bepuddled, roped-off ruins of the McCoo residence. A large crowd applauds H.H. as he grandly alights from the cab; only an encyclopedia has survived the holocaust. He recognizes that the lost opportunity to coach “the enigmatic [McCoo] nymphet” is no loss at all (see p. 41). Nabokov reinstated the scene in his published screenplay of
Lolita
(Stanley Kubrick had dropped it from the film). “Although there are just enough borrowings from [my
Lolita
script in Kubrick’s] version to justify my legal position as author of the script, the final product is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wish to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of
poshlust
[see Introduction,
here
] is often given by the cinema to the novel
it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass. Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but I shall never understand why he did not follow my directions and dreams. It is a great pity; but at least I shall be able to have people read my
Lolita
play in its original form” (
Paris Review
interview, 1967). Speaking more positively three years earlier, Nabokov said, “The four main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car—these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty [Peter Sellers] is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze [Shelley Winters; James Mason was H.H.]. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on stressing certain things that were not stressed—for example, the different motels at which they stopped” (
Playboy
interview). The highways and motels were so little in evidence because the film, released in 1962, was shot in England.