The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  CHAPTER 24

  garçon: French; fellow.

  Bill Brown … Dolores: see a saint and Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.. This “Bill Brown” rings a final verbal change on H.H.’s “While brown Dolores” (a saint) and Quilty’s “Horribly cruel” (says H.H.) guest book entry, “Will Brown” (Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.). The echoic cross-references are placed almost back-to-back in order to give the astute reader a chance to make the association. Seeing the veracity of the narrative collapse, but not willing to grant that fiction is artifice, and rightly feeling that any cruelty is at his expense, the reader may anxiously wonder who is responsible for what here. The author, is, of course, and Nabokov immediately mocks such doggedly persistent literalism by having H.H. hire Bill Brown, an imbecilic private detective, to check the names and addresses collected from those guest books—a gesture that can only be for the benefit of the literal-minded reader, since H.H. himself plainly considers the material “nonsense data.” The “information” provides a non-solution that parodies the reader’s need for a solution and our belief that either literature or life will ever reveal one, in the largest sense. A hyphen, omitted in 1958, has been added to Bill’s age.

  CHAPTER 25

  Dolorès Disparue: see Has disappeared. In the first French edition of Proust’s great novel, Albertine disparue is the next-to-last volume. The definitive Pléiade edition (1954) has restored Proust’s own title for it, La Fugitive (it is called The Sweet Cheat Gone in the Moncrieff translation). See Proustian theme … Bailey”.

  daymares: H.H.’s coinage.

  chambres garnies: French; furnished rooms.

  auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac: Freudian trappings, secondhand symbols. See a case history and Viennese medicine man.

  que … cela: French; how far away all this was!

  Comics: the first two are generalized and invented comic strips.

  gagoon … kiddoid gnomide: on a visit to Montreux in 1968, I mentioned to Nabokov that I had been unable to identify that “repulsive strip” for this edition. Nabokov could not remember its name, but, expanding upon H.H.’s description, he dated it (the late nineteen-for-ties), noted that the strip “had science-fiction overtones,” and vividly recalled “a big gangster, and his very small, big-eyed, lemur-like dwarf wife wearing a lot of jewelry.” Because even that failed to awaken this annotator’s memory, the author provided the drawing shown on the facing page. A 1976 correspondent is certain that the strip was Kerry Drake, created in 1943 by Alfred Andriola, who featured Dick Tracy–like grotesques drawn in a Milton Caniff manner. For other comic strip allusions, see caravansaries and Jutting Chin … funnies.

  Gagoon is a portmanteau of gag, goon, and baboon, while gnomide draws on the common meaning of gnome (dwarf) and combines its original meaning (from the Greek: a general maxim, a saying) with the nearly synonymous bromide (a tiresome, commonplace person; a hackneyed expression). Kiddoid is also H.H.’s coinage. Because the -oid suffix (resembling, having the form of) is used in scientific terms formed on Greek words, its incongruous usage here becomes humorous (e.g., anthropoid; H.H.’s word is defined as “genus of kid”). See hypnotoid.

  Et moi … génie: “And I was offering you my genius!” A bogus quotation, echoing any French Romantic poet (e.g., Alfred de Musset [1810–1857]). H.H. the cultivated European purposefully invokes French—the language of culture or genius—in ironic contrast with visual and verbal fragments of American mass culture. He catches perfectly the slangy neologisms and staccato beat of such forgotten voices as the gossip columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell (1897–1972): “Joe-Roe marital enigma is making yaps flap.”

  merman: a fabled marine male creature; the mermaid’s counterpart. See The Little Mermaid. In Pale Fire, Odon, Zemblan actor and patriot, appears in The Merman, “a fine old melodrama” (p. 129).

  losing contact with reality: for an earlier incarceration, see The reader will regret to learn … I had another bout with insanity.

  something I composed: H.H.’s “something” is generally light enough, especially in its humorously blatant rhymes, but its fifty-two lines are truly “composed” in the way they cohere with a larger pattern: the fifty-two weeks H.H. and Lo spend together on the road (August 1947-August 1948), the year of their deaths, and so forth (see interrelated combinations).

  I cannot … starling: a quotation from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). On a visit to Paris, Yorick the narrator takes lightly the infamous Bastille. But his attention is drawn to a caged talking starling: “ ‘I can’t get out,’ said the starling.” He is unable to free the bird, whose constant refrain moves him deeply. It becomes a symbol of all enslavement and confinement, and, returning to his room, he imagines at length a solitary captive in the Bastille. He next explains how the starling was given to him and subsequently changed hands countless times; the reader has perhaps seen the bird, suggests Yorick. From that time, he adds, he has borne the starling as the crest to his coat of arms, which he includes in the text. It bears an uncaged bird (see the Penguin English Library edition [1967], pp. 94-100). The starling that had learned only those “four simple words” is most important because it partakes of Lolita’s origin, and its lament is at the book’s center. Lolita’s initial inspiration, writes Nabokov, was “prompted by a newspaper story about an ape [in the Paris zoo] who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage” (p. 311). H.H., the “aging ape” writing from prison, whose impossible love metaphorically connects him with that imprisoned animal, learns the language, in his fashion, and records his “imprisonment.” His narrative is the “picture” of the bars of the poor creature’s cage—and an orchestration of the starling’s four simple words.

  vair: gray; the pale color of miniver fur.

  Soleil Vert: French; Green Sun.

  L’autre soir … de ta vie?: “The other night, a cold air [italics mine—A.A.] from the opera forced me to take to my bed; / Broken note—he who puts his trust in it is quite foolish! / It is snowing, the decor collapses, Lolita! / Lolita, what have I done with your life?” The four lines are a splendid parody and pastiche of various kinds of French verse. The alexandrine verse of line one (see Ne manque … Qu’il t’y) scans perfectly in French. The air froid is an untranslatable pun (air: melody; draft or wind). Line two is a traditional saying, originating with Virgil, though it is in fact drawn here from Le Roi s’amuse (1832), a play by Victor Hugo:

  Souvent femme varie,

  Bien fol est qui s’y fie!

  Une femme souvent

  N’est qu’une plume au vent.

  These lines are sung by the King, first in Act IV, scene ii, in a cabaret. The first two lines are repeated from off stage in Act V, scene iii, which informs Triboulet (or Rigoletto) that the King is still alive (he had planned to murder the King, but kills his daughter instead). The play was performed only once before being banned by royal decree. It is the source of Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851); Piave adapted the words and Verdi was responsible only for the music. The French version, which H.H. undoubtedly knows, is Rigoletto, ou Le Buffon du prince. Rigoletto is appropriate, since, figuratively speaking, H.H. is in his own right a grotesque clown. For Hugo, see Don Quixote. Line three of H.H.’s pastiche is overly sonorous, but the burlesqued entreaty of line four manages to express both the “truth and a caricature of it” (the artistic intention of Fyodor in The Gift, p. 200).

  pederosis: see tennis ball … my … darling.

  CHAPTER 26

  ensellure: French; the concave curve formed by the spine; in a woman, the lumbar incurvation.

  Babylonian blood: H.H. is very coy in “racial” matters, and enjoys using euphemisms (e.g., “Turk”) in the manner of the Victorians, with their “Mediterranean types.” See spaniel … baptized.

  depraved May: echo of a well-known line in T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”: “In depraved May, dogwood
and chestnut, flowering judas” (line 20). See pastiches.

  Blake: after the English poet and engraver William Blake (1757–1827). The invented Toylestown is a pun commemorating his “London” (1794) —toil’s town.

  burning … Tigermoth: a play on Blake’s “The Tiger” (1794)—“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright”—and a reference to the actual Tigermoth (“an Arctid,” noted Nabokov). For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..

  cavalier servant: a knight who is vassal to his fair lady; a medieval archetype of courtly love.

  mulberry moth wrote Nabokov: “Rita’s phrase ‘Going round and round like a mulberry moth’ combines rather pleasingly the ‘round and round the mulberry tree’ of the maypole song and the silk moth of China which breeds on mulberry.” See John Ray, Jr..

  Valechka: like Ritochka, a Russian diminutive.

  Schlegel … Hegel: Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the German philosophers, form a nonsense rhyme.

  shams and shamans: H.H. enjoys the fact that while shamans (conjurers, witch doctors) may be shams, the semantic similarities are also illusory; the former is Anglo-Saxon in origin, the latter Tungusic and Sanskritic. Columbine (two lines above in the text) was misspelled in the 1958 edition (0 instead of u); it has been corrected.

  ancilla: accessory, aid; literally, in Latin, “maidservant.”

  Tartary: from Tartarus, the infernal regions of mythology; any region, usually in European Russia and Asia, inhabited by the violent Tatar (or Tartar) tribes or hordes, who are mostly Turkic. The Tartar empire is restored in Ada’s Antiterra.

  Mnemosyne: in Greek mythology, a Titaness, daughter of Uranus and Gaea. She is associated with memory or remembrance. The nine Muses resulted from her union with Zeus. In the Foreword to the revised Speak, Memory, Nabokov says, “I had planned to entitle the British edition Speak, Mnemosyne but was told that ‘little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce.’ ”

  Cantrip … Mimir: a cantrip is a charm or spell, while Mimir is a giant in Norse mythology who lived by the well at the root of Yggdrasill, the great tree symbolizing the universe. By drinking its water, he knew the past and future.

  travaux: French; works.

  très digne: French; very dignified.

  souvenir … veux-tu?: “memory, memory, what do you want of me?” The opening line (minus “l’automne,” the last word) of “Nevermore”(title in English), by Paul Verlaine (1844–1896). H.H. begins his next sentence with that last word. Memories awakened by The Enchanted Hunters bring this line to mind. Verlaine’s poem ends with the poet telling his beloved that his most perfect day was when she charmingly murmured “Le premier oui”—her first yes (see also Keys, p. 33). For further Verlaine allusions, see Mes fenětres and mon … radieux. H.H. identifies with Verlaine, who was abandoned by his much younger (and homosexual) lover and traveling companion, Rimbaud. In Pale Fire, Kinbote recalls a visit to Nice, and “an old bearded bum … who stood like a statute of Verlaine with an unfastidious sea gull perched in profile on his matted hair” (p. 170). Ada and Van Veen are touched by “the long sobs of the violins,” the opening lines of Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne (1866), translated and quietly absorbed into the text of Ada (p. 411). Van’s “assassin pun” (p. 541) puns on “la Pointe assassine,” line seventeen of Verlaine’s Art poétique (1882). “Verlaine had been also a teacher somewhere / In England. And what about Baudelaire, / Alone in his Belgian hell?” writes Nabokov in “Exile,” an uncollected poem (The New Yorker, October 24, 1942, p. 26). For Baudelaire, see oh Baudelaire!.

  petite … accroupie: nymphet crouching.

  spaniel … baptized: the old lady’s dog, with which Lolita had played (cocker spaniel). H.H. wonders if the hotel’s policy of “NO DOGS” had been broken to accommodate Christian dogs, because “NEAR CHURCHES” was commonly used (c. 1940–1960) as a code sign, a discreet indication that only Gentiles were accepted. A similar quid pro quo occurs in the same hotel when “Humbert” is misunderstood and distorted into a Jewish-sounding “Humberg,” just as “Professor Hamburg” now finds the hotel full. “Refugee” H.H. is often mistaken for a Jew; see here, where John Farlow is on the point of making an anti-Semitic remark and is interrupted by sensitive Jean. Quilty thinks H.H. may be a “German refugee,” and reminds him, “This is a Gentile’s house, you know” (a Gentile’s house).

  Nabokov’s father was an outspoken foe of anti-Semitism. He wrote “The Blood Bath of Kishinev,” a famous protest against the 1903 pogrom, and was fined by the tsarist government for the fiery articles he wrote about the Beiliss trial (Maurice Samuel mentions him several times in his book on the Beiliss case, Blood Accusation [1966]—coincidentally published at the same time as Bernard Malamud’s novel based on it, The Fixer—and quotes from Nabokov’s reportage). Nabokov fils was also outraged by anti-Semitism, and, because his wife is Jewish, was sensitive to it in a most acutely personal way (witness the empathy for “poor Irving” [Irving]). Nabokov recalled going into a New England inn years ago, accompanied by his son and his son’s friend. Opening the menu, Nabokov noticed therein the succinct stipulation “Gentiles Only.” He called over the waitress and asked her what the management would do if there appeared at the door that very moment a bearded and berobed man, leading a mule bearing his pregnant wife, all of them dusty and tired from a long journey. “What … what are you talking about?” the waitress stammered. “I am talking about Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Nabokov, as he pointed to the phrase in question, rose from the table, and led his party from the restaurant. “My son was very proud of me,” said Nabokov. In Pale Fire, Kinbote and Shade discuss prejudice at length (note to line 470; pp. 216–218).

  Reader! Bruder!: German; “brother.” An echo of the last line of Au Lecteur, the prefatory poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857): “—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable, —monfrère!” (“Hypocrite reader —my fellow man—my brother.”). See oh Baudelaire!.

  the Gazette’s … Dr. Braddock and his group: see here. Gazette was not italicized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected.

  portrait … as a … brute: an obvious play on Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In searching for a title for his manuscript, the narrator of Despair considers “Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror,” but rejects it as “too jejune, too à la mode” (p. 201). For Joyce, see outspoken book: Ulysses.

  Brute Force: the actual title of a movie released by Universal Pictures in 1947, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, and Yvonne De Carlo. Possessed was released in 1947 by Warner Brothers, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, and starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, and Raymond Massey. The titles gloss H.H.’s circumstances, and Brute Force—a prison film, which Nabokov thought he had seen—is thematically apt.

  Omen Faustum: Latin; Lucky Omen, or Lucky Strike cigarettes (pointed out to me by the philologist and Latinist, Professor F. Colson Robinson), a companion to “Dromes”; related to dies faustus, “a day of favorable omen,” or, specifically, “a day on which Roman religious law permitted secular activities.”

  58 Inchkeith Ave.: obsolete for “inchworm” (or Looper), the last thing that should be used for the name of an avenue, since inchworms (the larvae of certain moths) destroy shade trees. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr.. Fifty-eight inches was Lolita’s height at the outset of the novel (see four feet ten).

  Dark Age: the author is Quilty; see Dark Age. Dark Age was not italicized in the 1958 edition. The misprint has been corrected.

  Wine, wine … for roses: see Reader! Bruder!. Quilty is toying with lines from the sixth stanza of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát (1879), by Omar Khayyám (d. 1123?), Persian poet and mathematician:

  And David’s lips are locked; but in divine

  High-piping Pehlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!

  Red Wine!”—the Nightingale cries to the Rose

  Th
at sallow cheek of hers to incarnadine.

  The latter word was used earlier by H.H. (see Incarnadine), demonstrating once more that “the tone of [Quilty’s] brain had affinities with my own.”

  nothing of myself: see a blinding flash … can be deemed immortal; but Quilty’s “spectral shoulder” has been immortalized. For a summary of allusions to Quilty, see Quilty, Clare.

  vin triste: French; melancholy intoxication.

  Why blue: when I asked Nabokov “why blue?” and whether it had anything to do with the butterflies commonly known as the “Blues,” he replied: “What Rita does not understand is that a white surface, the chalk of that hotel, does look blue in a wash of light and shade on a vivid fall day, amid red foliage. H.H. is merely paying a tribute to French impressionist painters. He notes an optical miracle as E. B. White does somewhere when referring to the divine combination of ‘red barn and blue snow.’ It is the shock of color, not an intellectual blueprint or the shadow of a hobby … I was really born a landscape painter.” See Orange … and Emerald.

  CHAPTER 27

  Alice-in-Wonderland: for Lewis Carroll, see A breeze from wonderland.