The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (56 page)

two titles
: the term “white widowed male” occurs in the case histories of psychiatric works, while the entire subtitle parodies the titillating confessional novel, such as John Cleland’s
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
(1749), and the expectations of the reader who hopes
Lolita
will provide the pleasures of pornography (see
Duk Duk
). Although Nabokov could hardly have realized it at the time of writing, there is no small irony in the fact that the timidity of American publishers resulted in the novel’s being first brought out by the Olympia Press, publishers of
The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe
and other “
eighteenth-century sexcapades
” (to use Clare Quilty’s description of Sade’s
Justine, ou, Les Infortunes de la vertu
[…
The Misfortunes of Virtue
]).

preambulates
: to make a preamble, introduce.

“Humbert Humbert”
: in his
Playboy
interview (1964), Nabokov said, “The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, but I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble. Lends
itself also to a number of puns.” Like James Joyce, Nabokov fashions his puns from literary sources, from any of the several languages available to him, from obsolete words, or the roots of arcane words. If the associations are rich enough, a pun succeeds in projecting a theme central to the fiction, in summarizing or commenting on the action. In both
The Gift
(1937) and the 1959 Foreword to the English translation of
Invitation to a Beheading
(1935–1936), Nabokov mentions
Discours sur les ombres
, by Pierre Delalande, “the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book … [and] whom I invented.” Delalande’s
Discours
provided the epigraph for
Invitation
—“
Comme un fou se croît Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels
” [“As a madman deems himself God, we deem ourselves mortal”]—and Nabokov’s entire corpus might be described as a “Discourse on Shadows, or Shades.” John Shade is the author of the poem
Pale Fire
. In a rejected draft of his poem, he writes, “I like my name: Shade,
Ombre
, almost ‘man’ / In Spanish …”—an accurate etymological pairing (hombre > ombre) and a resonant pun that figuratively places
bombre
in ombre—a card game popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and sets man to playing in Nabokov’s “game of worlds” (see
this is only a game
). Humbert was brought up on the French Riviera; pronounced with a French accent, his name partakes of these shadows and shades. By “
solipsizing
” Lolita, Humbert condemns her to the solitary confinement of his obsessional shadowland. “
She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland
,” says Humbert, who, by choosing to chase the figurative shadows that play on the walls of his “cave,” upends Plato’s famous allegory. Although Humbert has had the benefit of a journey in the sunny “upper world”—a Riviera boyhood, in fact, and a full-sized wife or two—he nevertheless pursues the illusion that he can recapture what is inexorably lost. As Humbert demonstrates, illusions
are
realities in their ability to destroy us. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane,” writes John Shade in the opening lines of
Pale Fire
, while in Nabokov’s poem “An Evening of Russian Poetry” (1945), the speaker says:

Seventeen years later in
Pale Fire
the Shadows are the Zemblan “regicidal organization” who dispatch Gradus, one of whose aliases is d’Argus, to assassinate the exiled King Charles (Kinbote). But the Shadows’ secret agent accidentally kills Shade instead.
Lolita
offers the converse, for “Shade” (Humbert) purposely kills his “shadow” (Clare Quilty). Thus the delusive nature of identity and perception, the constricting burdens of memory, and a haunting sense of mutability are all capsuled in a reverberating pun.

solecism
: an irregularity or impropriety in speech and diction, grammar or syntax. Also in conduct, and therefore not an unwarranted definition in Humbert’s instance.

presented intact
: it is important to recognize how Nabokov belies the illusion of “realism” which both Ray and Humbert seem to create. See
Lolita, light of my life
and
I have only words to play with
.

cognomen
: its current definition, “a distinguishing nickname,” is fundamental, and the humorous incongruity of using so high-toned a Latin-ate word is heightened by its original meaning: “The third or family name of a Roman citizen.”

this mask
: “
Is ‘mask’ the keyword?
” Humbert later asks. In his Foreword to
Pale Fire
, Kinbote says of Shade: “His whole being constituted a mask.”

remain unlifted
: not quite; although the “real” name is never revealed, the mask does slip. See
Chapter Twenty-six
, the shortest in the book.

her first name
: Lolita’s given name is “Dolores.” See
Dolores
.

“H.H.” ’s crime
: the murder of Clare Quilty (
here
); Humbert’s grotesque alter ego and parodic Double. Humbert will henceforth be identified by his initials.

1952
: a corrected author’s error (“September-October 1952,” instead of the 1958 edition’s “September”). The following locations in the text contain corrections which are detailed in the Notes: [P
ART
O
NE
]
fwd.1
,
frw.2
,
c5.1
,
c6.1
,
c8.1
,
c8.2
,
c11.1
,
c13.1
,
c27.1
,
c27.2
,
c32.1
, [P
ART
T
WO
]
c1.1
,
c2.1
,
c7.1
,
c10.1
,
c11.1
,
c11.2
,
c12.1
,
c14.1
,
c19.1
,
c20.1
,
c20.2
,
c24.1
,
c26.1
,
c26.2
,
c27.1
,
c36.1
, and
c36.2
. The 1958 Putnam’s edition was set in type from the 1955 Olympia Press edition. The latter contains many minuscule mistakes (e.g., punctuation) which were carried over into the Putnam’s edition and identified only when the present text was in page proof. Although these errors have been corrected, it was impossible to describe them separately in the Notes. However, since the present edition follows the Putnam’s format exactly, save for the pagination (each Putnam page is two higher), assiduous students of such textual matters can easily identify these corrections by collating the two texts, as follows, adding two to get the Putnam’s page: p. 5, line sixteen; p. 31, line fourteen; p. 40, last line; p. 63, lines three and twenty-six; p. 73, line nineteen; p. 82, last line; p. 111, line seventeen; p. 136, line thirteen; p. 141, lines six and seven; p. 150, line twenty-five; p. 156, line six; p. 158, line sixteen; p. 161, line fifteen; p. 164, line nine; p. 179, line three; p. 180, line nine; p. 218, line ten; p. 226, line seven; p. 239, line thirteen; p. 243, line twenty-three; p. 255, line five; p. 262, line twenty-five; p. 275, line four; p. 276, line thirty-three; and p. 278, line two.

“real people”… “true story”
: in the Afterword, Nabokov mentions his “
impersonation of suave John Ray
”; but by mocking the conventional reader’s desire for verisimilitude, as Nabokov does in the opening paragraphs of
Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading
, and
The Gift
, Dr. Ray here expresses the concerns of a novelist rather than psychologist, suggesting that the mask has not remained totally in place. There are subtle oscillations between the shrill locutions and behavioristic homilies of Ray and the quite reasonable statements of an authorial voice projected, as it were, from the wings. Note
“Vivian Darkbloom”
underlines this, while
moral apotheosis
and
Blanche Schwarzmann
–
his singing violin
suggest other instances of that presence.

sophomore
: a corrected misprint (a period instead of the 1958 edition’s semicolon after “sophomore”).

Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller”
: Lolita’s married name, first revealed
here
. The covert disclosure of Lolita’s death is significant, for the announcement that the three main characters are now dead challenges the “old-fashioned reader” ’s idea of “story”: to reveal the outcome before the story even begins is of course to ruin it. The heroine of “The Beauty” (1934), an untranslated Nabokov story, also dies in childbirth
within a year after her marriage (noted by Andrew Field,
Nabokov: His Life in Act
[Boston, 1967], p. 330).

1952
: for a hermetic allusion to this crucial year, see
interrelated combinations
.

Gray Star
: it is most remote, for there is no town by this name anywhere in the world. Nabokov calls it “
the capital town of the book.
” A gray star is one veiled by haze (Lolita’s surname), and H.H. recalls “the haze of stars” that has always “remained with me.” See
haze of stars
and
fly to Jupiter
.

“Vivian Darkbloom
” … 
“My Cue”
: “Vivian Darkbloom” is Clare Quilty’s mistress and an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov” (see my 1967
Wisconsin Studies
article, p. 216, and my 1968
Denver Quarterly
article, p. 32 [see
bibliography
]). “Vivian Darkbloom” is the author of “Notes to Ada,” which is appended to the 1970 Penguin paperback edition and the 1990 Vintage edition. Among her alphabetical cousins are “Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine,” who appears in
Speak, Memory
(p. 218), and “Mr. Vivian Badlook,” a photographer and teacher of English in the 1968 translation of the 1928 novel
King, Queen, Knave
(p. 153)—and they all descend from “Vivian Calmbrood” (see Field,
op. cit
., p. 73), the alleged author of
The Wanderers
, an uncompleted play written by Nabokov in Russian (the anagram is helped along by the fact that in Cyrillic, the
c
is a
k
). One act of it was published in the émigré almanac
Facets
(1923), as an English play written by Vivian Calmbrood in 1768 and translated by V. Sirin (the pen name under which all of Nabokov’s Russian work appeared). In a discussion in
Ada
(1969) of Van Veen’s first novel,
Letters from Terra
, mention is made of the influence “of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine” (p. 344).

As for H.H. and John Ray, unless characters in a novel can be said to have miraculously fashioned their creators, someone else must be responsible for an anagram of the author’s name, and such phenomena undermine the narrative’s realistic base by pointing beyond the book to Nabokov, the stage manager, ventriloquist, and puppeteer, who might simply state, “My cue.” Because Nabokov considered publishing
Lolita
anonymously (see
here
), there was also a purely utilitarian reason for anagrammatizing his name, as proof of authorship. “Cue” is also the cognomen of Clare Quilty, who pursues H.H. throughout the novel. But who
is
Quilty?—a question the reader will surely ask (see the
Introduction,
here
, and
Quilty, Clare
). As with H.H. and Lolita (
née
Dolores Haze), Quilty’s name lends itself to wordplay by turns jocose (see
Ne manque … Qu’il t’y
) and significant, since H.H. suggests that Clare Quilty is clearly guilty. Clare is also a town in Michigan (see
town … first name
), and, although Nabokov did not know it until this note came into being, Quilty is a town in County Clare, Ireland, appropriate to a verbally playful novel in which there are several apt references to James Joyce. See
outspoken book
.

etiolated
: to blanch or whiten a plant by exclusion of sunlight.

outspoken book
:
Ulysses
(1922), by James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish novelist and poet. Judge Woolsey’s historic decision paved the way for the 1934 American publication of
Ulysses
, and his decision, along with a statement by Morris Ernst, prefaces the Modern Library edition of the novel. Ray’s parenthetical allusion echoes and compresses its complete title: “THE MONUMENTAL DECISION OF THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT RENDERED DECEMBER 6, 1933, BY HON. JOHN M. WOOLSEY LIFTING THE BAN ON ‘ULYSSES.’ ” Ray’s Foreword in part burlesques the expert opinions which have inevitably prefaced subsequent “controversial” novels. For other allusions to Joyce, see
crooner’s mug
,
seva ascendes … quidquam
,
sly quip … Rigger
,
Dr. Ilse Tristramson
,
J’ai toujours … Dublinois
,
children-colors … a passage in James Joyce
,
fountain pen … repressed undinist … water nymphs in the Styx
,
portrait … as a … brute
, and
God or Shakespeare
.