The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (59 page)

princedom by the sea
: a variant of the most famous line in “Annabel Lee.” Poe’s “kingdom” has been changed to accommodate the fact that H.H. is always an aspirant, never an absolute monarch. He calls Lolita “
My Frigid Princess.
”

noble-winged seraphs, envied
: a pastiche composed of a phrase from line 11 of “Annabel Lee” and a verb from line 22. “Seraphs” are the highest of the nine orders of angels; in the Bible they have six wings, as well as hands and feet, and a human voice (Isaiah 6:2). “The seraph with his six flamingo wings” is invoked by John Shade in
Pale Fire
(line 225 of the poem).

tangle of thorns
: another H.H., the penitent, confessor, and martyr to love, calls attention to his thorns, the immodest reference to so sacred an image suggesting that the reader would do well to judge H.H.’s tone rather than his deeds. When H.H. addresses the “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” as he will do so often, he summarizes the judicial proclivities of those literal-minded and moralistic readers who, having soberly considered what John Ray, Jr., has said, already hate “Humbert the Horrible.” H.H. calls Lolita “
crucified
”—a verb that sincerely projects his “moral apotheosis.”

Jerome Dunn, the alpinist
: in a novel so allusive as
Lolita
it is only natural to be suspicious of the most innocuous references, and to search for allusions under every bush. Anticipating the efforts of future exegetes, I will occasionally offer non-notes—“anti-annotations” which simply state that Nabokov intended no allusion whatsoever. Thus, “Jerome Dunn” is non-allusive, as are “
Clarence Choate Clark
,” H.H.’s lawyer, and John Ray’s residence of “
Widworth, Mass..
” For important caveats in Nabokov’s own words, see
Aubrey McFate … devil of mine
and
Orange … and Emerald
.

paleopedology and Aeolian harps
: respectively, the branch of pedology concerned with the soils of past geological ages, and a box-shaped musical instrument on which the wind produces varying harmonies (after
Aeolus, Greek god of the winds). A favorite romantic metaphor for the poet’s sensibility.

midge
: a gnat-like insect. For entomological allusions, see
John Ray, Jr.
.

Sybil
: or
sibyl
, from the Greek; any of several prophetesses credited to widely separate parts of the ancient world. H.H.’s aunt is well-named, since she predicts her own death.

Mirana
: a heat-shimmer blend of “mirage,”
“se mirer
” (French; to look at oneself; admire oneself), “Mirabella,” and “Fata Morgana” (a kind of mirage most frequently seen in the Strait of Messina, and formerly considered the work of fairies who would thus lure sailors aground). Bewitching Lolita is often characterized as a fairy (see
Percy Elphinstone
); the latter word is derived from the Latin word
fatum
(fate, destiny), and H.H. is pursued by bedeviling “Aubrey McFate” (see
Aubrey McFate … devil of mine
).

Mon … papa
: French; my dear little Daddy.

Don Quixote
: the famous novel (1605, 1615) by Miguel Cervantes (1547–1616); see
Donald Quix
.
Les Misérables
(1862) is by Victor Hugo (1802–1885), French novelist, playwright, and poet; see
L’autre soir … de ta vie?
.

rose garden
: see
bodyguard of roses
and
Aubrey McFate … devil of mine
for more school-house roses.

La Beauté Humaine
: French; “The Human Beauty.” The book is invented, as is its author, whose name is a play on “
nichon
,” a French (slang) epithet for the female breast.

lycée
: the basic institution of French secondary education; a student attends a lycée for seven years (from age eleven to eighteen).

powdered Mrs. Leigh … Vanessa van Ness
: Poe’s “Annabel Lee
”;
here
it is spelled
Lee
. The Red Admirable (or Admiral) butterfly, which figures throughout Nabokov, is
Vanessa atalanta
, family
Nymphalidae
(for more on “nymph,” see
not human, but nymphic
); and butterflies, as well as women, are “powdered.” H.H. is also alluding to Jonathan Swift’s (1667–1745) “Vanessa,” as he called the young woman whose passion he awakened (for the Swift allusion, see also
Keys
, p. 96). Nabokov expands the dual allusion in
Pale Fire
. John Shade addresses “My dark Vanessa, Crimson-barred, my blest / My Admirable butterfly!…” (lines 270–271); and, in his
note to these lines, Charles Kinbote quotes from Swift’s “Cadenus and Vanessa,” though he doesn’t identify it by name: “When, lo!
Vanessa
in her bloom / Advanced like
Atalanta’s
star.” He also alludes to “Vanessa” ’s actual name thusly: “
Van
homrigh,
Esther
!” (p. 172)—thereby underscoring at least the alphabetical arrangement of Swift’s anagramour (let me laugh a little, too, gentlemen, as H.H. says
here
). But in his succinct way, H.H. has already anticipated Kinbote (“van Ness”). A Red Admirable lands on Shade’s arm the minute before he is killed (see lines 993–995 and Kinbote’s note for them) and the insect appears in
King, Queen, Knave
just after Nabokov has withdrawn his omniscience (p. 44). In the final chapter of
Speak, Memory
Nabokov recalls having seen in a Paris park, just before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a leash of thread by a little girl; “there was some vaguely repulsive symbolism about her sullen sport,” he writes (p. 306). When Van Veen casually mentions Ada’s having pointed out “some accursed insect,” the offended heroine parenthetically and angrily adds, “Accursed?
Accursed
? It was the newly described, fantastically rare vanessian,
Nymphalis danaus
Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch
through
the Viceroy, one of the Monarch’s best known imitators” (p. 158). See
John Ray, Jr.
.

solipsism
: a central word in
Lolita
. An epistemological theory that the self knows only its present state and is the only existent thing, and that “reality” is subjective; concern with the self at the expense of social relationships. See
safely solipsized
.

plage
: French; beach.

chocolat glacé
: French; in those days, an iced chocolate drink with whipped cream (today it means “chocolate ice cream”).

red rocks
: see
Roches Roses
and
Aubrey McFate … devil of mine
.

lost pair of sunglasses
: the sunglasses image connects Annabel and Lolita. H.H. first perceives her as his “Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses” (see
Riviera love … over dark glasses
). See also
Keys
, p. 43 and p. 143n.

point of possessing
: for a comment on the “traumatic” nature of this experience, see
natural climax
. “My darling” echoes line 39 of “Annabel Lee” (see
of my darling … my bride
for the entire line, and
Lo-lee-ta
for the poem itself).

Corfu
: Greek island.

haze of stars
: see
Gray Star
. In one sense, the novel begins and ends in “Gray Star.”

her spell
: “spells” and “enchantments” are fundamental in
Lolita
. See
not human, but nymphic
,
Little Carmen
, and
Cantrip … Mimir
.

manqué
: French; unfulfilled.

uranists
: H.H.’s own variant of the uncommon English word,
uranism
, derived from a Greek word for “spiritual” and meaning “homosexual.” Havelock Ellis uses it in Chapter Five of
Psychology of Sex
(1938), and claims the term was invented by the nineteenth-century legal official Karl Ulrichs.

Deux Magots
: the famous Left Bank café in Paris, where intellectuals congregate.
Magot
is a kind of monkey, but “
magots de Saxe
” means “statuettes of saxe [porcelain]” (eighteenth-century). Nabokov purposely seats his uranists in this particular café, because he wants to invoke the simian association and the image of the grotesque Chinese porcelain figures.

pastiches
: the “quotation” is an assemblage including bits and pieces of “Gerontion” (1920), by T. S. Eliot, the Anglo-American poet (1888–1965): “… Fräulein von Kulp / Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door” (lines 27–28); “… De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled …” (line 66); “… Gull against the wind, in the windy straits / Of Belle Isle …” (lines 69–70). See
depraved May
and
Because … a sinner
for other allusions to Eliot. Having small sympathy with some of Eliot’s social prejudices, Nabokov ironically describes in
Ada
a “Mr. Eliot, a Jewish businessman” (p. 5), who later meets the late-blooming banker (Eliot’s early vocation) Kithar Sween (= Eliot’s “Sweeney”), author of “
The Waistline
, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and
Cardinal Grishkin
[= Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality”], an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith” (p. 506). For
The Four Quartets
, see
Pale Fire
, lines 368–379. Nabokov said, “I was never exposed in the ’twenties and ’thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of Eliot and Pound. I read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend’s house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them,
but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did” (
Playboy
interview).

“
Proustian theme … Bailey”
: the letters of the English poet John Keats (1795–1821) to his close friend Benjamin Bailey (1791–1853) are among the important statements of Keats’s poetic theory. In
Pale Fire
, Kinbote measures the progress of poetry “from the caveman to Keats” (p. 289). H.H.’s “Proustian theme” is no doubt on the nature of time and memory. Marcel Proust (1871–1922)—the great French novelist, the first half of whose
À la Recherche du temps perdu
(
Remembrance of Things Past
, 1913–1927) was to Nabokov one of the four “greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose” (see
J’ai toujours … Dublinois
)—is also mentioned on
here
and
here
, and as noted
Dolorès Disparue
and
Proustianized and Procrusteanized
. He appears too in
Pale Fire
, pp. 87, 161–163, and 248, as well as in line 224 of Shade’s poem (p. 41), where he envisions eternity, and “… talks / With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks.” In
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, Knight’s hack biographer, Mr. Goodman, mentions “the French author M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied” (p. 114); and Knight himself parenthetically remarks in a letter, “I am [not] apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis” (p. 52)—a device H.H. consciously indulges, as when he parenthetically “
prolong[s] these Proustian intonations.
” There are also many allusions to Proust in
Ada
(see pp. 9, 55–56, 66, 73, 168–169, 254, and 541).

“
Histoire … anglaise”
: French; “A Short History of English Poetry.”

not human, but nymphic
: like Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” (
Babbitt
, 1922), Nabokov’s “nymphet” has entered the language, though the latest dictionary entries which
Lolita
has inspired are as inelegant as they are inaccurate:
nymph
: “a woman of loose morals” (
Webster’s Third New International
, echoed by the
Random House Dictionary
).
The Penguin English Dictionary
, G. N. Garmonsway, ed., gives under
nymphet
: “(coll.) very young but sexually attractive girl” (H.H., who strives so desperately to expropriate idiomatic English, would appreciate that “colloquial”). “Nymphet” continues to be loosely used. Witness
People
magazine: “She plays Kelly Bundy, the shopping-mall nymphet, on Fox’s comedy hit
Married
 … 
with Children
, but Christina Applegate says she—” reports the columnist, though the lovely eighteen-year-old actress in the photo could pass for twenty-five (September 24, 1990, p. 108). As for
nymph
, the mythological and zoological definitions are
primary. In Greek and Roman mythology, a
nymph
is “One of the inferior divinities of nature represented as beautiful maidens dwelling in the mountains, waters, forests, etc.”
Nympholepsy
, H.H.’s malady (hence, “
nympholept
”), is “a species of demoniac enthusiasm supposed to seize one bewitched by a nymph; a frenzy of emotion, as for some unattainable ideal” (more specifically, in
Blakiston’s New Gould Medical Dictionary
, it is defined as “ecstasy of an erotic type”). Under the entry for “The Nymphs” in
The Book of Imaginary Beings
(1969), Jorge Luis Borges notes that “Paracelsus limited their dominion to water, but the ancients thought the world was full of Nymphs… [some] Nymphs were held to be immortal or, as Plutarch obscurely intimates, lived for above 9,720 years … The exact number of the Nymphs is unknown; Hesiod gives us the figure three thousand … Glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death. A line of Propertius affirms this.” H.H. echoes these definitions. Here and on the following pages he alludes to “spells,” “magic,” “fantastic powers,” and “deadly demons” (for various enchantments, see
Mirana
[Fata Morgana],
it was Lilith
[Lilith],
Percy Elphinstone
[elves],
Little Carmen
[
Carmen
],
incubus
[an incubus], and
heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit
[king of the elves]). Lolita’s “inhuman” and “bewitching charms” suggest that she is Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819) in bobby socks (Nabokov translated the poem into Russian in
The Empyrean Path
, 1923), and that the novel is in part a unique variant of the archetypal tale of a mortal destroyed by his love for a supernatural
femme fatale
, “The Lovely Lady Without Pity” of ballad, folk tale, and fairy tale. Nabokov calls
Lolita
a “fairy tale,” and his nymph a “
fairy princess
”; see
Percy Elphinstone
.