Vladimir Nabokov《Lolita》1

Foreword

“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use his discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.

My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H.H.”‘s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask — through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow — had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to “H.H.”‘s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading lamp.

For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore, “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris.

“Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” has written a biography, “My Cue,” to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.

Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a

certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6,

1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to

forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of sensuous

existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending

unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the

same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H.H.”‘s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube;

that at least 12% of American adult males — a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann

(verbal communication) — enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H.H.” describes with such

despair; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there

would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.

This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual;” and a great work of art is of course always original, and

thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No

doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of

his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs

through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a

gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us

entranced with the book while abhorring its author!

As a case history, “Lolita” will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical

impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson;

the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac — these are not only vivid characters in a unique

story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita” should make all of us — parents,

social workers, educators — apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.

Widworth, Mass.                                                                                                                                                                                     John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. August 5, 1955

Part One

1

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I

not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years

before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noblewinged

seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

2

I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of

mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute

some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two

grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome

Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects — paleopedology and

Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was

three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of

memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set:

surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or

suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden

midges.

My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s had married and then neglected, served in my

immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in

love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time

the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity — the fatal rigidity — of some of her rules.

Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pinkrimmed

azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew

she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of

his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright would of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea

vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a

whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the

flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes

listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me

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expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and

water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Misérables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him

whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of

me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.

I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent

marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can

remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a

solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an

American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional

world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with

infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous Le Beauté Humaine that that I had filched from under a mountain of

marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the

information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycée in

Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme

de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult.

3

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far

less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one

when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel

in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “think arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright

mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the

objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).

Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my

junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel

Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At

first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her

fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I

doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive

tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain.

She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add,

because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating

every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have

so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which

more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of

the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified

paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand,

half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her

opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children

granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and

inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still

clawed at each other, could bring relief.

Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt

which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer

courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in

the act of bending over her chocolat glacé, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all

that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I,

sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed

boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That

photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and

final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really

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mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet

shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of

sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded

bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and

four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

4

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that

remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an

inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of

retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each

visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced,

however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it

a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical

had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standardbrained

youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we

had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919)

a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved

me thus!

I have reserved for the conclusion of my “Annabel” phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night,

she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the

back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we

could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to

me now like playing cards — presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and

twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above

us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I

saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs,

were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, halfpleasure,

half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary

ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost

woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth,

distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She

would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw

away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while

with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I have her to hold in her

awkward fist the scepter of my passion.

I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder — I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid — a

sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the

brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing — and as we drew away from each

other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother’s

voice calling her, with a rising frantic note — and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that

mimosa grove — the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that

little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since — until at last, twenty-four years later, I

broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

5

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like

those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation

car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and

Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I

planned to take a degree in psychiatry and many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a

peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed

pastiches:

…Fräulein von Kulp

may turn, her hand upon the door;

I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor

that Gull.

A paper of mine entitled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by

the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an “Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise” for a prominent

publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with

comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties — and the last volume of

which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest.

I found a job — teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil. Then a school for boys employed me for a

couple of winters. Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I had formed among social workers and

psychotherapists to visit in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools, where pale

pubescent girls with matted eyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted one in

dreams.

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens

who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not

human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see “nine” and

“fourteen” as the boundaries — the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks — of an enchanted island haunted by those

nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets?

Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone

insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not

necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious

charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial

world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes.

Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is trickingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just

nice, or “cute,” or even “sweet” and “attractive,” ordinary, plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human

little girls, with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at the ugly

dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed into stunning stars of the screen). A normal

man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not

necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite

melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your

subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs — the slightly

feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and

tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate — the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands

unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to

learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as

many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s

spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain

contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little

Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time;

but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial

fateful elf in my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys

adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open,

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and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen

but not a girl of twelve.

No wonder, then, that my adult life during the European period of my existence proved monstrously twofold.

Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for

breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding

poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready

to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big

males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that

those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my

pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the

most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. I was aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which

was mine; both would be termed female by the anatomist. But to me, through the prism of my senses, “they were

as different as mist and mast.” All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my

throes quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body’s every plea. One

moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts

wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only object of amorous tremor were

sisters of Annabel’s, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity. At other

times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved

to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and

Young Person Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years”

(after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young person”). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the

other hand, a “wayward child” is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen years of age” (who, moreover,

habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of

James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. This is all very interesting, and I daresay

you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little

tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in a single tone, but probably

preferred a lad’s perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that

royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact

after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some

brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship.

Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces.

Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with

Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this

was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with

his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight,

in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.

But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he id. He had the

utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have

interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among

the innocent throng, he espied a demon child, “enfant charmante et fourbe,” dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail

if you only show her you are looking at her. So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve,

but it was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of

somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of

pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles.

A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger’s shivering child. Darling, this is only a game! How

marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling

book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree’s

shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me

upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun,

with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared

pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameloenic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl hung

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over me in the metro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a

great number of these one-sided diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for

instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in

the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially

keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender

pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his

underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night.

Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy

(a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave

me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.

6

A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron would of criss-cross

cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had possessed her

— and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her

fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.

I learned, however, what they looked like, those lovely, maddening, thin-armed nymphets, when they grew up. I

remember walking along an animated street on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short

slim girl passed me at a rapid, high-heeled, tripping step, we glanced back at the same moment, she stopped and I

accosted her. She came hardly up to my chest hair and had the kind of dimpled round little face French girls so

often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her young body which

still retained — and that was the nymphic echo, the chill of delight, the leap in my loins — a childish something

mingling with the professional frétillement of her small agile rump. I asked her price, and she promptly replied

with melodious silvery precision (a bird, a very bird!) “Cent.” I tried to haggle but she saw the awful lone longing

in my lowered eyes, directed so far down at her round forehead and rudimentary hat (a band, a posy); and with one

beat of her lashes: “Tant pis,” she said, and made as if to move away. Perhaps only three years earlier I might have

seen her coming home from school! That evocation settled the matter. She led me up the usual steep stairs, with the

usual bell clearing the way for the monsieur who might not care to meet another monsieur, on the mournful climb

to the abject room, all bed and bidet. As usual, she asked at once for her petit cadeau, and as usual I asked her

name (Monique) and her age (eighteen). I was pretty well acquainted with the banal way of streetwalkers. They all

answer “dix-huit” — a trim twitter, a note of finality and wistful deceit which they emit up to ten times per day, the

poor little creatures. But in Monique’s case there could be no doubt she was, if anything, adding one or two years to

her age. This I deduced from many details of her compact, neat, curiously immature body. Having shed her clothes

with fascinating rapidity, she stood for a moment partly wrapped in the dingy gauze of the window curtain

listening with infantile pleasure, as pat as pat could be, to an organ-grinder in the dust-brimming courtyard below.

When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to their grubby fingernails, she said with a naïve frown

“Oui, ce n’est pas bien,” and went to the wash-basin, but I said it did not matter, did not matter at all. With her

brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin, she looked perfectly charming. Her hips were no bigger than

those of a squatting lad; in fact, I do not hesitate to say (and indeed this is the reason why I linger gratefully in that

gauze-gray room of memory with little Monique) that among the eighty or so grues I had had operate upon me, she

was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. “Il était malin, celui qui a inventé ce truc-là,” she

commented amiably, and got back into her clothes with the same high-style speed.

I asked for another, more elaborate, assignment later the same evening, and she said she would meet me at the

corner café at nine, and swore she had never posé un lapin in all her young life. We returned to the same room, and

I could not help saying how very pretty she was to which she answered demurely: “Tu es bien gentil de dire ça”

and then, noticing what I noticed too in the mirror reflecting our small Eden — the dreadful grimace of clenchedteeth

tenderness that distorted my mouth — dutiful little Monique (oh, she had been a nymphet, all right!) wanted

to know if she should remove the layer of red from her lips avant qu’on se couche in case I planned to kiss her. Of

course, I planned it. I let myself go with her more completely than I had with any young lady before, and my last

vision that night of long-lashed Monique is touched up with a gaiety that I find seldom associated with any event in

my humiliating, sordid, taciturn love life. She looked tremendously pleased with the bonus of fifty I gave her as she

trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake. Stopping before a

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window display she said with great gusto: “Je vais m’acheter des bas!” and never may I forget the way her Parisian

childish lips exploded on “bas,” pronouncing it with an appetite that all but changed the “a” into a brief buoyant

bursting “o” as in “bot”.

I had a date with her next day at 2.15 p.m. in my own rooms, but it was less successful, she seemed to have

grown less juvenile, more of a woman overnight. A cold I caught from her led me to cancel a fourth assignment,

nor was I sorry to break an emotional series that threatened to burden me with heart-rending fantasies and peter out

in dull disappointment. So let her remain, sleek, slender Monique, as she was for a minute or two: a delinquent

nymphet shining through the matter-of-fact young whore.

My brief acquaintance with her started a train of thought that may seem pretty obvious to the reader who knows

the ropes. An advertisement in a lewd magazine landed me, one brave day, in the office of a Mlle Edith who began

by offering me to choose a kindred soul from a collection of rather formal photographs in a rather soiled album

(“Regardez-moi cette belle brune!”). When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to blurt out my

criminal craving, she looked as if about to show me the door; however, after asking me what price I was prepared

to disburse, she condescended to put me in touch with a person qui pourrait arranger la chose. Next day, an

asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provencal accent and a black

mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing

the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically

drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually

slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with redribboned

thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. When I shook my head and tried to

shuffle out of the trap, the woman, talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the young giantess’

torso; then, seeing my determination to leave, she demanded son argent. A door at the end of the room was opened,

and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very

swarthy and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bowlegged toddler lurked behind them.

With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in

the police, lui, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to Marie — for that was her stellar name — who by

then had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool at the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup

while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into

her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.

7

I do not know if the pimp’s album may not have been another link in the daisy-chain; but soon after, for my own

safety, I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of

marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain

moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous

desires, at least to keep them under pacific control. A little money that had come my way after my father’s death

(nothing very grand — the Mirana had been sold long before), in addition to my striking if somewhat brutal good

looks, allowed me to enter upon my quest with equanimity. After considerable deliberation, my choice fell on the

daughter of a Polish doctor: the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness and tachycardia. We

played chess; his daughter watched me from behind her easel, and inserted eyes or knuckles borrowed from me

into the cubistic trash that accomplished misses then painted instead of lilacs and lambs. Let me repeat with quiet

force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark

hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s

displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my

case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had

become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold

lap. Had I been a français moyen with a taste for flashy ladies, I might have easily found, among the many crazed

beauties that lashed my grim rock, creatures far more fascinating than Valeria. My choice, however, was prompted

by considerations whose essence was, as I realized too late, a piteous compromise. All of which goes to show how

dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex.

8

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Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin,

what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because she had

divined something about me; it was just her style — and I fell for it. Actually, she was at least in her late twenties

(I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that

changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was as naïve as only a pervert can be. She looked fluffy and

frolicsome, dressed à la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to stress the white of a bare

instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short

curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable.

After a brief ceremony at the mairie, I tool her to the new apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise,

had her wear, before I touched her, a girl’s plain nightshirt that I had managed to filch from the linen closet of an

orphanage. I derived some fun from that nuptial night and had the idiot in hysterics by sunrise. But reality soon

asserted itself. The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a shaved shin; the

mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love, disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the

corresponding part in a treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama; and presently, instead of a pale little gutter

girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba.

This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her only asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an

odd sense of comfort in our small squalid flat: two rooms, a hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other, a

tiny kitchen, a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me.

We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir, I working at a rickety table. We went to

movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency

and despair. The grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow drove me mad; but with Valeria’s help I did

find after all some legal outlets to my fantastic predicament. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu and

had most of our meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on the table cloth and a

good deal of foreign babble. And next door, an art dealer displayed in his cluttered window a splendid, flamboyant,

green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American estampe — a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great

baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and

mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds.

These burst. In the summer of 1939 mon oncle d’Amérique died bequeathing me an annual income of a few

thousand dollars on condition I came to live in the States and showed some interest in his business. This prospect

was most welcome to me. I felt my life needed a shake-up. There was another thing, too: moth holes had appeared

in the plush of matrimonial comfort. During the last weeks I had kept noticing that my fat Valeria was not her usual

self; had acquired a queer restlessness; even showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out of

keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate. When I informed her we were shortly to sail for

New York, she looked distressed and bewildered. There were some tedious difficulties with her papers. She had a

Nansen, or better say Nonsense, passport which for some reason a share in her husband’s solid Swiss citizenship

could not easily transcend; and I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the préfecture, and other formalities,

that had made her so listless, despite my patiently describing to her America, the country of rosy children and great

trees, where life would be such an improvement on dull dingy Paris.

We were coming out of some office building one morning, with her papers almost in order, when Valeria, as she

waddled by my side, began to shake her poodle head vigorously without saying a word. I let her go on for a while

and then asked if she thought she had something inside. She answered (I translate from her French which was, I

imagine, a translation in its turn of some Slavic platitude): “There is another man in my life.”

Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed me, I confess. To beat her up in the street, there

and then, as an honest vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of secret sufferings had taught me

superhuman self-control. So I ushered her into a taxi which had been invitingly creeping along the curb for some

time, and in this comparative privacy I quietly suggested she comment her wild talk. A mounting fury was

suffocating me — not because I had any particular fondness for that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because

matters of legal and illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide, and here she was, Valeria, the comedy wife,

brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way of my comfort and fate. I demanded her lover’s name. I repeated my

question; but she kept up a burlesque babble, discoursing on her unhappiness with me and announcing plans for an

immediate divorce. “Mais qui est-ce?” I shouted at last, striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even

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wincing, stared at me as if the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug and pointed at the thick

neck of the taxi driver. He pulled up at a small café and introduced himself. I do not remember his ridiculous name

but after all those years I still see him quite clearly — a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache

and a crew cut; there were thousands of them plying that fool’s trade in Paris. We sat down at a table; the Tsarist

ordered wine, and Valeria, after applying a wet napkin to her knee, went on talking — into me rather than to me;

she poured words into this dignified receptacle with a volubility I had never suspected she had in her. And every

now and then she would volley a burst of Slavic at her stolid lover. The situation was preposterous and became

even more so when the taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began to unfold his views and plans.

With an atrocious accent to his careful French, he delineated the world of love and work into which he proposed to

enter hand in hand with his child-wife Valeria. She by now was preening herself, between him and me, rouging her

pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent,

and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being transferred, for her own good, from one

wise guardian to another even wiser one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured

certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe

and the books she had read or should read. “I think,” — he said, “She will like Jean Christophe?” Oh, he was quite

a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.

I put an end to this gibberish by suggesting Valeria pack up her few belongings immediately, upon which the

platitudinous colonel gallantly offered to carry them into the car. Reverting to his professional state, he drove the

Humberts to their residence and all the way Valeria talked, and Humbert the Terrible deliberated with Humbert the

Small whether Humbert Humbert should kill her or her lover, or both, or neither. I remember once handling an

automatic belonging to a fellow student, in the days (I have not spoken of them, I think, but never mind) when I

toyed with the idea of enjoying his little sister, a most diaphanous nymphet with a black hair bow, and then

shooting myself. I now wondered if Valechka (as the colonel called her) was really worth shooting, or strangling,

or drowning. She had very vulnerable legs, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her very horribly as soon

as we were alone.

But we never were. Valechka — by now shedding torrents of tears tinged with the mess of her rainbow make-up,

— started to fill anyhow a trunk, and two suitcases, and a bursting carton, and visions of putting on my mountain

boots and taking a running kick at her rump were of course impossible to put into execution with the cursed colonel

hovering around all the time. I cannot say he behaved insolently or anything like that; on the contrary, he displayed,

as a small sideshow in the theatricals I had been inveigled in, a discreet old-world civility, punctuating his

movements with all sorts of mispronounced apologies (j’ai demande pardonne — excuse me — est-ce que j’ai puis

— may I — and so forth), and turning away tactfully when Valechka took down with a flourish her pink panties

from the clothesline above the tub; but he seemed to be all over the place at once, le gredin, agreeing his frame

with the anatomy of the flat, reading in my chair my newspaper, untying a knotted string, rolling a cigarette,

counting the teaspoons, visiting the bathroom, helping his moll to wrap up the electric fan her father had given her,

and carrying streetward her luggage. I sat with arms folded, one hip on the window sill, dying of hate and boredom.

At last both were out of the quivering apartment — the vibration of the door I had slammed after them still rang in

my every nerve, a poor substitute for the backhand slap with which I ought to have hit her across the cheekbone

according to the rules of the movies. Clumsily playing my part, I stomped to the bathroom to check if they had

taken my English toilet water; they had not; but I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor

of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a

soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a

weapon. Actually I daresay it was nothing but middle-class Russian courtesy (with an oriental tang, perhaps) that

had prompted the good colonel (Maximovich! his name suddenly taxies back to me), a very formal person as they

all are, to muffle his private need in decorous silence so as not to underscore the small size of his host’s domicile

with the rush of a gross cascade on top of his own hushed trickle. But this did not enter my mind at the moment, as

groaning with rage I ransacked the kitchen for something better than a broom. Then, canceling my search, I dashed

out of the house with the heroic decision of attacking him barefisted; despite my natural vigor, I am no pugilist,

while the short but broad-shouldered Maximovich seemed made of pig iron. The void of the street, revealing

nothing of my wife’s departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for

three unnecessary years in a broken box, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little revenge

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in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth

around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a

year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and

racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he

had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent,

diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in

a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I

tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet.

These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with photographs

when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works. The one

to which I am restricted these days, despite my lawyer’s favors, is a good example of the inane eclecticism

governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set,

N.Y., G.W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the Children’s Encyclopedia (with some nice

photographs of sunshine-haired Girl Scouts in shorts), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they

also have such coruscating trifles as A vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston,

1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who’s Who in the Limelight — actors, producers, playwrights, and shots

of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume, I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences

that logicians loathe and poets love. I transcribe most of the page:

Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y.

Made debut in Sunburst. Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Girl in Green,

Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Mushroom, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You.

Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University.

Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved

Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and

others. His many plays for children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and played 280

performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography,

pets.

Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied for stage at American Academy. First played in

Ottawa in 1900. Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers. Has disappeared since in [a list

of some thirty plays follows].

How the look of my dear love’s name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with

helpless pain! Perhaps, she might have been an actress too. Born 1935. Appeared (I notice the slip of my pen in the

preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence) in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty

of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

9

Divorce proceedings delayed my voyage, and the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe

when, after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, I at last reached the States. In New York I eagerly

accepted the soft job fate offered me: it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads. I welcomed its

desultory character and pseudoliterary aspects, attending to it whenever I had nothing better to do. On the other

hand, I was urged by a war-time university in New York to complete my comparative history of French literature

for English-speaking students. The first volume took me a couple of years during which I put in seldom less than

fifteen hours of work daily. As I look back on those days, I see them divided tidily into ample light and narrow

shade: the light pertaining to the solace of research in palatial libraries, the shade to my excruciating desires and

insomnias of which enough has been said. Knowing me by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty and hot I

got, trying to catch a glimpse of nymphets (alas, always remote) playing in Central Park, and how repulsed I was

by the glitter of deodorized career girls that a gay dog in one of the offices kept unloading upon me. Let us skip all

that. A dreadful breakdown sent me to a sanatorium for more than a year; I went back to my work-only to be

hospitalized again.

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Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. One of my favorite doctors, a charming cynical chap

with a little brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead an expedition into arctic Canada. I was

attached to it as a “recorder of psychic reactions.” With two young botanists and an old carpenter I shared now and

then (never very successfully) the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita Johnson — who was soon flown

back, I am glad to say. I had little notion of what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number of

meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair (somewhere on Prince of Wales’ Island, I understand)

the wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather

station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton. A third studied

tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a film photographer — an insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made to

partake in a good deal of menial work (he, too, had some psychic troubles) — maintained that the big men on our

team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the

coats of the arctic fox.

We lived in prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian world of granite. We had heaps of supplies — the

Reader’s Digest, an ice cream mixer, chemical toilets, paper caps for Christmas. My health improved wonderfully

in spite or because of all the fantastic blankness and boredom. Surrounded by such dejected vegetation as willow

scrub and lichens; permeated, and, I suppose, cleansed by a whistling gale; seated on a boulder under a completely

translucent sky (through which, however, nothing of importance showed), I felt curiously aloof from my own self.

No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and

guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.

I left my betters the task of analyzing glacial drifts, drumlins, and gremlins, and kremlins, and for a time tried to

jot down what I fondly thought were “reactions” (I noticed, for instance, that dreams under the midnight sun tended

to be highly colored, and this my friend the photographer confirmed). I was also supposed to quiz my various

companions on a number of important matters, such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food-fantasies,

nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio programs, changes in outlook and so forth. Everybody got so fed up

with this that I soon dropped the project completely, and only toward the end of my twenty months of cold labor

(as one of the botanists jocosely put it) concocted a perfectly spurious and very racy report that the reader will find

published in he Annals of Adult Psychophysics for 1945 or 1946, as well as in the issue of Arctic Explorations

devoted to that particular expedition; which, in conclusion, was not really concerned with Victoria Island copper or

anything like that, as I learned later from my genial doctor; for the nature of its real purpose was what is termed

“hush-hush,” and so let me add merely that whatever it was, that purpose was admirably achieved.

The reader will regret to learn that soon after my return to civilization I had another bout with insanity (if to

melancholia and a sense of insufferable oppression that cruel term must be applied). I owe my complete restoration

to a discovery I made while being treated at that particular very expensive sanatorium. I discovered there was an

endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see

that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make

them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake “primal scenes”; and never

allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament. By bribing a nurse I won access to some files

and discovered, with glee, cards calling me “potentially homosexual” and “totally impotent.” The sport was so

excellent, its results — in my case — so ruddy that I stayed on for a whole month after I was quite well (sleeping

admirably and eating like a schoolgirl). And then I added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a

powerful newcomer, a displaced (and, surely, deranged) celebrity, known for his knack of making patients believe

they had witnessed their own conception.

10

Upon signing out, I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white

church) where I could spend a studious summer subsisting on a compact boxful of notes I had accumulated and

bathing in some nearby lake. My work had begun to interest me again — I mean my scholarly exertions; the other

thing, my active participation in my uncle’s posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to a minimum.

One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished family, suggested I spend a few months in the

residence of his impoverished cousins, a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who wanted to let their upper story

where a late aunt had delicately dwelt. He said they had two little daughters, one a baby, the other a girl of twelve,

and a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect.

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I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train,

imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish. Nobody

met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone;

eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale

with the news that his house had just burned down — possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had

been raging all night in my veins. His family, he said, had fled to a farm he owned, and had taken the car, but a

friend of his wife’s, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate me. A lady who lived

opposite Mrs. Haze’s had lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned, square-topped affair, manned by

a cheerful Negro. Now, since the only reason for my coming at all had vanished, the aforesaid arrangement seemed

preposterous. All right, his house would have to be completely rebuilt, so what? Had he not insured it sufficiently?

I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in

that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I

saw him scamper away, and my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En route, I swore to myself I would

not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the Bermudas or the

Bahamas or the Blazes. Possibilities of sweetness on technicolor beaches had been trickling through my spine for

some time before, and McCoo’s cousin had, in fact, sharply diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but

as it transpired now absolutely inane suggestion.

Speaking of sharp turns: we almost ran over a meddlesome suburban dog (one of those who like in wait for cars)

as we swerved into Lawn Street. A little further, the Haze house, a white-frame horror, appeared, looking dingy

and old, more gray than white — the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in

lieu of shower. I tipped the chauffeur and hoped he would immediately drive away so that I might double back

unnoticed to my hotel and bag; but the man merely crossed to the other side of the street where an old lady was

calling to him from her porch. What could I do? I pressed the bell button.

A colored maid let me in — and left me standing on the mat while she rushed back to the kitchen where

something was burning that ought not to burn.

The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin,

and that banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s “Arlésienne.” A door ajar to the right afforded a glimpse

of a living room, with some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet and a striped sofa along the wall. There was a

staircase at the end of the hallway, and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how hot it had been

out-of-doors) and staring, to stare at something, at an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came from

the upper landing the contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who leaning over the banisters inquired melodiously, “Is that

Monsieur Humbert?” A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in addition. Presently, the lady herself — sandals,

maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order — came down the steps, her index finger still

tapping upon her cigarette.

I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with. The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had

a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as

a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich. Patting her bronze-brown bun, she led me into the parlor and we talked for a

minute about the McCoo fire and the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Her very wide-set sea-green eyes had a funny

way of traveling all over you, carefully avoiding your own eyes. Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow;

and uncoiling herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept making spasmodic dashes at three ashtrays and the near

fender (where lay the brown core of an apple); whereupon she would sink back again, one leg folded under her.

She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any

other deadly conventionality, but never her soul; women who are completely devoid of humor; women utterly

indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules

of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily

distinguished. I was perfectly aware that if by any wild chance I became her lodger, she would methodically

proceed to do in regard to me what taking a lodger probably meant to her all along, and I would again be enmeshed

in one of those tedious affairs I knew so well.

But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled

magazines on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called “functional modern

furniture” and the tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with dead lamps. I was led upstairs, and to

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the left — into “my” room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I did discern above “my”

bed Rene Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata.” And she called that servant maid’s room a “semi-studio”! Let’s get out of here

at once, I firmly said to myself as I pretended to deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price that my

wistful hostess was asking for board and bed.

Old-world politeness, however, obliged me to go on with the ordeal. We crossed the landing to the right side of

the house (where “I and Lo have our rooms” — Lo being presumably the maid), and the lodger-lover could hardly

conceal a shudder when he, a very fastidious male, was granted a preview of the only bathroom, a tiny oblong

between the landing and “Lo’s” room, with limp wet things overhanging the dubious tub (the question mark of a

hair inside); and there were the expected coils of the rubber snake, and its complement — a pinkish cozy, coyly

covering the toilet lid.

“I see you are not too favorably impressed,” said the lady letting her hand rest for a moment upon my sleeve:

she combined a cool forwardness — the overflow of what I think is called “poise” — with a shyness and sadness

that caused her detached way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the intonation of a professor of

“speech.” “This is not a neat household, I confess,” the doomed ear continued, “but I assure you [she looked at my

lips], you will be very comfortable, very comfortable, indeed. Let me show you the garden” (the last more brightly,

with a kind of winsome toss of the voice).

Reluctantly I followed her downstairs again; then through the kitchen at the end of the hall, on the right side of

the house — the side where also the dining room and the parlor were (under “my” room, on the left, there was

nothing but a garage). In the kitchen, the Negro maid, a plump youngish woman, said, as she took her large glossy

black purse from the knob of the door leading to the back porch: “I’ll go now, Mrs. Haze.” “Yes, Louise,” answered

Mrs. Haze with a sigh. “I’ll settle with you Friday.” We passed on to a small pantry and entered the dining room,

parallel to the parlor we had already admired. I noticed a white sock on the floor. With a deprecatory grunt, Mrs.

Haze stooped without stopping and threw it into a closet next to the pantry. We cursorily inspected a mahogany

table with a fruit vase in the middle, containing nothing but the still glistening stone of one plum. I groped for the

timetable I had in my pocket and surreptitiously fished it out to look as soon as possible for a train. I was still

walking behind Mrs. Haze though the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery — “the

piazza,” sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from

a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me

over dark glasses.

It was the same child — the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same

chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not

from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairytale

nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnaped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at

the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying

for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound

mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of

her shorts — that last mad immortal day behind the “Roches Roses.” The twenty-five years I had lived since then,

tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.

I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition.

In the course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes blinking over those

stern dark spectacles — the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my

adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in

every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of course,

she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I want to stress is that my

discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that “princedom by the sea” in my tortured past. Everything between

the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made

one of them.

I have no illusions, however. My judges will regard all this as a piece of mummery on the part of a madman

with a gross liking for the fruit vert. Au fond, ça m’est bien égal. All I now is that while the Haze woman and I

went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my

lips were like sand, and —

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“That was my Lo,” she said, “and these are my lilies.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”

11

Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather, with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its

upper left-hand corner. I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as if it were really

before me. Actually, it was destroyed five years go and what we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic

memory) is but its brief materialization, a puny unfledged phoenix.

I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry in pencil (with

many erasures and corrections) on the leaves of what is commercially known as a “typewriter tablet”; then, I copied

it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic, hand in the little black book just mentioned.

May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the Carolinas. That day an epidemic of

“abdominal flu” (whatever that is) forced Ramsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check the

weather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before that I moved into the Haze house, and the little

diary which I now propose to reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he swallowed)

covers most of June.

Thursday. Very warm day. From a vantage point (bathroom window) saw Dolores taking things off a

clothesline in the apple-green light behind the house. Strolled out. She wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers.

Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body.

After a while she sat down next to me on the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles

between her feet — pebbles, my God, then a curled bit of milk-bottle glass resembling a snarling lip — and chuck

them at a can. Ping. You can’t a second time — you can’t hit it — this is agony — a second time. Ping. Marvelous

skin — oh, marvelous: tender and tanned, not the least blemish. Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily

substance called sebum which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irritation that

opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food. God,

what agony, that silky shimmer above her temple grading into bright brown hair. And the little bone twitching at

the side of her dust-powdered ankle. “The McCoo girl? Ginny McCoo? Oh, she’s a fright. And mean. And lame.

Nearly died of polio.” Ping. The glistening tracery of down on her forearm. When she got up to take in the wash, I

had a chance of adoring from afar the faded seat of her rolled-up jeans. Out of the lawn, bland Mrs. Haze, complete

with camera, grew up like a fakir’s fake tree and after some heliotropic fussing — sad eyes up, glad eyes down —

had the cheek of taking my picture as I sat blinking on the steps, Humbert le Bel.

Friday. Saw her going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose. Why does the way she walks — a child, mind

you, a mere child! — excite me so abominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind of wiggly

looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall. The ghost of a drag. Very infantile, infinitely

meretricious. Humbert Humbert is also infinitely moved by the little one’s slangy speech, by her harsh high voice.

Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across the fence. Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. Pause. “I

must go now, kiddo.”

Saturday. (Beginning perhaps amended.) I know it is madness to keep this journal but it gives me a strange thrill

to do so; and only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script. Let me state with a sob that today my L.

was sun-bathing on the so-called “piazza,” but her mother and some other woman were around all the time. Of

course, I might have sat there in the rocker and pretended to read. Playing safe, I kept away, for I was afraid that

the horrible, insane, ridiculous and pitiful tremor that palsied me might prevent me from making my entrée with

any semblance of casualness.

Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most favonian week. This time I took up a strategic position, with obese

newspaper and new pipe, in the piazza rocker before L. arrived. To my intense disappointment she came with her

mother, both in two-piece bathing suits, black, as new as my pipe. My darling, my sweetheart stood for a moment

near me — wanted the funnies — and she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one, but more

intensely so, with rougher overtones — a torrid odor that at once set my manhood astir — but she had already

yanked out of me the coveted section and retreated to her mat near her phocine mamma. There my beauty lay down

on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder

blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in

black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She

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was the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. As I looked on, through prismatic layers of

light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if

properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately; but, like some

predator that prefers a moving prey to a motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with the

various girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and

revealing a stippled armpit — but fat Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light,

and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular fraud.

Monday. Delectatio morosa. I spend my doleful days in dumps and dolors. We (mother Haze, Dolores and I)

were to go to Our Glass Lake this afternoon, and bathe, and bask; but a nacreous morn degenerated at noon into

rain, and Lo made a scene.

The median age of pubescence for girls has been found to be thirteen years and nine months in New York and

Chicago. The age varies for individuals from ten, or earlier, to seventeen. Virginia was not quite fourteen when

Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at

Petersburg, Fla. “Monsieur Poe-poe,” as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert’s classes in Paris called the

poet-poet.

I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses

stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover, I am said to

resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush.

Tuesday. Rain. Lake of the Rains. Mamma out shopping. L., I knew, was somewhere quite near. In result of

some stealthy maneuvering, I came across her in her mother’s bedroom. Prying her left eye open to get rid of a

speck of something. Checked frock. Although I do love that intoxicating brown fragrance of hers, I really think she

should wash her hair once in a while. For a moment, we were both in the same warm green bath of the mirror that

reflected the top of a poplar with us in the sky. Held her roughly by the shoulders, then tenderly by the temples,

and turned her about. “It’s right there,” she said. “I can feel it.” “Swiss peasant would use the top of her tongue.”

“Lick it out?” “Yeth. Shly try?” “Sure,” she said. Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball.

“Goody-goody,” she said nictating. “It is gone.” “Now the other?” “You dope,” she began, “there is noth —” but

here she noticed the pucker of my approaching lips. “Okay,” she said cooperatively, and bending toward her warm

upturned russet face somber Humbert pressed his mouth to her fluttering eyelid. She laughed, and brushed past me

out of the room. My heart seemed everywhere at once. Never in my life — not even when fondling my child-love

in France — never —

Night. Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to describe her face, her ways — and I cannot,

because my own desire for her blinds me when she is near. I am not used to being with nymphets, damn it. If I

close my eyes I see but an immobilized fraction of her, a cinematographic still, a sudden smooth nether loveliness,

as with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits tying her shoe. “Dolores Haze, ne nontrez pas vos zhambes” (this

is her mother who thinks she knows French).

A poet à mes heures, I composed a madrigal to the soot-black lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes, to the five

asymmetrical freckles on her bobbed nose, to the blond down of her brown limbs; but I tore it up and cannot recall

it today. Only in the tritest of terms (diary resumed) can I describe Lo’s features: I might say her hair is auburn, and

her lips as red as licked red candy, the lower one prettily plump — oh, that I were a lady writer who could have her

pose naked in a naked light! But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black

eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile. And neither is

she the fragile child of a feminine novel. What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet — of every

nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming

from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, from the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservants in

the Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very young harlots disguised as children in

provincial brothels; and then again, all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through

the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And what is most singular is that she, this

Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer’s ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is — Lolita.

Wednesday. “Look, make Mother take you and me to Our Glass Lake tomorrow.” These were the textual words

said to me by my twelve-year-old flame in a voluptuous whisper, as we happened to bump into one another on the

front porch, I out, she in. The reflection of the afternoon sun, a dazzling white diamond with innumerable

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iridescent spikes quivered on the round back of a parked car. The leafage of a voluminous elm played its mellow

shadows upon the clapboard wall of the house. Two poplars shivered and shook. You could make out the formless

sounds of remote traffic; a child calling “Nancy, Nan-cy!” In the house, Lolita had put on her favorite “Little

Carmen” record which I used to call “Dwarf Conductors,” making her snort with mock derision at my mock wit.

Thursday. Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman, Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into

amorous darkness. The old girl had finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seen

sometime in the winter. The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met the good old priest (who had been a

boxer himself in his robust youth and could still slug a sinner). We sat on cushions heaped on the floor, and L. was

between the woman and me (she had squeezed herself in, the pet). In my turn, I launched upon a hilarious account

of my arctic adventures. The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said:

Ah! All the while I was acutely aware of L.’s nearness and as I spoke I gestured in the merciful dark and took

advantage of those invisible gestures of mine to touch her hand, her shoulder and a ballerina of wool and gauze

which she played with and kept sticking into my lap; and finally, when I had completely enmeshed my glowing

darling in this weave of ethereal caresses, I dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin, and I

chuckled at my own jokes, and trembled, and concealed my tremors, and once or twice felt with my rapid lips the

warmth of her hair as I treated her to a quick nuzzling, humorous aside and caressed her plaything. She, too,

fidgeted a good deal so that finally her mother told her sharply to quit it and sent the doll flying into the dark, and I

laughed and addressed myself to Haze across Lo’s legs to let my hand creep up my nymphet’s thin back and feel

her skin through her boy’s shirt.

But I knew it was all hopeless, and was sick with longing, and my clothes felt miserably tight, and I was almost

glad when her mother’s quiet voice announced in the dark: “And now we all think that Lo should go to bed.” “I

think you stink,” said Lo. “Which means there will be no picnic tomorrow,” said Haze. “This is a free country,”

said Lo. When angry Lo with a Bronx cheer had gone, I stayed on from sheer inertia, while Haze smoked her tenth

cigarette of the evening and complained of Lo.

She had been spiteful, if you please, at the age of one, when she used to throw her toys out of her crib so that her

poor mother should keep picking them up, the villainous infant! Now, at twelve, she was a regular pest, said Haze.

All she wanted from life was to be one day a strutting and prancing baton twirler or a jitterbug. Her grades were

poor, but she was better adjusted in her new school than in Pisky (Pisky was the Haze home town in the Middle

West. The Ramsdale house was her late mother-in-law’s. They had moved to Ramsdale less than two years ago).

“Why was she unhappy there?” “Oh,” said Haze, “poor me should know, I went through that when I was a kid:

boys twisting one’s arm, banging into one with loads of books, pulling one’s hair, hurting one’s breasts, flipping

one’s skirt. Of course, moodiness is a common concomitant of growing up, but Lo exaggerates. Sullen and evasive.

Rude and defiant. Struck Viola, an Italian schoolmate, in the seat with a fountain pen. Know what I would like? If

you, monsieur, happened to be still here in the fall, I’d ask you to help her with her homework — you seem to

know everything, geography, mathematics, French.” “Oh, everything,” answered monsieur. “That means,” said

Haze quickly, “you’ll be here!” I wanted to shout that I would stay on eternally if only I could hope to caress now

and then my incipient pupil. But I was wary of Haze. So I just grunted and stretched my limbs nonconcomitantly

(le mot juste) and presently went up to my room. The woman, however, was evidently not prepared to call it a day.

I was already lying upon my cold bed both hands pressing to my face Lolita’s fragrant ghost when I heard my

indefatigable landlady creeping stealthily up to my door to whisper through it — just to make sure, she said, I was

through with the Glance and Gulp magazine I had borrowed the other day. From her room Lo yelled she had it. We

are quite a lending library in this house, thunder of God.

Friday. I wonder what my academic publishers would say if I were to quote in my textbook Ronsard’s “la

vermeillette fente” or Remy Belleau’s “un petit mont feutré de mousse délicate, tracé sur le milieu d’un fillet

escarlatte” and so forth. I shall probably have another breakdown if I stay any longer in this house, under the strain

of this intolerable temptation, by the side of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride. Has she already

been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of the Menarche? Bloated feelings. The Curse of the Irish. Falling

from the roof. Grandma is visiting. “Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls’ magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on

the chance a possible baby may have to be bedded down there.” The tiny madman in his padded cell.

Incidentally: if I ever commit a serious murder… Mark the “if.” The urge should be something more than the

kind of thing that happened to me with Valeria. Carefully mark that then was rather inept. If and when you wish to

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sizzle me to death, remember that only a spell of insanity could ever give me the simple energy to be a brute (all

this amended, perhaps). Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams. But do you know what happens? For instance I

hold a gun. For instance I aim at a bland, quietly interested enemy. Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one bullet

after another feebly drops on the floor from the sheepish muzzle. In those dreams, my only thought is to conceal

the fiasco from my foe, who is slowly growing annoyed.

At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong gleam of motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just

been describing, in a flippant vein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite decided to grow):

“Better don’t if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty.” Instantly Lo pushed her plate of boiled fish away, all but

knocking her milk over, and bounced out of the dining room. “Would it bore you very much,” quoth Haze, “to

come with us tomorrow for a swim in Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes for her manners?”

Later, I heard a great banging of doors and other sounds coming from quaking caverns where the two rivals

were having a ripping row.

She had not apologized. The lake is out. It might have been fun.

Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the door ajar, while I wrote in my room; but only today did

the trap work. With a good deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scraping — to disguise her embarrassment at

visiting me without having been called — Lo came in and after pottering around, became interested in the

nightmare curlicues I had penned on a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a belle-lettrist’s inspired

pause between two paragraphs; they were the hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust.

As she bent her brown curs over the desk at which I was sitting, Humbert the Hoarse put his arm around her in a

miserable imitation of blood-relationship; and still studying, somewhat shortsightedly, the piece of paper she held,

my innocent little visitor slowly sank to a half-sitting position upon my knee. Her adorable profile, parted lips,

warm hair were some three inches from my bared eyetooth; and I felt the heat of her limbs through her rough

tomboy clothes. All at once I knew I could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew

she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches. A double vanilla with hot fudge — hardly

more unusual than that. I cannot tell my learned reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the

way to the back of his bald head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me; perhaps my ape-ear had

unconsciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of her respiration — for now she was not really looking at

my scribble, but waiting with curiosity and composure — oh, my limpid nymphet! — for the glamorous lodger to

do what he was dying to do. A modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow closeups,

might not think it too strange, I guessed, if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend — too late. The house

was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise’s voice telling Mrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead

something she and Leslie Tomson had found in the basement, and little Lolita was not one to miss such a tale.

Sunday. Changeful, bad-tempered, cheerful, awkward, graceful with the tart grace of her coltish subteens,

excruciatingly desirable from head to foot (all New England for a lady-writer’s pen!), from the black read-made

bow and bobby pins holding her hair in place to the little scar on the lower part of her neat calf (where a rollerskater

kicked her in Pisky), a couple of inches above her rough white sock. Gone with her mother to the Hamiltons

— a birthday party or something. Full-skirted gingham frock. Her little doves seem well formed already.

Precocious pet!

Monday. Rainy morning. “Ces matins gris si doux…” My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am

like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving

little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily

wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Just heard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato

sound as it is turned; and no footfalls has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to her room. Is she

still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo performs with real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just slammed,

so one has to feel elsewhere about the house for the beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have a strand of silk

descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means that she is not in the kitchen — not banging the refrigerator door

or screeching at her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing and subduedly mirthful,

telephone conversation of the morning). Well, let us grope and hope. Ray-like, I glide in through to the parlor and

find the radio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton, very softly, flushed, smiling,

cupping the telephone with her free hand, denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor,

roomer, whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face to face talk). So my nymphet is not in

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the house at all! Gone! What I thought was a prismatic weave turns out to be but an old gray cobweb, the house is

empty, is dead. And then comes Lolita’s soft sweet chuckle through my half-open door “Don’t tell Mother but I’ve

eaten all your bacon.” Gone when I scuttle out of my room. Lolita, where are you? My breakfast tray, lovingly

prepared by my landlady, leers at me toothlessly, ready to be taken in. Lola, Lolita!

Tuesday. Clouds again interfered with that picnic on that unattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming? Yesterday I

tried on before the mirror a new pair of bathing trunks.

Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (common-sensical shoes, tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown

to buy a present for a friend of a friend of hers, and would I please come too because I have such a wonderful taste

in textures and perfumes. “Choose your favorite seduction,” she purred. What could Humbert, being in the perfume

business, do? She had me cornered between the front porch and her car. “Hurry up,” she said as I laboriously

doubled up my large body in order to crawl in (still desperately devising a means of escape). She had started the

engine, and was genteelly swearing at a backing and turning truck in front that had just brought old invalid Miss

Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when my Lolita’s sharp voice came from the parlor window: “You! Where are

you going? I’m coming too! Wait!” “Ignore her,” yelped Haze (killing the motor); alas for my fair driver; Lo was

already pulling at the door on my side. “This is intolerable,” began Haze; but Lo had scrambled in, shivering with

glee. “Move your bottom, you,” said Lo. “Lo!” cried Haze (sideglancing at me, hoping I would throw rude Lo out).

“And behold,” said Lo (not for the first time), as she jerked back, as I jerked back, as the car leapt forward. “It is

intolerable,” said Haze, violently getting into second, “that a child should be so ill-mannered. And so very

persevering. When she knows she is unwanted. And needs a bath.”

My knuckles lay against the child’s blue jeans. She was barefooted; her toenails showed remnants of cherry-red

polish and there was a bit of adhesive tape across her big toe; and, God, what would I not have given to kiss then

and there those delicate-boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet! Suddenly her hand slipped into mine and without our

chaperon’s seeing, I held, and stroked, and squeezed that little hot paw, all the way to the store. The wings of the

diver’s Marlenesque nose shone, having shed or burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant

monologue anent the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in profile,

while I prayed we would never get to that store, but we did.

I have nothing else to report, save, primo: that big Haze had little Haze sit behind on our way home, and

secundo: that the lady decided to keep Humbert’s Choice for the backs of her own shapely ears.

Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young

People’s Encyclopedia, I found a map of the states that a child’s pencil had started copying out on a sheet of

lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was

a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school. It is a poem I know already

by heart.

Angel, Grace

Austin, Floyd

Beale, Jack

Beale, Mary

Buck, Daniel

Byron, Marguerite

Campbell, Alice

Carmine, Rose

Chatfield, Phyllis

Clarke, Gordon

Cowan, John

Cowan, Marion

Duncan, Walter

Falter, Ted

Fantasia, Stella

Flashman, Irving

Fox, George

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Glave, Mabel

Goodale, Donald

Green, Lucinda

Hamilton, Mary Rose

Haze, Dolores

Honeck, Rosaline

Knight, Kenneth

McCoo, Virginia

McCrystal, Vivian

McFate, Aubrey

Miranda, Anthony

Miranda, Viola

Rosato, Emil

Schlenker, Lena

Scott, Donald

Sheridan, Agnes

Sherva, Oleg

Smith, Hazel

Talbot, Edgar

Talbot, Edwin

Wain, Lull

Williams, Ralph

Windmuller, Louise

A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this “Haze, Dolores” (she!) in its special

bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses — a fairy princess between her two maids of honor. I am trying to

analyze the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all those others. What is it that excites me almost to

tears (hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity of this name with

its formal veil (“Dolores”) and that abstract transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair of new

pale gloves or a mask? Is “mask” the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery,

the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you

alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy

darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the

foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary

Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry.

And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys’ eyes on her hair and

neck, my Lolita.

Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly

and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man,

I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, my explanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A

brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance, when she was again in my

room to show me her drawings, school-artware); he might have bribed her — and got away with it. A simpler and

more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercial substitutes — if you know where to go, I

don’t. Despite my many looks, I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of

running into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald sea monsters. “Mais allez-y, allez-y!” Annabel

skipping on one foot to get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her.

Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze

at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to

the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final

scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on

1. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some

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appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder — and plunge

with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet

little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she could not

possibly behave. At 3 a.m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody

revealed to me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of

emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickax, although imported mimosas

and oleanders flowered on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of

schillings for adding such a libidream to her files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and

little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle

although there was no horse between them, only elastic air — one of those little omissions due to the

absentmindedness of the dream agent.

Saturday. My heart is still thumping. I still squirm and emit low moans of remembered embarrassment.

Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white gym shorts. Bending, over a window sill, in the

act of tearing off leaves from a poplar outside while engrossed in torrential talk with a newspaper boy below

(Kenneth Knight, I suspect) who had just propelled the Ramsdale Journal with a very precise thud onto the porch. I

began creeping up to her — “crippling” up to her as pantomimists say. My arms and legs were convex surfaces

between which — rather than upon which — I slowly progressed by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert

the Wounded Spider. I must have taken hours to reach her: I seemed to see her through the wrong end of a

telescope, and toward her taut little rear I moved like some paralytic, on soft distorted limbs, in terrible

concentration. At last I was right behind her when I had the unfortunate idea of blustering a trifle-shaking her by

the scruff of the neck and that sort of thing to cover my real manège, and she said in a shrill brief whine: “Cut it

out!” — most coarsely, the little wench, and with a ghastly grin Humbert the Humble beat a gloomy retreat while

she went on wisecracking streetward.

But now listen to what happened next. After lunch I was reclining in a low chair trying to read. Suddenly two

deft little hands were over my eyes: she had crept up from behind as if re-enacting, in a ballet sequence, my

morning maneuver. Her fingers were a luminous crimson as they tried to blot out the sun, and she uttered hiccups

of laughter and jerked this way and that as I stretched my arm sideways and backwards without otherwise changing

my recumbent position. My hand swept over her agile giggling legs, and the book like a sleigh left my lap, and Mrs.

Haze strolled up and said indulgently: “Just slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarly meditations. How I

love this garden [no exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn’t it divine in the sun [no question mark either].” And with a

sign of feigned content, the obnoxious lady sank down on the grass and looked up at the sky as she leaned back on

her splayed-out hands, and presently an old gray tennis ball bounced over her, and Lo’s voice came from the house

haughtily: “Pardonnez, Mother. I was not aiming at you.” Of course not, my hot downy darling.

12

This proved to be the last of twenty entries or so. It will be seem from them that for all the devil’s inventiveness,

the scheme remained daily the same. First he would tempt me — and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain

in the very root of my being. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how to do it, without impinging on a child’s

chastity; after all, I had had some experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possessed dappled nymphets in

parks; had wedged my wary and bestial way into the hottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of straphanging

school children. But for almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all my pathetic machinations. The agent of

these interruptions was usually the Haze woman (who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo’s deriving

some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for that nymphet — for the first

nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid claws — would have certainly

landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have

me as a plaything for some time longer.

The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey

McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the

presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary

Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be

whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome

lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag.

How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady

had planned to have an old spinster, a Miss Phalen, whose mother had been cook in Mrs. Haze’s family, come to

stay in the house with Lolita and me, while Mrs. Haze, a career girl at heart, sought some suitable job in the nearest

city. Mrs. Haze had seen the whole situation very clearly: the bespectacled, round-backed Herr Humbert coming

with his Central-European trunks to gather dust in his corner behind a heap of old books; the unloved ugly little

daughter firmly supervised by Miss Phalen who had already once had my Lo under her buzzard wing (Lo recalled

that 1944 summer with an indignant shudder); and Mrs. Haze herself engaged as a receptionist in a great elegant

city. But a not too complicated event interfered with that program. Miss Phalen broke her hip in Savannah, Ga., on

the very day I arrived in Ramsdale.

13

The Sunday after the Saturday already described proved to be as bright as the weatherman had predicted. When

putting the breakfast things back on the chair outside my room for my good landlady to remove at her convenience,

I gleaned the following situation by listening from the landing across which I had softly crept to the banisters in my

old bedroom slippers — the only old things about me.

There had been another row. Mrs. Hamilton had telephoned that her daughter “was running a temperature.” Mrs.

Haze informed her daughter that the picnic would have to be postponed. Hot little Haze informed big cold Haze

that, if so, she would not go with her to church. Mother said very well and left.

I had come out on the landing straight after shaving, soapy-earlobed, still in my white pajamas with the

cornflower blue (not the lilac) design on the back; I now wiped off the soap, perfumed my hair and armpits, slipped

on a purple silk dressing gown, and, humming nervously, went down the stairs in quest of Lo.

I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every

detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my

lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, “impartial sympathy.” So let us get started. I have a difficult job

before me.

Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room. Props: old,

candy-striped davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze — God bless

the good man — had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed room, on a honeymoon trip to Vera

Cruz, and mementoes, among these Dolores, were all over the place). She wore that day a pretty print dress that I

had seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice, short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink,

and, to complete the color scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful,

banal, Eden-red apple. She was not shod, however, for church. And her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the

phonograph.

My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, cool skirt ballooning, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played

with her glossy fruit. She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it — it made a cupped polished plop.

Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple.

“Give it back,” — she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms. I produced Delicious. She grasped it

and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under thin crimson skin, and with the monkeyish nimbleness that was so

typical of that American nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I had opened (pity no film

had recorded the curious pattern, the monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves). Rapidly,

hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo flipped violently through the pages in search of something

she wished Humbert to see. Found it at last. I faked interest by bringing my head so close that her hair touched my

temple and her arm brushed my cheek as she wiped her lips with her wrist. Because of the burnished mist through

which I peered at the picture, I was slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently

against each other. Dimly there came into view: a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him,

likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend. I

whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a sham effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught

her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free,

recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child

extended her legs across my lap.

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting

there, on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless limbs. It

was no easy matter to divert the little maiden’s attention while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for

the success of the trick. Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden

toothache to explain the breaks in my patter — and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden

goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the

physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) between

the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. Having,

in the course of my patter, hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them slightly, the words of a

foolish song that was then popular — O my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those something

nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic stuff and holding

her under its special spell (spell because of the garbling), and all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of

God might interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of which all my being seemed concentrated,

and this anxiety forced me to work, for the first minute or so, more hastily than was consensual with deliberately

modulated enjoyment. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were

presently taken over by her; her voice stole and corrected the tune I had been mutilating. She was musical and

apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the righthand

corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice,

losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines

heaped on my left on the sofa — and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal

and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty — between my gagged,

bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.

Under my glancing finger tips I felt the minute hairs bristle ever so slightly along her shins. I lost myself in the

pungent but healthy heat which like summer haze hung about little Haze. Let her stay, let her stay… As she strained

to chuck the core of her abolished apple into the fender, her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and

round bottom, shifted in my tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap; and all of a sudden a mysterious change

came over my senses. I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within

my body. What had begun as a delicious distention of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had

reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life. With the

deep hot sweetness thus established and well on its way to the ultimate convulsion, I felt I could slow down in

order to prolong the glow. Lolita had been safely solipsized. The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars; we

were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight,

unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the

Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness. Everything was now ready. The nerves of pleasure

had been laid bare. The corpuscles of Krause were entering the phase of frenzy. The least pressure would suffice to

set all paradise loose. I had ceased to be Humbert the Hound, the sad-eyed degenerate cur clasping the boot that

would presently kick him away. I was above the tribulations of ridicule, beyond the possibilities of retribution. In

my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom,

postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves. Suspended on the brink of that

voluptuous abyss (a nicety of physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in the arts) I kept repeating

the chance words after her — barmen, alarmin’, my charmin’, my carmen, ahmen, ahahamen — as one talking and

laughing in his sleep while my happy hand crept up her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed. The

day before she had collided with the heavy chest in the hall and — “Look, look!” — I gasped — “look what you’ve

done, what you’ve done to yourself, ah, look”; for there was, I swear, a yellowish-violet bruise on her lovely

nymphet thigh which my huge hairy hand massaged and slowly enveloped — and because of her very perfunctory

underthings, there seemed to be nothing to prevent my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin

— just as you might tickle and caress a giggling child — just that — and: “Oh, it’s nothing at all,” she cried with a

sudden shrill note in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on

her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury, almost reached her

bare neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever

known.

Immediately afterward (as if we had been struggling and now my grip had eased) she rolled off the sofa and

jumped to her feet — to her foot, rather — in order to attend to the formidably loud telephone that may have been

ringing for ages as far as I was concerned. There she stood and blinked, cheeks aflame, hair awry, her eyes passing

over me as lightly as they did over the furniture, and as she listened or spoke (to her mother who was telling her to

come to lunch with her at the Chatfileds — neither Lo nor Hum knew yet what busybody Haze was plotting), she

kept tapping the edge of the table with the slipper she held in her hand. Blessed be the Lord, she had noticed

nothing!

With a handkerchief of multicolored silk, on which her listening eyes rested in passing, I wiped the sweat off

my forehead, and, immersed in a euphoria of release, rearranged my royal robes. She was still at the telephone,

haggling with her mother (wanted to be fetched by car, my little Carmen) when, singing louder and louder, I swept

up the stairs and set a deluge of steaming water roaring into the tub.

At this point I may as well give the words of that song hit in full — to the best of my recollection at least — I

don’t think I ever had it right. Here goes:

O my Carmen, my little Carmen!

Something, something those something nights,

And the stars, and the cars, and the bars and the barmen —

And, O my charmin’, our dreadful fights.

And the something town where so gaily, arm in

Arm, we went, and our final row,

And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen,

The gun I am holding now.

(Drew his .32 automatic, I guess, and put a bullet through his moll’s eye.)

14

I had lunch in town — had not been so hungry for years. The house was still Lo-less when I strolled back. I spent

the afternoon musing, scheming, blissfully digesting my experience of the morning.

I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no

harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse; and

lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was

safe — and I was safe. What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita —

perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no

consciousness — indeed, no life of her own.

The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance

that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback

abusing myself in the dark. The afternoon drifted on and on, in ripe silence, and the sappy tall trees seemed to be in

the know; and desire, even stronger than before, began to afflict me again. Let her come soon, I prayed, addressing

a loan God, and while mamma is in the kitchen, let a repetition of the davenport scene be staged, please, I adore her

so horribly.

No: “horribly” is the wrong word. The elation with which the vision of new delights filled me was not horrible

but pathetic. I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic — because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I

intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child.

And now see how I was repaid for my pains. No Lolita came home — she had gone with the Chatfields to a

movie. The table was laid with more elegance than usual: candlelight, if you please. In this mawkish aura, Mrs.

Haze gently touched the silver on both sides of her plate as if touching piano keys, and smiled down on her empty

plate (was on a diet), and said she hoped I liked the salad (recipe lifted from a woman’s magazine). She hoped I

liked the cold cuts, too. It had been a perfect day. Mrs. Chatfield was a lovely person. Phyllis, her daughter, was

going to a summer camp tomorrow. For three weeks. Lolita, it was decided, would go Thursday. Instead of waiting

till July, as had been initially planned. And stay there after Phyllis had left. Till school began. A pretty prospect,

my heart.

Oh, how I was taken aback — for did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her

mine? To explain my grim mood, I had to use the same toothache I had already simulated in the morning. Must

have been an enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry.

“We have,” said Haze, “an excellent dentist. Our neighbor, in fact. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the

playwright. Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him ‘brace’ her, as my mother used to

say. It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these days. And we are in for a

couple of stormy ones before she goes. She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I left her with the Chatfields

because I dreaded to face her alone just yet. The movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is no

earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am very sorry about that tooth of yours. It would be so

much more reasonable to let me contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow morning if it still hurts. And, you know, I

think a summer camp is so much healthier, and — well, it is all so much more reasonable as I say than to mope on

a suburban lawn and use mamma’s lipstick, and pursue shy studious gentlemen, and go into tantrums at the least

provocation.”

“Are you sure,” I said at last, “that she will be happy there?” (lame, lamentably lame!)

“She’d better,” said Haze. “And it won’t be all play either. The camp is run by Shirley Holmes — you know, the

woman who wrote Campfire Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things — health, knowledge,

temper. And particularly in a sense of responsibility towards other people. Shall we take these candles with us and

sit for a while on the piazza, or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?”

Nurse that tooth.

15

Next day they drove downtown to buy things needed for the camp: any wearable purchase worked wonders with

Lo. She seemed her usual sarcastic self at dinner. Immediately afterwards, she went up to her room to plunge into

the comic books acquired for rainy days at Camp Q (they were so thoroughly sampled by Thursday that she left

them behind). I too retired to my lair, and wrote letters. My plan now was to leave for the seaside and then, when

school began, resume my existence in the Haze household; for I knew already that I could not live without the

child. On Tuesday they went shopping again, and I was asked to answer the phone if the camp mistress rang up

during their absence. She did; and a month or so later we had occasion to recall our pleasant chat. That Tuesday,

Lo had her dinner in her room. She had been crying after a routine row with her mother and, as had happened on

former occasions, had not wished me to see her swollen eyes: she had one of those tender complexions that after a

good cry get all blurred and inflamed, and morbidly alluring. I regretted keenly her mistake about my private

aesthetics, for I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes;

and, naturally, her bashful whim deprived me of many opportunities of specious consolation. There was, however,

more to it than I thought. As we sat in the darkness of the verandah (a rude wind had put out her red candles), Haze,

with a dreary laugh, said she had told Lo that her beloved Humbert thoroughly approved of the whole camp idea

“and now,” added Haze, “the child throws a fit; pretext: you and I want to get rid of her; actual reason: I told her we

would exchange tomorrow for plainer stuff some much too cute night things that she bullied me into buying for her.

You see, she sees herself as a starlet; I see her as a sturdy, healthy, but decidedly homely kid. This, I guess, is at the

root of our troubles.”

On Wednesday I managed to waylay Lo for a few seconds: she was on the landing, in sweatshirt and greenstained

white shorts, rummaging in a trunk. I said something meant to be friendly and funny but she only emitted a

snort without looking at me. Desperate, dying Humbert patted her clumsily on her coccyx, and she struck him,

quite painfully, with one of the late Mr. Haze’s shoetrees. “Doublecrosser,” she said as I crawled downstairs

rubbing my arm with a great show of rue. She did not condescend to have dinner with Hum and mum: washed her

hair and went to bed with her ridiculous books. And on Thursday quiet Mrs. Haze drove her to Camp Q.

As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those

imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be

forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would

turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl” — that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only

to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared,

the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hair

— of the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar

vocabulary — “revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip” — that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose

forever. So how could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months out of the

two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle

Humbert, and put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: “Let

us adopt that deep-voiced D.P.,” and drag the said, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth.

Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze!

Idle dry dreams. Two months of beauty, two months of tenderness, would be squandered forever, and I could do

nothing about it, but nothing, mais rien.

One drop of rare honey, however, that Thursday did hold in its acorn cup. Haze was to drive her to the camp in

the early morning. Upon sundry sounds of departure reaching me, I rolled out of bed and leaned out of the window.

Under the poplars, the car was already athrob. On the sidewalk, Louise stood shading her eyes with her hand, as if

the little traveler were already riding into the low morning sun. The gesture proved to be premature. “Hurry up!”

shouted Haze. My Lolita, who was half in and about to slam the car door, wind down the glass, wave to Louise and

the poplars (whom and which she was never to see again), interrupted the motion of fate: she looked up — and

dashed back into the house (Haze furiously calling after her). A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the

stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung

the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and then she was in my

arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling! The next

instant I heart her — alive, unraped — clatter downstairs. The motion of fate was resumed. The blond leg was

pulled in, the car door was slammed — was re-slammed — and driver Haze at the violent wheel, rubber-red lips

writhing in angry, inaudible speech, swung my darling away, while unnoticed by them or Louise, old Miss

Opposite, an invalid, feebly but rhythmically waved from her vined veranda.

16

The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita — full of the feel of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that

ivory-smooth, sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down while I held her. I

marched into her tumbled room, threw open the door of the closet, and plunged into a heap of crumpled things that

had touched her. There was particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid odor in the seam. I

wrapped in it Humbert’s huge engorged heart. A poignant chaos was welling within me — but I had to drop those

things and hurriedly regain my composure, as I became aware of the maid’s velvety voice calling me softly from

the stairs. She had a message for me, she said; and, topping my automatic thanks with a kindly “you’re welcome,”

good Louise left an unstamped, curiously clean-looking letter in my shaking hand.

This is a confession: I love you [so the letter began; and for a distorted moment I mistook its hysterical

scrawl for a schoolgirl’s scribble]. Last Sunday in church — bad you, who refused to come to see our

beautiful new windows! — only last Sunday, my dear one, when I asked the Lord what to do about it, I was

told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I

am a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life.

Now, my dearest, dearest, mon cher, cher monsieur, you have read this; now you know. So, will you

please, at once, pack and leave. This is a landlady’s order. I am dismissing a lodger. I am kicking you out.

Go! Scram! Departez! I shall be back by dinnertime, if I do eighty both ways and don’t have an accident (but

what would it matter?), and I do not wish to find you in the house. Please, please, leave at once, now, do not

even read this absurd note to the end. Go. Adieu.

The situation, chéri, is quite simple. Of course, I know with absolute certainty that I am nothing to you,

nothing at all to you, nothing at all. Oh yes, you enjoy talking to me (and kidding poor me), you have grown

fond of our friendly house, of the books I like, of my lovely garden, even of Lo’s noisy ways — but I am

nothing to you. Right? Right. Nothing to you whatever. But if, after reading my “confession,” you decided,

in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for you to take advantage of my letter and

make a pass at me, then you would be a criminal — worse than a kidnaper who rapes a child. You see, chéri.

If you decided to stay, if I found you at home (which I know I won’t — and that’s why I am able to go on like

this), the fact of your remaining would only mean one thing: that you want me as much as I do you: as a

lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my

little girl.

Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my dearest, since I know this letter has been by now

torn by you, and its pieces (illegible) in the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, mon très, très cher, what a world

of love I have built up for you during this miraculous June! I know how reserved you are, how “British.”

Your old-world reticence, your sense of decorum may be shocked by the boldness of an American girl! You

who conceal your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor

bruised heart like this. In years gone by, many disappointments came my way. Mr. Haze was a splendid

person, a sterling soul, but he happened to be twenty years my senior, and — well, let us not gossip about the

past. My dearest, your curiosity must be well satisfied if you have ignored my request and read this letter to

the bitter end. Never mind. Destroy it and go. Do not forget to leave the key on the desk in your room. And

some scrap of address so that I could refund the twelve dollars I owe you till the end of the month. Good-bye,

dear one. Pray for me — if you ever pray.

C.H.

What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and what I remember of the letter I remember verbatim

(including that awful French). It was at least twice longer. I have left out a lyrical passage which I more or less

skipped at the time, concerning Lolita’s brother who died at 2 when she was 4, and how much I would have liked

him. Let me see what else can I say? Yes. There is just a chance that “the vortex of the toilet” (where the letter did

1. go) is my own matter-of-fact contribution. She probably begged me to make a special fire to consume it.

My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like a friend’s calm hand falling upon my

shoulder and bidding me take my time. I did. I came out of my daze and found myself still in Lo’s room. A fullpage

ad ripped out of a slick magazine was affixed to the wall above the bed, between a crooner’s mug and the

lashes of a movie actress. It represented a dark-haired young husband with a kind of drained look in his Irish eyes.

He was modeling a robe by So-and-So and holding a bridgelike tray by So-and-So, with breakfast for two. The

legend, by the Rev. Thomas Morell, called him a “conquering hero.” The thoroughly conquered lady (not shown)

was presumably propping herself up to receive her half of the tray. How her bed-fellow was to get under the bridge

without some messy mishap was not clear. Lo had drawn a jocose arrow to the haggard lover’s face and had put, in

block letters: H.H. And indeed, despite a difference of a few years, the resemblance was striking. Under this was

another picture, also a colored ad. A distinguished playwright was solemnly smoking a Drome. He always smoked

Dromes. The resemblance was slight. Under this was Lo’s chaste bed, littered with “comics.” The enamel had come

off the bedstead, leaving black, more or less rounded, marks on the white. Having convinced myself that Louise

had left, I got into Lo’s bed and reread the letter.

17

Gentlemen of the jury! I cannot swear that certain motions pertaining to the business in hand — if I may coin an

expression — had not drifted across my mind before. My mind had not retained them in any logical form or in any

relation to definitely recollected occasions; but I cannot swear — let me repeat — that I had not toyed with them

(to rig up yet another expression), in my dimness of thought, in my darkness of passion. There may have been

times — there must have been times, if I know my Humbert — when I had brought up for detached inspection the

idea of marrying a mature widow (say, Charlotte Haze) with not one relative left in the wide gray world, merely in

order to have my way with her child (Lo, Lola, Lolita). I am even prepared to tell my tormentors that perhaps once

or twice I had cast an appraiser’s cold eye at Charlotte’s coral lips and bronze hair and dangerously low neckline,

and had vaguely tried to fit her into a plausible daydream. This I confess under torture. Imaginary torture, perhaps,

but all the more horrible. I wish I might digress and tell you more of the pavor nocturnus that would rack me at

night hideously after a chance term had struck me in the random readings of my boyhood, such as peine forte et

dure (what a Genius of Pain must have invented that!) or the dreadful, mysterious, insidious words “trauma,”

“traumatic event,” and “transom.” But my tale is sufficiently incondite already.

After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my

purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenly — Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a

Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun. I

imagined (under conditions of new and perfect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother’s husband would be

able to lavish on his Lolita. I would hold her against me three times a day, every day. All my troubles would be

expelled, I would be a healthy man. “To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent’s

kiss…” Well-read Humbert!

Then, with all possible caution, on mental tiptoe so to speak, I conjured up Charlotte as a possible mate. By God,

I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.

Humbert Humbert sweating in the fierce white light, and howled at, and trodden upon by sweating policemen, is

now ready to make a further “statement” (quel mot!) as he turns his conscience inside out and rips off its innermost

lining. I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous

manner such as killing her by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial sherry or anything like

that; but a delicately allied, pharmacopoeial thought did tinkle in my sonorous and clouded brain. Why limit myself

to the modest masked caress I had tried already? Other visions of venery presented themselves to me swaying and

smiling. I saw myself administering a powerful sleeping potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the

latter though the night with perfect impunity. The house was full of Charlotte’s snore, while Lolita hardly breathed

in her sleep, as still as a painted girl-child. “Mother, I swear Kenny never even touched me.” “You either lie,

Dolores Haze, or it was an incubus.” No, I would not go that far.

So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed — and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that

create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines,

sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights. Then, figuratively speaking, I shattered the glass,

and boldly imagined (for I was drunk on those visions by then and underrated the gentleness of my nature) how

eventually I might blackmail — no, that it too strong a word — mauvemail big Haze into letting me consort with

the little Haze by gently threatening the poor doting Big Dove with desertion if she tried to bar me from playing

with my legal stepdaughter. In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas,

I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.

And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the

gentleman. It is with a great effort of will that in this memoir I have managed to tune my style to the tone of the

journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze was to me but an obstacle. That journal of mine is no more; but I have

considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now.

Fortunately, my story has reached a point where I can cease insulting poor Charlotte for the sake of retrospective

verisimilitude.

Wishing to spare poor Charlotte two or three hours of suspense on a winding road (and avoid, perhaps, a headon

collision that would shatter our different dreams), I made a thoughtful but abortive attempt to reach her at the

camp by telephone. She had left half an hour before, and getting Lo instead, I told her — trembling and brimming

with my mastery over fate — that I was going to marry her mother. I had to repeat it twice because something was

preventing her from giving me her attention. “Gee, that’s swell,” she said laughing. “When is the wedding? Hold on

a sec, the pup — That put here has got hold of my sock. Listen —” and she added she guessed she was going to

have loads of fun… and I realized as I hung up that a couple of hours at that camp had been sufficient to blot out

with new impressions the image of handsome Humbert Humbert from little Lolita’s mind. But what did it matter

now? I would get her back as soon as a decent amount of time after the wedding had elapsed. “The orange blossom

would have scarcely withered on the grave,” as a poet might have said. But I am no poet. I am only a very

conscientious recorder.

After Louise had gone, I inspected the icebox, and finding it much too puritanic, walked to town and bought the

richest foods available. I also bought some good liquor and two or three kinds of vitamins. I was pretty sure that

with the aid of these stimulants and my natural resources, I would avert any embarrassment that my indifference

might incur when called upon to display a strong and impatient flame. Again and again resourceful Humbert

evoked Charlotte as seen in the raree-show of a manly imagination. She was well groomed and shapely, this I

could say for her, and she was my Lolita’s big sister — this notion, perhaps, I could keep up if only I did not

visualize too realistically her heavy hips, round knees, ripe bust, the coarse pink skin of her neck (“coarse” by

comparison with silk and honey) and all the rest of that sorry and dull thing: a handsome woman.

The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another.

And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself

with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog — I loathe dogs —

had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.

The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge.

Incarnadine zebras! There are some eructations that sound like cheers — at least, mine did. An old fence at the

back of the garden separated us from the neighbor’s garbage receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between

the front end of our lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore I was able to watch

(with the smirk of one about to perform a good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at

once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye

on that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us

down, down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite’s ivied brick house and high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than

ours) and disappeared behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored.

The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose

comings and goings I had mechanically followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the

avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both

talking at the top of their sunny voices. Leslie, old Miss Opposite’s gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and

athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented by gesture, that I was mighty

energetic today. The fool dog of the prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car — not Charlotte’s. The

prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with little to halt, bright hair — a nymphet, by Pan! —

ran back down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. And

Mrs. Humbert’s residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its

roof before the shadows snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver roof — holding with his

left hand and the junkman’s dog tearing alongside. There was a smiling pause — and then, with a flutter in my

breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and disappear behind the corner of the

house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know

whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she looked down at me

from the window of Lo’s room. By sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it.

18

When the bride is a window and the groom is a widower; when the former has lived in Our Great Little Town for

hardly two years, and the latter for hardly a month; when Monsieur wants to get the whole damned thing over with

as quickly as possible, and Madame gives in with a tolerant smile; then, my reader, the wedding is generally a

“quiet” affair. The bride may dispense with a tiara of orange blossoms securing her finger-tip veil, nor does she

carry a white orchid in a prayer book. The bride’s little daughter might have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and

1. a touch of vivid vermeil; but I knew I would not dare be too tender with cornered Lolita yet, and therefore

agreed it was not worth while tearing the child away from her beloved Camp Q.

My soi-disant passionate and lonely Charlotte was in everyday life matter-of-fact and gregarious. Moreover, I

discovered that although she could not control her heart or her cries, she was a woman of principle. Immediately

after she had become more or less my mistress (despite the stimulants, her “nervous, eager chéri” — a heroic chéri!

— had some initial trouble, for which, however, he amply compensated her by a fantastic display of old-world

endearments), good Charlotte interviewed me about my relations with God. I could have answered that on that

score my mind was open; I said, instead — paying my tribute to a pious platitude — that I believed in a cosmic

spirit. Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I

countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had been, say,

a Turk. She said it did not matter a bit; but that, if she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she

would commit suicide. She said it so solemnly that it gave me the creeps. It was then I knew she was a woman of

principle.

Oh, she was very genteel: she said “excuse me” whenever a slight burp interrupted her flowing speech, called an

envelope and ahnvelope, and when talking to her lady-friends referred to me as Mr. Humbert. I thought it would

please her if I entered the community trailing some glamour after me. On the day of our wedding a little interview

with me appeared in the Society Column of the Ramsdale Journal, with a photograph of Charlotte, one eyebrow up

and a misprint in her name (“Hazer”). Despite this contretemps, the publicity warmed the porcelain cockles of her

heart — and made my rattles shake with awful glee. By engaging in church work as well as by getting to know the

better mothers of Lo’s schoolmates, Charlotte in the course of twenty months or so had managed to become if not a

prominent, at least an acceptable citizen, but never before had she come under that thrilling rubrique, and it was I

who put her there, Mr. Edgar H. Humbert (I threw in the “Edgar” just for the heck of it), “writer and explorer.”

McCoo’s brother, when taking it down, asked me what I had written. Whatever I told him came out as “several

books on Peacock, Rainbow and other poets.” It was also noted that Charlotte and I had known each other for

several years and that I was a distant relation of her first husband. I hinted I had had an affair with her thirteen

years ago but this was not mentioned in print. To Charlotte I said that society columns should contain a shimmer of

errors.

Let us go on with this curious tale. When called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover, did I

experience only bitterness and distaste? No. Mr. Humbert confesses to a certain titillation of his vanity, to some

faint tenderness, even to a pattern of remorse daintily running along the steel of his conspiratorial dagger. Never

had I thought that the rather ridiculous, through rather handsome Mrs. Haze, with her blind faith in the wisdom of

her church and book club, her mannerisms of elocution, her harsh, cold, contemptuous attitude toward an adorable,

downy-armed child of twelve, could turn into such a touching, helpless creature as soon as I laid my hands upon

her which happened on the threshold of Lolita’s room whither she tremulously backed repeating “no, no, please

no.”

The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the

radiance of utter adoration — a radiance having something soft and moist about it, in which, with wonder, I

recognized a resemblance to the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had when gloating over a new kind of concoction

at the soda fountain or mutely admiring my expensive, always tailor-fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I would

watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady and made that national grimace of

feminine resignation (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping sideways) which, in an infantile form, I had seen Lo making

herself. We had highballs before turning in, and with their help, I would manage to evoke the child while caressing

the mother. This was the white stomach within which my nymphet had been a little curved fish in 1934. This

carefully dyed hair, so sterile to my sense of smell and touch, acquired at certain lamplit moments in the poster bed

the tinge, if not the texture, of Lolita’s curls. I kept telling myself, as I wielded my brand-new large-as-life wife,

that biologically this was the nearest I could get to Lolita; that at Lolita’s age, Lotte had been as desirable a

schoolgirl as her daughter was, and as Lolita’s daughter would be some day. I had my wife unearth from under a

collection of shoes (Mr. Haze had a passion for them, it appears) a thirty-year-old album, so that I might see how

Lotte had looked as a child; and even though the light was wrong and the dresses graceless, I was able to make out

a dim first version of Lolita’s outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita, Lolitchen.

So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent,

naïvely lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my

nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of

dark decaying forests.

I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife was. At breakfast, in the depressingly bright

kitchen, with its chrome glitter and Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute breakfast nook (simulating that Coffee

Shoppe where in their college days Charlotte and Humbert used to coo together), she would sit, robed in red, her

elbow on the plastic-topped table, her cheek propped on her fist, and stare at me with intolerable tenderness as I

consumed my ham and eggs. Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia, but in her eyes it vied in beauty and

animation with the sun and shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrigerator. My solemn exasperation was to

her the silence of love. My small income added to her even smaller one impressed her as a brilliant fortune; not

because the resulting sum now sufficed for most middle-class needs, but because even my money shone in her eyes

with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our joint account as one of those southern boulevards at midday that

have solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the other, all the way to the end of a prospect, where pink

mountains loom.

Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the activities of as many years. The poor woman

busied herself with a number of things she had foregone long before or had never been much interested in, as if (to

prolong these Proustian intonations) by my marrying the mother of the child I loved I had enabled my wife to

regain an abundance of youth by proxy. With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to “glorify the home.”

Knowing as I did its every cranny by heart — since those days when from my chair I mentally mapped out Lolita’s

course through the house — I had long entered into a sort of emotional relationship with it, with its very ugliness

and dirt, and now I could almost feel the wretched thing cower in its reluctance to endure the bath of ecru and

ocher and putt-buff-and-snuff that Charlotte planned to give it. She never got as far as that, thank God, but she did

use up a tremendous amount of energy in washing window shades, waxing the slats of Venetian blinds, purchasing

new shades and new blinds, returning them to the store, replacing them by others, and so on, in a constant

chiaroscuro of smiles and frowns, doubts and pouts. She dabbled in cretonnes and chintzes; she changed the colors

of the sofa — the sacred sofa where a bubble of paradise had once burst in slow motion within me. She rearranged

the furniture — and was pleased when she found, in a household treatise, that “it is permissible to separate a pair of

sofa commodes and their companion lamps.” With the authoress of Your Home Is You, she developed a hatred for

little lean chairs and spindle tables. She believed that a room having a generous expanse of glass, and lots of rich

wood paneling was an example of the masculine type of room, whereas the feminine type was characterized by

lighter-looking windows and frailer woodwork. The novels I had found her reading when I moved in were now

replaced by illustrated catalogues and homemaking guides. From a firm located at 4640 Roosevelt Blvd.,

Philadelphia, she ordered for our double bed a “damask covered 312 coil mattress” — although the old one seemed

to me resilient and durable enough for whatever it had to support.

A Midwesterner, as her late husband had also been, she had lived in coy Ramsdale, the gem of an eastern state,

not long enough to know all the nice people. She knew slightly the jovial dentist who lived in a kind of ramshackle

wooden chateau behind our lawn. She had met at a church tea the “snooty” wife of the local junk dealer who

owned the “colonial” white horror at the corner of the avenue. Now and then she “visited with” old Miss Opposite;

but the more patrician matrons among those she called upon, or met at lawn functions, or had telephone chats with

— such dainty ladies as Mrs. Glave, Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. McCrystal, Mrs. Knight and others, seldom seemed to

call on my neglected Charlotte. Indeed, the only couple with whom she had relations of real cordiality, devoid of

any arrière-pensée or practical foresight, were the Farlows who had just come back from a business trip to Chile in

time to attend our wedding, with the Chatfields, McCoos, and a few others (but not Mrs. Junk or the even prouder

Mrs. Talbot). John Farlow was a middle-aged, quiet, quietly athletic, quietly successful dealer in sporting goods,

who had an office at Parkington, forty miles away: it was he who got me the cartridges for that Colt and showed

me how to use it, during a walk in the woods one Sunday; he was also what he called with a smile a part-time

lawyer and had handled some of Charlotte’s affairs. Jean, his youngish wife (and first cousin), was a long-limbed

girl in harlequin glasses with two boxer dogs, two pointed breasts and a big red mouth. She painted — landscapes

and portraits — and vividly do I remember praising, over cocktails, the picture she had made of a niece of hers,

little Rosaline Honeck, a rosy honey in a Girl Scout uniform, beret of green worsted, belt of green webbing,

charming shoulder-long curls — and John removed his pipe and said it was a pity Dolly (my Dolita) and Rosaline

were so critical of each other at school, but he hoped, and we all hoped, they would get on better when they

returned from their respective camps. We talked of the school. It had its drawbacks, and it had its virtues. “Of

course, too many of the tradespeople here are Italians,” said John, “but on the other hand we are still spared —” “I

wish,” interrupted Jean with a laugh, “Dolly and Rosaline were spending the summer together.” Suddenly I

imagined Lo returning from camp — brown, warm, drowsy, drugged — and was ready to weep with passion and

impatience.

19

A few words more about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon). I had been

always aware of the possessive streak in her, but I never thought she would be so crazily jealous of anything in my

life that had not been she. She showed a fierce insatiable curiosity for my past. She desired me to resuscitate all my

loves so that she might make me insult them, and trample upon them, and revoke them apostately and totally, thus

destroying my past. She made me tell her about my marriage to Valeria, who was of course a scream; but I also had

to invent, or to pad atrociously, a long series of mistresses for Charlotte’s morbid delectation. To keep her happy, I

had to present her with an illustrated catalogue of them, all nicely differentiated, according to the rules of those

American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio of races, with one — only one, but as cute as they

make them — chocolate-colored round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle of the front row. So I presented

my women, and had them smile and sway — the languorous blond, the fiery brunette, the sensual copperhead — as

if on parade in a bordello. The more popular and platitudinous I made them, the more Mrs. Humbert was pleased

with the show.

Never in my life had I confessed so much or received so many confessions. The sincerity and artlessness with

which she discussed what she called her “love-life,” from first necking to connubial catch-as-catch-can, were,

ethically, in striking contrast with my glib compositions, but technically the two sets were congeneric since both

were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my

characters and she for her mode of expression. I was considerably amused by certain remarkable sexual habits that

the good Harold Haze had had according to Charlotte who thought my mirth improper; but otherwise her

autobiography was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would have been. I never saw a healthier woman than she,

despite thinning diets.

Of my Lolita she seldom spoke — more seldom, in fact, than she did of the blurred, blond male baby whose

photograph to the exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom. In once of her tasteless reveries, she

predicted that the dead infant’s soul would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her present

wedlock. And although I felt no special urge to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harold’s production

(Lolita, with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it occurred to me that a prolonged

confinement, with a nice Cesarean operation and other complications in a safe maternity ward sometime next

spring, would give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps — and gorge the limp nymphet with

sleeping pills.

Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to

answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool’s book she had (A guide to Your Child’s Development),

published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at

each of her child’s birthdays. On Lo’s twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the

following epithets, ten out of forty, under “Your Child’s Personality”: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful,

impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty

remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening.

With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of

Lo’s little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized

bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to

improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s

anklets. And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling’s letters!

Dear Mummy and Hummy,

Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new

sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. I’m having a time. Love.

Dolly

“The dumb child,” said Mrs. Humbert, “has left out a word before ‘time.’ That sweater was all-wool, and I wish

you would not send her candy without consulting me.”

20

There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake — not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and

there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in

some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.

We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were making our way down a path cut through

the pine forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged

to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip “in the ebony” (as John had quipped) at five o’clock in

the morning last Sunday. “The water,” I said, “must have been quite cold.”

“That is not the point,” said the logical doomed dear. “He is subnormal, you see. And,” she continued (in that

carefully phrased way of hers that was beginning to tell on my health), “I have a very definite feeling our Louise is

in love with that moron.”

Feeling. “We feel Dolly is not doing as well” etc. (from an old school report).

The Humberts walked on, sandaled and robed.

“Do you know, Hum: I have one most ambitious dream,” pronounced Lady Hum, lowering her head — shy of

that dream — and communing with the tawny ground. “I would love to get hold of a real trained servant maid like

that German girl the Talbots spoke of; and have her live in the house.”

“No room,” I said.

“Come,” she said with her quizzical smile, “surely, chéri, you underestimate the possibilities of the Humbert

home. We would put her in Lo’s room. I intended to make a guestroom of that hole anyway. It’s the coldest and

meanest in the whole house.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, the skin of my cheekbones tensing up (this I take the trouble to note only

because my daughter’s skin did the same when she felt that way: disbelief, disgust, irritation).

“Are you bothered by Romantic Associations?” queried my wife — in allusion to her first surrender.

“Hell no,” said I. “I just wonder where will you put your daughter when you get your guest or your maid.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Humbert, dreaming, smiling, drawing out the “Ah” simultaneously with the raise of one

eyebrow and a soft exhalation of breath. “Little Lo, I’m afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all. Little Lo goes

straight from camp to a good boarding school with strict discipline and some sound religious training. And then —

Beardsley College. I have it all mapped out, you need not worry.”

She went on to say that she, Mrs. Humbert, would have to overcome her habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalli’s

sister who taught at St. Algebra. The dazzling lake emerged. I said I had forgotten my sunglasses in the car and

would catch up with her.

I had always thought that wringing one’s hands was a fictional gesture — the obscure outcome, perhaps, of

some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the

gesture (“look, Lord, at these chains!”) that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood.

Had Charlotte been Valeria, I would have known how to handle the situation; and “handle” is the word I want.

In the good old days, by merely twisting fat Valechka’s brittle wrist (the one she had fallen upon from a bicycle) I

could make her change her mind instantly; but anything of the sort in regard to Charlotte was unthinkable. Bland

American Charlotte frightened me. My lighthearted dream of controlling her through her passion for me was all

wrong. I dared not do anything to spoil the image of me she had set up to adore. I had toadied to her when she was

the awesome duenna of my darling, and a groveling something still persisted in my attitude toward her. The only

ace I held was her ignorance of my monstrous love for her Lo. She had been annoyed by Lo’s liking me; but my

feelings she could not divine. To Valeria I might have said: “Look here, you fat fool, c’est moi qui décide what is

good for Dolores Humbert.” To Charlotte, I could not even say (with ingratiating calm): “Excuse me, my dear, I

disagree. Let us give the child one more chance. Let me be her private tutor for a year or so. You once told me

yourself —” In fact, I could not say anything at all to Charlotte about the child without giving myself away. Oh,

you cannot imagine (as I had never imagined) what these women of principle are! Charlotte, who did not notice the

falsity of all the everyday conventions and rules of behavior, and foods, and books, and people she doted upon,

would distinguish at once a false intonation in anything I might say with a view to keeping Lo near. She was like a

musician who may be an odious vulgarian in ordinary life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will hear a false note

in music with diabolical accuracy of judgment. To break Charlotte’s will, I would have to break her heart. If I broke

her heart, her image of me would break too. If I said: “Either I have my way with Lolita, and you help me to keep

the matter quiet, or we part at once,” she would have turned as pale as a woman of clouded glass and slowly replied:

“All right, whatever you add or retract, this is the end.” And the end it would be.

Such, then, was the mess. I remember reaching the parking area and pumping a handful of rust-tasting water,

and drinking it as avidly as if it would give me magic wisdom, youth, freedom, a tiny concubine. For a while,

purple-robed, heel-dangling, I sat on the edge of one of the rude tables, under the whooshing pines. In the middle

distance, two little maidens in shorts and halters came out of a sun-dappled privy marked “Women.” Gum-chewing

Mabel (or Mabel’s understudy) laboriously, absentmindedly straddled a bicycle, and Marion, shaking her hair

because of the flies, settled behind, legs wide apart; and wobbling, they slowly, absently, merged with the light and

shade. Lolita! Father and daughter melting into these woods! The natural solution was to destroy Mrs. Humbert.

But how?

No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it. There was the famous dispatch of a

Mme Lacour in Arles, southern France, at the close of last century. An unidentified bearded six-footer, who, it was

later conjectured, had been the lady’s secret lover, walked up to her in a crowded street, soon after her marriage to

Colonel Lacour, and mortally stabbed her in the back, three times, while the Colonel, a small bulldog of a man,

hung onto the murderer’s arm. By a miraculous and beautiful coincidence, right at the moment when the operator

was in the act of loosening the angry little husband’s jaws (while several onlookers were closing in upon the group),

a cranky Italian in the house nearest to the scene set off by sheer accident some kind of explosive he was tinkering

with, and immediately the street was turned into a pandemonium of smoke, falling bricks and running people. The

explosion hurt no one (except that it knocked out game Colonel Lacour); but the lady’s vengeful lover ran when the

others ran — and lived happily ever after.

Now look what happens when the operator himself plans a perfect removal.

I walked down to Hourglass Lake. The spot from which we and a few other “nice” couples (the Farlows, the

Chatfields) bathed was a kind of small cove; my Charlotte liked it because it was almost “a private beach.” The

main bathing facilities (or drowning facilities” as the Ramsdale Journal had had occasion to say) were in the left

(eastern) part of the hourglass, and could not be seen from our covelet. To our right, the pines soon gave way to a

curve of marshland which turned again into forest on the opposite side.

I sat down beside my wife so noiselessly that she started.

“Shall we go in?” she asked.

“We shall in a minute. Let me follow a train of thought.”

I thought. More than a minute passed.

“All right. Come on.”

“Was I on that train?”

“You certainly were.”

“I hope so,” said Charlotte entering the water. It soon reached the gooseflesh of her thick thighs; and then,

joining her outstretched hands, shutting her mouth tight, very plain-faced in her black rubber headgear, charlotte

flung herself forward with a great splash.

Slowly we swam out into the shimmer of the lake.

On the opposite bank, at least a thousand paces away (if one cold walk across water), I could make out the tiny

figures of two men working like beavers on their stretch of shore. I knew exactly who they were: a retired

policeman of Polish descent and the retired plumber who owned most of the timber on that side of the lake. And I

also knew they were engaged in building, just for the dismal fun of the thing, a wharf. The knocks that reached us

seemed so much bigger than what could be distinguished of those dwarfs’ arms and tools; indeed, one suspected the

director of those acrosonic effects to have been at odds with the puppet-master, especially since the hefty crack of

each diminutive blow lagged behind its visual version.

The short white-sand strip of “our” beach — from which by now we had gone a little way to reach deep water

— was empty on weekday mornings. There was nobody around except those two tiny very busy figures on the

opposite side, and a dark-red private plane that droned overhead, and then disappeared in the blue. The setting was

really perfect for a brisk bubbling murder, and here was the subtle point: the man of law and the man of water were

just near enough to witness an accident and just far enough not to observe a crime. They were near enough to hear

a distracted bather thrashing about and bellowing for somebody to come and help him save his drowning wife; and

they were too far to distinguish (if they happened to look too soon) that the anything but distracted swimmer was

finishing to tread his wife underfoot. I was not yet at that stage; I merely want to convey the ease of the act, the

nicety of the setting! So there was Charlotte swimming on with dutiful awkwardness (she was a very mediocre

mermaid), but not without a certain solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?); and as I watched, with

the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know — trying to see things as you will remember having seen

them), the glossy whiteness of her wet face so little tanned despite all her endeavors, and her pale lips, and her

naked convex forehead, and the tight black cap, and the plump wet neck, I knew that all I had to do was to drop

back, take a deep breath, then grab her by the ankle and rapidly dive with my captive corpse. I say corpse because

surprise, panic and inexperience would cause her to inhale at once a lethal gallon of lake, while I would be able to

hold on for at least a full minute, open-eyed under water. The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star

across the blackness of the contemplated crime. It was like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer holding the

ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery twilight. I might come up for a mouthful of air while still

holding her down, and then would dive again as many times as would be necessary, and only when the curtain

came down on her for good, would I permit myself to yell for help. And when some twenty minutes later the two

puppets steadily growing arrived in a rowboat, one half newly painted, poor Mrs. Humbert Humbert, the victim of

a cramp or coronary occlusion, or both, would be standing on her head in the inky ooze, some thirty feet below the

smiling surface of Hourglass Lake.

Simple, was it not? But what d’ye know, folks — I just could not make myself do it!

She swam beside me, a trustful and clumsy seal, and all the logic of passion screamed in my ear: Now is the

time! And, folks, I just couldn’t! In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned, and still hell

screamed its counsel, and still I could not make myself drown the poor, slippery, big-bodied creature. The scream

grew more and more remote as I realized the melancholy fact that neither tomorrow, nor Friday, nor any other day

or night, could I make myself put her to death. Oh, I could visualize myself slapping Valeria’s breasts out of

alignment, or otherwise hurting her — and I could see myself, no less clearly, shooting her lover in the underbelly

and making him say “akh!” and sit down. But I could not kill Charlotte — especially when things were on the

whole not quite as hopeless, perhaps, as they seemed at first wince on that miserable morning. Were I to catch her

by her strong kicking foot; were I to see her amazed look, hear her awful voice; were I still to go through with the

ordeal, her ghost would haunt me all my life. Perhaps if the year were 1447 instead of 1947 I might have

hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter

of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of

the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and

gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but

not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask

the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet

private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends!

We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to

control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a

nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal

heaven among an eternal alchemy of asphalt and rubber and metal and stone — but thank God, not water, not water!

Nonetheless it was a very close shave, speaking quite objectively. And now comes the point of my perfect-crime

parable.

We sat down on our towels in the thirsty sun. She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her

stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply. She extended one

arm and groped in the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. She sat up and smoked. She examined her right

shoulder. She kissed me heavily with open smoky mouth. Suddenly, down the sand bank behind us, from under the

bushes and pines, a stone rolled, then another.

“Those disgusting prying kids,” said Charlotte, holding up her big bra to her breast and turning prone again. “I

shall have to speak about that to Peter Krestovski.”

From the debouchment of the trail came a rustle, a footfall, and Jean Farlow marched down with her easel and

things.

“You scared us,” said Charlotte.

Jean said she had been up there, in a place of green concealment, spying on nature (spies are generally shot),

trying to finish a lakescape, but it was no good, she had no talent whatever (which was quite true) — “And have

you ever tried painting, Humbert?” Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming.

He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be

picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving

them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts.

Her long brown legs were about as attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare. She showed her gums when she

smiled.

“I almost put both of you into my lake,” she said. “I even noticed something you overlooked. You [addressing

Humbert] had your wrist watch on in, yes, sir, you had.”

“Waterproof,” said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.

Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte’s gift, then put back Humbert’s hand on the sand,

palm up.

“You could see anything that way,” remarked Charlotte coquettishly.

Jean sighed. “I once saw,” she said, “two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love. Their

shadows were giants. And I told you about Mr. Tomson at daybreak. Next time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the

ivory. He is really a freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears

—”

“Hullo there,” said John’s voice.

21

My habit of being silent when displeased or, more exactly, the cold and scaly quality of my displeased silence,

used to frighten Valeria out of her wits. She used to whimper and wail, saying “Ce qui me rend folle, c’est que je ne

sais à quoi tu penses quand tu es comme ça.” I tried being silent with Charlotte — and she just chirped on, or

chucked my silence under the chin. An astonishing woman! I would retire to my former room, now a regular

“studio,” mumbling I had after all a learned opus to write, and cheerfully Charlotte went on beautifying the home,

warbling on the telephone and writing letters. From my window, through the lacquered shiver of poplar leaves, I

could see her crossing the street and contentedly mailing her letter to Miss Phalen’s sister.

The week of scattered showers and shadows which elapsed after our last visit to the motionless sands of

Hourglass Lake was one of the gloomiest I can recall. Then came two or three dim rays of hope — before the

ultimate sunburst.

It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order and that I might as well use it. If I dared not

meddle with my wife’s plans for her daughter (getting warmer and browner every day in the fair weather of

hopeless distance), I could surely devise some general means to assert myself in a general way that might be later

directed toward a particular occasion. One evening, Charlotte herself provided me with an opening.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said looking at me with fond eyes over a spoonful of soup. “In the fall we two

are going to England.”

I swallowed my spoonful, wiped my lips with pink paper (Oh, the cool rich linens of Mirana Hotel!) and said:

“I have also a surprise for you, my dear. We two are not going to England.”

“Why, what’s the matter?” she said, looking — with more surprise than I had counted upon — at my hands (I

was involuntarily folding and tearing and crushing and tearing again the innocent pink napkin). My smiling face set

her somewhat at ease, however.

“The matter is quite simple,” I replied. “Even in the most harmonious of households, as ours is, not all decisions

are taken by the female partner. There are certain things that the husband is there to decide. I can well imagine the

thrill that you, a healthy American gal, must experience at crossing the Atlantic on the same ocean liner with Lady

Bumble — or Sam Bumble, the Frozen Meat King, or a Hollywood harlot. And I doubt not that you and I would

make a pretty ad for the Traveling Agency when portrayed looking — you, frankly starry-eyed, I, controlling my

envious admiration — at the Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards, or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they are called. But I

happen to be allergic to Europe, including merry old England. As you well know, I have nothing but very sad

associations with the Old and rotting World. No colored ads in your magazines will change the situation.”

“My darling,” said Charlotte. “I really —”

“No, wait a minute. The present matter is only incidental. I am concerned with a general trend. When you

wanted me to spend my afternoons sunbathing on the Lake instead of doing my work, I gladly gave in and became

a bronzed glamour boy for your sake, instead of remaining a scholar and, well, an educator. When you lead me to

bridge and bourbon with the charming Farlows, I meekly follow. No, please, wait. When you decorate your home,

I do not interfere with your schemes. When you decide — when you decide all kinds of matters, I may be in

complete, or in partial, let us say, disagreement — but I say nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore the

general. I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules. I am not cross. I am not cross at all. Don’t do that.

But I am one half of this household, and have a small but distinct voice.”

She had come to my side and had fallen on her knees and was slowly, but very vehemently, shaking her head

and clawing at my trousers. She said she had never realized. She said I was her ruler and her god. She said Louise

had gone, and let us make love right away. She said I must forgive her or she would die.

This little incident filled me with considerable elation. I told her quietly that it was a matter not of asking

forgiveness, but of changing one’s ways; and I resolved to press my advantage and spend a good deal of time, aloof

and moody, working at my book — or at least pretending to work.

The “studio bed” in my former room had long been converted into the sofa it had always been at heart, and

Charlotte had warned me since the very beginning of our cohabitation that gradually the room would be turned into

a regular “writer’s den.” A couple of days after the British Incident, I was sitting in a new and very comfortable

easy chair, with a large volume in my lap, when Charlotte rapped with her ring finger and sauntered in. How

different were her movements from those of my Lolita, when she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans,

smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her shirt

unfastened. Let me tell you, however, something. Behind the brashness of little Haze, and the poise of big Haze, a

trickle of shy life ran that tasted the same, that murmured the same. A great French doctor once told my father that

in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same “voice.”

So Charlotte sauntered in. She felt all was not well between us. I had pretended to fall asleep the night before,

and the night before that, as soon as we had gone to bed, and had risen at dawn.

Tenderly, she inquired if she were not “interrupting.”

“Not at the moment,” I said, turning volume C of the Girls’ Encyclopedia around to examine a picture printed

“bottom-edge” as printers say.

Charlotte went up to a little table of imitation mahogany with a drawer. She put her hand upon it. The little table

was ugly, no doubt, but it had done nothing to her.

“I have always wanted to ask you,” she said (businesslike, not coquettish), “why is this thing locked up? Do you

want it in this room? It’s so abominably uncouth.”

“Leave it alone,” I said. I was Camping in Scandinavia.

“Is there a key?” “Hidden.”

“Oh, Hum…”

“Locked up love letters.”

She gave me one of those wounded — doe looks that irritated me so much, and then, not quite knowing if I was

serious, or how to keep up the conversation, stood for several slow pages (Campus, Canada, Candid Camera,

Candy) peering at the window pane rather than through it, drumming upon it with sharp almond-and-rose

fingernails.

Presently (at Canoeing or Canvasback) she strolled up to my chair and sank down, tweedily, weightily, on its

arm, inundating me with the perfume my first wife had used. “Would his lordship like to spend the fall here?” she

asked, pointing with her little finger at an autumn view in a conservative Eastern State. “Why?” (very distinctly and

slowly). She shrugged. (Probably Harold used to take a vacation at that time. Open season. Conditional reflex on

her part.)

“I think I know where that is,” she said, still pointing. “There is a hotel I remember, Enchanted Hunters, quaint,

isn’t it? And the food is a dream. And nobody bothers anybody.”

She rubbed her cheek against my temple. Valeria soon got over that.

“Is there anything special you would like for dinner, dear? John and Jean will drop in later.”

I answered with a grunt. She kissed me on my underlip, and, brightly saying she would bake a cake (a tradition

subsisted from my lodging days that I adored her cakes), left me to my idleness.

Carefully putting down the open book where she had sat (it attempted to send forth a rotation of waves, but an

inserted pencil stopped the pages), I checked the hiding place of the key: rather self-consciously it lay under the old

expensive safety razor I had used before she bought me a much better and cheaper one. Was it the perfect hiding

place — there, under the razor, in the groove of its velvet-lined case? The case lay in a small trunk where I kept

various business papers. Could I improve upon this? Remarkable how difficult it is to conceal things — especially

when one’s wife keeps monkeying with the furniture.

22

I think it was exactly a week after our last swim that the noon mail brought a reply from the second Miss Phalen.

The lady wrote she had just returned to St. Algebra from her sister’s funeral. “Euphemia had never been the same

after breaking that hip.” As to the matter of Mrs. Humbert’s daughter, she wished to report that it was too late to

enroll her this year; but that she, the surviving Phalen, was practically certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Humbert brought

Dolores over in January, her admittance might be arranged.

Next day, after lunch, I went to see “our” doctor, a friendly fellow whose perfect bedside manner and complete

reliance on a few patented drugs adequately masked his ignorance of, and indifference to, medical science. The fact

that Lo would have to come back to Ramsdale was a treasure of anticipation. For this event I wanted to be fully

prepared. I had in fact begun my campaign earlier, before Charlotte made that cruel decision of hers. I had to be

sure when my lovely child arrived, that very night, and then night after night, until St. Algebra took her away from

me, I would possess the means of putting two creatures to sleep so thoroughly that neither sound nor touch should

rouse them. Throughout most of July I had been experimenting with various sleeping powders, trying them out on

Charlotte, a great taker of pills. The last dose I had given her (she thought it was a tablet of mild bromides — to

anoint her nerves) had knocked her out for four solid hours. I had put the radio at full blast. I had blazed in her face

an olisbos-like flashlight. I had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her — and nothing had disturbed the rhythm of

her calm and powerful breathing. However, when I had done such a simple thing as kiss her, she had awakened at

once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped). This would not do, I thought; had to get something still

safer. At first, Dr. Byron did not seem to believe me when I said his last prescription was no match for my

insomnia. He suggested I try again, and for a moment diverted my attention by showing me photographs of his

family. He had a fascinating child of Dolly’s age; but I saw through his tricks and insisted he prescribe the

mightiest pill extant. He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, “would really

work”; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end,

which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could

calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for

centuries. I love to fool doctors, and though inwardly rejoicing, pocketed the pills with a skeptical shrug.

Incidentally, I had had to be careful with him. Once, in another connection, a stupid lapse on my part made me

mention my last sanatorium, and I thought I saw the tips of his ears twitch. Being not at all keen for Charlotte or

anybody else to know that period of my past, I had hastily explained that I had once done some research among the

insane for a novel. But no matter; the old rogue certainly had a sweet girleen.

I left in great spirits. Steering my wife’s car with one finger, I contentedly rolled homeward. Ramsdale had, after

all, lots of charm. The cicadas whirred; the avenue had been freshly watered. Smoothly, almost silkily, I turned

down into our steep little street. Everything was somehow so right that day. So blue and green. I knew the sun

shone because my ignition key was reflected in the windshield; and I knew it was exactly half past three because

the nurse who came to massage Miss Opposite every afternoon was tripping down the narrow sidewalk in her

white stockings and shoes. As usual, Junk’s hysterical setter attacked me as I rolled downhill, and as usual, the

local paper was lying on the porch where it had just been hurled by Kenny.

The day before I had ended the regime of aloofness I had imposed upon myself, and now uttered a cheerful

homecoming call as I opened the door of the living room. With her cream-white nape and bronze bun to me,

wearing the yellow blouse and maroon slacks she had on when I first met her, Charlotte sat at the corner bureau

writing a letter. My hand still on the doorknob, I repeated my hearty cry. Her writing hand stopped. She sat still for

a moment; then she slowly turned in her chair and rested her elbow on its curved back. Her face, disfigured by her

emotion, was not a pretty sight as she stared at my legs and said:

“The Haze woman, the big bitch, the old cat, the obnoxious mamma, the — the old stupid Haze is no longer

your dupe. She has — she has…”

My fair accuser stopped, swallowing her venom and her tears. Whatever Humbert Humbert said — or attempted

to say — is inessential. She went on:

“You’re a monster. You’re a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud. If you come near — I’ll scream out the

window. Get back!”

Again, whatever H.H. murmured may be omitted, I think.

“I am leaving tonight. This is all yours. Only you’ll never, never see that miserable brat again. Get out of this

room.”

Reader, I did. I went up to the ex-semi-studio. Arms akimbo, I stood for a moment quite still and self-composed,

surveying from the threshold the raped little table with its open drawer, a key hanging from the lock, four other

household keys on the table top. I walked across the landing into the Humberts’ bedroom, and calmly removed my

diary from under her pillow into my pocket. Then I started to walk downstairs, but stopped half-way: she was

talking on the telephone which happened to be plugged just outside the door of the living room. I wanted to hear

what she was saying: she canceled an order for something or other, and returned to the parlor. I rearranged my

respiration and went through the hallway to the kitchen. There, I opened a bottle of Scotch. She could never resist

Scotch. Then I walked into the dining room and from there, through the half-open door, contemplated Charlotte’s

broad back.

“You are ruining my life and yours,” I said quietly. “Let us be civilized people. It is all your hallucination. You

are crazy, Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel. Your name and hers were put in by mere

chance. Just because they came handy. Think it over. I shall bring you a drink.”

She neither answered nor turned, but went on writing in a scorching scrawl whatever she was writing. A third

letter, presumably (two in stamped envelopes were already laid out on the desk). I went back to the kitchen.

I set out two glasses (to St. Algebra? to Lo?) and opened the refrigerator. It roared at me viciously while I

removed the ice from its heart. Rewrite. Let her read it again. She will not recall details. Change, forge. Write a

fragment and show it to her or leave it lying around. Why do faucets sometimes whine so horribly? A horrible

situation, really. The little pillow-shaped blocks of ice-pillows for polar teddy bear, Lo — emitted rasping,

crackling, tortured sounds as the warm water loosened them in their cells. I bumped down the glasses side by side.

I poured in the whiskey and a dram of soda. She had tabooed my pin. Bark and bang went the icebox. Carrying the

glasses, I walked through the dining room and spoke through the parlor door which was a fraction ajar, not quite

space enough for my elbow.

“I have made you a drink,” I said.

She did not answer, the mad bitch, and I placed the glasses on the sideboard near the telephone, which had

started to ring.

“Leslie speaking. Leslie Tomson,” said Leslie Tomson who favored a dip at dawn. “Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been

run over and you’d better come quick.”

I answered, perhaps a bit testily, that my wife was safe and sound, and still holding the receiver, I pushed open

the door and said:

“There’s this man saying you’ve been killed, Charlotte.”

But there was no Charlotte in the living room.

23

I rushed out. The far side of our steep little street presented a peculiar sight. A big black glossy Packard had

climbed Miss Opposite’s sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk (where a tartan laprobe had dropped in a heap),

and stood there, shining in the sun, its doors open like wings, its front wheels deep in evergreen shrubbery. To the

anatomical right of this car, on the trim turn of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, welldressed

— doublebreasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tie — lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size

wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their physical

accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss

O.’s nurse running with a rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened porch — where the

propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself may be imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown the

rhythmical yaps of the Junk setter walking from group to group — from a bunch of neighbors already collected on

the sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the car which he had finally run to earth, and then to another

group on the lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man with tortoise shell glasses. At this point, I

should explain that the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due

to their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down the grade; that the fellow

with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had

just watered on the green bank where he lay — a banked banker so to speak — was not in a dead faint, but was

comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on

the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the

mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as

she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite’s lawn. These

were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to

fragments in my trouser pocket.

Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took over. The widower, a man of exceptional

self-control, neither wept nor raved. He staggered a bit, that he did; but he opened his mouth only to impart such

information or issue such directions as were strictly necessary in connection with the identification, examination

and disposal of a dead woman, the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood. The sun was

still a blinding red when he was put to bed in Dolly’s room by his two friends, gentle John and dewy-eyed Jean;

who, to be near, retired to the Humberts’ bedroom for the night; which, for all I know, they may not have spent as

innocently as the solemnity of the occasion required.

I have no reason to dwell, in this very special memoir, on the pre-funeral formalities that had to be attended to,

or on the funeral itself, which was as quiet as the marriage had been. But a few incidents pertaining to those four or

five days after Charlotte’s simple death, have to be noted.

My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as the child who had slept in that bed. Next

morning I hastened to inspect the fragments of letters in my pocket. They had got too thoroughly mixed up to be

sorted into three complete sets. I assumed that “… and you had better find it because I cannot buy…” came from a

letter to Lo; and other fragments seemed to point to Charlotte’s intention of fleeing with Lo to Parkington, or even

back to Pisky, lest the vulture snatch her precious lamb. Other tatters and shreds (never had I thought I had such

strong talons) obviously referred to an application not to St. A. but to another boarding school which was said to be

so harsh and gray and gaunt in its methods (although supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the

nickname of “Reformatory for Young Ladies.” Finally, the third epistle was obviously addressed to me. I made out

such items as “…after a year of separation we may…” “…oh, my dearest, oh my…” “…worse than if it had been a

woman you kept…” “…or, maybe, I shall die…” But on the whole my gleanings made little sense; the various

fragments of those three hasty missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as their elements had been in

poor Charlotte’s head.

That day John had to see a customer, and Jean had to feed her dogs, and so I was to be deprived temporarily of

my friends’ company. The dear people were afraid I might commit suicide if left alone, and since no other friends

were available (Miss Opposite was incommunicado, the McCoos were busy building a new house miles away, and

the Chatfields had been recently called to Maine by some family trouble of their own), Leslie and Louise were

commissioned to keep me company under the pretense of helping me to sort out and pack a multitude of orphaned

things. In a moment of superb inspiration I showed the kind and credulous Farlows (we were waiting for Leslie to

come for his paid tryst with Louise) a little photograph of Charlotte I had found among her affairs. From a boulder

she smiled through blown hair. It had been taken in April 1934, a memorable spring. While on a business visit to

the States, I had had occasion to spend several months in Pisky. We met — and had a mad love affair. I was

married, alas, and she was engaged to Haze, but after I returned to Europe, we corresponded through a friend, now

dead. Jean whispered she had heard some rumors and looked at the snapshot, and, still looking, handed it to John,

and John removed his pipe and looked at lovely and fast Charlotte Becker, and handed it back to me. Then they left

for a few hours. Happy Louise was gurgling and scolding her swain in the basement.

hardly had the Farlows gone than a blue-chinned cleric called — and I tried to make the interview as brief as

was consistent with neither hurting his feelings nor arousing his doubts. Yes, I would devote all my life to the

child’s welfare. Here, incidentally, was a little cross that Charlotte Becker had given me when we were both young.

I had a female cousin, a respectable spinster in New York. There we would find a good private school for Dolly.

Oh, what a crafty Humbert!

For the benefit of Leslie and Louise who might (and did) report it to John and Jean I made a tremendously loud

and beautifully enacted long-distance call and simulated a conversation with Shirley Holmes. When John and Jean

returned, I completely took them in by telling them, in a deliberately wild and confused mutter, that Lo had gone

with the intermediate group on a five-day hike and could not be reached.

“Good Lord,” said Jean, “what shall we do?”

John said it was perfectly simple — he would get the Climax police to find the hikers — it would not take them

an hour. In fact, he knew the country and —

“Look,” he continued, “why don’ I drive there right now, and you may sleep with Jean” — (he did not really add

that but Jean supported his offer so passionately that it might be implied).

I broke down. I pleaded with John to let things remain the way they were. I said I could not bear to have the

child all around me, sobbing, clinging to me, she was so high-strung, the experience might react on her future,

psychiatrists have analyzed such cases. There was a sudden pause.

“Well, you are the doctor,” said John a little bluntly. “But after all I was Charlotte’s friend and adviser. One

would like to know what you are going to do about the child anyway.”

“John,” cried Jean, “she is his child, not Harold Haze’s. Don’t you understand? Humbert is Dolly’s real father.”

“I see,” said John. “I am sorry. Yes. I see. I did not realize that. It simplifies matters, of course. And whatever

you feel is right.”

The distraught father went on to say he would go and fetch his delicate daughter immediately after the funeral,

and would do his best to give her a good time in totally different surroundings, perhaps a trip to New Mexico or

California — granted, of course, he lived.

So artistically did I impersonate the calm of ultimate despair, the hush before some crazy outburst, that the

perfect Farlows removed me to their house. They had a good cellar, as cellars go in this country; and that was

helpful, for I feared insomnia and a ghost.

Now I must explain my reasons for keeping Dolores away. Naturally, at first, when Charlotte had just been

eliminated and I re-entered the house a free father, and gulped down the two whiskey-and-sodas I had prepared,

and topped them with a pint or two of my “pin,” and went to the bathroom to get away from neighbors and friends,

there was but one thing in my mind and pulse — namely, the awareness that a few hours hence, warm, brownhaired,

and mine, mine, mine, Lolita would be in my arms, shedding tears that I would kiss away faster than they

could well. But as I stood wide-eyed and flushed before the mirror, John Farlow tenderly tapped to inquire if I was

okay — and I immediately realized it would be madness on my part to have her in the house with all those

busybodies milling around and scheming to take her away from me. Indeed, unpredictable Lo herself might — who

knows? — show some foolish distrust of me, a sudden repugnance, vague fear and the like — and gone would be

the magic prize at the very instant of triumph.

Speaking of busybodies, I had another visitor — friend Beale, the fellow who eliminated my wife. Stodgy and

solemn, looking like a kind of assistant executioner, with his bulldog jowls, small black eyes, thickly rimmed

glasses and conspicuous nostrils, he was ushered in by John who then left us, closing the door upon us, with the

utmost tact. Suavely saying he had twins in my stepdaughter’s class, my grotesque visitor unrolled a large diagram

he had made of the accident. It was, as my stepdaughter would have put it, “a beaut,” with all kinds of impressive

arrows and dotted lines in varicolored inks. Mrs. H.H.’s trajectory was illustrated at several points by a series of

those little outline figures — doll-like wee career girl or WAC — used in statistics as visual aids. Very clearly and

conclusively, this route came into contact with a boldly traced sinuous line representing two consecutive swerves

— one which the Beale car made to avoid the Junk dog (dog not shown), and the second, a kind of exaggerated

continuation of the first, meant to avert the tragedy. A very black cross indicated the spot where the trim little

outline figure had at last come to rest on the sidewalk. I looked for some similar mark to denote the place on the

embankment where my visitor’s huge wax father had reclined, but there was none. That gentleman, however, had

signed the document as a witness underneath the name of Leslie Tomson, Miss Opposite and a few other people.

With his hummingbird pencil deftly and delicately flying from one point to another, Frederick demonstrated his

absolute innocence and the recklessness of my wife: while he was in the act of avoiding the dog, she had slipped on

the freshly watered asphalt and plunged forward whereas she should have flung herself not forward but backward

(Fred showed how by a jerk of his padded shoulder). I said it was certainly not his fault, and the inquest upheld my

view.

Breathing violently though jet-black tense nostrils, he shook his head and my hand; then, with an air of perfect

savoir vivre and gentlemanly generosity, he offered to pay the funeral-home expenses. He expected me to refuse

his offer. With a drunken sob of gratitude I accepted it. This took him aback. Slowly, incredulously, he repeated

what he had said. I thanked him again, even more profusely than before.

In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul was for a moment resolved. And no wonder! I had

actually seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate — and its padded shoulder. A brilliant and

monstrous mutation had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument. Within the intricacies of the pattern

(hurrying housewife, slippery pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its wheel), I could dimly

distinguish my own vile contribution. Had I not been such a fool — or such an intuitive genius — to preserve that

journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to the

mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing

phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the

strong and the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate’s formal handshake (as reproduced by Beale before leaving the room)

brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury — I wept.

24

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead

loomed above Ramsdale’s white church tower when I looked around me for the last time. For unknown adventures

I was leaving the livid house where I had rented a room only ten weeks before. The shades — thrifty, practical

bamboo shades — were already down. On porches or in the house their rich textures lend modern drama. The

house of heaven must seem pretty bare after that. A raindrop fell on my knuckles. I went back into the house for

something or other while John was putting my bags into the car, and then a funny thing happened. I do not know if

in these tragic notes I have sufficiently stressed the peculiar “sending” effect that the writer’s good looks —

pseudo-Celtic, attractively simian, boyishly manly — had on women of every age and environment. Of course,

such announcements made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once in a while I have to remind the

reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a

dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book.

There may be more to it in the present case. My gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind’s eye if my story is

to be properly understood. Pubescent Lo swooned to Humbert’s charm as she did to hiccuppy music; adult Lotte

loved me with a mature, possessive passion that I now deplore and respect more than I care to say. Jean Farlow,

who was thirty-one and absolutely neurotic, had also apparently developed a strong liking for me. She was

handsome in a carved-Indian sort of way, with a burnt sienna complexion. Her lips were like large crimson polyps,

and when she emitted her special barking laugh, she showed large dull teeth and pale gums.

She was very tall, wore either slacks with sandals or billowing skirts with ballet slippers, drank any strong

liquor in any amount, had had two miscarriages, wrote stories about animals, painted, as the reader knows,

lakescapes, was already nursing the cancer that was to kill her at thirty-three, and was hopelessly unattractive to me.

Judge then of my alarm when a few seconds before I left (she and I stood in the hallway) Jean, with her always

trembling fingers, took me by the temples, and, tears in her bright blue eyes, attempted, unsuccessfully, to glue

herself to my lips.

“Take care of yourself,” she said, “kiss your daughter for me.”

A clap of thunder reverberated throughout the house, and she added:

“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again” (Jean, whatever,

wherever you are, in minus time-space or plus soul-time, forgive me all this, parenthesis included).

And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was

whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was

confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where

Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still

wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.

25

One might suppose that with all blocks removed and a prospect of delirious and unlimited delights before me, I

would have mentally sunk back, heaving a sigh of delicious relief. Eh bine, pas du tout! Instead of basking in the

beams of smiling Chance, I was obsessed by all sorts of purely ethical doubts and fears. For instance: might it not

surprise people that Lo was so consistently debarred from attending festive and funeral functions in her immediate

family? You remember — we had not had her at our wedding. Or another thing: granted it was the long hairy arm

of Coincidence that had reached out to remove an innocent woman, might Coincidence not ignore in a heathen

moment what its twin lamb had done and hand Lo a premature note of commiseration? True, the accident had been

reported only by the Ramsdale Journal — not by the Parkington Recorder or the Climax Herald, Camp Q being in

another state, and local deaths having no federal news interest; but I could not help fancying that somehow Dolly

Haze had been informed already, and that at the very time I was on my way to fetch her, she was being driven to

Ramsdale by friends unknown to me. Still more disquieting than all these conjectures and worries, was the fact that

Humbert Humbert, a brand-new American citizen of obscure European origin, had taken no steps toward becoming

the legal guardian of his dead wife’s daughter (twelve years and seven months old). Would I ever dare take those

steps? I could not repress a shiver whenever I imagined my nudity hemmed in by mysterious statutes in the

merciless glare of the Common Law.

My scheme was a marvel of primitive art: I would whizz over to Camp Q, tell Lolita her mother was about to

undergo a major operation at an invented hospital, and then keep moving with my sleepy nymphet from inn to inn

while her mother got better and better and finally died. But as I traveled campward my anxiety grew. I could not

bear to think I might not find Lolita there — or find, instead, another, scared, Lolita clamoring for some family

friend: not the Farlows, thank God — she hardly knew them — but might there not be other people I had not

reckoned with? Finally, I decided to make the long-distance call I had simulated so well a few days before. It was

raining hard when I pulled up in a muddy suburb of Parkington, just before the Fork, one prong of which bypassed

the city and led to the highway which crossed the hills to Lake Climax and Camp Q. I flipped off the ignition and

for quite a minute sat in the car bracing myself for that telephone call, and staring at the rain, at the inundated

sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous thing, really, painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of its arms

to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood dripped upon its argent chains. No wonder that stopping

beside those nightmare cripples is taboo. I drove up to a gasoline station. A surprise awaited me when at last the

coins had satisfactorily clanked down and a voice was allowed to answer mine.

Holmes, the camp mistress, informed me that Dolly had gone Monday (this was Wednesday) on a hike in the

hills with her group and was expected to return rather late today. Would I care to come tomorrow, and what was

exactly — Without going into details, I said that her mother was hospitalized, that the situation was grave, that the

child should not be told it was grave and that she should be ready to leave with me tomorrow afternoon. The two

voices parted in an explosion of warmth and good will, and through some freak mechanical flaw all my coins came

tumbling back to me with a hitting-the-jackpot clatter that almost made me laugh despite the disappointment at

having to postpone bliss. One wonders if this sudden discharge, this spasmodic refund, was not correlated

somehow, in the mind of McFate, with my having invented that little expedition before ever learning of it as I did

now.

What next? I proceeded to the business center of Parkington and devoted the whole afternoon (the weather had

cleared, the wet town was like silver-and-glass) to buying beautiful things for Lo. Goodness, what crazy purchases

were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days for check weaves, bright cottons, frills,

puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts! Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as

Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? Did I

have something special in mind? coaxing voices asked me. Swimming suits? We have them in all shades. Dream

pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black. What about playsuits? Slips? No slips. Lo and I loathed

slips.

One of my guides in these matters was an anthropometric entry made by her mother on Lo’s twelfth birthday

(the reader remembers that Know-Your-Child book). I had the feeling that Charlotte, moved by obscure motives of

envy and dislike, had added an inch here, a pound there; but since the nymphet had no doubt grown somewhat in

the last seven months, I thought I could safely accept most of those January measurements: hip girth, twenty-nine

inches; thigh girth (just below the gluteal sulcus), seventeen; calf girth and neck circumference, eleven; chest

circumference, twenty-seven; upper arm girth, eight; waist, twenty-three; stature, fifty-seven inches; weight,

seventy-eight pounds; figure, linear; intelligence quotient, 121; vermiform appendix present, thank God.

Apart from measurements, I could of course visualize Lolita with hallucinational lucidity; and nursing as I did a

tingle on my breastbone at the exact spot her silky top had come level once or twice with my heart; and feeling as I

did her warm weight in my lap (so that, in a sense, I was always “with Lolita” as a woman is “with child”), I was

not surprised to discover later that my computation had been more or less correct. Having moreover studied a

midsummer sale book, it was with a very knowing air that I examined various pretty articles, sport shoes, sneakers,

pumps of crushed kid for crushed kids. The painted girl in black who attended to all these poignant needs of mine

turned parental scholarship and precise description into commercial euphemisms, such as “petite.” Another, much

older woman, in a white dress, with a pancake make-up, seemed to be oddly impressed by my knowledge of junior

fashions; perhaps I had a midget for mistress; so, when shown a skirt with “cute” pockets in front, I intentionally

put a naïve male question and was rewarded by a smiling demonstration of the way the zipper worked in the back

of the skirt. I had next great fun with all kinds of shorts and briefs — phantom little Lolitas dancing, falling,

daisying all over the counter. We rounded up the deal with some prim cotton pajamas in popular butcher-boy style.

Humbert, the popular butcher.

There is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in those large stores where according to ads a career girl

can get a complete desk-to-date wardrobe, and where little sister can dream of the day when her wool jersey will

make the boys in the back row of the classroom drool. Life-size plastic figures of snubbed-nosed children with

dun-colored, greenish, brown-dotted, faunish faces floated around me. I realized I was the only shopper in that

rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium. I sensed strange thoughts form in the

minds of the languid ladies that escorted me from counter to counter, from rock ledge to seaweed, and the belts and

the bracelets I chose seemed to fall from siren hands into transparent water. I bought an elegant valise, had my

purchases put into it, and repaired to the nearest hotel, well pleased with my day.

Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical afternoon of fastidious shopping, I recalled the hotel or inn

with the seductive name of The Enchanted Hunters with Charlotte had happened to mention shortly before my

liberation. With the help of a guidebook I located it in the secluded town of Briceland, a four-hour drive from Lo’s

camp. I could have telephoned but fearing my voice might go out of control and lapse into coy croaks of broken

English, I decided to send a wire ordering a room with twin beds for the next night. What a comic, clumsy,

wavering Prince Charming I was! How some of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with

the wording of my telegram! What should I put: Humbert and daughter? Humberg and small daughter? Homberg

and immature girl? Homburg and child? The droll mistake — the “g” at the end — which eventually came through

may have been a telepathic echo of these hesitations of mine.

And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my broodings over the philter I had with me! Oh miserly Hamburg!

Was he not a very Enchanted Hunter as he deliberated with himself over his boxful of magic ammunition? To rout

the monster of insomnia should he try himself one of those amethyst capsules? There were forty of them, all told

— forty nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of one such night in order to sleep?

Certainly not: much too precious was each tiny plum, each microscopic planetarium with its live startdust. Oh, let

me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

26

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than

a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August

15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head — everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita,

Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.

27

Still in Parkington. Finally, I did achieve an hour’s slumber — from which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly

exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger. By then it was six in the morning, and it

suddenly occurred to me it might be a good thing to arrive at the camp earlier than I had said. From Parkington I

had still a hundred miles to go, and there would be more than that to the Hazy Hills and Briceland. If I had said I

would come for Dolly in the afternoon, it was only because my fancy insisted on merciful night falling as soon as

possible upon my impatience. But now I foresaw all kinds of misunderstandings and was all a-jitter lest delay

might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale. However, when at 9.30 a.m. I attempted to

start, I was confronted by a dead battery, and noon was nigh when at last I left Parkington.

I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded

impish lad stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco

cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration of the camp mistress, a

sluttish worn out female with rusty hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was

sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counselors? Or look at the

cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent

over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she

would say to somebody or other: “The poor guy looked like his own ghost.”)

Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt,

scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly

spreading a banknote over it with a bright “…and five!”; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or

butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (“nature study”); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my

trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze’s behavior for July (“fair to good;

keen on swimming and boating”); a sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart… I was standing with my

back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heart her respiration and voice behind me. She

arrived dragging and bumping her heavy suitcase. “Hi!” she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly, glad eyes,

her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully endearing smile.

She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I

had cherished for more than a month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much lentigo camouflaged her rosy

rustic features; and that first impression (a very narrow human interval between two tiger heartbeats) carried the

clear implication that all widower Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking

though sun-colored little orphan au yeux battus (and even those plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles)

a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age among whom (if the

fates deigned to repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty little Mägdlein for Herr Doktor Humbert alone. But “in a

wink,” as the Germans say, the angelic line of conduct was erased, and I overtook my prey (time moves ahead of

our fancies!), and she was my Lolita again — in fact, more of my Lolita than ever. I let my hand rest on her warm

auburn head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, with a pattern of

little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of

coagulated rubies, and the ribbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the remembered level, and because

of her childish gait, or because I had memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle oxfords looked

somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain

unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. In the hot car she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her

lovely knee; then, her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked down the window

on her side and settled back again. We sped through the striped and speckled forest.

“How’s Mother?” she asked dutifully.

I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No,

abdominal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of

Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where we would take in all the

shows. She thought it a peachy idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine p.m.

“We should be at Briceland by dinner time,” I said, “and tomorrow we’ll visit Lepingville. How was the hike?

Did you have a marvelous time at the camp?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sorry to leave?”

“Un-un.”

“Talk, Lo — don’t grunt. Tell me something.”

“What thing, Dad?” (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation).

“Any old thing.”

“Okay, if I call you that?” (eyes slit at the road).

“Quite.”

“It’s a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?”

“Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty

of spiritual relationship.”

“Bah!” said the cynical nymphet.

Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape.

“Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside.”

“I think I’ll vomit if I look at a cow again.”

“You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.”

“I did not. Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it does not matter one bit, because you’ve stopped

caring for me, anyway. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister.”

I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.

“Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?”

“Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?”

Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoulder of road ahead, and bumped and wobbled into

the weeds. Remember she is only a child, remember she is only —

Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed into my arms. Not daring, not daring let

myself go — not even daring let myself realize that this (sweet wetness and trembling fire) was the beginning of

the ineffable life which, ably assisted by fate, I had finally willed into being — not daring really kiss her, I touched

her hot, opening lips with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious; but she, with an impatient wriggle, pressed

her mouth to mine so hard that I felt her big front teeth and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva. I knew, of

course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery in imitation of some simulacrum of fake

romance, and since (as the psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell you) the limits and rules of such girlish

games are fluid, or at least too childishly subtle for the senior partner to grasp — I was dreadfully afraid I might go

too far and cause her to start back in revulsion and terror. And, as above all I was agonizingly anxious to smuggle

her into the hermetic seclusion of The Enchanted Hunters, and we had still eighty miles to go, blessed intuition

broke our embrace — a split second before a highway patrol car drew up alongside.

Florid and beetle-browed, its driver stared at me:

“Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you before the junction?”

“Why, no.”

“We didn’t,” said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, her innocent hand on my legs, “but are you sure it was blue,

because —”

The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little colleen his best smile and went into a U-turn.

We drove on.

“The fruithead!” remarked Lo. “He should have nabbed you.”

“Why me for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty, and — No, don’t slow down, you, dull bulb. He’s gone now.”

“We have still quite a stretch,” I said, “and I want to get there before dark. So be a good girl.”

“Bad, bad girl,” said Lo comfortably. “Juvenile delickwent, but frank and fetching. That light was red. I’ve never

seen such driving.”

We rolled silently through a silent townlet.

“Say, wouldn’t Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers?”

“Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way.”

“But we are lovers, aren’t we?”

“Not that I know of. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don’t you want to tell me of those little pranks

of yours in camp?”

“You talk like a book, Dad.”

“What have you been up to? I insist you tell me.”

“Are you easily shocked?”

“No. Go on.”

“Let us turn into a secluded lane and I’ll tell you.”

“Lo, I must seriously ask you not to play the fool. Well?”

“Well — I joined in all the activities that were offered.”

“Ensuite?”

“Ansooit, I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake,

in fact.”

“Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet.”

“We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged

her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.”

“Your memory is excellent, Lo, but I must trouble you to leave out the swear words. Anything else?”

“The Girl Scout’s motto,” said Lo rhapsodically, “is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as —

well, never mind what. My duty is — to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful. That

was another police car. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed.”

“Now I do hope that’s all, you witty child.”

“Yep. That’s all. No — wait a sec. We baked in a reflector oven. Isn’t that terrific?”

“Well, that’s better.”

“We washed zillions of dishes. ‘Zillions’ you know is schoolmarm’s slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes,

last but not least, as Mother says — Now let me see — what was it? I know we made shadowgraphs. Gee, what

fun.”

“C’est bien tout?”

“C’est. Except for one little thing, something I simply can’t tell you without blushing all over.”

“Will you tell it me later?”

“If we sit in the dark and you let me whisper, I will. Do you sleep in your old room or in a heap with Mother?”

“Old room. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious operation, Lo.”

“Stop at that candy bar, will you,” said Lo.

Sitting on a high stool, a band of sunlight crossing her bare brown forearm, Lolita was served an elaborate icecream

concoction topped with synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought her by a pimply brute of a boy in a

greasy bow-tie who eyed my fragile child in her thin cotton frock with carnal deliberation. My impatience to reach

Briceland and The Enchanted Hunters was becoming more than I could endure. Fortunately she dispatched the

stuff with her usual alacrity.

“How much cash do you have?” I asked.

“Not a cent,” she said sadly, lifting her eyebrows, showing me the empty inside of her money purse.

“This is a matter that will be mended in due time,” I rejoined archly. “Are you coming?”

“Say, I wonder if they have a washroom.”

“you are not going there,” I said Firmly. “It is sure to be a vile place. Do come on.”

She was on the whole an obedient little girl and I kissed her in the neck when we got back into the car.

“Don’t do that,” she said looking at me with unfeigned surprise. “Don’t drool on me. You dirty man.”

She rubbed the spot against her raised shoulder.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “I’m rather fond of you, that’s all.”

We drove under a gloomy sky, up a winding road, then down again.

“Well, I’m also sort of fond of you,” said Lolita in a delayed soft voice, with a sort of sigh, and sort of settled

closer to me.

(Oh, my Lolita, we shall never get there!)

Dusk was beginning to saturate pretty little Briceland, its phony colonial architecture, curiosity sops and

imported shade trees, when we drove through the weakly lighted streets in search of the Enchanted Hunters. The

air, despite a steady drizzle beading it, was warm and green, and a queue of people, mainly children and old men,

had already formed before the box office of a movie house, dripping with jewel-fires.

“Oh, I want to see that picture. Let’s go right after dinner. Oh, let’s!”

“We might,” chanted Humbert — knowing perfectly well, the sly tumescent devil, that by nine, when his show

began, she would be dead in his arms.

“Easy!” cried Lo, lurching forward, as an accursed truck in front of us, its backside carbuncles pulsating,

stopped at a crossing.

If we did not get to the hotel soon, immediately, miraculously, in the very next block, I felt I would lose all

control over the Haze jalopy with its ineffectual wipers and whimsical brakes; but the passers-by I applied to for

directions were either strangers themselves or asked with a frown “Enchanted what?” as if I were a madman; or

else they went into such complicated explanations, with geometrical gestures, geographical generalities and strictly

local clues (…then bear south after you hit the court-house…) that I could not help losing my way in the maze of

their well-meaning gibberish. Lo, whose lovely prismatic entrails had already digested the sweetmeat, was looking

forward to a big meal and had begun to fidget. As to me, although I had long become used to a kind of secondary

fate (McFate’s inept secretary, so to speak) pettily interfering with the boss’s generous magnificent plan — to grind

and grope through the avenues of Briceland was perhaps the most exasperating ordeal I had yet faced. In later

months I could laugh at my inexperience when recalling the obstinate boyish way in which I had concentrated upon

that particular inn with its fancy name; for all along our route countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in

neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most

corrupt and vigorous couples. Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer’s black nights, what frolics, what twists

of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments

and became as transparent as boxes of glass!

The miracle I hankered for did happen after all. A man and a girl, more or less conjoined in a dark car under

dripping trees, told us we were in the heart of The Park, but had only to turn left at the next traffic light and there

we would be. We did not see any next traffic light — in fact, The Park was as black as the sins it concealed — but

soon after falling under the smooth spell of a nicely graded curve, the travelers became aware of a diamond glow

through the mist, then a gleam of lakewater appeared — and there it was, marvelously and inexorably, under

spectral trees, at the top of a graveled drive — the pale palace of The Enchanted Hunters.

A row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough, seemed at first sight to forbid access; but then, by magic, a

formidable convertible, resplendent, rubious in the lighted rain, came into motion — was energetically backed out

by a broad-shouldered driver — and we gratefully slipped into the gap it had left. I immediately regretted my haste

for I noticed that my predecessor had now taken advantage of a garage-like shelter nearby where there was ample

space for another car; but I was too impatient to follow his example.

“Wow! Looks swank,” remarked my vulgar darling squinting at the stucco as she crept out into the audible

drizzle and with a childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had struck in the peach-cleft-to quote Robert

Browning. Under the arclights enlarged replicas of chestnut leaves plunged and played on white pillars. I unlocked

the trunk compartment. A hunchbacked and hoary Negro in a uniform of sorts took our bags and wheeled them

slowly into the lobby. It was full of old ladies and clergy men. Lolita sank down on her haunches to caress a palefaced,

blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet under her hand — as who would not,

my heart — while I cleared my throat through the throng to the desk. There a bald porcine old man — everybody

was old in that old hotel — examined my features with a polite smile, then leisurely produced my (garbled)

telegram, wrestled with some dark doubts, turned his head to look at the clock, and finally said he was very sorry,

he had held the room with the twin beds till half past six, and now it was gone. A religious convention, he said, had

clashed with a flower show in Briceland, and — “The name,” I said coldly, “is not Humberg and not Humbug, but

Herbert, I mean Humbert, and any room will do, just put in a cot for my little daughter. She is ten and very tired.”

The pink old fellow peered good-naturedly at Lo — still squatting, listening in profile, lips parted, to what the

dog’s mistress, an ancient lady swathed in violet veils, was telling her from the depths of a cretonne easy chair.

Whatever doubts the obscene fellow had, they were dispelled by that blossom-like vision. He said, he might still

have a room, had one, in fact — with a double bed. As to the cot —

“Mr. Potts, do we have any cots left?” Potts, also pink and bald, with white hairs growing out of his ears and

other holes, would see what could be done. He came and spoke while I unscrewed my fountain pen. Impatient

Humbert!

“Our double beds are really triple,” Potts cozily said tucking me and my kid in. “One crowded night we had

three ladies and a child like yours sleep together. I believe one of the ladies was a disguised man [my static].

However — would there be a spare cot in 49, Mr. Swine?

“I think it went to the Swoons,” said Swine, the initial old clown.

“We’ll manage somehow,” I said. “My wife may join us later — but even then, I suppose, we’ll manage.”

The two pink pigs were now among my best friends. In the slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H.

Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale. A key (342!) was half-shown to me (magician showing object

he is about to palm) — and handed over to Uncle Tom. Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose

from her haunches; a raindrop fell on Charlotte’s grave; a handsome young Negress slipped open the elevator door,

and the doomed child went in followed by her throat-clearing father and crayfish Tom with the bags.

Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death.

“Say, it’s our house number,” said cheerful Lo.

There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a

blue-dark window, a reflected bed there, the same in the closet mirror, two chairs, a glass-topped table, two

bedtables, a double bed: a big panel bed, to be exact, with a Tuscan rose chenille spread, and two frilled, pinkshaded

nightlamps, left and right.

I was tempted to place a five-dollar bill in that sepia palm, but thought the largesse might be misconstrued, so I

placed a quarter. Added another. He withdrew. Click. Enfin seuls.

“Are we going to sleep in one room?” said Lo, her features working in that dynamic way they did — not cross

or disgusted (though plain on the brink of it) but just dynamic — when she wanted to load a question with violent

significance.

“I’ve asked them to put in a cot. Which I’ll use if you like.”

“You are crazy,” said Lo.

“Why, my darling?”

“Because, my dahrling, when dahrling Mother finds out she’ll divorce you and strangle me.”

Just dynamic. Not really taking the matter too seriously.

“Now look here,” I said, sitting down, while she stood, a few feet away from me, and stared at herself

contentedly, not unpleasantly surprised at her own appearance, filling with her own rosy sunshine the surprised and

pleased closet-door mirror.

“Look here, Lo. Let’s settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great

tenderness for you. In your mother’s absence I am responsible for your welfare. We are not rich, and while we

travel, we shall be obliged — we shall be thrown a good deal together. Two people sharing one room, inevitably

enter into a kind — how shall I say — a kind —”

“The word is incest,” said Lo — and walked into the closet, walked out again with a young golden giggle,

opened the adjoining door, and after carefully peering inside with her strange smoky eyes lest she make another

mistake, retired to the bathroom.

I opened the window, tore off my sweat-drenched shirt, changed, checked the pill vial in my coat pocket,

unlocked the —

She drifted out. I tried to embrace her: casually, a bit of controlled tenderness before dinner.

She said: “Look, let’s cut out the kissing game and get something to eat.”

It was then that I sprang my surprise.

Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion

walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was there something wrong, I wondered, with

those great gray eyes of hers, or were we both plunged in the same enchanted mist?) She stepped up to it, lifting

her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked through dilating

space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a coppercolored,

charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands as if she were a

bemused bird-hunter holding his breath over the incredible bird he spreads out by the tips of its flaming wings.

Then (while I stood waiting for her) she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on.

Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure,

indifferent, twilight eyes — for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate

— while we moan and die.

“What’s the katter with misses?” I muttered (word-control gone) into her hair.

“If you must know,” she said, “you do it the wrong way.”

“Show, wight ray.”

“All in good time,” responded the spoonerette.

Seva ascendes, pulsata, brulans, kitzelans, dementissima. Elevator clatterans, pausa, clatterans, populus in

corridoro. Hanc nisi mors mihi adimet nemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondissime, nobserva nihil quidquam;

but, of course, in another moment I might have committed some dreadful blunder; fortunately, she returned to the

treasure box.

From the bathroom, where it took me quite a time to shift back into normal gear for a humdrum purpose, I heard,

standing, drumming, retaining my breath, my Lolita’s “oo’s” and “gee’s” of girlish delight.

She had used the soap only because it was sample soap.

“Well, come on, my dear, if you are as hungry as I am.”

And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse, father walking in front (nota bene: never behind,

she is not a lady). As we stood (now side by side) waiting to be taken down, she threw back her head, yawned

without restraint and shook her curls.

“When did they make you get up at that camp?”

“Half-past —” she stifled another yawn — “six” — yawn in full with a shiver of all her frame. “Half-past,” she

repeated, her throat filling up again.

The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with

maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid

animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man in a sports coat were finishing

their meals in silence. The dining room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were, happily,

in a desperate hurry to get rid of us.

“Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?” said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing,

but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room.

“Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?”

Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass.

“Course not,” she said with a splutter of mirth. “I meant the writer fellow in the Dromes ad.”

Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina!

When the dessert was plunked down — a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream her

protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie — I produced a small vial containing Papa’s Purple

Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my

behavior then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all

seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself that the last diner had left, removed

the stopped, and with the utmost deliberation tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a

mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected,

she pounced upon the vial with its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty’s Sleep.

“Blue!” she exclaimed. “Violet blue. What are they made of?”

“Summer skies,” I said, “and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of emperors.”

“No, seriously — please.”

“Oh, just Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?”

Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.

I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the

morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to tell

me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume — oh, how fast the magic potion worked! —

and had been active in other ways too. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time

we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly

smiling — wouldn’t you like me to tell you? — half closing her dark-lidded eyes. “Sleepy, huh?” said Uncle Tom

who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in

roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned, tottering, dazed rosedarling. I had almost to carry her into

our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones.

“If I tell you — if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy — head lolling, eyes going out], promise you

won’t make complaints?”

“Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I’ll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give you ten minutes.”

“Oh, I’ve been such a disgusting girl,” she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair

ribbon. “Lemme tell you —”

“Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed — for goodness sake, to bed.”

I pocketed the key and walked downstairs.

28

Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le

grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling

at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties — she had

always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic

vision of her which I had locked in — after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its

numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It

was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes — say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my

uncle Gustave used to say — I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride,

imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel

with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave

the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, — indeed, the globe — that very same night.

Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self-accusatory innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to

pursue my policy of sparing her purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely

anesthetized little nude. Restraint and reverence were still my motto — even if that “purity” (incidentally,

thoroughly debunked by modern science) had been slightly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no

doubt homosexual, at that accursed camp of hers. Of course, in my old-fashioned, old-world way, I, Jean-Jacques

Humbert, had taken for granted, when I first met her, that she was as unravished as the stereotypical notion of

“normal child” had been since the lamented end of the Ancient World B.C. and its fascinating practices. We are not

surrounded in our enlighted era by little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as

they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times,

use tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old link

between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws.

Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After all, Lolita

was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time and place — even bearing in mind the crude

behavior of American schoolchildren — I still was under the impression that whatever went on among those brash

brats, went on at a later age, and in a different environment. Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation)

the moralist in me by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what twelve-year-old girls should be.

The child therapist in me (a fake, as most of them are — but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and

conjured up a dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the “latency” period of girlhood. Finally, the sensualist in me (a

great and insane monster) had no objection to some depravity in his prey. But somewhere behind the raging bliss,

bewildered shadows conferred — and not to have heeded them, this is what I regret! Human beings, attend! I

should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel, and

that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation,

would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal. I should have known (by the signs made to me by

something in Lolita — the real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and

horror would result from the expected rapture. Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!

And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine. In the course

of evocations and schemes to which I had dedicated so many insomnias, I had gradually eliminated all the

superfluous blur, and by stacking level upon level of translucent vision, had evolved a final picture. Naked, except

for one sock and her charm bracelet, spread-eagled on the bed where my philter had felled her — so I foreglimpsed

her; a velvet hair ribbon was still clutched in her hand; her honey-brown body, with the white negative image of a

rudimentary swimsuit patterned against her tan, presented to me its pale breastbuds; in the rosy lamplight, a little

pubic floss glistened on its plump hillock. The cold key with its warm wooden addendum was in my pocket.

I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust

is never quite sure — even when the velvety victim is locked up in one’s dungeon — that some rival devil or

influential god may still not abolish one’s prepared triumph. In common parlance, I needed a drink; but there was

no barroom in that venerable place full of perspiring philistines and period objects.

I drifted to the Men’s Room. There, a person in the clerical black — a “hearty party” comme on dit — checking

with the assistance of Vienna, if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk, and looked

puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy. Upon which, I neatly chucked the tissue

paper I had been wiping my sensitive finger tips with into the receptacle provided for it, and sallied lobbyward.

Comfortably resting my elbows on the counter, I asked Mr. Potts was he quite sure my wife had not telephoned,

and what about that cot? He answered she had not (she was dead, of course) and the cot would be installed

tomorrow if we decided to stay on. From a big crowded place called The Hunters’ Hall came a sound of many

voices discussing horticulture or eternity. Another room, called The Raspberry Room, all bathed in light, with

bright little tables and a large one with “refreshments,” was still empty except for a hostess (that type of worn

woman with a glassy smile and Charlotte’s manner of speaking); she floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock,

because if so, Miss Beard had been looking for me. “What a name for a woman,” I said and strolled away.

In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood. I would give her till half-past-nine. Going back to the lobby, I

found there a change: a number of people in floral dresses or black cloth had formed little groups here and there,

and some elfish chance offered me the sight of a delightful child of Lolita’s age, in Lolita’s type of frock, but pure

white, and there was a white ribbon in her black hair. She was not pretty, but she was a nymphet, and her ivory

pale legs and lily neck formed for one memorable moment a most pleasurable antiphony (in terms of spinal music)

to my desire for Lolita, brown and pink, flushed and fouled. The pale child noticed my gaze (which was really

quite casual and debonair), and being ridiculously self-conscious, lost countenance completely, rolling her eyes and

putting the back of her hand to her cheek, and pulling at the hem of her skirt, and finally turning her thin mobile

shoulder blades to me in specious chat with her cow-like mother.

I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps, looking at the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling

around the lamps in the soggy black night, full of ripple and stir. All I would do — all I would dare do — would

amount to such a trifle… Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a

chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then

a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed

me:

“Where the devil did you get her?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said: the weather is getting better.”

“Seems so.”

“Who’s the lassie?”

“My daughter.”

“You lie — she’s not.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said: July was hot. Where’s her mother?”

“Dead.”

“I see. Sorry. By the way, why don’t you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by

then.”

“We’ll be gone too. Good night.”

“Sorry. I’m pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say.

Smoke?”

“Not now.”

He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another

person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotels — and his white rocker. Nobody said anything

and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some

sepulchral mucus.

I left the porch. At least half an hour in all had elapsed. I ought to have asked for a sip. The strain was beginning

to tell. If a violin string can ache, then I was that string. But it would have been unseemly to display any hurry. As I

made my way through a constellation of fixed people in one corner of the lobby, there came a blinding flash — and

beaming Dr. Braddock, two orchid-ornamentalized matrons, the small girl in white, and presumably the bared teeth

of Humbert Humbert sidling between the bridelike lassie and the enchanted cleric, were immortalized — insofar as

the texture and print of small-town newspapers can be deemed immortal. A twittering group had gathered near the

elevator. I again chose the stairs. 342 was near the fire escape. One could still — but the key was already in the

lock, and then I was in the room.

29

The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a skeleton glow came though the Venetian blind

from the outside arclights; these intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom and revealed the

following situation.

Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, my Lolita lay on her side with her back to me, in the middle of the bed.

Her lightly veiled body and bare limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; a band of

pale light crossed her top vertebrae.

I seemed to have shed my clothes and slipped into pajamas with the kind of fantastic instantaneousness which is

implied when in a cinematographic scene the process of changing is cut; and I had already placed my knee on the

edge of the bed when Lolita turned her head and stared at me though the striped shadows.

Now this was something the intruder had not expected. The whole pill-spiel (a rather sordid affair, entre nous

soit dit) had had for object a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed, and here she was

staring at me, and thickly calling me “Barbara.” Barbara, wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her,

remained poised motionless over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away, resuming

her initial position. For at least two minutes I waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade

parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower. Her faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep.

Finally I heaved myself onto my narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the odds and ends of sheets piled up to

the south of my stone-cold heels — and Lolita lifted her head and gaped at me.

As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple pill did not even belong to the big and noble family

of barbiturates, and though it might have induced sleep in a neurotic who believed it to be a potent drug, it was too

mild a sedative to affect for any length of time a wary, albeit weary, nymphet. Whether the Ramsdale doctor was a

charlatan or a shrewd old rogue, does not, and did not, really matter. What mattered, was that I had been deceived.

When Lolita opened her eyes again, I realized that whether or not the drug might work later in the night, the

security I had relied upon was a sham one. Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her unfair amount of

pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpled hair, at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a

haunch and half a shoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her sleep by the rate of her respiration.

Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided I might risk getting a little closer to that lovely and maddening

glimmer; but hardly had I moved into its warm purlieus than her breathing was suspended, and I had the odious

feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would explode in screams if I touched her with any part of my

wretchedness. Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely

circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine

me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there

is no harm in smiling. For instance (I almost wrote “frinstance”), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of

heartburn (they call those fries “French,” grand Dieu!) was added to my discomfort.

She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite

Dormeuse ou l’Amant Ridicule. Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that had so thoroughly numbed

her mummy. In the glove compartment — or in the Gladstone bag? Should I wait a solid hour and then creep up

again? The science of nympholepsy is a precise science. Actual contact would do it in one second flat. An

interspace of a millimeter would do it in ten. Let us wait.

There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, oldfashioned,

homey place — “gracious living” and all that stuff. The clatter of the elevator’s gate — some twenty

yards northeast of my head but as clearly perceived as if it were inside my left temple — alternated with the

banging and booming of the machine’s various evolutions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then,

immediately east of my left ear (always assuming I lay on my back, not daring to direct my viler side toward the

nebulous haunch of my bed-mate), the corridor would brim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending

in a volley of good-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of my cerebellum took over. It was a

manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook

the wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick, almost coughing out his life with

his liquor, and his toilet descended like a veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when finally

all the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, the avenue under the window of my

insomnia, to the west of my wake — a staid, eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees — degenerated

into the despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night.

And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulous Lolita! After a long stirless vigil, my

tentacles moved towards her again, and this time the creak of the mattress did not awake her. I managed to bring

my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek. And

then, she sat up, gasped, muttered with insane rapidity something about boats, tugged at the sheets and lapsed back

into her rich, dark, young unconsciousness. As she tossed, within that abundant flow of sleep, recently auburn, at

present lunar, her arm struck me across the face. For a second I held her. She freed herself from the shadow of my

embrace — doing this not consciously, not violently, not with any personal distaste, but with the neutral plaintive

murmur of a child demanding its natural rest. And again the situation remained the same: Lolita with her curved

spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on his hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia.

The latter necessitated a trip to the bathroom for a draft of water which is the best medicine I know in my case,

except perhaps milk with radishes; and when I re-entered the strange pale-striped fastness where Lolita’s old and

new clothes reclined in various attitudes of enchantment on pieces of furniture that seemed vaguely afloat, my

impossible daughter sat up and in clear tones demanded a drink, too. She took the resilient and cold paper cup in

her shadowy hand and gulped down its contents gratefully, her long eyelashes pointing cupward, and then, with an

infantile gesture that carried more charm than any carnal caress, little Lolita wiped her lips against my shoulder.

She fell back on her pillow (I had subtracted mine while she drank) and was instantly asleep again.

I had not dared offer her a second helping of the drug, and had not abandoned hope that the first might still

consolidate her sleep. I started to move toward her, ready for any disappointment, knowing I had better wait but

incapable of waiting. My pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward my glimmering darling, stopping or retreating

every time I thought she stirred or was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts,

and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that

breeze. Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep,

shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness

enfolded mountains of longing. Now and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey was about to meet halfway

the enchanted hunter, that her haunch was working its way toward me under the soft sand of a remote and fabulous

beach; and then her dimpled dimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from me than ever.

If I dwell at some length on the tremors and groupings of that distant night, it is because I insist upon proving

that I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions though

which I crept were the patrimonies of poets — not crime’s prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy

would have been all softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt the heat, even if

she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would

allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. And so, in between tentative approximations, with a confusion of

perception metamorphosing her into eyespots of moonlight or a fluffy flowering bush, I would dream I regained

consciousness, dream I lay in wait.

In the first antemeridian hours there was a lull in the restless hotel night. Then around four the corridor toilet

cascaded and its door banged. A little after five a reverberating monologue began to arrive, in several installments,

from some courtyard or parking place. It was not really a monologue, since the speaker stopped every few seconds

to listen (presumably) to another fellow, but that other voice did not reach me, and so no real meaning could be

derived from the part heard. Its matter-of-fact intonations, however, helped to bring in the dawn, and the room was

already suffused with lilac gray, when several industrious toilets went to work, one after the other, and the

clattering and whining elevator began to rise and take down early risers and downers, and for some minutes I

miserably dozed, and Charlotte was a mermaid in a greenish tank, and somewhere in the passage Dr. Boyd said

“Good morning to you” in a fruity voice, and birds were busy in the trees, and then Lolita yawned.

Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal

myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going

to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.

Upon hearing her first morning yawn, I feigned handsome profiled sleep. I just did not know what to do. Would

she be shocked at finding me by her side, and not in some spare bed? Would she collect her clothes and lock

herself up in the bathroom? Would she demand to be taken at once to Ramsdale — to her mother’s bedside — back

to camp? But my Lo was a sportive lassie. I felt her eyes on me, and when she uttered at last that beloved chortling

note of hers, I knew her eyes had been laughing. She rolled over to my side, and her warm brown hair came against

my collarbone. I gave a mediocre imitation of waking up. We lay quietly. I gently caressed her hair, and we gently

kissed. Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which

made me conclude she had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian. No Charlie boy could have taught her

that. As if to see whether I had my fill and learned the lesson, she drew away and surveyed me. Her cheekbones

were flushed, her full underlip glistened, my dissolution was near. All at once, with a burst of rough glee (the sign

of the nymphet!), she put her mouth to my ear — but for quite a while my mind could not separate into words the

hot thunder of her whisper, and she laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and tried again, and gradually the

odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I

realized what she was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie had played. “You mean

you have never —?” — her features twisted into a stare of disgusted incredulity. “You have never —” she started

again. I took time out by nuzzling her a little. “Lay off, will you,” she said with a twangy whine, hastily removing

her brown shoulder from my lips. (It was very curious the way she considered — and kept doing so for a long time

— all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either “romantic slosh” or “abnormal”.)

“You mean,” she persisted, now kneeling above me, “you never did it when you were a kid?”

“Never,” I answered quite truthfully.

“Okay,” said Lolita, “here is where we start.”

However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of Lolita’s presumption. Suffice it to say

that not a trace of modesty did I perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education,

juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely

as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no

business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate

gadget unconnected with me. While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared

for certain discrepancies between a kid’s life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my

strange predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way — at least while I could still bear it.

But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called “sex” at all. Anybody can imagine those

elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.

30

I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you

once popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you wretched

emeritus read to by a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita! had I

been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned

me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list

some fragments:

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature

studies — a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There

would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a

callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal

glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the

part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been

poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last

throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

31

I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of

hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world — nymphet love. The beastly and beautiful

merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?

The stipulation of the Roman law, according to which a girl may marry at twelve, was adopted by the Church,

and is still preserved, rather tacitly, in some of the United States. And fifteen is lawful everywhere. There is

nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed by the local priest and bloated with drink,

sheds his sweat-drenched finery and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride. “In such stimulating

temperate climates [says an old magazine in this prison library] as St. Louis, Chicago and Cincinnati, girls mature

about the end of their twelfth year.” Dolores Haze was born less than three hundred miles from stimulating

Cincinnati. I have but followed nature. I am nature’s faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off?

Did I deprive her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.

32

She told me the way she had been debauched. We ate flavorless mealy bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable

potato chips, and die Kleine told me everything. Her voluble but disjointed account was accompanied by many a

droll moue. As I think I have already observed, I especially remember one wry face on an “ugh!” basis: jelly-mouth

distended sideways and eyes rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation and tolerance for young

frailty.

Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another

camp, a “very select” one as she put it. That tent-mate (“quite a derelict character,” “half-crazy,” but a “swell kid”)

instructed her in various manipulations. At first, loyal Lo refused to tell me her name.

“Was it Grace Angel?” I asked.

She shook her head. No, it wasn’t it was the daughter of a big shot. He —

“Was it perhaps Rose Carmine?”

“No, of course not. Her father —”

“Was it, then, Agnes Sheridan perchance?”

She swallowed and shook her head — and then did a double take.

“Say, how come you know all those kids?”

I explained.

“Well,” she said. “They are pretty bad, some of that school bunch, but not that bad. If you have to know, her

name was Elizabeth Talbot, she goes now to a swanky private school, her father is an executive.”

I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor Charlotte used to introduce into party chat such

elegant tidbits as “when my daughter was out hiking last year with the Talbot girl.”

I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions?

“Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo mimicking dread and relief, pressing a falsely fluttering hand to her chest.

I was more interested, however, in heterosexual experience. She had entered the sixth grade at eleven, soon after

moving to Ramsdale from the Middle West. What did she mean by “pretty bad”?

Well, the Miranda twins had shared the same bed for years, and Donald Scott, who was the dumbest boy in the

school, had done it with Hazel Smith in his uncle’s garage, and Kenneth Knight — who was the brightest — used

to exhibit himself wherever and whenever he had a chance, and —

“Let us switch to Camp Q,” I said. And presently I got the whole story.

Barbara Burke, a sturdy blond, two years older than Lo and by far the camp’s best swimmer, had a very special

canoe which she shared with Lo “because I was the only other girl who could make Willow Island” (some

swimming test, I imagine). Through July, every morning — mark, reader, every blessed morning — Barbara and

Lo would be helped to carry the boat to Onyx or Eryx (two small lakes in the wood) by Charlie Holmes, the camp

mistress’ son, aged thirteen — and the only human male for a couple of miles around (excepting an old meek stonedeaf

handyman, and a farmer in an old Ford who sometimes sold the campers eggs as farmers will); every morning,

oh my reader, the three children would take a short cut through the beautiful innocent forest brimming with all the

emblems of youth, dew, birdsongs, and at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth, Lo would be left as sentinel,

while Barbara and the boy copulated behind a bush.

At first, Lo had refused “to try what it was like,” but curiosity and camaraderie prevailed, and soon she and

Barbara were doing it by turns with the silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable Charlie, who had as much sex

appeal as a raw carrot but sported a fascinating collection of contraceptives which he used to fish out of a third

nearby lake, a considerably larger and more populous one, called Lake Climax, after the booming young factory

town of that name. Although conceding it was “sort of fun” and “fine for the complexion,” Lolita, I am glad to say,

held Charlie’s mind and manners in the greatest contempt. Nor had her temperament been roused by that filthy

fiend. In fact, I think he had rather stunned it, despite the “fun.”

By that time it was close to ten. With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic

drabness of a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples. Brown, naked, frail Lo, her

narrow white buttocks to me, her sulky face to a door mirror, stood, arms akimbo, feet (in new slippers with pussyfur

tops) wide apart, and through a forehanging lock tritely mugged at herself in the glass. From the corridor came

the cooing voices of colored maids at work, and presently there was a mild attempt to open the door of our room. I

had Lo go to the bathroom and take a much-needed soap shower. The bed was a frightful mess with overtones of

potato chips. She tried on a two-piece navy wool, then a sleeveless blouse with a swirly clathrate skirt, but the first

was too tight and the second too ample, and when I begged her to hurry up (the situation was beginning to frighten

me), Lo viciously sent those nice presents of mine hurtling into a corner, and put on yesterday’s dress. When she

was ready at last, I gave her a lovely new purse of simulated calf (in which I had slipped quite a few pennies and

two mint-bright dimes) and told her to buy herself a magazine in the lobby.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said. “And if I were you, my dear, I would not talk to strangers.”

Except for my poor little gifts, there was not much to pack; but I was forced to devote a dangerous amount of

time (was she up to something downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such a way as to suggest the abandoned nest of

a restless father and his tomboy daughter, instead of an ex-convict’s saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores.

Then I finished dressing and had the hoary bellboy come up for the bags.

Everything was fine. There, in the lobby, she sat, deep in an overstuffed blood-red armchair, deep in a lurid

movie magazine. A fellow of my age in tweeds (the genre of the place had changed overnight to a spurious

country-squire atmosphere) was staring at my Lolita over his dead cigar and stale newspaper. She wore her

professional white socks and saddle oxfords, and that bright print frock with the square throat; a splash of jaded

lamplight brought out the golden down on her warm brown limbs. There she sat, her legs carelessly highcrossed,

and her pale eyes skimming along the lines with every now and then a blink. Bill’s wife had worshipped him from

afar long before they ever met: in fact, she used to secretly admire the famous young actor as he ate sundaes in

Schwab’s drugstore. Nothing could have been more childish than her snubbed nose, freckled face or the purplish

spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had feasted, or the unconscious movement of her tongue

exploring a touch of rosy rash around her swollen lips; nothing could be more harmless than to read about Jill, an

energetic starlet who made her own clothes and was a student of serious literature; nothing could be more innocent

than the part in that glossy brown hair with that silky sheen on the temple; nothing could be more naïve — But

what sickening envy the lecherous fellow whoever he was — come to think of it, he resembled a little my Swiss

uncle Gustave, also a great admirer of le découvert — would have experienced had he known that every nerve in

me was still anointed and ringed with the feel of her body — the body of some immortal demon disguised as a

female child.

Was pink pig Mr. Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He was. If she did, would he tell her we

had gone on to Aunt Clare’s place? He would, indeedie. I settled the bill and roused Lo from her chair. She read to

the car. Still reading, she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few blocks south. Oh, she ate all right. She even

laid aside her magazine to eat, but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I knew little Lo could be

very nasty, so I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a squall. I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no

bowel movement. My nerves were a-jangle. I did not like the way my little mistress shrugged her shoulders and

distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk. Had Phyllis been in the know before she joined her

parents in Maine? I asked with a smile. “Look,” said Lo making a weeping grimace, “let us get off the subject.” I

then tried — also unsuccessfully, no matter how I smacked my lips — to interest her in the road map. Our

destination was, let me remind my patient reader whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of

Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That destination was in itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as,

alas, so many were to be), and I shook in my shoes as I wondered how to keep the whole arrangement plausible,

and what other plausible objectives to invent after we had taken in all the movies in Lepingville. More and more

uncomfortable did Humbert Feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as

if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face. It flitted again,

more meaningfully, as she settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced it that second time for my benefit.

Foolishly, I asked her what was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,” she replied. “You what?” I asked. She was silent.

Leaving Briceland. Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was an orphan.

This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous

intercourse three times that very morning. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all

expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark — and plunged into a nightmare. I had been careless, stupid, and

ignoble. And let me be quite frank: somewhere at the bottom of that dark turmoil I felt the writhing of desire again,

so monstrous was my appetite for that miserable nymphet. Mingled with the pangs of guilt was the agonizing

through that her mood might prevent me from making love to her again as soon as I found a nice country road

where to park in peace. In other words, poor Humbert Humbert was dreadfully unhappy, and while steadily and

inanely driving toward Lepingville, he kept racking his brains for some quip, under the bright wing of which he

might dare turn to his seatmate. It was she, however, who broke the silence:

“Oh, a squashed squirrel,” she said. “What a shame.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” (eager, hopeful Hum).

“Let us stop at the next gas station,” Lo continued. “I want to go to the washroom.”

“We shall stop wherever you want,” I said. And then as a lovely, lonely, supercilious grove (oaks, I thought; American trees at that stage were beyond me) started to echo greenly the rush of our car, a red and ferny road on our right turned its head before slanting into the woodland, and I suggested we might perhaps —

“Drive on,” my Lo cried shrilly.

“Righto. Take it easy.” (Down, poor beast, down.)

I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling.

“You chump,” she said, sweetly smiling at me. “You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man.”

Was she just joking? An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly words. Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her.

The sweat rolled down my neck, and we almost ran over some little animal or other that was crossing the road with tail erect, and again my vile-tempered companion called me an ugly name. When we stopped at the filling station, she scrambled out without a word and was a long time away. Slowly, lovingly, an elderly friend with a broken nose wiped my windshield — they do it differently at every place, from chamois cloth to soapy brush, this fellow used a pink sponge.

She appeared at last. “Look,” she said in that neutral voice that hurt me so, “give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in that hospital. What’s the number?”

“Get in,” I said. “You can’t call that number.”

“Why?”

“Get in and slam the door.”

She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed at her. I swung onto the highway.

“Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?”

“Because,” I answered, “your mother is dead.”

33

In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments — swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.