Vladimir Nabokov《Lolita》2

Part Two

1

It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel — clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. At first, in my dread of arousing suspicion, I would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, each containing a double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangement was even intended for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy could be attained by means of the incomplete partition dividing the cabin or room into two communicating love nests. By and by, the very possibilities that such honest promiscuity suggested (two young couples merrily swapping mates or a child shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities) made me bolder, and every now and then I would take a bed-and-cot or twin-bed cabin, a prison cell or paradise, with yellow window shades pulled down to create a morning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvania and rain.

We came to know — nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation — the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown glaze, of friend-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell or some other gloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast of (except “good beds”), and an unsmiling landlady always prepared to have her gift (“…well, I could give you…”) turned down.

Nous connûmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of their repetitious names — all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac’s Courts. There was sometimes a special line in the write-up, such as “Children welcome, pets allowed” (You are welcome, you are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turn instantly beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether your neighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessary complement in the shower you had so carefully blended. Some motels had instructions pasted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels were unhygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies; others had special notices under glass, such as Things to Do (Riding: You will often see riders coming down Main Street on their way back from a romantic moonlight ride. “Often at 3 a.m.,” sneered unromantic Lo).

Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.

We avoided Tourist Homes, country cousins of Funeral ones, old-fashioned, genteel and showerless, with elaborate dressing tables in depressingly white-and-pink little bedrooms, and photographs of the landlady’s children in all their instars. But I did surrender, now and then, to Lo’s predilection for “real” hotels. She would pick out in the book, while I petted her in the parked car in the silence of a dusk-mellowed, mysterious side-road, some

highly recommended lake lodge which offered all sorts of things magnified by the flashlight she moved over them,

such as congenial company, between-meals snacks, outdoor barbecues — but which in my mind conjured up

odious visions of stinking high school boys in sweatshirts and an ember-red cheek pressing against hers, while poor

Dr. Humbert, embracing nothing but two masculine knees, would cold-humor his piles on the damp turf. Most

empty to her, too, were those “Colonial” Inns, which apart from “gracious atmosphere” and picture windows,

promised “unlimited quantities of M-m-m food.” Treasured recollections of my father’s palatial hotel sometimes

led me to seek for its like in the strange country we traveled through. I was soon discouraged; but Lo kept

following the scent of rich food ads, while I derived a not exclusively economic kick from such roadside signs as

Timber Hotel, Children under 14 Free. On the other hand, I shudder when recalling that soi-disant “high-class”

resort in a Midwestern state, which advertised “raid-the-icebox” midnight snacks and, intrigued by my accent,

wanted to know my dead wife’s and dead mother’s maiden names. A two-days’ stay there cost me a hundred and

twenty-four dollars! And do you remember, Miranda, that other “ultrasmart” robbers’ den with complimentary

morning coffee and circulating ice water, and no children under sixteen (no Lolitas, of course)?

Immediately upon arrival at one of the plainer motor courts which became our habitual haunts, she would set the

electric fan a-whirr, or induce me to drop a quarter into the radio, or she would read all the signs and inquire with a

whine why she could not go riding up some advertised trail or swimming in that local pool of warm mineral water.

Most often, in the slouching, bored way she cultivated, Lo would fall prostrate and abominably desirable into a red

springchair or a green chaise longue, or a steamer chair of striped canvas with footrest and canopy, or a sling chair,

or any other lawn chair under a garden umbrella on the patio, and it would take hours of blandishments, threats and

promises to make her lend me for a few seconds her brown limbs in the seclusion of the five-dollar room before

undertaking anything she might prefer to my poor joy.

A combination of naïveté and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue silks and rosy mirth, Lolita, when she

chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom,

intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off — a kind of

diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a

disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie

magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many

nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! I still hear the nasal voices of those

invisibles serenading her, people with names like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patty

and Rex, and sentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her various candies were to my palate. She

believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that that appeared in Movie Love or Screen

Land — Starasil Starves Pimples, or “You better watch out if you’re wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals,

because Jill says you shouldn’t.” If a roadside sign said: Visit Our Gift Shop — we had to visit it, had to buy its

Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. The words “novelties and souvenirs” simply entranced her by

their trochaic lilt. If some café sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, she was automatically stirred, although all drinks

everywhere were ice-cold. She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of

every foul poster. And she attempted — unsuccessfully — to patronize only those restaurants where the holy spirit

of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads.

In those days, neither she nor I had thought up yet the system of monetary bribes which was to work such havoc

with my nerves and her morals somewhat later. I relied on three other methods to keep my pubescent concubine in

submission and passable temper. A few years before, she had spent a rainy summer under Miss Phalen’s bleary eye

in a dilapidated Appalachian farmhouse that had belonged to some gnarled Haze or other in the dead past. It still

stood among its rank acres of golden rod on the edge of a flowerless forest, at the end of a permanently muddy

road, twenty miles from the nearest hamlet. Lo recalled that scarecrow of a house, the solitude, the soggy old

pastures, the wind, the bloated wilderness, with an energy of disgust that distorted her mouth and fattened her half revealed

tongue. And it was there that I warned her she would dwell with me in exile for months and years if need

be, studying under me French and Latin, unless her “present attitude” changed. Charlotte, I began to understand you!

A simple child, Lo would scream no! and frantically clutch at my driving hand whenever I put a stop to her

tornadoes of temper by turning in the middle of a highway with the implication that I was about to take her straight

to that dark and dismal abode. The farther, however, we traveled away from it west, the less tangible that menace

became, and I had to adopt other methods of persuasion.

Among these, the reformatory threat is the one I recall with the deepest moan of shame. From the very

beginning of our concourse, I was clever enough to realize that I must secure her complete co-operation in keeping

our relations secret, that it should become a second nature with her, no matter what grudge she might bear me, no

matter what other pleasure she might seek.

“Come and kiss your old man,” I would say, “and drop that moody nonsense. In former times, when I was still

your dream male [the reader will notice what pains I took to speak Lo’s tongue], you swooned to records of the

number one throb-and-sob idol of your coevals [Lo: “Of my what? Speak English”]. That idol of your pals sounded,

you thought, like friend Humbert. But now, I am just your old man, a dream dad protecting his dream daughter.

“My chère Dolorès! I want to protect you, dear, from all the horrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and

alley ways, and alas, comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, in the blueberry woods during the bluest of

summers. Through thick and thin I will still stay your guardian, and if you are good, I hope a court may legalize

that guardianship before long. Let us, however, forget, Dolores Haze, so-called legal terminology, terminology that

accepts as rational the term ‘lewd and lascivious cohabitation.’ I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking

indecent liberties with a child. The rapist was Charlie Holmes; I am the therapist — a matter of nice spacing in the

way of distinction. I am your daddum, Lo. Look, I’ve a learned book here about young girls. Look, darling, what it

says. I quote: the normal girl — normal, mark you — the normal girl is usually extremely anxious to please her

father. She feels in him the forerunner of the desired elusive male (‘elusive’ is good, by Polonius!). The wise

mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived) will encourage a companionship between

father and daughter, realizing — excuse the corny style — that the girl forms her ideals of romance and of men

from her association with her father. Now, what association does this cheery book mean — and recommend? I

quote again: Among Sicilians sexual relations between a father and his daughter are accepted as a matter of course,

and the girl who participates in such relationship is not looked upon with disapproval by the society of which she is

part. I’m a great admirer of Sicilians, fine athletes, fine musicians, fine upright people, Lo, and great lovers. But

let’s not digress. Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender

who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for

immoral purposes, whatever these are. Dolores darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not

advise you to consider yourself my cross-country slave, and I deplore the Mann Act as lending itself to a dreadful

pun, the revenge that the Gods of Semantics take against tight-zippered Philistines. I am your father, and I am

speaking English, and I love you.

“Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of having impaired the morals of an adult in a

respectable inn, what happens if you complain to the police of my having kidnapped and raped you? Let us

suppose they believe you. A minor female, who allows a person over twenty-one to know her carnally, involves

her victim into statutory rape, or second-degree sodomy, depending on the technique; and the maximum penalty is

ten years. So, I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan? Well, you are luckier. You

become the ward of the Department of Public Welfare — which I am afraid sounds a little bleak. A nice grim

matron of the Miss Phalen type, but more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take away your lipstick and fancy

clothes. No more gadding about! I don’t know if you have ever heard of the laws relating to dependent, neglected,

incorrigible and delinquent children. While I stand gripping the bars, you, happy neglected child, will be given a

choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile

detention home, or one of those admirable girls’ protectories where you knit things, and sing hymns, and have

rancid pancakes on Sundays. You will go there, Lolita — my Lolita, this Lolita will leave plainer words, if we two

are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized, my pet, c’est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell

(come here, my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no, allow me, please) under the

supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the

circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?”

By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who despite a certain brash alertness of manner and spurts

of wit was not as intelligent a child as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish that background of

shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful in keeping her in good humor. Every morning during

our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward

to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day

sagged and collapsed. The object in view might be anything — a lighthouse in Virginia, a natural cave in Arkansas

converted to a café, a collection of guns and violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in

Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local museum of a Rocky Mountains resort,

anything whatsoever — but it had to be there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would

feign gagging as soon as we got to it.

By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did my best for hours on end to give her the

impression of “going places,” of rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. I have never seen

such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us, across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states.

Voraciously we consumed those long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance floors. Not

only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail

of landscape; which I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the delicate beauty ever

present in the margin of our undeserving journey. By a paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-

American countryside had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition because

of those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in

Central-European nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic green views they

depicted — opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a

stone fence or hills of greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger

and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would

be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading

the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line

of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain

clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of

the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of

some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the

whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.

Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by

the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups,

samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A great user of roadside facilities, my

unfastidious Lo would be charmed by toilet signs — Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck’s-Doe’s; while

lost in an artist’s dream, I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid

green of oaks, or at a distant hill scrambling out — scarred but still untamed — from the wilderness of agriculture

that was trying to swallow it.

At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and

thundered by the belated little sedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the heat, would

melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the

car inside would be a furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote car changing its

shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hang for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the

hot haze. And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the

mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun

grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes,

and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all

along the highway; in the middle o which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left,

white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the itinerary we followed, and I suppose I have reached

here a point where I cannot avoid that chore. Roughly, during that mad year (August 1947 to August 1948), our

route began with a series of wiggles and whorls in New England, then meandered south, up and down, east and

west; dipped deep into ce qu’on appelle Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there, veered west,

zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts (this is not too clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not keep any

notes, and have at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour book in three volumes, almost a symbol of my torn

and tattered past, in which to check these recollections); crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled through

southern deserts where we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned north through the pale lilac fluff of flowering

shrubs along forest roads; almost reached the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and bad

lands, back to agriculture on a grand scale, avoiding, despite little Lo’s strident remonstrations, little Lo’s birthplace,

in a corn, coal and hog producing area; and finally returned to the fold of the East, petering out in the college town

of Beardsley.

2

Now, in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind not only the general circuit as adumbrated above,

with its many sidetrips and tourist traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations, but also the fact that far from

being an indolent partie de plaisir, our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d’être

(these French clichés are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss.

Thumbing through that battered tour book, I dimly evoke that Magnolia Garden in a southern state which cost

me four bucks and which, according to the ad in the book, you must visit for three reasons: because John

Galsworthy (a stone-dead writer of sorts) acclaimed it as the world’s fairest garden; because in 1900 Baedeker’s

Guide had marked it with a star; and finally, because… O, Reader, My Reader, guess!… because children (and by

Jingo was not my Lolita a child!) will “walk starry-eyed and reverently through this foretaste of Heaven, drinking

in beauty that can influence a life.” “Not mine,” said grim Lo, and settled down on a bench with the fillings of two

Sunday papers in her lovely lap.

We passed and re-passed through the whole gamut of American roadside restaurants, from the lowly Eat with its

deer head (dark trace of long tear at inner canthus), “humorous” picture post cards of the posterior “Kurort” type,

impaled guest checks, life savers, sunglasses, adman visions of celestial sundaes, one half of a chocolate cake

under glass, and several horribly experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the ignoble counter;

and all the way to the expensive place with the subdued lights, preposterously poor table linen, inept waiters (exconvicts

or college boys), the roan back of a screen actress, the sable eyebrows of her male of the moment, and an

orchestra of zoot-suiters with trumpets.

We inspected the world’s largest stalagmite in a cave where three southeastern states have a family reunion;

admission by age; adults one dollar, pubescents sixty cents. A granite obelisk commemorating the Battle of Blue

Licks, with old bones and Indian pottery in the museum nearby, Lo a dime, very reasonable. The present log cabin

boldly simulating the past log cabin where Lincoln was born. A boulder, with a plaque, in memory of the author of

“Trees” (by now we are in Poplar Cove, N.C., reached by what my kind, tolerant, usually so restrained tour book

angrily calls “a very narrow road, poorly maintained,” to which, though no Kilmerite, I subscribe). From a hired

motor-boat operated by an elderly, but still repulsively handsome White Russian, a baron they said (Lo’s palms

were damp, the little fool), who had known in California good old Maximovich and Valeria, we could distinguish

the inaccessible “millionaires’ colony” on an island, somewhere off the Georgia coast. We inspected further: a

collection of European hotel picture post cards in a museum devoted to hobbies at a Mississippi resort, where with

a hot wave of pride I discovered a colored photo of my father’s Mirana, its striped awnings, its flag flying above the

retouched palm trees. “So what?” said Lo, squinting at the bronzed owner of an expensive car who had followed us

into the Hobby House. Relics of the cotton era. A forest in Arkansas and, on her brown shoulder, a raised purplepink

swelling (the work of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent poison between my long

thumbnails and then sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood. Bourbon Street (in a town named New Orleans)

whose sidewalks, said the tour book, “may [I liked the “may”] feature entertainment by pickaninnies who will {I

liked the “will” even better] tap-dance for pennies” (what fun), while “its numerous small and intimate night clubs

are thronged with visitors” (naughty). Collections of frontier lore. Ante-bellum homes with iron-trellis balconies

and hand-worked stairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor,

holding up the fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way, and the devoted Negress

shaking her head on the upper landing. The Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck of it. A

patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping white flies.

Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill

Something Rodeo. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever

turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing

snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered

enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and

lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, “too prehistoric for words” (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring

mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their

heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks;

a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot.

Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in Colorado, and the snow banks, and the cushionets

of tiny alpine flowers, and more snow; down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried to slide, and squealed, and was

snowballed by some youngsters, and retaliated in kind comme on dit. Skeletons of burned aspens, patches of spired

blue flowers. The various items of a scenic drive. Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of Bear Creeks, Soda

Springs, Painted Canyons. Texas, a drought-struck plain. Crystal Chamber in the longest cave in the world,

children under 12 free, Lo a young captive. A collection of a local lady’s homemade sculptures, closed on a

miserable Monday morning, dust, wind, witherland. Conception Park, in a town on the Mexican border which I

dared not cross. There and elsewhere, hundreds of gray hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim

flowers. Shakespeare, a ghost town in New Mexico, where bad man Russian Bill was colorfully hanged seventy

years ago. Fish hatcheries. Cliff dwellings. The mummy of a child (Florentine Bea’s Indian contemporary). Our

twentieth Hell’s Canyon. Our fiftieth Gateway to something or other fide that tour book, the cover of which had

been lost by that time. A tick in my groin. Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away the

summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain. A hazy blue view beyond railings on a mountain pass,

and the backs of a family enjoying it (with Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper — “Look,

the McCrystals, please, let’s talk to them, please” — let’s talk to them, reader! — “please! I’ll do anything you want,

oh, please…”). Indian ceremonial dances, strictly commercial. ART: American Refrigerator Transit Company.

Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings, aboriginal pictographs, a dinosaur track in a desert canyon, printed there thirty

million years ago, when I was a child. A lanky, six-foot, pale boy with an active Adam’s apple, ogling Lo and her

orange-brown bare midriff, which I kissed five minutes later, Jack. Winter in the desert, spring in the foothills,

almonds in bloom. Reno, a dreary town in Nevada, with a nightlife said to be “cosmopolitan and mature.” A

winery in California, with a church built in the shape of a wine barrel. Death Valley. Scotty’s Castle. Works of Art

collected by one Rogers over a period of years. The ugly villas of handsome actresses. R. L. Stevenson’s footprint

on an extinct volcano. Mission Dolores: good title for book. Surf-carved sandstone festoons. A man having a lavish

epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park. Blue, blue Crater Lake. A fish hatchery in Idaho and the

State Penitentiary. Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows of bubbling mudsymbols

of my passion. A herd of antelopes in a wildlife refuge. Our hundredth cavern, adults one dollar, Lolita

fifty cents. A chateau built by a French marquess in N.D. The Corn Palace in S.D.; and the huge heads of

presidents carved in towering granite. The Bearded Woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single. A zoo

in Indiana where a large troop of monkeys lived on concrete replica of Christopher Columbus’ flagship. Billions of

dead, or halfdead, fish-smelling May flies in every window of every eating place all along a dreary sandy shore.

Fat gulls on big stones as seen from the ferry City of Cheboygan, whose brown woolly smoke arched and dipped

over the green shadow it cast on the aquamarine lake. A motel whose ventilator pipe passed under the city sewer.

Lincoln’s home, largely spurious, with parlor books and period furniture that most visitors reverently accepted as

personal belongings.

We had rows, minor and major. The biggest ones we had took place: at Lacework Cabins, Virginia; on Park

Avenue, Little Rock, near a school; on Milner Pass, 10,759 feet high, in Colorado; at the corner of Seventh Street

and Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona; on Third Street, Los Angeles, because the tickets to some studio or other

were sold out; at a motel called Poplar Shade in Utah, where six pubescent trees were scarcely taller than my Lolita,

and where she asked, à propos de rien, how long did I think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy

things together and never behaving like ordinary people? On N. Broadway, Burns, Oregon, corner of W.

Washington, facing Safeway, a grocery. In some little town in the Sun Valley of Idaho, before a brick hotel, pale

and flushed bricks nicely mixed, with, opposite, a poplar playing its liquid shadows all over the local Honor Roll.

In a sage brush wilderness, between Pinedale and Farson. Somewhere in Nebraska, on Main Street, near the First

National Bank, established 1889, with a view of a railway crossing in the vista of the street, and beyond that the

white organ pipes of a multiple silo. And on McEwen St., corner of Wheaton Ave., in a Michigan town bearing his

first name.

We came to know the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man, Homo pollex of science, with all its many

sub-species and forms; the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki’s viatic appeal;

the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous,

elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college student

displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly as the name of the famous college arching across the

front of his sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shiftyeyed,

white-faced young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs

to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings.

“Let’s take him,” Lo would often plead, rubbing her knees together in a way she had, as some particularly

disgusting pollex, some man of my age and shoulder breadth, with the face à claques of unemployed actor, walked

backwards, practically in the path of our car.

Oh, I had to keep a very sharp eye on Lo, little limp Lo! Owing perhaps to constant amorous exercise, she

radiated, despite her very childish appearance, some special languorous glow which threw garage fellows, hotel

pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools, into fits of concupiscence which

might have tickled my pride, had it not incensed my jealousy. For little Lo was aware of that glow of hers, and I

would often catch her coulant un regard in the direction of some amiable male, some grease monkey, with a

sinewy golden-brown forearm and watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this very

Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love song of wisecracks.

When, during our longer stops, I would relax after a particularly violent morning in bed, and out of the goodness

of my lulled heart allow her — indulgent Hum! — to visit the rose garden or children’s library across the street

with a motor court neighbor’s plain little Mary and Mary’s eight-year-old brother, Lo would come back an hour late,

with barefoot Mary trailing far behind, and the little boy metamorphosed into two gangling, golden-haired high

school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhea. The reader may well imagine what I answered my pet when — rather

uncertainly, I admit — she would ask me if she could go with Carl and Al here to the roller-skating rink.

I remember the first time, a dusty windy afternoon, I did let her go to one such rink. Cruelly she said it would be

no fun if I accompanied her, since that time of day was reserved for teenagers. We wrangled out a compromise: I

remained in the car, among other (empty) cars with their noses to the canvas-topped open-air rink, where some

fifty young people, many in pairs, were endlessly rolling round and round to mechanical music, and the wind

silvered the trees. Dolly wore blue jeans and white high shoes, as most of the other girls did. I kept counting the

revolutions of the rolling crowd — and suddenly she was missing. When she rolled past again, she was together

with three hoodlums whom I had heard analyze a moment before the girl skaters from the outside — and jeer at a

lovely leggy young thing who had arrived clad in red shorts instead of those jeans and slacks.

At inspection stations on highways entering Arizona or California, a policeman’s cousin would peer with such

intensity at us that my poor heart wobbled. “Any honey?” he would inquire, and every time my sweet fool giggled.

I still have, vibrating all along my optic nerve, visions of Lo on horseback, a link in the chain of a guided trip along

a bridle trail: Lo bobbing at a walking pace, with an old woman rider in front and a lecherous red-necked duderancher

behind; and I behind him, hating his fat flowery-shirted back even more fervently than a motorist does a

slow truck on a mountain road. Or else, at a ski lodge, I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary,

in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting

for her, for her.

In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way, anent the whereabouts of natatoriums,

museums, local schools, the number of children in the nearest school and so forth; and at school bus time, smiling

and twitching a little (I discovered this tic nerveux because cruel Lo was the first to mimic it), I would park at a

strategic point, with my vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave school — always a

pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to bore my so easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of

sympathy for other people’s whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while blue-eyed little

brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the

sun.

As a sort of compromise, I freely advocated whenever and wherever possible the use of swimming pools with

other girl-children. She adored brilliant water and was a remarkably smart diver. Comfortably robed, I would settle

down in the rich post-meridian shade after my own demure dip, and there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag

of bonbons, or both, or nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped, bepearled, smoothly

tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly would I

marvel that she was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent matitudinal swoon to the moan of the mourning doves,

and devise the late afternoon one, and slitting my sun-speared eyes, compare Lolita to whatever other nymphets

parsimonious chance collected around her for my anthological delectation and judgment; and today, putting my

hand on my ailing heart, I really do not think that any of them ever surpassed her in desirability, or if they did, it

was so two or three times at the most, in a certain light, with certain perfumes blended in the air — once in the

hopeless case of a pale Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman, and another time — mais je

divague.

Naturally, I had to be always wary, fully realizing, in my lucid jealousy, the danger of those dazzling romps. I had only to turn away for a moment — to walk, say, a few steps in order to see if our cabin was at last ready after the morning change of linen — and Lo and Behold, upon returning, I would find the former, les yeux perdus, dipping and kicking her long-toed feet in the water on the stone edge of which she lolled, while, on either side of her, there crouched a brun adolescent whom her russet beauty and the quicksilver in the baby folds of her stomach were sure to cause to se tordre — oh Baudelaire! — in recurrent dreams for months to come.

I tried to teach her to play tennis so we might have more amusements in common; but although I had been a good player in my prime, I proved to be hopeless as a teacher; and so, in California, I got her to take a number of

very expensive lessons with a famous coach, a husky, wrinkled old-timer, with a harem of ball boys; he looked an

awful wreck off the court, but now and then, when, in the course of a lesson, to keep up the exchange, he would put

out as it were an exquisite spring blossom of a stroke and twang the ball back to his pupil, that divine delicacy of

absolute power made me recall that, thirty years before, I had seen him in Cannes demolish the great Gobbert!

Until she began taking those lessons, I thought she would never learn the game. On this or that hotel court I would

drill Lo, and try to relive the days when in a hot gale, a daze of dust, and queer lassitude, I fed ball after ball to gay,

innocent, elegant Annabel (gleam of bracelet, pleated white skirt, black velvet hair band). With every word of

persistent advice I would only augment Lo’s sullen fury. To our games, oddly enough, she preferred — at least,

before we reached California — formless pat ball approximations — more ball hunting than actual play — with a

wispy, weak, wonderfully pretty in an ange gauche way coeval. A helpful spectator, I would go up to that other

child, and inhale her faint musky fragrance as I touched her forearm and held her knobby wrist, and push this way

or that her cool thigh to show her the back-hand stance. In the meantime, Lo, bending forward, would let her

sunny-brown curls hang forward as she stuck her racket, like a cripple’s stick, into the ground and emitted a

tremendous ugh of disgust at my intrusion. I would leave them to their game and look on, comparing their bodies

in motion, a silk scarf round my throat; this was in south Arizona, I think — and the days had a lazy lining warmth,

and awkward Lo would slash at the ball and miss it, and curse, and send a simulacrum of a serve into the net, and

show the wet glistening young down of her armpit as she brandished her racket in despair, and her even more

insipid partner would dutifully rush out after every ball, and retrieve none; but both were enjoying themselves

beautifully, and in clear ringing tones kept the exact score of their ineptitudes all the time.

One day, I remember, I offered to bring them cold drinks from the hotel, and went up the gravel path, and came

back with two tall glasses of pineapple juice, soda and ice; and then a sudden void within my chest made me stop

as I saw that the tennis court was deserted. I stooped to set down the glasses on a bench and for some reason, with a

kind of icy vividness, saw Charlotte’s face in death, and I glanced around, and noticed Lo in white shorts receding

through the speckled shadow of a garden path in the company of a tall man who carried two tennis rackets. I sprang

after them, but as I was crashing through the shrubbery, I saw, in an alternate vision, as if life’s course constantly

branched, Lo, in slacks, and her companion, in shorts, trudging up and down a small weedy area, and beating

bushes with their rackets in listless search for their last lost ball.

I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove to my judges that I did everything in my power to give my Lolita

a really good time. How charming it was to see her, a child herself, showing another child some of her few

accomplishments, such as for example a special way of jumping rope. With her right hand holding her left arm

behind her untanned back, the lesser nymphet, a diaphanous darling, would be all eyes, as the pavonine sun was all

eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees, while in the midst of that oculate paradise, my freckled and raffish

lass skipped, repeating the movements of so many others I had gloated over on the sun-shot, watered, dampsmelling

sidewalks and ramparts of ancient Europe. Presently, she would hand the rope back to her little Spanish

friend, and watch in her turn the repeated lesson, and brush away the hair from her brow, and fold her arms, and

step on one toe with the other, or drop her hands loosely upon her still unflared hips, and I would satisfy myself

that the damned staff had at last finished cleaning up our cottage; whereupon, flashing a smile to the shy, darkhaired

page girl of my princess and thrusting my fatherly fingers deep into Lo’s hair from behind, and then gently

but firmly clasping them around the nape of her neck, I would lead my reluctant pet to our small home for a quick

connection before dinner.

“Whose cat has scratched poor you?” A full-blown fleshy handsome woman of the repulsive type to which I was

particularly attractive might ask me at the “lodge,” during a table d’hôte dinner followed by dancing promised to Lo.

This was one of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people as possible, while Lo, on the other hand,

would do her utmost to draw as many potential witnesses into her orbit as she could.

She would be, figuratively speaking wagging her tiny tail, her whole behind in fact as little bitches do — while

some grinning stranger accosted us and began a bright conversation with a comparative study of license plates.

“Long way from home!” Inquisitive parents, in order to pump Lo about me, would suggest her going to a movie

with their children. We had some close shaves. The waterfall nuisance pursued me of course in all our

caravansaries. But I never realized how wafery their wall substance was until one evening, after I had loved too

loudly, a neighbor’s masculine cough filled the pause as clearly as mine would have done; and next morning as I

was having breakfast at the milk bar (Lo was a late sleeper, and I liked to bring her a pot of hot coffee in bed), my

neighbor of the eve, an elderly fool wearing plain glasses on his long virtuous nose and a convention badge on his

lapel, somehow managed to rig up a conversation with me, in the course of which he inquired, if my missus was

like his missus a rather reluctant get-upper when not on the farm; and had not the hideous danger I was skirting

almost suffocated me, I might have enjoyed the odd look of surprise on his thin-lipped weather-beaten face when I

drily answered, as I slithered off my stool, that I was thank God a widower.

How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until she had done her morning duty. And I was

such a thoughtful friend, such a passionate father, such a good pediatrician, attending to all the wants of my little

auburn brunette’s body! My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply

voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely

twin kidneys. On especially tropical afternoons, in the sticky closeness of the siesta, I liked the cool feel of

armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical kid picking

her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something

she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove. Her eyes would

follow the adventures of her favorite strip characters: there was one well-drawn sloppy bobby-soxer, with high

cheekbones and angular gestures, that I was not above enjoying myself; she studied the photographic results of

head-on collisions; she never doubted the reality of place, time, and circumstance alleged to match the publicity

pictures of naked-thighed beauties; and she was curiously fascinated by the photographs of local brides, some in

full wedding apparel, holding bouquets and wearing glasses.

A fly would settle and walk in the vicinity of her navel or explore her tender pale areolas. She tried to catch it in

her fist (Charlotte’s method) and then would turn to the column Let’s Explore Your Mind.

“Let’s explore your mind. Would sex crimes be reduced if children obeyed a few don’ts? Don’t play around

public toilets. Don’t take candy or rides from strangers. If picked up, mark down the license of the car.”

“…and the brand of the candy,” I volunteered.

She went on, her cheek (recedent) against mine (pursuant); and this was a good day, mark, O reader!

“If you don’t have a pencil, but are old enough to read —”

“We,” I quip-quoted, “medieval mariners, have placed in this bottle —”

“If,” she repeated, “you don’t have a pencil, but are old enough to read and write — this is what the guy means,

isn’t it, you dope — scratch the number somehow on the roadside.”

“With your little claws, Lolita.”

3

She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of

amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain

repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for

my pains. To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To

think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would — invariably, with icy precision — plump for the

former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I

visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid

Princess. She did not see the wistful joke.

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.

Reader must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were,

beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours,

that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all

the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled

deep in my elected paradise — a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames — but still a paradise.

The able psychiatrist who studies my case — and whom by now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of

leporine fascination — is no doubt anxious to have me take Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at last, the

“gratification” of a lifetime urge, and release from the “subconscious” obsession of an incomplete childhood

romance with the initial little Miss Lee.

Well, comrade, let me tell you that I did look for a beach, though I also have to confess that by the time we

reached its mirage of gray water, so many delights had already been granted me by my traveling companion that

the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or whatnot, far from being the impulse of the

subconscious, had become the rational pursuit of a purely theoretical thrill. The angels knew it, and arranged things

accordingly. A visit to a plausible cove on the Atlantic side was completely messed up by foul weather. A thick

damp sky, muddy waves, a sense of boundless but somehow matter-of-fact mist — what could be further removed

from the crisp charm, the sapphire occasion and rosy contingency of my Riviera romance? A couple of

semitropical beaches on the Gulf, though bright enough, were starred and spattered by venomous beasties and

swept by hurricane winds. Finally, on a Californian beach, facing the phantom of the Pacific, I hit upon some

rather perverse privacy in a kind of cave whence you could hear the shrikes of a lot of girl scouts taking their first

surf bath on a separate part of the beach, behind rotting trees; but the fog was like a wet blanket, and the sand was

gritty and clammy, and Lo was all gooseflesh and grit, and for the first time in my life I had as little desire for her

as for a manatee. Perhaps, my learned readers may perk up if I tell them that even had we discovered a piece of

sympathetic seaside somewhere, it would have come too late, since my real liberation had occurred much earlier: at

the moment, in point of fact, when Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta, had appeared tome, golden and

brown, kneeling, looking up, on that shoddy veranda, in a kind of fictitious, dishonest, but eminently satisfactory

seaside arrangement (although there was nothing but a second-rate lake in the neighborhood.).

So much for those special sensations, influence, if not actually brought about, by the tenets of modern

psychiatry. Consequently, I turned away — I headed my Lolita away — from beaches which were either too bleak

when lone, or too populous when ablaze. However, in recollection, I suppose, of my hopeless hauntings of public

parks in Europe, I was still keenly interested in outdoor activities and desirous of finding suitable playgrounds in

the open where I had suffered such shameful privations. Here, too, I was to be thwarted. The disappointment I must

now register (as I gently grade my story into an expression of the continuous risk and dread that ran through my

bliss) should in no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic, tragic but never Arcadian American wilds. They are beautiful,

heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered,

toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and

kissed on the trim turf of old-would mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic

benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America

the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants

burn his sweetheart’s buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects

hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes — que dis-je, of semi-extinct dragons! —

while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy

white sock alike.

I am exaggerating a little. One summer noon, just below timberline, where heavenly-hued blossoms that I would

fain call larkspur crowded all along a purly mountain brook, we did find, Lolita and I, a secluded romantic spot, a

hundred feet or so above the pass where we had left our car. The slope seemed untrodden. A last panting pine was

taking a well-earned breather on the rock it had reached. A marmot whistled at us and withdrew. Beneath the laprobe

I had spread for Lo, dry flowers crepitated softly. Venus came and went. The jagged cliff crowning the upper

talus and a tangle of shrugs growing below us seemed to offer us protection from sun and man alike. Alas, I had

not reckoned with a faint side trail that curled up in cagey fashion among the shrubs and rocks a few feet from us.

It was then that we came close to detection than ever before, and no wonder the experience curbed forever my

yearning for rural amours.

I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms; — a salutory storm of sobs after

one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year! I

had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of blind impatient passion, and thee

she was sprawling and sobbing, and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the atrocious,

unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue

of my bliss; and so we lay, when with one of those jolts that have ended by knocking my poor heart out of its

groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strange and beautiful children, faunlet and nymphet, whom their

identical flat dark hair and bloodless cheeks proclaimed siblings if not twins. They stood crouching and gaping at

us, both in blue playsuits, blending with the mountain blossoms. I plucked at the lap-robe for desperate

concealment — and within the same instant, something that looked like a polka-dotted pushball among the

undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which was transformed into the gradually rising figure

of a stout lady with a raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, while staring over her

shoulder at us from behind her lovely carved bluestone children.

Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I know that I am a courageous man, but in those

days I was not aware of it, and I remember being surprised by my own coolness. With the quiet murmured order

one gives a sweat-stained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of plights (what mad hope or hate

makes the young beast’s flanks pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up, and we

decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car. Behind it a nifty station wagon was parked, and

a handsome Assyrian with q little blue-black beard, un monsieur très bien, in silk shirt and magenta slacks,

presumably the corpulent botanist’s husband, was gravely taking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of

the pass. It was well over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and with a scrunch and a skid we drove off, Lo

still struggling with her clothes and swearing at me in language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let

alone use.

There were other unpleasant incidents. There was the movie theatre once, for example. Lo at the time still had

for the cinema a veritable passion (it was to decline into tepid condescension during her second high school year).

We took in, voluptuously and indiscriminately, oh, I don’t know, one hundred and fifty or two hundred programs

during that one year, and during some of the denser periods of movie-going we saw many of the newsreels up to

half-a-dozen times since the same weekly one went with different main pictures and pursued us from town to town.

Her favorite kinds were, in this order: musicals, underworlders, westerners. In the first, real singers and dancers

had unreal stage careers in an essentially grief-proof sphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were banned,

and where, at the end, white-haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctant father of a show-crazy

girl always finished by applauding her apotheosis on fabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world apart: there,

heroic newspapermen were tortured, telephone bills ran to billions, and, in a robust atmosphere of incompetent

marksmanship, villains were chased through sewers and store-houses by pathologically fearless cops (I was to give

them less exercise). Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced, blue-eyed roughriders, the prim

pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust

through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing mountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture,

the table used as a weapon, the timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie knife, the

grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora

of pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now), nothing to show but the rather becoming

bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero embracing his gorgeous frontier bride. I remember one matinee

in a small airless theatre crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath of popcorn. The moon was yellow

above the neckerchiefed crooner, and his finger was on his strumstring, and his foot was on a pine log, and I had

innocently encircled Lo’s shoulder and approached my jawbone to her temple, when two harpies behind us started

muttering the queerest things — I do not know if I understood aright, but what I thought I did, made me withdraw

my gentle hand, and of course the rest of the show was fog to me.

Another jolt I remember is connected with a little burg we were traversing at night, during our return journey.

Some twenty miles earlier I had happened to tell her that the day school she would attend at Beardsley was a rather

high-class, non-coeducational one, with no modern nonsense, whereupon Lo treated me to one of those furious

harangues of hers where entreaty and insult, self-assertion and double talk, vicious vulgarity and childish despair,

were interwoven in an exasperating semblance of logic which prompted a semblance of explanation from me.

Enmeshed in her wild words (swell chance… I’d be a sap if I took your opinion seriously… Stinker… You can’t boss

me… I despise you… and so forth), I drove through the slumbering town at a fifty-mile-per-hour pace in

continuance of my smooth highway swoosh, and a twosome of patrolmen put their spotlight on the car, and told me

to pull over. I shushed Lo who was automatically raving on. The men peered at her and me with malevolent

curiosity. Suddenly all dimples, she beamed sweetly at them, as she never did at my orchideous masculinity; for, in

a sense, my Lo was even more scared of the law than I — and when the kind officers pardoned us and servilely we

crawled on, her eyelids closed and fluttered as she mimicked limp prostration.

At this point I have a curious confession to make. You will laugh — but really and truly I somehow never

managed to find out quite exactly what the legal situation was. I do not know it yet. Oh, I have learned a few odds

and ends. Alabama prohibits a guardian from changing the ward’s residence without an order of the court;

Minnesota, to whom I take off my hat, provides that when a relative assumes permanent care and custody of any

child under fourteen, the authority of a court does not come into play. Query: is the stepfather of a gaspingly

adorable pubescent pet, a stepfather of only one month’s standing, a neurotic widower of mature years and small

but independent means, with the parapets of Europe, a divorce and a few madhouses behind him, is he to be

considered a relative, and thus a natural guardian? And if not, must I, and could I reasonably dare notify some

Welfare Board and file a petition (how do you file a petition?), and have a court’s agent investigate meek, fishy me

and dangerous Dolores Haze? The many books on marriage, rape, adoption and so on, that I guiltily consulted at

the public libraries of big and small towns, told me nothing beyond darkly insinuating that the state is the superguardian

of minor children. Pilvin and Zapel, if I remember their names right, in an impressive volume on the legal

side of marriage, completely ignored stepfathers with motherless girls on their hands and knees. My best friend, a

social service monograph(Chicago, 1936), which was dug out for me at great pains form a dusty storage recess by

an innocent old spinster, said “There is no principle that every minor must have a guardian; the court is passive and

enters the fray only when the child’s situation becomes conspicuously perilous.” A guardian, I concluded, was

appointed only when he expressed his solemn and formal desire; but months might elapse before he was given

notice to appear at a hearing and grow his pair of gray wings, and in the meantime the fair demon child was legally

left to her own devices which, after all, was the case of Dolores Haze. Then came the hearing. A few questions

from the bench, a few reassuring answers from the attorney, a smile, a nod, a light drizzle outside, and the

appointment was made. And still I dared not. Keep away, be a mouse, curl up in your hole. Courts became

extravagantly active only when there was some monetary question involved: two greedy guardians, a robbed

orphan, a third, still greedier, party. But here all was in perfect order, and inventory had been made, and her

mother’s small property was waiting untouched for Dolores Haze to grow up. The best policy seemed to be to

refrain from any application. Or would some busybody, some Humane Society, butt in if I kept too quiet?

Friend Farlow, who was a lawyer of sorts and ought to have been able to give me some solid advice, was too

much occupied with Jean’s cancer to do anything more than what he had promised — namely, to look after

Charlotte’s meager estate while I recovered very gradually from the shock of her death. I had conditioned him into

believing Dolores was my natural child, and so could not expect him to bother his head about the situation. I am, as

the reader must have gathered by now, a poor businessman; but neither ignorance nor indolence should have

prevented me from seeking professional advice elsewhere. What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I

meddled with fate in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be snatched away like that

palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian

how come a strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and foundation.

I decided that at Beardsley (the site of Bearsley College for Women) I would have access to works of reference

that I had not yet been able to study, such as Woerner’s Treatise “On the American Law of Guardianship” and

certain United States Children’s Bureau Publications. I also decided that anything was better for Lo than the

demoralizing idleness in which she lived. I could persuade her to do so many things — their list might stupefy a

professional educator; but no matter how I pleaded or stormed, I could never make her read any other book than

the so-called comic books or stories in magazines for American females. Any literature a peg higher smacked to

her of school, and though theoretically willing to enjoy A Girl of the Limberlost or the Arabian Nights, or Little

Women, she was quite sure she would not fritter away her “vacation” on such highbrow reading matter.

I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley,

instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a

couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole; for I must confess that depending on

the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to

the other — from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose

magic nymphage had evaporated — to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually

a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960,

when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to

distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert — or was it green rot? — bizarre, tender, salivating Dr.

Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.

In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure.

I did my best; I read and reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own Daughter, which I

got at the same store where I bought Lo, for her thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially

“beautiful” illustrations, of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. But even at our very best moments, when we sat

reading on a rainy day (Lo’s glance skipping from the window to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet

hearty meal in a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, or silently stared, with other

motorists and their children, at some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young woman’s shoe in the ditch (Lo,

as we drove on: “that was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store”); on all those

random occasions, I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty

locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation? Would improvement be forthcoming with a

fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl’s day?

In my choice of Beardsley I was guided not only by the fact of there being a comparatively sedate school for

girls located there, but also by the presence of the women’s college. In my desire to get myself casé, to attach

myself somehow to some patterned surface which my stripes would blend with, I thought of a man I knew in the

department of French at Beardsley College; he was good enough to use my textbook in his classes and had

attempted to get me over once to deliver a lecture. I had no intention of doing so, since, as I have once remarked in

the course of these confessions, there are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves

and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe, the coffin of coarse female flesh within

which my nymphets are buried alive); but I did crave for a label, a background, and a simulacrum, and, as presently

will become clear, there was a reason, a rather zany reason, why old Gaston Godin’s company would be

particularly safe.

Finally, there was the money question. My income was cracking under the strain of our joy-ride. True, I clung to

the cheaper motor courts; but every now and then, there would be a loud hotel de luxe, or a pretentious dude ranch,

to mutilate our budget; staggering sums, moreover, were expended on sightseeing and Lo’s clothes, and the old

Haze bus, although a still vigorous and very devoted machine, necessitated numerous minor and major repairs. In

one of our strip maps that has happened to survive among the papers which the authorities have so kindly allowed

me to use for the purpose of writing my statement, I find some jottings that help me compute the following. During

that extravagant year 1947-1948, August to August, lodgings and food cost us around 5,500 dollars; gas, oil and

repairs, 1,234, and various extras almost as much; so that during about 150 days of actual motion (we covered

about 27,000 miles!) plus some 200 days of interpolated standstills, this modest rentier spent around 8,000 dollars,

or better say 10,000 because, unpractical as I am, I have surely forgotten a number of items.

And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with

health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad’s, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight

pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking that our

long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by

then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her

sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.

4

When, through decorations of light and shade, we drove to 14 Thayer Street, a grave little lad met us with the keys

and a note from Gaston who had rented the house for us. My Lo, without granting her new surroundings one glance,

unseeingly turned on the radio to which instinct led her and lay down on the living room sofa with a batch of old

magazines which in the same precise and blind manner she landed by dipping her hand into the nether anatomy of

a lamp table.

I really did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock my Lolita up somewhere; but I had, I suppose, in the

course of my correspondence with vague Gaston, vaguely visualized a house of ivied brick. Actually the place bore

a dejected resemblance to the Haze home (a mere 400 distant): it was the same sort of dull gray frame affair with a

shingled roof and dull green drill awnings; and the rooms, though smaller and furnished in a more consistent plushand-

plate style, were arranged in much the same order. My study turned out to be, however, a much larger room,

lined from floor to ceiling with some two thousand books on chemistry which my landlord (on sabbatical leave for

the time being) taught at Beardsley College.

I had hoped Beardsley School for girls, an expensive day school, with lunch thrown in and a glamorous

gymnasium, would, while cultivating all those young bodies, provide some formal education for their minds as

well. Gaston Godin, who was seldom right in his judgment of American habitus, had warned me that the institution

might turn out to be one of those where girls are taught, as he put it with a foreigner’s love for such things: “not to

spell very well, but to smell very well.” I don’t think they achieved even that.

At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, she approved of my child’s “nice blue eyes” (blue! Lolita!) and of

my own friendship with that “French genius” (a genius! Gaston!) — and then, having turned Dolly over to a Miss

Cormorant, she wrinkled her brow in a kind of recueillement and said:

“We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms or be able to reel

off all the capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What

we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is why we stress the four D’s: Dramatics,

Dance, Debating and Dating. We are confronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will presently enter an age

group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean as much to her as, say, business, business

connections, business success, mean to you, or as much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me.

Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life which consists, whether we like it or not, of

hot-dog stands, corner drugstores, malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, and even

hair-fixing parties! Naturally at Beardsley School we disapprove of some of these activities; and we rechannel

others into more constructive directions. But we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face the sunshine.

To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching techniques, we are more interested in communication than in

composition. That is, with due respect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicate freely with the

live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books. We are still groping perhaps, but we grope

intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor. We thing, Dr. Humburg, in organismal and organizational terms.

We have done away with the mass or irrelevant topics that have traditionally been presented to young girls, leaving

no place, in former days, for the knowledges and the skills, and the attitudes they will need in managing their lives

and — as the cynic might add — the lives of their husbands. Mr. Humberson, let us put it this way: the position of

a star is important, but the most practical spot for an icebox in the kitchen may be even more important to the

budding housewife. You say that all you expect a child to obtain from school is a sound education. But what do we

mean by education? In the old days it was in the main a verbal phenomenon; I mean, you could have a child learn

by heart a good encyclopedia and he or she would know as much as or more than a school could offer. Dr.

Hummer, do you realize that for the modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of less vital value than

weekend ones [twinkle]? — to repeat a pun that I heard the Beardsley college psychoanalyst permit herself the

other day. We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are

meaningless. What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care for Greece and the Orient with their harems and

slaves?”

This program rather appalled me, but I spoke to two intelligent ladies who had been connected with the school,

and they affirmed that the girls did quite a bit of sound reading and that the “communication” line was more or less

ballyhoo aimed at giving old-fashioned Beardsley School a financially remunerative modern touch, though actually

it remained as prim as a prawn.

Another reason attracting me to that particular school may seem funny to some readers, but it was very

important to me, for that is the way I am made. Across our street, exactly in front of our house, there was, I noticed,

a gap of weedy wasteland, with some colorful bushes and a pile of bricks and a few scattered planks, and the foam

of shabby mauve and chrome autumn roadside flowers; and through that gap you could see a shimmery section of

School Rd., running parallel to our Thayer St., and immediately beyond that, the playground of the school Apart

from the psychological comfort this general arrangement should afford me by keeping Dolly’s day adjacent to mine,

I immediately foresaw the pleasure I would have in distinguishing from my study-bedroom, by means of powerful

binoculars, the statistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the other girl children playing around Dolly

during recess; unfortunately, on the very first day of school, workmen arrived and put up a fence some way down

the gap, and in no time a construction of tawny wood maliciously arose beyond that fence utterly blocking my

magic vista; and as soon as they had erected a sufficient amount of material to spoil everything, those absurd

builders suspended their work and never appeared again.

5

In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green, fawn, and golden of a mellow academic townlet, one was

bound to have a few amiable fine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself on the exact temperature of my relations

with them: never rude, always aloof. My west-door neighbor, who might have been a businessman or a college

teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or,

at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don’t mind if these verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just

sufficiently articulate to sound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precluded any evolution

toward chumminess. Of the two houses flanking the bit of scrubby waste opposite, one was closed, and the other

contained two professors of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedly feminine Miss Fabian,

whose only subject of brief sidewalk conversation with me was (God bless their tact!) the young loveliness of my

daughter and the naïve charm of Gaston Godin. My east-door neighbor was by far the most dangerous one, a sharpnosed

stock character whose late brother had been attached to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and

Grounds. I remember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living room window, feverishly awaiting my

darling’s return from school. The odious spinster, trying to conceal her morbid inquisitiveness under a mask of

dulcet goodwill, stood leaning on her slim umbrella (the sleet had just stopped, a cold wet sun had sidled out), and

Dolly, her brown coat open despite the raw weather, her structural heap of books pressed against her stomach, her

knees showing pink above her clumsy wellingtons, a sheepish frightened little smile flitting over and off her snubnosed

face, which — owing perhaps to the pale wintry light — looked almost plain, in a rustic, German, Mägdleinlike

way, as she stood there and dealt with Miss East’s questions “And where is your mother, my dear? And what is

your poor father’s occupation? And where did you love before?” Another time the loathsome creature accosted me

with a welcoming whine — but I evaded her; and a few days later there came from her a note in a blue-margined

envelope, a nice mixture of poison and treacle, suggesting Dolly come over on a Sunday and curl up in a chair to

look through the “loads of beautiful books my dear mother gave me when I was a child, instead of having the radio

on at full blast till all hours of the night.”

I had also to be careful in regard to a Mrs. Holigan, a charwoman and cook of sorts whom I had inherited with

the vacuum cleaner from the previous tenants. Dolly got lunch at school, so that this was no trouble, and I had

become adept at providing her with a big breakfast and warming up the dinner that Mrs. Holigan prepared before

leaving. That kindly and harmless woman had, thank God, a rather bleary eye that missed details, and I had

become a great expert in bedmaking; but still I was continuously obsessed by the feeling that some fatal stain had

been left somewhere, or that, on the rare occasions where Holigan’s presence happened to coincide with Lo’s,

simple Lo might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy kitchen chat. I often felt we lived in a lighted

house of glass, and any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded

window to obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would have paid a small fortune to watch.

6

A word about Gaston Godin. The main reason why I enjoyed — or at least tolerated with relief — his company

was the spell of absolute security that his ample person cast on my secret. Not that he knew it; I had no special

reason to confide in him, and he was much too self-centered and abstract to notice or suspect anything that might

lead to a frank question on his part and a frank answer on mine. He spoke well of me to Beardsleyans, he was my

good herald. Had he discovered mes goûts and Lolita’s status, it would have interested him only insofar as throwing

some light on the simplicity of my attitude toward him, which attitude was as free of polite strain as it was of ribald

allusions; for despite his colorless mind and dim memory, he was perhaps aware that I knew more about him than

the burghers of Beardsley did. He was a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor tapering upward to a pair of

narrow, not quite level shoulders and a conical pear-head which had sleek black hair on one side and only a few

plastered wisps on the other. But the lower part of his body was enormous, and he ambulated with a curious

elephantine stealth by means of phenomenally stout legs. He always wore black, even his tie was black; he seldom

bathed; his English was a burlesque. And, nonetheless, everybody considered him to be a supremely lovable,

lovably freakish fellow! Neighbors pampered him; he knew by name all the small boys in our vicinity (he lived a

few blocks away from me)and had some of them clean his sidewalk and burn leaves in his back yard, and bring

wood from his shed, and even perform simple chores about the house, and he would feed them fancy chocolates,

with real liqueurs inside — in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement, with amusing daggers and

pistols arrayed on the moldy, rug-adorned walls among the camouflaged hot-water pipes. Upstairs he had a studio

— he painted a little, the old fraud. He had decorated its sloping wall (it was really not more than a garret) with

large photographs of pensive André Gide, Tchaïkovsky, Norman Douglas, two other well-known English writers,

Nijinsky (all thighs and fig leaves), Harold D. Doublename (a misty-eyed left-wing professor at a Midwestern

university) and Marcel Proust. All these poor people seemed about to fall on you from their inclined plane. He had

also an album with snapshots of all the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, and when I happened to thumb

through it and make some casual remark, Gaston would purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout “Oui, ils

sont gentils.” His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his

own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day),

and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say “Prenez donc une de ces

poires. La bonne dame d’en face m’en offre plus que je n’en peux savourer.” Or: “Mississe Taille Lore vient de me

donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs que j’exècre.” (Somber, sad, full of world-weariness.)

For obvious reasons, I preferred my house to his for the games of chess we had two or three times weekly. He

looked like some old battered idol as he sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and stared at the board as if it were a

corpse. Wheezing he would mediate for ten minutes — then make a losing move. Or the good man, after even

more thought, might utter: Au roi! with a slow old-dog woof that had a gargling sound at the back of it which made

his jowls wabble; and then he would lift his circumflex eyebrows with a deep sigh as I pointed out to him that he

was in check himself.

Sometimes, from where we sat in my cold study I could hear Lo’s bare feet practicing dance techniques in the

living room downstairs; but Gaston’s outgoing senses were comfortably dulled, and he remained unaware of those

naked rhythms — and-one, and-two, and-one, and-two, weight transferred on a straight right leg, leg up and out to

the side, and-one, and-two, and only when she started jumping, opening her legs at the height of the jump, and

flexing one leg, and extending the other, and flying, and landing on her toes — only then did my pale, pompous,

morose opponent rub his head or cheek a if confusing those distant thuds with the awful stabs of my formidable

Queen.

Sometimes Lola would slouch in while we pondered the board — and it was every time a treat to see Gaston,

his elephant eye still fixed on his pieces, ceremoniously rise to shake hands with her, and forthwith release her limp

fingers, and without looking once at her, descend again into his chair to topple into the trap I had laid for him. One

day around Christmas, after I had not seen him for a fortnight or so, he asked me “Et toutes vos fillettes, elles vont

bien?” from which it became evident to me that he had multiplied my unique Lolita by the number of sartorial

categories his downcast moody eye had glimpsed during a whole series of her appearances: blue jeans, a skirt,

shorts, a quilted robe.

I am loath to dwell so long on the poor fellow (sadly enough, a year later, during a voyage to Europe, from

which he did not return, he got involved in a sale histoire, in Naples of all places!). I would have hardly alluded to

him at all had not his Beardsley existence had such a queer bearing on my case. I need him for my defense. There

he was devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old invert,

highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language — there he was in

priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young — oh, having a grand time and fooling

everybody; and here was I.

7

I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals. If her share in the ardors she

kindled had never amounted to much, neither had pure lucre ever come to the fore. But I was weak, I was not wise,

my school-girl nymphet had me in thrall. With the human element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the

torture only increased; and of this she took advantage.

Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents at the

start of the Beardsley era — and went up to one dollar five before its end. This was a more than generous

arrangement seeing she constantly received from me all kinds of small presents and had for the asking any

sweetmeat or movie under the moon — although, of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or even a

whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted very badly some item of juvenile amusement. She

was, however, not easy to deal with. Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies — or three nickels — per

day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange,

slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the

very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she

managed — during one schoolyear! — to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks! O

Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big

silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in the margin of that

leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open

afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot. And just as every other day I would

cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visit drugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to

receding girl laughter in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now and then I would burgle her

room and scrutinize torn papers in the wastebasket with the painted roses, and look under the pillow of the virginal

bed I had just made myself. Once I found eight one-dollar notes in one of her books (fittingly — Treasure Island),

and once a hole in the wall behind Whistler’s Mother yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and some change —

say twenty-four sixty — which I quietly removed, upon which, next day, she accused, to my face, honest Mrs.

Holigan of being a filthy thief. Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hoarding place which I never

discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way

permission to participate in the school’s theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that she might ruin

me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out

that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood — or the foul kitchen

of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars,

and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.

8

I did my best, your Honor, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called

Column for Teens, to find out how to behave!

A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now

the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely

and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an executive’s office, but yesterday you were just

highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn

has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want your daughter, now

that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want them

to have wholesome fun together?

Wholesome fun? Good Lord!

Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw

them out, make them laugh and feel at ease?

Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.

If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of

your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the daughter of an old ogre.

First of all the old ogre drew up a list under “absolutely forbidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.”

Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triple — the next step being of course mass orgy. She might

visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car

at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable group in Butler’s

Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a

girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like flamingoes).

Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl

friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long

as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car,

or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone

conversations, even if “only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.”

Lo was enraged by all this — called me a lousy crook and worse — and I would probably have lost my temper

had I not soon discovered, to my sweetest relief, that what really angered her was my depriving her not of a

specific satisfaction but of a general right. I was impinging, you see, on the conventional program, the stock

pastimes, the “things that are done,” the routine of youth; for there is nothing more conservative than a child,

especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet, the most mythopoeic nymphet in October’s orchard-haze.

Do not misunderstand me. I cannot be absolutely certain that in the course of the winter she did not manage to

have, in a casual way, improper contacts with unknown young fellows; of course, no matter how closely I

controlled her leisure, there would constantly occur unaccounted-for time leaks with over-elaborate explanations to

stop them up in retrospect; of course, my jealousy would constantly catch its jagged claw in the fine fabrics of

nymphet falsity; but I did definitely feel — and can now vouchsafe for the accuracy of my feeling — that there was

no reason for serious alarm. I felt that way not because I never once discovered any palpable hard young throat to

crush among the masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the background; but because it was to me

“overwhelmingly obvious” (a favorite expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boys — from

the perspiring nincompoop whom “holding hands” thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up

car — equally bored my sophisticated young mistress. “All this noise about boys gags me,” she had scrawled on

the inside of a schoolbook, and underneath, in Mona’s hand (Mona is due any minute now), there was the sly quip:

“What about Rigger?” (due too).

Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her company. There was for instance Red Sweater who one

day, the day we had the first snow — saw her home; from the parlor window I observed them talking near our

porch. She wore her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favorite hairdo — the

fringe in front and the swirl at the sides and the natural curls at the back — and her damp-dark moccasins and

white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to her chest while speaking or listening,

and her feet gestured all the time: she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward, cross

her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps, and then start the series all over again. There was Windbreaker who

talked to her in front of a restaurant one Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister attempted to walk me away

for a chat; I dragged along and looked back at my only love. She had developed more than one conventional

mannerism, such as the polite adolescent way of showing one is literally “doubled up” with laughter by inclining

one’s head, and so (as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless merriment, she walked backward a couple of steps,

and then faced about, and walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I greatly liked — perhaps

because it reminded me of her first unforgettable confession — her trick of sighing “oh dear!” in humorous wistful

submission to fate, or emitting a long “no-o” in a deep almost growling undertone when the blow of fate had

actually fallen. Above all — since we are speaking of movement and youth — I liked to see her spinning up and

down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back

in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would

flip through a magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side of her upper lip and push

off with her foot, and again sprint through pale shade and sun.

On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her surroundings than I had hoped she would be when

considering my spoiled slave-child and the bangles of demeanor she naïvely affected the winter before in

California. Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, the

tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed after a

session of adoration and despair in Lolita’s cold bedroom, I used to review the concluded day by checking my own

image as it prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye. I watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic,

probably high-church, possibly very high-church, Dr. Humbert see his daughter off to school I watched him greet

with his slow smile and pleasantly arched thick black ad-eyebrows good Mrs. Holigan, who smelled of the plague

(and would head, I knew, for master’s gin at the first opportunity). With Mr. West, retired executioner or writer of

religious tracts — who cared? — I saw neighbor what’s his name, I think they are French or Swiss, meditate in his

frank-windowed study over a typewriter, rather gaunt-profiled, an almost Hitlerian cowlick on his pale brow.

Weekends, wearing a well-tailored overcoat and brown gloves, Professor H. might be seen with his daughter

strolling to Walton Inn (famous for its violet-ribboned china bunnies and chocolate boxes among which you sit and

wait for a “table for two” still filthy with your predecessor’s crumbs). Seen on weekdays, around one p.m. , saluting

with dignity Argus-eyed East while maneuvering the car out of the garage and around the damned evergreens, and

down onto the slippery road. Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College

library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge. Walking across the

campus with the college clergyman, the Rev. Rigger (who also taught Bible in Beardsley School). “Somebody told

me her mother was a celebrated actress killed in an airplane accident. Oh? My mistake, I presume. Is that so? I see.

How sad.” (Sublimating her mother, eh?) Slowly pushing my little pram through the labyrinth of the supermarket,

in the wake of Professor W., also a slow-moving and gentle widower with the eyes of a goat. Shoveling the snow

in my shirt-sleeves, a voluminous black and white muffler around my neck. Following with no show of rapacious

haste (even taking time to wipe my feet on the mat) my school-girl daughter into the house. Taking Dolly to the

dentist — pretty nurse beaming at her — old magazines — ne montrez pas vos zhambes. At dinner with Dolly in

town, Mr. Edgar H. Humbert was seen eating his steak in the continental knife-and-fork manner. Enjoying, in

duplicate, a concert: two marble-faced, becalmed Frenchmen sitting side by side, with Monsieur H.H.’s musical

little girl on her father’s right, and the musical little boy of Professor W. (father spending a hygienic evening in

Providence) on Monsieur G.G.’s left. Opening the garage, a square of light that engulfs the car and is extinguished.

Brightly pajamaed, jerking down the window shade in Dolly’s bedroom. Saturday morning, unseen, solemnly

weighing the winter-bleached lassie in the bathroom. Seen and heard Sunday morning, no churchgoer after all,

saying don’t be too late, to Dolly who is bound for the covered court. Letting in a queerly observant schoolmate of

Dolly’s: “First time I’ve seen a man wearing a smoking jacket, sir — except in movies, of course.”

9

Her girlfriends, whom I looked forward to meet, proved on the whole disappointing. There was Opal Something,

and Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman, and Eva Rosen, and Mona Dahl (save one, all these names are approximations,

of course). Opal was a bashful, formless, bespectacled, bepimpled creature who doted on Dolly who bullied her.

With Linda Hall the school tennis champion, Dolly played singles at least twice a week: I suspect Linda was a true

nymphet, but for some unknown reason she did not come — was perhaps not allowed to come — to our house; so I

recall her only as a flash of natural sunshine on an indoor court. Of the rest, none had any claims to nymphetry

except Eva Rosen. Avis was a plump lateral child with hairy legs, while Mona, though handsome in a coarse

sensual way and only a year older than my aging mistress, had obviously long ceased to be a nymphet, if she ever

had been one. Eva Rosen, a displaced little person from France, was on the other hand a good example of a not

strikingly beautiful child revealing to the perspicacious amateur some of the basic elements of nymphet charm,

such as a perfect pubescent figure and lingering eyes and high cheekbones. Her glossy copper hair had Lolita’s

silkiness, and the features of her delicate milky-white face with pink lips and silverfish eyelashes were less foxy

than those of her likes — the great clan of intra-racial redheads; nor did she sport their green uniform but wore, as I

remember her, a lot of black or cherry dark — a very smart black pullover, for instance, and high-heeled black

shoes, and garnet-red fingernail polish. I spoke French to her (much to Lo’s disgust). The child’s tonalities were still

admirably pure, but for school words and play words she resorted to current American and then a slight Brooklyn

accent would crop up in her speech, which was amusing in a little Parisian who went to a select New England

school with phoney British aspirations. Unfortunately, despite “that French kid’s uncle” being “a millionaire,” Lo

dropped Eva for some reason before I had had time to enjoy in my modest way her fragrant presence in the

Humbert open house. The reader knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation

prize nymphets, around my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my senses in Mona Dahl who was a good

deal around, especially during the spring term when Lo and she got so enthusiastic about dramatics. I have often

wondered what secrets outrageously treacherous Dolores Haze had imparted to Mona while blurting out to me by

urgent and well-paid request various really incredible details concerning an affair that Mona had had with a marine

at the seaside. It was characteristic of Lo that she chose for her closest chum that elegant, cold, lascivious,

experienced young female whom I once heard (misheard, Lo swore) cheerfully say in the hallway to Lo — who

had remarked that her (Lo’s) sweater was of virgin wool: “The only thing about you that is, kiddo…” She had a

curiously husky voice, artificially waved dull dark hair, earrings, amber-brown prominent eyes and luscious lips.

Lo said teachers had remonstrated with her on her loading herself with so much costume jewelry. Her hands

trembled. She was burdened with a 150 I.Q. And I also knew she had a tremendous chocolate-brown mole on he

womanish back which I inspected the night Lo and she had worn low-cut pastel-colored, vaporous dresses for a

dance at the Butler Academy.

I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my memory all over the keyboard of that school year. In the

meeting my attempts to find out what kind of boys Lo knew, Miss Dahl was elegantly evasive. Lo who had gone to

play tennis at Linda’s country club had telephoned she might be a full half hour late, and so, would I entertain

Mona who was coming to practice with her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the modulations, all

the allure of manner and voice she was capable of and staring at me with perhaps — could I be mistaken? — a

faint gleam of crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: “Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is not much concerned with

mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a crush on the Reverend Rigger.” (This was a joke — I have

already mentioned that gloomy giant of a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to near murder with his

impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents that I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.)

How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A panic. Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh,

not a frightful lot, just as much as she could stand. What did she, languorous Mona, think of Lo? Sir? Did she think

Lo was doing well at school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a kid. But her general behavior was —? Oh, she was a

swell kid. But still? “Oh, she’s a doll,” concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a book that happened

to lie at hand, and with a change of expression, falsely furrowing her brow, inquired: “Do tell me about Ball Zack,

sir. Is he really that good?” She moved up so close to my chair that I made out through lotions and creams her

uninteresting skin scent. A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the

wrong substitute. Avoiding Mona” cool gaze, I talked literature for a minute. Then Dolly arrived — and slit her

pale eyes at us. I left the two friends to their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby

casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained

rectangles and its asymmetrical position — a night’s move from the top — always strangely disturbed me.

10

Sometimes… Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no

human heart have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while Lolita

would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs

over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride — and

literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look — a gray furry question mark of

a look: “Oh no, not again” (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any

specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of

yours — how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between

my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and — “Pulease,

leave me alone, will you,” you would say, “for Christ’s sake leave me alone.” And I would get up from the floor

while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I

am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.

11

One Monday forenoon, in December I think, Pratt asked me to come over for a talk. Dolly’s last report had been

poor, I knew. But instead of contenting myself with some such plausible explanation of this summons, I imagined

all sort of horrors, and had to fortify myself with a pint of my “pin” before I could face the interview. Slowly, all

Adam’s apple and heart, I went up the steps of the scaffold.

A huge women, gray-haired, frowsy, with a broad flat nose and small eyes behind black-rimmed glasses — “Sit

down,” she said, pointing to an informal and humiliating hassock, while she perched with ponderous spryness on

the arm of an oak chair. For a moment or two, she peered at me with smiling curiosity. She had done it at our first

meeting, I recalled, but I could afford then to scowl back. Her eye left me. She lapsed into thought — probably

assumed. Making up her mind she rubbed, fold on fold, her dark gray flannel skirt at the knee, dispelling a trace of

chalk or something. Then she said, still rubbing, not looking up:

“Let me ask a blunt question, Mr. Haze. You are an old-fashioned Continental father, aren’t you?”

“Why, no,” I said, “conservative, perhaps, but not what you would call old-fashioned.”

She sighed, frowned, then clapped her big plump hands together in a let’s-get-down-to-business manner, and

again fixed her beady eyes upon me.

“Dolly Haze,” she said, “is a lovely child, but the onset of sexual maturing seems to give her trouble.”

I bowed slightly. What else could I do?

“She is still shuttling,” said Miss Pratt, showing how with her liver-spotted hands, “between the anal and genital

zones of development. Basically she is a lovely —”

“I beg your pardon,” I said, “what zones?”

“That’s the old-fashioned European in you!” cried Pratt delivering a slight tap on my wrist watch and suddenly

disclosing her dentures. “All I mean is that biologic drives — do you smoke? — are not fused in Dolly, do not fall

so to speak into a — into a rounded pattern.” Her hands held for a moment an invisible melon.

“She is attractive, bright though careless” (breathing heavily, without leaving her perch, the woman took time

out to look at the lovely child’s report sheet on the desk at her right). “Her marks are getting worse and worse. Now

I wonder, Mr. Haze —” Again the false meditation.

“Well,” she went on with zest, “as for me, I do smoke, and, as dear Dr. Pierce used to say: I’m not proud of it but

I jeest love it.” She lit up and the smoke she exhaled from her nostrils was like a pair of tusks.

“Let me give you a few details, it won’t take a moment. Now here let me see [rummaging among her papers].

She is defiant toward Miss Redcock and impossibly rude to Miss Cormorant. Now here is one of our special

research reports: Enjoys singing with group in class though mind seems to wander. Crosses her knees and wags left

leg to rhythm. Type of by-words: a two-hundred-forty-two word area of the commonest pubescent slang fenced in

by a number of obviously European polysyllabics. Sighs a good deal in class. Let me see. Yes. Now comes the last

week in November. Sighs a good deal in class. Chews gum vehemently. Does not bite her nails though if she did,

this would conform better to her general pattern — scientifically speaking, of course. Menstruation, according to

the subject, well established. Belongs at present to no church organization. By the way, Mr. Haze, her mother was

—? Oh, I see. And you are —? Nobody’s business is, I suppose, God’s business. Something else we wanted to

know. She was no regular home duties, I understand. Making a princess of your Dolly, Mr. Haze, he? Well, what

else have we got here? Handles books gracefully. Voice pleasant. Giggles rather often. A little dreamy. Has private

jokes of her own, transposing for instance the first letters of some of her teachers names. Hair light and dark brown,

lustrous — well [laughing] you are aware of that, I suppose. Nose unobstructed, feet high-arched, eyes — let me

see, I had here somewhere a still more recent report. Aha, here we are. Miss Gold says Dolly’s tennis form is

excellent to superb, even better than Linda Hall’s, but concentration and point-accumulation are just “poor to fair.”

Miss Cormorant cannot decide whether Dolly has exceptional emotional control or none at all. Miss Horn reports

she — I mean, Dolly — cannot verbalize her emotions, while according to Miss Cole Dolly’s metabolic efficiency

is superfine. Miss Molar thinks Dolly is myopic and should see a good ophthalmologist, but Miss Redcock insists

that the girl simulates eye-strain to get away with scholastic incompetence. And to conclude, Mr. Haze, our

researchers are wondering about something really crucial. Now I want to ask you something. I want to know if

your poor wife, or yourself, or anyone else in the family — I understand she has several aunts and a maternal

grandfather in California? — oh, had! — I’m sorry — well, we all wonder if anybody in the family has instructed

Dolly in the process of mammalian reproduction. The general impression is that fifteen-year-old Dolly remains

morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and

self-dignity. All right — fourteen. You see, Mr. Haze, Beardsley School does not believe in bees and blossoms,

and storks and love birds, but it does believe very strongly in preparing its students for mutually satisfactory

mating and successful child rearing. We feel Dolly could make excellent progress if only she would put her mind

to her work. Miss Cormorant’s report is significant in that respect. Dolly is inclined to be, mildly speaking

impudent. But all feel that primo, you should have your family doctor tell her the facts of life and, secundo, that

you allow her to enjoy the company of her schoolmates’ brothers at the Junior Club or in Dr. Rigger’s organization,

or in the lovely homes of our parents.”

“She may meet boys at her own lovely home,” I said.

“I hope she will,” said Pratt buoyantly. “When we questioned her about her troubles, Dolly refused to discuss

the home situation, but we have spoken to some of her friends and really — well, for example, we insist you unveto

her nonparticipation in the dramatic group. You just must allow her to take part in The Hunted Enchanters.

She was such a perfect little nymph in the try-out, and sometime in spring the author will stay for a few days at

Beardsley College and may attend a rehearsal or two in our new auditorium. I mean it is all part of the fun of being

young and alive and beautiful. You must understand —”

“I always thought of myself,” I said, “as a very understanding father.”

“Oh, no doubt, no doubt, but Miss Cormorant thinks, and I am inclined to agree with her, that Dolly is obsessed

by sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet, and will tease and martyrize other girls, or even our younger

instructors because they do have innocent dates with boys.”

“Shrugged my shoulders. A shabby émigré.

“Let us put our two heads together, Mr. Haze. What on earth is wrong with that child?”

“She seems quite normal and happy to me,” I said (disaster coming at last? Was I found out? Had they got some

hypnotist?).

“What worries me,” said Miss Pratt looking at her watch and starting to go over the whole subject again, “is that

both teachers and schoolmates find Dolly antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey — and everybody wonders why you are

so firmly opposed to all the natural recreations of a normal child.”

“Do you mean sex play?” I asked jauntily, in despair, a cornered old rat.

“Well, I certainly welcome this civilized terminology,” said Pratt with a grin. “But this is not quite the point.

Under the auspices of Beardsley School, dramatics, dances and other natural activities are not technically sex play,

though girls do meet boys, if that is what you object to.”

“All right,” I said, my hassock exhaling a weary sign. “You win. She can take part in that play. Provided male

parts are taken by female parts.”

“I am always fascinated,” said Pratt, “by the admirable way foreigners — or at least naturalized Americans —

use our rich language. I’m sure Miss Gold, who conducts the play group, will be overjoyed. I notice she is one of

the few teachers that seem to like — I mean who seem to find Dolly manageable. This takes care of general topics,

I guess; now comes a special matter. We are in trouble again.”

Pratt paused truculently, then rubbed her index finger under her nostrils with such vigor that her nose performed

a kind of war dance.

“I’m a frank person,” she said, “but conventions are conventions, and I find it difficult… Let me put it this way…

The Walkers, who live in what we call around here the Duke’s Manor, you know the great gray house on the hill —

they send their two girls to our school, and we have the niece of President Moore with us, a really gracious child,

not to speak of a number of other prominent children. Well, under the circumstances, it is rather a jolt when Dolly,

who looks like a little lady, uses words which you as a foreigner probably simply do not know or do not understand.

Perhaps it might be better — Would you like me to have Dolly come up here right away to discuss things? No?

You see — oh well, let’s have it out. Dolly has written a most obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells

me is low-Mexican for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets which Miss Redcock, who is getting

married in June, distributed among the girls, and we thought she should stay after hours — another half hour at

least. But if you like —”

“No,” I said, “I don’t want to interfere with rules. I shall talk to her later. I shall thrash it out.”

“Do,” said the woman rising from her chair arm. “And perhaps we can get together again soon, and if things do

not improve we might have Dr. Cutler analyze her.”

Should I marry Pratt and strangle her?

“…And perhaps your family doctor might like to examine her physically — just a routine check-up. She is in

Mushroom — the last classroom along that passage.”

Beardsley School, it may be explained, copied a famous girls school in England by having “traditional”

nicknames for its various classrooms: Mushroom, Room-In 8, B-Room, Room-BA and so on. Mushroom was

smelly, with a sepia print of Reynolds’ “Age of Innocence” above the chalkboard, and several rows of clumsylooking

pupil desks. At one of these, my Lolita was reading the chapter on “Dialogue” in Baker’s Dramatic

Technique, and all was very quiet, and there was another girl with a very naked, porcelain-white neck and

wonderful platinum hair, who sat in front reading too, absolutely lost to the world and interminably winding a soft

curl around one finger, and I sat beside Dolly just behind that neck and that hair, and unbuttoned my overcoat and

for sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate in the school play, had Dolly put her inky, chalky, redknuckled

hand under the desk. Oh, stupid and reckless of me, no doubt, but after the torture I had been subjected to,

I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again.

12

Around Christmas she caught a bad chill and was examined by a friend of Miss Lester, a Dr. Ilse Tristramson (hi,

Ilse, you were a dear, uninquisitive soul, and you touched my dove very gently). She diagnosed bronchitis, patted

Lo on the back (all its bloom erect because of the fever) and put her to bed for a week or longer. At first she “ran a

temperature” in American parlance, and I could not resist the exquisite caloricity of unexpected delights — Venus

febriculosa — though it was a very languid Lolita that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace. And as

soon as she was well again, I threw a Party with Boys.

Perhaps I had drunk a little too much in preparation for the ordeal. Perhaps I made a fool of myself. The girls

had decorated and plugged in a small fir tree — German custom, except that colored bulbs had superseded wax

candles. Records were chosen and fed into my landlord’s phonograph. Chic Dolly wore a nice gray dress with fitted

bodice and flared skirt. Humming, I retired to my study upstairs — and then every ten or twenty minutes I would

come down like an idiot just for a few seconds; to pick up ostensibly my pipe from the mantelpiece or hunt for the

newspaper; and with every new visit these simple actions became harder to perform, and I was reminded of the

dreadfully distant days when I used to brace myself to casually enter a room in the Ramsdale house where Little

Carmen was on.

The party was not a success. Of the three girls invited, one did not come at all, and one of the boys brought his

cousin Roy, so there was a superfluity of two boys, and the cousins knew all the steps, and the other fellows could

hardly dance at all, and most of the evening was spent in messing up the kitchen, and then endlessly jabbering

about what card game to play, and sometime later, two girls and four boys sat on the floor of the living room, with

all windows open, and played a word game which Opal could not be made to understand, while Mona and Roy, a

lean handsome lad, drank ginger ale in the kitchen, sitting on the table and dangling their legs, and hotly discussing

Predestination and the Law of Averages. After they had all gone my Lo said ugh, closed her eyes, and dropped into

a chair with all four limbs starfished to express the utmost disgust and exhaustion and swore it was the most

revolting bunch of boys she had ever seen. I bought her a new tennis racket for that remark.

January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia: none of the townspeople had ever seen such

weather. Other presents came tumbling in. For her birthday I bought her a bicycle, the doe-like and altogether

charming machine already mentioned — and added to this a History of Modern American Painting: her bicycle

manner, I mean her approach to it, the hip movement in mounting, the grace and so on, afforded me supreme

pleasure; but my attempt to refine her pictorial taste was a failure; she wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on

Doris Lee’s hay was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the foreground, and could not understand why I

said Grant Wood or Peter Hurd was good, and Reginald Marsh or Frederick Waugh awful.

13

By the time spring had touched up Thayer Street with yellow and green and pink, Lolita was irrevocably stagestruck.

Pratt, whom I chanced to notice one Sunday lunching with some people at Walton Inn, caught my eye from

afar and went through the motion of sympathetically and discreetly clapping her hands while Lo was not looking. I

detest the theatre as being a primitive and putrid form, historically speaking; a form that smacks of stone-age rites

and communal nonsense despite those individual injections of genius, such as, say, Elizabethan poetry which a

closeted reader automatically pumps out of the stuff. Being much occupied at the time with my own literary labors,

I did not bother to read the complete text of The Enchanted Hunters, the playlet in which Dolores Haze was

assigned the part of a farmer’s daughter who imagines herself to be a woodland witch, or Diana, or something, and

who, having got hold of a book on hypnotism, plunges a number of lost hunters into various entertaining trances

before falling in her turn under the spell of a vagabond poet (Mona Dahl). That much I gleaned from bits of

crumpled and poorly typed script that Lo sowed all over the house. The coincidence of the title with the name of an

unforgettable inn was pleasant in a sad little way: I wearily thought I had better not bring it to my own

enchantress’s notice, lest a brazen accusation of mawkishness hurt me even more than her failure to notice it for

herself had done. I assumed the playlet was just another, practically anonymous, version of some banal legend.

Nothing prevented one, of course, from supposing that in quest of an attractive name the founder of the hotel had

been immediately and solely influenced by the chance fantasy of the second-rate muralist he had hired, and that

subsequently the hotel’s name had suggested the play’s title. But in my credulous, simple, benevolent mind I

happened to twist it the other way round, and without giving the whole matter much though really, supposed that

mural, name and title had all been derived from a common source, from some local tradition, which I, an alien

unversed in New England lore, would not be supposed to know. In consequence I was under the impression (all

this quite casually, you understand, quite outside my orbit of importance) that the accursed playlet belonged to the

type of whimsy for juvenile consumption, arranged and rearranged many times, such as Hansel and Gretel by

Richard Roe, or The Sleeping Beauty by Dorothy Doe, or The Emperor’s New Clothes by Maurice Vermont and

Marion Rumpelmeyer — all this to be found in any Plays for School Actors or Let’s Have a Play! In other words, I

did not know — and would not have cared, if I did — that actually The Enchanted Hunters was a quite recent and

technically original composition which had been produced for the first time only three or four months ago by a

highbrow group in New York. To me — inasmuch as I could judge from my charmer’s part — it seemed to be a

pretty dismal kind of fancy work, with echoes from Lenormand and Maeterlinck and various quiet British dreamers.

The red-capped, uniformly attired hunters, of which one was a banker, another a plumber, a third a policeman, a

fourth an undertaker, a fifth an underwriter, a sixth an escaped convict (you see the possibilities!), went through a

complete change of mind in Dolly’s Dell, and remembered their real lives only as dreams or nightmares from

which little Diana had aroused them; but a seventh Hunter (in a green cap, the fool) was a Young Poet, and he

insisted, much to Diana’s annoyance, that she and the entertainment provided (dancing nymphs, and elves, and

monsters) were his, the Poet’s, invention. I understand that finally, in utter disgust at his cocksureness, barefooted

Dolores was to lead check-trousered Mona to the paternal farm behind the Perilous Forest to prove to the braggart

she was not a poet’s fancy, but a rustic, down-to-brown-earth lass — and a last-minute kiss was to enforce the

play’s profound message, namely, that mirage and reality merge in love. I considered it wiser not to criticize the

thing in front of Lo: she was so healthily engrossed in “problems of expression,” and so charmingly did she put her

narrow Florentine hands together, batting her eyelashes and pleading with me not to come to rehearsals as some

ridiculous parents did because she wanted to dazzle me with a perfect First Night — and because I was, anyway,

always butting in and saying the wrong thing, and cramping her style in the presence of other people.

There was one very special rehearsal… my heart, my heart… there was one day in May marked by a lot of gay

flurry — it all rolled past, beyond my ken, immune to my memory, and when I saw Lo next, in the late afternoon,

balancing on her bike, pressing the palm of her hand to the damp bark of a young birch tree on the edge of our

lawn, I was so struck by the radiant tenderness of her smile that for an instant I believed all our troubles gone. “Can

you remember,” she said, “what was the name of that hotel, you know [nose puckered], come on, you know —

with those white columns and the marble swan in the lobby? Oh, you know [noisy exhalation of breath] — the

hotel where you raped me. Okay, skip it. I mean, was it [almost in a whisper] The Enchanted Hunters? Oh, it was?

[musingly] Was it?” — and with a yelp of amorous vernal laughter she slapped the glossy bole and tore uphill, to

the end of the street, and then rode back, feet at rest on stopped pedals, posture relaxed, one hand dreaming in her

print-flowered lap.

14

Because it supposedly tied up with her interest in dance and dramatics, I had permitted Lo to take piano lessons

with a Miss Emperor (as we French scholars may conveniently call her) to whose blue-shuttered little white house

a mile or so beyond Beardsley Lo would spin off twice a week. One Friday night toward the end of May (and a

week or so after the very special rehearsal Lo had not had me attend) the telephone in my study, where I was in the

act of mopping up Gustave’s — I mean Gaston’s — king’s side, rang and Miss Emperor asked if Lo was coming

next Tuesday because she had missed last Tuesday’s and today’s lessons. I said she would by all means — and went

on with the game. As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now impaired, and a move or two later, with

Gaston to play, I noticed through the film of my general distress that he could collect my queen; he noticed it too,

but thinking it might be a trap on the part of his tricky opponent, he demurred for quite a minute, and puffed and

wheezed, and shook his jowls, and even shot furtive glances at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with his

pudgily bunched fingers — dying to take that juicy queen and not daring — and all of a sudden he swooped down

upon it (who knows if it did not teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a dreary hour in achieving a draw.

He finished his brandy and presently lumbered away, quite satisfied with this result (mon pauvre ami, je ne vous ai

jamais revu et quoiqu’il y ait bien peu de chance que vous voyiez mon livre, permettez-moi de vous dire que je vous

serre la main bien cordialement, et que toutes mes fillettes vous saluent). I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen table,

consuming a wedge of pie, with her eyes fixed on her script. They rose to meet mine with a kind of celestial

vapidity. She remained singularly unruffled when confronted with my discovery, and said d’un petit air faussement

contrit that she knew she was a very wicked kid, but simply had not been able to resist the enchantment, and had

used up those music hours — O Reader, My Reader! — in a nearby public park rehearsing the magic forest scene

with Mona. I said “fine” — and stalked to the telephone. Mona’s mother answered: “Oh yes, she’s in” and retreated

with a mother’s neutral laugh of polite pleasure to shout off stage “Roy calling!” and the very next moment Mona

rustled up, and forthwith, in a low monotonous not untender voice started berating Roy for something he had said

or done and I interrupted her, and presently Mona was saying in her humbles, sexiest contralto, “yes, sir,” “surely,

sir” “I am alone to blame, sir, in this unfortunate business,” (what elocution! what poise!) “honest, I feel very bad

about it” — and so on and so forth as those little harlots say.

So downstairs I went clearing my throat and holding my heart. Lo was now in the living room, in her favorite

overstuffed chair. As she sprawled there, biting at a hangnail an mocking me with her heartless vaporous eyes, and

all the time rocking a stool upon which she had placed the heel of an outstretched shoeless foot, I perceived all at

once with a sickening qualm how much she had changed since I first met her two years ago. Or had this happened

during those last two weeks? Tendresse? Surely that was an exploded myth. She sat right in the focus of my

incandescent anger. The fog of all lust had been swept away leaving nothing but this dreadful lucidity. Oh, she had

changed! Her complexion was now that of any vulgar untidy highschool girl who applies shared cosmetics with

grubby fingers to an unwashed face and does not mind what soiled texture, what pustulate epidermis comes in

contact with her skin. Its smooth tender bloom had been so lovely in former days, so bright with tears, when I used

to roll, in play, her tousled head on my knee. A coarse flush had now replaced that innocent fluorescence. What

was locally known as a “rabbit cold” had painted with flaming pink the edges of her contemptuous nostrils. As in

terror I lowered my gaze, it mechanically slid along the underside of her tensely stretched bare thigh — how

polished and muscular her legs had grown! She kept her wide-set eyes, clouded-glass gray and slightly bloodshot,

fixed upon me, and I saw the stealthy thought showing through them that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she,

orphan Lo, could expose me without getting penalized herself. How wrong I was. How mad I was! Everything

about her was of the same exasperating impenetrable order — the strength of her shapely legs, the dirty sole of her

white sock, the thick sweater she wore despite the closeness of the room, her wenchy smell, and especially the dead

end of her face with its strange flush and freshly made-up lips. Some of the red had left stains on her front teeth,

and I was struck by a ghastly recollection — the evoked image not of Monique, but of another young prostitute in a

bell-house, ages ago, who had been snapped up by somebody else before I had time to decide whether her mere

youth warranted my risking some appalling disease, and who had just such flushed prominent pommettes and a

dead maman, and big front teeth, and a bit of dingy red ribbon in her country-brown hair.

“Well, speak,” said Lo. “Was the corroboration satisfactory?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Perfect. yes. And I do not doubt you two made it up. As a matter of fact, I do not doubt you

have told her everything about us.”

“Oh, yah?”

I controlled my breath and said: “Dolores, this must stop right away. I am ready to yank you out of Beardsley

and lock you up you know where, but this must stop. I am ready to take you away the time it takes to pack a

suitcase. This must stop or else anything may happen.”

“Anything may happen, huh?”

I snatched away the stool she was rocking with her heel and her foot fell with a thud on the floor.

“Hey,” she cried, “take it easy.”

“First of all you go upstairs,” I cried in my turn, — and simultaneously grabbed at her and pulled her up. From

that moment, I stopped restraining my voice, and we continued yelling at each other, and she said, unprintable

things. She said she loathed me. She made monstrous faces at me, inflating her cheeks and producing a diabolical

plopping sound. She said I had attempted to violate her several times when I was her mother’s roomer. She said she

was sure I had murdered her mother. She said she would sleep with the very first fellow who asked her and I could

do nothing about it. I said she was to go upstairs and show me all her hiding places. It was a strident and hateful

scene. I held her by her knobby wrist and she kept turning and twisting it this way and that, surreptitiously trying to

find a weak point so as to wrench herself free at a favorable moment, but I held her quite hard and in fact hurt her

rather badly for which I hope my heart may rot, and once or twice she jerked her arm so violently that I feared her

wrist might snap, and all the while she stared at me with those unforgettable eyes where could anger and hot tears

struggled, and our voices were drowning the telephone, and when I grew aware of its ringing she instantly escaped.

With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god. This time it

was an irate neighbor. The east window happened to be agape in the living room, with the blind mercifully down,

however; and behind it the damp black night of a sour New England spring had been breathlessly listening to us. I

had always thought that type of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of considerable literary

inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am convinced that prude and prurient Miss East — or to explode her

incognito, Miss Fenton Lebone — had been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as

she strove to catch the gist of our quarrel.

“…This racket… lacks all sense of…” quacked the receiver, “we do not live in a tenement here. I must

emphatically…” I apologized for my daughter’s friends being so loud. Young people, you know — and cradled the

next quack and a half.

Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped?

Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the

dark — hub of the bicycle wheel — moved, shivered, and she was gone.

It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to

pursue on foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot

visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch

Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian’s dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three steps

and runt three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an

iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed — no, not her, mistake. My talons still tingling, I flew on.

Half a mile or so east of number fourteen, Thayer Street tangles with a private lane and a cross street; the latter

leads to the town proper; in front of the first drugstore, I saw — with what melody of relief! — Lolita’s fair bicycle

waiting for her. I pushed instead of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled, and entered. Look out! some ten paces away

Lolita, though the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us), cupping the tube, confidentially

hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her treasure, hurriedly hung up, and walked out with a

flourish.

“Tried to reach you at home,” she said brightly. “A great decision has been made. But first buy me a drink, dad.”

She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the coke, add the cherry syrup — and my heart

was bursting with love-ache. That childish wrist. My lovely child. You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We

always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction.

J’ai toujours admiré l’oeuvre du sublime Dublinois. And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous

shower.

“Look,” she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk, “look, I’ve

decided something. I want to leave school I hate that school I hate the play, I really do! Never go back. Find

another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again. But this time we’ll go wherever I want, won’t we?”

I nodded. My Lolita.

“I choose? C’est entendu?” she asked wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good

little girl.

“Okay. Entendu. Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you’ll get soaked.” (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.)

She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashioned, leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird.

Miss Lester’s finely groomed hand held a porch-door open for a waddling old dog qui prenait son temps.

Lo was waiting for me near the ghostly birch tree.

“I am drenched,” she declared at the top of her voice. “Are you glad? To hell with the play! See what I mean?”

An invisible hag’s claw slammed down an upper-floor window.

In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair,

stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:

“Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight.”

It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability — a most singular case, I presume —

of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.

15

The brakes were relined, the waterpipes unclogged, the valves ground, and a number of other repairs and

improvements were paid for by not very mechanically-minded but prudent papa Humbert, so that the late Mrs.

Humbert’s car was in respectable shape when ready to undertake a new journey.

We had promised Beardsley School, good old Beardsley School, that we would be back as soon as my

Hollywood engagement came to an end (inventive Humbert was to be, I hinted, chief consultant in the production

of a film dealing with “existentialism,” still a hot thing at the time). Actually I was toying with the idea of gently

trickling across the Mexican border — I was braver now than last year — and there deciding what to do with my

little concubine who was now sixty inches tall and weighed ninety pounds. We had dug out our tour books and

maps. She had traced our route with immense zest. Was it thanks to those theatricals that she had now outgrown

her juvenile jaded airs and was so adorably keen to explore rich reality? I experienced the queer lightness of

dreams that pale but warm Sunday morning when we abandoned Professor Chem’s puzzled house and sped along

Main Street toward the four-lane highway. My Love’s striped, black-and-white cotton frock, jaunty blue with the

large beautifully cut aquamarine on a silver chainlet, which gemmed her throat: a spring rain gift from me. We

passed the New Hotel, and she laughed. “A penny for your thoughts,” I said and she stretched out her palm at once,

but at that moment I had to apply the breaks rather abruptly at a red light. As we pulled up, another car came to a

gliding stop alongside, and a very striking looking, athletically lean young woman (where had I seen her?) with a

high complexion and shoulder-length brilliant bronze hair, greeted Lo with a ringing “Hi!” — and then, addressing

me, effusively, edusively (placed!), stressing certain words, said: “What a shame to was to tear Dolly away from

the play — you should have heard the author raving about her after that rehearsal —” “Green light, you dope,” said

Lo under her breath, and simultaneously, waving in bright adieu a bangled arm, Joan of Arc (in a performance we

saw at the local theatre) violently outdistanced us to swerve into Campus Avenue.

“Who was it exactly? Vermont or Rumpelmeyer?”

“No — Edusa Gold — the gal who coaches us.”

“I was not referring to her. Who exactly concocted that play?”

“Oh! Yes, of course. Some old woman, Clare Something, I guess. There was quite a crowd of them there.”

“So she complimented you?”

“Complimented my eye — she kissed me on my pure brow” — and my darling emitted that new yelp of

merriment which — perhaps in connection with her theatrical mannerisms — she had lately begun to affect.

“You are a funny creature, Lolita,” I said — or some such words. “Naturally, I am overjoyed you gave up that

absurd stage business. But what is curious is that you dropped the whole thing only a week before its natural

climax. Oh, Lolita, you should be careful of those surrenders of yours. I remember you gave up Ramsdale for camp,

and camp for a joyride, and I could list other abrupt changes in your disposition. You must be careful. There are

things that should never be given up. You must persevere. You should try to be a little nicer to me, Lolita. You

should also watch your diet. The tour of your thigh, you know, should not exceed seventeen and a half inches.

More might be fatal (I was kidding, of course). We are now setting out on a long happy journey. I remember —”

16

I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had “Appalachian Mountains” boldly

running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned — Tennessee, the Virginias,

Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic

Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le montagnard émigré

in his bear skin glory, and Felis tigris goldsmithi, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all boiled down to a

measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinerator, was appalling. Farewell, Appalachia! Leaving it, we

crossed Ohio, the three states beginning with “I,” and Nebraska — ah, that first whiff of the West! We traveled

very leisurely, having more than a week to reach Wace, Continental Divide, where she passionately desired to see

he Ceremonial Dances marking the seasonal opening of Magic Cave, and at least three weeks to reach Elphinstone,

gem of a western State where she yearned to climb Red Rock from which a mature screen star had recently jumped

to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo.

Again we were welcomed to wary motels by means of inscriptions that read:

“We wish you feel at home while here. All equipment was carefully checked upon your arrival. Your license

number is on record here. Use hot water sparingly. We reserve the right to eject without notice any objectionable

person. Do not throw waste material of any kind in the toilet bowl. Thank you. Call again. The Management. P.S.

We consider our guests the Finest People of the World.”

In these frightening places we paid ten for twins, flies queued outside at the screenless door and successfully

scrambled in, the ashes of our predecessors still lingered in the ashtrays, a woman’s hair lay on the pillow, one

heard one’s neighbor hanging his coat in his closet, the hangers were ingeniously fixed to their bars by coils of wire

so as to thwart theft, and, in crowning insult, the pictures above the twin beds were identical twins. I also noticed

that commercial fashion was changing. There was a tendency for cabins to fuse and gradually form the caravansary,

and, lo (she was not interested but the reader may be), a second story was added, and a lobby grew in, and cars

were removed to a communal garage, and the motel reverted to the good old hotel.

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past

destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do

is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics;

but that is not McFate’s way — even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.

For instance: I would not swear that there was not at least one occasion, prior to, or at the very beginning of, the

Midwest lap of our journey, when she managed to convey some information to, or otherwise get into contact with,

a person or persons unknown. We had stopped at a gas station, under the sign of Pegasus, and she had slipped out

of her seat and escaped to the rear of the premises while the raised hood, under which I had bent to watch the

mechanic’s manipulations, hid her for a moment from my sight. Being inclined to be lenient, I only shook my

benign head though strictly speaking such visits were taboo, since I felt instinctively that toilets — as also

telephones — happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all

have such fateful objects — it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another — carefully chosen

by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart

always break.

Well — my car had been attended to, and I had moved it away from the pumps to let a pickup truck be serviced

— when the growing volume of her absence began to weigh upon me in the windy grayness. Not for the first time,

and not for the last, had I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary trivialities that look almost

surprised, like staring rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveler’s field of vision: that green garbage can,

those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks,

the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incompleted crossword puzzle of their wooden cells, that bug

patiently walking up the inside of the window of the office. Radio music was coming from its open door, and

because the rhythm was not synchronized with the heave and flutter and other gestures of wind-animated

vegetation, one had the impression of an old scenic film living its own life while piano or fiddle followed a line of

music quite outside the shivering flower, the swaying branch. The sound of Charlotte’s last sob incongruously

vibrated through me as, with her dress fluttering athwart the rhythm, Lolita veered from a totally unexpected

direction. She had found the toilet occupied and had crossed over to the sign of the Conche in the next block. They

said there they were proud of their home-clean restrooms. These prepaid postcards, they said, had been provided

for your comments. No postcards. No soap. Nothing. No comments.

That day or the next, after a tedious drive through a land of food crops, we reached a pleasant little burg and put

up at Chestnut Court — nice cabins, damp green grounds, apple trees, an old swing — and a tremendous sunset

which the tried child ignored. She had wanted to go through Kasbeam because it was only thirty miles north from

her home town but on the following morning I found her quite listless, with no desire to see again the sidewalk

where she had played hopscotch some five years before. For obvious reasons I had rather dreaded that side trip,

even though we had agreed not to make ourselves conspicuous in any way — to remain in the car and not look up

old friends. My relief at her abandoning the project was spoiled by the thought that had she felt I were totally

against the nostalgic possibilities of Pisky, as I had been last year, she would not have given up so easily. On my

mentioning this with a sigh, she sighed too and complained of being out of sorts. She wanted to remain in bed till

teatime at least, with lots of magazines, and then if she felt better she suggested we just continue westward. I must

say she was very sweet and languid, and craved for fresh fruits, and I decided to go and fetch her a toothsome

picnic lunch in Kasbeam. Our cabin stood on the timbered crest of a hill, and from our window you could see the

road winding down, and then running as straight as a hair parting between two rows of chestnut trees, towards the

pretty town, which looked singularly distinct and toylike in the pure morning distance. One could make out an elflike

girl on an insect-like bicycle, and a dog, a bit too large proportionately, all as clear as those pilgrims and mules

winding up wax-pale roads in old paintings with blue hills and red little people. I have the European urge to use my

feet when a drive can be dispensed with, so I leisurely walked down, eventually meeting the cyclist — a plain

plump girl with pigtails, followed by a huge St. Bernard dog with orbits like pansies. In Kasbeam a very old barber

gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my

neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to

produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an

easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last

thirty years.

I had a cup of hot flavorless coffee, bought a bunch of bananas for my monkey, and spent another ten minutes or

so in a delicatessen store. At least an hour and a half must have elapsed when this homeward-bound little pilgrim

appeared on the winding road leading to Chestnut Castle.

The girl I had seen on my way to town was now loaded with linen and engaged in helping a misshapen man

whose big head and coarse features reminded me of the “Bertoldo” character in low Italian comedy. They were

cleaning the cabins of which there was a dozen or so on Chestnut Crest, all pleasantly spaced amid the copious

verdure. It was noon, and most of them, with a final bang of their screen doors, had already got rid of their

occupants. A very elderly, almost mummy-like couple in a very new model were in the act of creeping out of one

of the contiguous garages; from another a red hood protruded in somewhat cod-piece fashion; and nearer to our

cabin, a strong and handsome young man with a shock of black hair and blue eyes was putting a portable

refrigerator into a station wagon. For some reason he gave me a sheepish grin as I passed. On the grass expanse

opposite, in the many-limbed shade of luxuriant trees, the familiar St. Bernard dog was guarding his mistress’

bicycle, and nearby a young woman, far gone in the family way, had seated a rapt baby on a swing and was

rocking it gently, while a jealous boy of two or three was making a nuisance of himself by trying to push or pull the

swing board; he finally succeeded in getting himself knocked down by it, and bawled loudly as he lay supine on

the grass while his mother continued to smile gently at neither of her present children. I recall so clearly these

minutiae probably because I was to check my impressions so thoroughly only a few minutes later; and besides,

something in me had been on guard ever since that awful night in Beardsley. I now refused to be diverted by the

feeling of well-being that my walk had engendered — by the young summer breeze that enveloped the nape of my

neck, the giving crunch of the damn gravel, the juice tidbit. I had sucked out at last from a hollow tooth, and even

the comfortable weight of my provisions which the general condition of my heart should not have allowed me to

carry; but even that miserable pump of mine seemed to be working sweetly, and I felt adolori d’amoureuse

langueur, to quote dear old Ronsard, as I reached the cottage where I had left my Dolores.

To my surprise I found her dressed. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in slacks and T-shirt, and was

looking at me as if she could not quite place me. The frank soft shape of her small breasts was brought out rather

than blurred by the limpness of her thin shirt, and this frankness irritated me. She had not washed; yet her mouth

was freshly though smudgily painted, and her broad teeth glistened like wine-tinged ivory, or pinkish poker chips.

And there she sat, hands clasped in her lap, and dreamily brimmed with a diabolical glow that had no relations to

me whatever.

I plumped down my heavy paper bag and stood staring at the bare ankles of her sandaled feet, then at her silly

face, then again at her sinful feet. “You’ve been out,” I said (the sandals were filthy with gravel).

“I just got up,” she replied, and added upon intercepting my downward glance: “Went out for a sec. Wanted to

see if you were coming back.”

She became aware of the bananas and uncoiled herself tableward.

What special suspicion could I have? None indeed — but those muddy, moony eyes of hers, that singular

warmth emanating from her! I said nothing. I looked at the road meandering so distinctly within the frame of the

window… Anybody wishing to betray my trust would have found it a splendid lookout. With rising appetite, Lo

applied herself to the fruit. All at once I remembered the ingratiating grin of the Johnny next door. I stepped out

quickly. All cars had disappeared except his station wagon; his pregnant young wife was not getting into it with her

baby and the other, more or less canceled, child.

“What’s the matter, where are you going?” cried Lo from the porch.

I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped

the rest of her, I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I traveled upon

was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy.

17

Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make presents — presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or

so he prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he sent me next morning, with a

little lad of his, a copper case: it had an elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. Once

glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes called for some reason “luizettas” that you

buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for holding

my bulky chessmen, but I kept it — using it for a totally different purpose.

In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I had decided — despite

Lo’s visible annoyance — to spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the morning, I

ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we

all had rigged up for her) and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the “luizetta” were safe. There, snugly

wrapped in a white woolen scarf, lay a pocket automatic: caliber .32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a

little under one ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late

Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily said in part: “Particularly well adapted for use in the home and

car as well as on the person.” There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully

cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a

pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb.

I was now glad I had it with me — and even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine

forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an

admirable marksman, and with his .38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird, though I must say not much of it

could be retrieved for proof — only a little iridescent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the

twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a tiny woodpecker — completely out of

season, incidentally. Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I

did would a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. “You like here,” I whispered to my light-weight

compact little chum, and then toasted it with a dram of gin.

18

The reader must now forget Chestnuts and Colts, and accompany us further west. The following days were marked

by a number of great thunderstorms — or perhaps, thee was but one single storm which progressed across country

in ponderous frogleaps and which we could not shake off just as we could not shake off detective Trapp: for it was

during those days that the problem of the Aztec Red Convertible presented itself to me, and quite overshadowed

the theme of Lo’s lovers.

Queer! I who was jealous of every male we met — queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.

Perhaps I had been lulled by Lo’s modest behavior in winter, and anyway it would have been too foolish even for a

lunatic to suppose another Humbert was avidly following Humbert and Humbert’s nymphet with Jovian fireworks,

over the great and ugly plains. I surmised, donc, that the Red Yak keeping behind us at a discreet distance mile

after mile was operated by a detective whom some busybody had hired to see what exactly Humbert Humbert was

doing with that minor stepdaughter of his. As happens with me at periods of electrical disturbance and crepitating

lightnings, I had hallucinations. Maybe they were more than hallucinations. I do not know what she or he, or both

had put into my liquor but one night I felt sure somebody was tapping on the door of our cabin, and I flung it open,

and noticed two things — that I was stark naked and that, white-glistening in the rain-dripping darkness, there

stood a man holding before his face the mask of Jutting Chin, a grotesque sleuth in the funnies. He emitted a

muffled guffaw and scurried away, and I reeled back into the room, and fell asleep again, and am not sure even to

this day that the visit was not a drug-provoked dream: I have thoroughly studied Trapp’s type of humor, and this

might have been a plausible sample. Oh, crude and absolutely ruthless! Somebody, I imagined, was making money

on those masks of popular monsters and morons. Did I see next morning two urchins rummaging in a garbage can

and trying on Jutting Chin? I wonder. It may all have been a coincidence — due to atmospheric conditions, I

suppose.

Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and

gentlemen, the exact day when I first knew with utter certainty that the red convertible was following us. I do

remember, however, the first time I saw its driver quite clearly. I was proceeding slowly one afternoon through

torrents of rain and kept seeing that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently the

deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether. With a swishing sound a sunburst swept the

highway, and needing a pair of new sunglasses, I pulled up at a filling station. What was happening was a sickness,

a cancer, that could not be helped, so I simply ignored the fact that our quiet pursuer, in his converted state,

stopped a little behind us at a café or bar bearing the idiotic sign: The Bustle: A Deceitful Seatful. Having seen to

the needs of my car, I walked into the office to get those glasses and pay for the gas. As I was in the act of signing

a traveler’s check and wondered about my exact whereabouts, I happened to glance through a side window, and

saw a terrible thing. A broad-backed man, baldish, in an oatmeal coat and dark-brown trousers, was listening to Lo

who was leaning out of the car and talking to him very rapidly, her hand with outspread fingers going up and down

as it did when she was very serious and emphatic. What struck me with sickening force was — how should I put it?

— the voluble familiarity of her way, as if they had known each other — oh, for weeks and weeks. I saw him

scratch his cheek and nod, and turn, and walk back to his convertible, a broad and thickish man of my age,

somewhat resembling Gustave Trapp, a cousin of my father’s in Switzerland — same smoothly tanned face, fuller

than mine, with a small dark mustache and a rosebud degenerate mouth. Lolita was studying a road map when I got

back into the car.

“What did that man ask you, Lo?”

“Man? Oh, that man. Oh yes. Oh, I don’t know. He wondered if I had a map. Lost his way, I guess.”

We drove on, and I said:

“Now listen, Lo. I do not know whether you are lying or not, and I do not know whether you are insane or not,

and I do not care for the moment; but that person has been following us all day, and his car was at the motel

yesterday, and I think he is a cop. You know perfectly well what will happen and where you will go if the police

find out about things. Now I want to know exactly what he said to you and what you told him.”

She laughed.

“If he’s really a cop,” she said shrilly but not illogically, “the worst thing we could do, would be to show him we

are scared. Ignore him, Dad.”

“Did he ask where we were going?”

“Oh, he knows that” (mocking me).

“Anyway,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine

called Trapp.”

“Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you — Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a

little kid,” she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed

to put the car in reverse.”

It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had

taught her that trick; and silently we traveled on, unpursued.

But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug and hope wear off, there it was again

behind us, that glossy red beast. The traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and

nobody attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow — as if there were some

spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glasslike

virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked

like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it

with out shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even

attempt to outspeed him. O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed long grades and rolled

downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black

wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on

intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private

blaze on my right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek.

A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets — at half-past-four p.m. in a factory town —

was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut off my

shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on, and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A

sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb.

When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had

disappeared.

Lola snorted and said: “If he is what you think he is, how silly to give him the slip.”

“I have other notions by now,” I said.

“You should — ah — check them by — ah — keeping in touch with him, fahther deah,” said Lo, writhing in the

coils of her own sarcasm. “Gee, you are mean,” she added in her ordinary voice.

We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of

prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us.

“I am not a lady and do not like lightning,” said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic

solace.

We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001.

“Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is already here.”

“Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.”

We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all

was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and,

on time, we drove into Wace.

Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave

ceremonies were over! She took it bravely, I must admit — and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a

summer theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening. I really could not tell you

the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady.

The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted,

barelimbed — seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the

partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered

throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this

idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James

Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely — Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and

Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother

or her protector.

As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause — a sound my nerves cannot stand — began to crash all

around me, I started to pull and push Lo toward the exit, in my so natural amorous impatience to get her back to

our neon-blue cottage in the stunned, starry night: I always say nature is stunned by the sights she sees. Dolly-Lo,

however, lagged behind, in a rosy daze, her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the rest of her

senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly came together at all in the mechanical action of clapping they

still went through. I had seen that kind of thing in children before but, by God, this was a special child, myopically

beaming at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of the joint authors — a man’s tuxedo and the

bare shoulders of a hawk-like, black-haired, strikingly tall woman.

“You’ve again hurt my wrist, you brute,” said Lolita in a small voice as she slipped into her car seat.

“I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet darling,” I said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow,

and I added, to change the conversation — to change the direction of fate, oh God, oh God: “Vivian is quite a

woman. I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop.”

“Sometimes,” said Lo, “you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare;

and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood.”

“I thought,” I said kidding her, “Quilty was an ancient flame of yours, in the days when you loved me, in sweet

old Ramsdale.”

“What?” countered Lo, her features working. “That fat dentist? You must be confusing me with some other fast

little article.”

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure

every inch of their nymphancy.

19

With Lo’s knowledge and assent, the two post offices given to the Beardsley postmaster as forwarding addresses

were P.O. Wace and P.O. Elphinstone. Next morning we visited the former and had to wait in a short but slow

queue. Serene Lo studied the rogues’ gallery. Handsome Bryan Bryanski, alias Anthony Bryan, alias Tony Brown,

eyes hazel, complexion fair, was wanted for kidnapping. A sad-eyed old gentleman’s faux-pas was mail fraud, and,

as if that were not enough, he was cursed with deformed arches. Sullen Sullivan came with a caution: Is believed

armed, and should be considered extremely dangerous. If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of

these faces gently melt into my own, while I look. And moreover there was a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl,

age fourteen, wearing brown shoes when last seen, rhymes. Please notify Sheriff Buller.

I forget my letters; as to Dolly’s, there was her report and a very special-looking envelope. This I deliberately

opened and perused its contents. I concluded I was doing the foreseen since she did not seem to mind and drifted

toward the newsstand near the exit.

“Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay quiet having been slightly drugged by

Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow

the responsiveness, the relaxed vitality, the charm of my — and the author’s — Diana; but there was no author to

applaud us as last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own modest offstage thunder. Oh

dear, life does fly. Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother’s confinement (our baby, alas,

did not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still bear traces of the paint.

“We are going to New York after to-morrow, and I guess I can’t manage to wriggle out of accompanying my

parents to Europe. I have even worse news for you. Dolly-Lo! I may not be back at Beardsley if and when you

return. With one thing and another, one being you know who, and the other not being who you think you know,

Dad wants me to go to school in Paris for one year while he and Fullbright are around.

“As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving at the bit of French nonsense. Remember? Ne

manque pas de dire à ton amant, Chimène, comme le lac est beau car il faut qu’il t’y mène. Lucky beau! Qu’il t’y —

What a tongue-twister! Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from your Poet, and best regards to the Governor. Your

Mona. P.S. Because of one thing and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly controlled. So better wait

till I write you from Europe.” (She never did as far as I know. The letter contained an element of mysterious

nastiness that I am too tired today to analyze. I found it later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and give it here à

titre documentaire. I read it twice.)

I looked up from the letter and was about to — There was no Lo to behold. While I was engrossed in Mona’s

witchery, Lo had shrugged her shoulders and vanished. “Did you happen to see —” I asked of a hunchback

sweeping the floor near the entrance. He had, the old lecherer. He guessed she had seen a friend and had hurried

out. I hurried out too. I stopped — she had not. I hurried on. I stopped again. It had happened at last. She had gone

for ever.

In later years I have often wondered why she did not go forever that day. Was it the retentive quality of her new

summer clothes in my locked car? Was it some unripe particle in some general plan? Was it simply because, all

things considered, I might as well be used to convey her to Elphinstone — the secret terminus, anyway? I only

know I was quite certain she had left me for ever. The noncommittal mauve mountains half encircling the town

seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting Lolitas who dissolved in their haze. A big W

made of white stones on a steep talus in the far vista of a cross street seemed the very initial of woe.

The new and beautiful post office I had just emerged from stood between a dormant movie house and a

conspiracy of poplars. The time was 9 a.m. mountain time. The street was charming it into beauty, was one of

those fragile young summer mornings with flashes of glass here and there and a general air of faltering and almost

fainting at the prospect of an intolerably torrid noon. Crossing over, I loafed and leafed, as it were, through one

long block: Drugs, Real Estate, Fashions, Auto Parts, Cafe, Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Furniture, Appliances,

Western Union, Cleaners, Grocery. Officer, officer, my daughter has run away. In collusion with a detective; in

love with a black-mailer. Took advantage of my utter helplessness. I peered into all the stores. I deliberated inly if I

should talk to any of the sparse foot-passengers. I did not. I sat for a while in the parked car. I inspected the public

garden on the east side. I went back to Fashions and Auto Parts. I told myself with a burst of furious sarcasm — un

ricanement — that I was crazy to suspect her, that she would turn up any minute.

She did.

I wheeled around and shook off the hand she had placed on my sleeve with a timid and imbecile smile.

“Get into the car,” I said.

She obeyed, and I went on pacing up and down, struggling with nameless thoughts, trying to plan some way of

tackling her duplicity.

Presently she left the car and was at my side again. My sense of hearing gradually got tuned in to station Lo

again, and I became aware she was telling me that she had met a former girl friend.

“Yes? Whom?”

“A Beardsley girl.”

“Good. I now every name in your group. Alice Adams?”

“The girl was not in my group.”

“Good. I have a complete student list with me. Her name please.”

“She was not in my school She is just a town girl in Beardsley.”

“Good. I have the Beardsley directory with me too. We’ll look up all the Browns.”

“I only know her first name.”

“Mary or Jane?”

“No — Dolly, like me.”

“So that’s the dead end” (the mirror you break your nose against). “Good. Let us try another angle. You have

been absent twenty-eight minutes. What did the two Dollys do?”

“We went to a drugstore.”

“And you had there —?”

“Oh, just a couple of Cokes.”

“Careful, Dolly. We can check that, you know.”

“At least, she had. I had a glass of water.”

“Good. Was it that place there?”

“Sure.”

“Good, come on, we’ll grill the soda jerk.”

“Wait a sec. Come to think it might have been further down — just around the corner.”

“Come on all the same. Go in please. Well, let’s see.” (Opening a chained telephone book.) “Dignified Funeral

Service. NO, not yet. Here we are: Druggists-Retail. Hill Drug Store. Larkin’s Pharmacy. And two more. That’s all

Wace seems to have in the way of soda fountains — at least in the business section. Well, we will check them all.”

“Go to hell,” she said.

“Lo, rudeness will get you nowhere.”

“Okay,” she said. “But you’re not going to trap me. Okay, so we did not have a pop. We just talked and looked

at dresses in show windows.”

“Which? That window there for example?”

“Yes, that one there, for example.”

“Oh Lo! Let’s look closer at it.”

It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning a carpet upon which stood two figures

that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its

comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it had represented, and would represent

when clothed again, a girl-child of Lolita’s size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a much

taller veiled bride, quite perfect and intacta except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels,

where the man crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blond wig.

Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.

“Look, Lo,” I said quietly. “Look well. Is not that a rather good symbol of something or other? However” — I

went on as we got back into the car — “I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove

compartment), on this pad I have our boy friend’s car number.”

As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing

figure as if the whole amphitheater of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the

central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme edges — a capital P and a 6. I

have to go into those details (which in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because otherwise

the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond-bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as

he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had

acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried

shuttle smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand,

presented a tangle of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the state — one adjacent to the state

Beardsley was in.

I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics

from the back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current

adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground

where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and

without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.

And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual

reconciliation. In the velvet night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I

immolated myself… But it was all of no avail. both doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of

persecution.

In a street of Wace, on its outskirts… Oh, I am quite sure it was not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had

glimpsed the Aztec Red Convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp, it contained four or five loud young

people of several sexes — but I said nothing. After Wace a totally new situation arose. For a day or two, I enjoyed

the mental emphasis with which I told myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and then I became

sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and was still with us, in this or that rented car.

A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another. This

technique implied the existence of garages specializing in “stage-automobile” operations, but I never could

discover the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream

convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood

Gray. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found

myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue

Oldsmobile he had rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I

tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Gray, Chevrolet’s Thistle Gray, Dodge’s French

Gray…

The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little mustache and open shirt — or for his baldish pate

and broad shoulders — led me to a profound study of all cars on the road — behind, before, alongside, coming,

going, every vehicle under the dancing sun: the quiet vacationist’s automobile with the box of Tender-Touch

tissues in the back window; the recklessly speeding jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog’s head protruding,

and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor’s tudor sedan crowded with suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer

weaving in front, immune to the Indian file of fury boiling behind it; the car with the young female passenger

politely perched in the middle of the front seat to be closer to the young male driver; the car carrying on its roof a

red boat bottom up… The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us.

We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow and Champion, and rolling down an almost

imperceptible grade, when I had my next distinct view of Detective Paramour Trapp. The gray mist behind us had

deepened and concentrated into the compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden, as if the car I drove

responded to my poor heart’s pangs, we were slithering from side to side, with something making a helpless plapplap-

plap under us. “You got a flat, mister,” said cheerful Lo.

I pulled up — near a precipice. She folded her arms and put her foot on the dashboard. I got out and examined

the right rear wheel. The base of its tire was sheepishly and hideously square. Trapp had stopped some fifty yards

behind us. His distant face formed a grease spot of mirth. This was my chance. I started to walk towards him —

with the brilliant idea of asking him for a jack through I had one. He backed a little. I stubbed my toe against a

stone — and there was a sense of general laughter. Then a tremendous truck loomed from behind Trapp and

thundered by me — and immediately after, I heard it utter a convulsive honk. Instinctively I looked back — and

saw my own car gently creeping away. I could make out Lo ludicrously at the wheel, and the engine was certainly

running — though I remembered I had cut it but had not applied the emergency brake; and during the brief space

of throb-time that it took me to reach the croaking machine which came to a standstill at last, it dawned upon me

that during the last two years little Lo had had ample time to pick up the rudiments of driving. As I wrenched the

door open, I was goddam sure she had started the car to prevent me from walking up to Trapp. Her trick proved

useless, however, for even while I was pursuing her he had made an energetic U-turn and was gone. I rested for a

while. Lo asked wasn’t I going to thank her — the car had started to move by itself and — Getting no answer, she

immersed herself in a study of the map. I got out again and commenced the “ordeal of the orb,” as Charlotte used to

say. Perhaps, I was losing my mind.

We continued our grotesque journey. After a forlorn and useless dip, we went up and up. On a steep grade I

found myself behind the gigantic truck that had overtaken us. It was now groaning up a winding road and was

impossible to pass. Out of its front part a small oblong of smooth silver — the inner wrapping of chewing gum —

escaped and flew back into our windshield. It occurred to me that if I were really losing my mind, I might end by

murdering somebody. In fact — said high-and-dry Humbert to floundering Humbert — it might be quite clever to

prepare things — to transfer the weapon from box to pocket — so as to be ready to take advantage of the spell of

insanity when it does come.

20

By permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit. It now appeared that it had not

been merely a matter of learning the answers to such questions as what is the basic conflict in “Hedda Gabler,” or

where are the climaxes in “Love Under the Lindens,” or analyze the prevailing mood of “Cherry Orchard”; it was

really a matter of learning to betray me. How I deplored now the exercises in sensual simulation that I had so often

seen her go through in our Beardsley parlor when I would observe her from some strategic point while she, like a

hypnotic subject of a performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated version of infantile make-believe by going

through the mimetic actions of hearing a moan in the dark, seeing for the first time a brand new young stepmother,

tasting something she hated, such as buttermilk, smelling crushed grass in a lush orchard, or touching mirages of

objects with her sly, slender, girl-child hands. Among my papers I still have a mimeographed sheet suggesting:

Tactile drill. Imagine Yourself picking up and holding: a pingpong ball, an apple, a sticky date, a new

flannel-fluffed tennis ball, a hot potato, an ice cube, a kitten, a puppy, a horseshoe, a feather, a flashlight.

Knead with your fingers the following imaginary things: a piece of brad, india rubber, a friend’s aching

temple, a sample of velvet, a rose petal.

You are a blind girl. Palpate the face of: a Greek youth, Cyrano, Santa Claus, a baby, a laughing faun, a

sleeping stranger, your father.

But she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate spells, in the dreamy performance of her

enchantments and duties! On certain adventurous evenings, in Beardsley, I also had her dance for me with the

promise of some treat or gift, and although these routine leg-parted leaps of hers were more like those of a football

cheerleader than like the languorous and jerky motions of a Parisian petit rat, the rhythms of her not quite nubile

limbs had given me pleasure. But all that was nothing, absolutely nothing, to the indescribable itch of rapture that

her tennis game produced in me — the teasing delirious feeling of teetering on the very brink of unearthly order

and splendor.

Despite her advanced age, she was more of a nymphet than ever, with her apricot-colored limbs, in her sub-teen

tennis togs! Winged gentlemen! No hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that

Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right: the white wide little-boy shorts, the slender

waist, the apricot midriff, the white breast-kerchief whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end behind in

a dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable apricot shoulder blades with that pubescence and

those lovely gentle bones, and the smooth, downward-tapering back. Her cap had a white peak. Her racket had cost

me a small fortune. Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I would have had her now with me, before my eyes,

in the projection room of my pain and despair!

She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often

bounced the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the score,

always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at home. Her tennis was the highest point to which I

can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry

of basic reality.

The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every

stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the

instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging

contact. Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis — without any

utilitarian results. As Edusa’s sister, Electra Gold, a marvelous young coach, said to me once while I sat on a

pulsating hard bench watching Dolores Haze toying with Linda Hall (and being beaten by her): “Dolly has a

magnet in the center of her racket guts, but why the heck is she so polite?” Ah, Electra, what did it matter, with

such grace! I remember at the very first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of

beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service

cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine

armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended

so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it

with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.

It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking

pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop.

That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments, immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me

moan today with frustration. They would have been so much more than the snapshots I burned! Her overhead

volley was related to her service as the envoy is to the ballade; for she had been trained, my pet, to patter up at once

to the net on her nimble, vivid, white-shod feet. There was nothing to choose between her forehand and backhand

drives: they were mirror images of one another — my very loins still tingle with those pistol reports repeated by

crisp echoes and Electra’s cries. One of the pearls of Dolly’s game was a short half-volley that Ned Litam had

taught her in California.

She preferred acting to swimming, and swimming to tennis; yet I insist that had not something within her been

broken by me — not that I realized it then! — she would have had on the top of her perfect form the will to win,

and would have become a real girl champion. Dolores, with two rackets under her arm, in Wimbledon. Dolores

endorsing a Dromedary. Dolores turning professional. Dolores acting a girl champion in a movie. Dolores and her

gray, humble, hushed husband-coach, old Humbert.

There was nothing wrong or deceitful in the spirit of her game — unless one considered her cheerful

indifference toward its outcome as the feint of a nymphet. She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life,

revealed an innocence, a frankness, a kindness of ball-placing, that permitted a second-rate but determined player,

no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to poke and cut his way to victory. Despite her small stature, she covered

the one thousand and fifty-three square feet of her half of the court with wonderful ease, once she had entered into

the rhythm of a rally and as long as she could direct that rhythm; but any abrupt attack, or sudden change of tactics

on her adversary’s part, left her helpless. At match point, her second serve, which — rather typically — was even

stronger and more stylish than her first (for she had none of the inhibitions that cautious winners have), would

strike vibrantly the hard-cord of the net — and ricochet out of court. The polished gem of her dropshot was

snapped up and put away by an opponent who seemed four-legged and wielded a crooked paddle. Her dramatic

drives and lovely volleys would candidly fall at his feet. Over and over again she would land an easy one into the

net — and merrily mimic dismay by drooping in a ballet attitude, with her forelocks hanging. So sterile were her

grace and whipper that she could not even win from panting me and my old-fashioned lifting drive.

I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board

as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom,

which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud. Similarly, the initial tennis coaching I had inflicted

on Lolita — prior to the revelations that came to her through the great Californian’s lessons — remained in my

mind as oppressive and distressful memories — not only because she had been so hopelessly and irritatingly

irritated by every suggestion of mine — but because the precious symmetry of the court instead of reflecting the

harmonies latent in her was utterly jumbled by the clumsiness and lassitude of the resentful child I mistaught. Now

things were different, and on that particular day, in the pure air of Champion, Colorado, on that admirable court at

the foot of seep stone stairs leading up to Champion Hotel where we had spent the night, I felt I could rest from the

nightmare of unknown betrayals within the innocence of her style, of her soul, of her essential grace.

She was hitting hard and flat, with her usual effortless sweep, feeding me deep skimming balls — all so

rhythmically coordinated and overt as to reduce my footwork to, practically, a swinging stroll — crack players will

understand what I mean. My rather heavily cut serve that I had been taught by my father who had learned it from

Decugis or Borman, old friends of his and great champions, would have seriously troubled my Lo, had I really tried

to trouble her. But who would upset such a lucid dear? Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of

vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen?

An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us.

Two people in tennis shorts, a red-haired fellow only about eight years my junior, and an indolent dark girl with

a moody mouth and hard eyes, about two years Lolita’s senior, appeared from nowhere. As is common with dutiful

tyros, their rackets were sheathed and framed, and they carried them not as if they were the natural and comfortable

extensions of certain specialized muscles, but hammers or blunderbusses or wimbles, or my own dreadful

cumbersome sins. Rather unceremoniously seating themselves near my precious coat, on a bench adjacent to the

court, they fell to admiring very vocally a rally of some fifty exchanges that Lo innocently helped me to foster and

uphold — until there occurred a syncope in the series causing her to gasp as her overhead smash went out of court,

whereupon she melted into winsome merriment, my golden pet.

I felt thirsty by then, and walked to the drinking fountain; there Red approached me and in all humility

suggested a mixed double. “I am Bill Mead,” he said. “And that’s Fay Page, actress. Maffy On Say” — he added

(pointing with his ridiculously hooded racket at polished Fay who was already talking to Dolly). I was about to

reply “Sorry, but —” (for I hate to have my filly involved in the chops and jabs of cheap bunglers), when a

remarkably melodious cry diverted my attention: a bellboy was tripping down the steps from the hotel to our court

and making me signs. I was wanted, if you please, on an urgent long distance call — so urgent in fact that the line

was being held for me. Certainly. I got into my coat (inside pocket heavy with pistol) and told Lo I would be back

in a minute. She was picking up a ball — in the continental foot-racket way which was one of the few nice things I

had taught her, — and smiled — she smiled at me!

An awful calm kept my heart afloat as I followed the boy up to the hotel. This, to use an American term, in

which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it. I

had left her in mediocre hands, but it hardly mattered now. I would fight, of course. Oh, I would fight. Better

destroy everything than surrender her. Yes, quite a climb.

At the desk, dignified, Roman-nosed man, with, I suggest, a very obscure past that might reward investigation,

handed me a message in his own hand. The line had not been held after all. The note said:

“Mr. Humbert. The head of Birdsley (sic!) School called. Summer residence — Birdsley 2-82-82. Please call

back immediately. Highly important.”

I folded myself into a booth, took a little pill, and four about twenty minutes tussled with space-spooks. A

quartet of propositions gradually became audible: soprano, there was no such number in Beardsley; alto, Miss Pratt

was on her way to England; tenor, Beardsley School had not telephoned; bass, they could not have done so, since

nobody knew I was, that particular day, in Champion, Colo. Upon my stinging him, the Roman took the trouble to

find out if there had been a long distance call. There had been none. A fake call from some local dial was not

excluded. I thanked him. He said: You bet. After a visit to the purling men’s room and a stiff drink at the bar, I

started on my return march. From the very first terrace I saw, far below, on the tennis court which seemed the size

of a school child’s ill-wiped slate, golden Lolita playing in a double. She moved like a fair angel among three

horrible Boschian cripples. One of these, her partner, while changing sides, jocosely slapped her on her behind

with his racket. He had a remarkably round head and wore incongruous brown trousers. There was a momentary

flurry — he saw me, and throwing away his racket — mine — scuttled up the slope. He waved his wrists and

elbows in a would-be comical imitation of rudimentary wings, as he climbed, blow-legged, to the street, where his

gray car awaited him. Next moment he and the grayness were gone. When I came down, the remaining trio were

collecting and sorting out the balls.

“Mr. Mead, who was that person?”

Bill and Fay, both looking very solemn, shook their heads.

That absurd intruder had butted in to make up a double, hadn’t he, Dolly?

Dolly. The handle of my racket was still disgustingly warm. Before returning to the hotel, I ushered her into a

little alley half-smothered in fragrant shrubs, with flowers like smoke, and was about to burst into ripe sobs and

plead with her imperturbed dream in the most abject manner for clarification, no matter how meretricious, of the

slow awfulness enveloping me, when we found ourselves behind the convulsed Mead twosome — assorted people,

you know, meeting among idyllic settings in old comedies. Bill and Fay were both weak with laughter — we had

come at the end of their private joke. It did not really matter.

Speaking as if it really did not really matter, and assuming, apparently, that life was automatically rolling on

with all its routine pleasures, Lolita said she would like to change into her bathing things, and spend the rest of the

afternoon at the swimming pool. It was a gorgeous day. Lolita!

21

“Lo! Lola! Lolita!” I hear myself crying from a doorway into the sun, with the acoustics of time, domed time,

endowing my call and its tell-tale hoarseness with such a wealth of anxiety, passion and pain that really it would

have been instrumental in wrenching open the zipper of her nylon shroud had she been dead. Lolita! In the middle

of a trim turfed terrace I found her at last — she had run out before I was ready. Oh Lolita! There she was playing

with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was losing and snapping up again and adjusting between

his jaws a wet little red ball; he took rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf, and then would bounce

away. I had only wanted to see where she was, I could not swim with my heart in that state, but who cared — and

there she was, and there was I, in my robe — and so I stopped calling; but suddenly something in the pattern of her

motions, as she dashed this way and that in her Aztec Red bathing briefs and bra, struck me… there was an ecstasy,

a madness about her frolics that was too much of a glad thing. Even the dog seemed puzzled by the extravagance of

her reactions. I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some

distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like

excrements in the blue sea water in Nice. One of the bathers had left the pool and, half-concealed by the peacocked

shade of trees, stood quite still, holding the ends of the towel around his neck and following Lolita with his amber

eyes. There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness,

his damp black hair or what was left of it, glued to his round head, his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on

his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with bright droplets, his

tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back

like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood. And as I looked at his oval nut-brown face, it dawned upon me

that what I had recognized him by was the reflection of my daughter’s countenance — the same beatitude and

grimace but made hideous by his maleness. And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking,

enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As she

made for the ball and missed it, she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedaling in the air; I could

sense the musk of her excitement from where I stood, and then I saw (petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the

man close his eyes and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned against a tree in which a

multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards a marvelous transformation took place. He was no

longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned more than

once, who used to counteract his “sprees” (he drank beer with milk, the good swine) by feats of weight-lifting —

tottering and grunting on a lake beach with his otherwise very complete bathing suit jauntily stripped from one

shoulder. This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the towel on his name walked back with false insouciance

to the pool. And as if the sun had gone out of the game, Lo slackened and slowly got up ignoring the ball that the

terrier placed before her. Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp? I started

to say something, and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited a torrent of

browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.

I saw Lolita’s eyes, and they seemed to be more calculating than frightened. I heard her saying to a kind lady

that her father was having a fit. Then for a long time I lay in a lounge chair swallowing pony upon pony of gin.

And next morning I felt strong enough to drive on (which in later years no doctor believed).

22

The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone, turned out to belong to the glossily

browned pine-log kind that Lolita used to be so fond of in the days of our carefree first journey; oh, how different

things were now! I am not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After all — well, really… After all, gentlemen, it was

becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments of my

persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the

cocky Gallic part of my brain — and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy

gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange

relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the

“Birdsley” telephone call… But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at

Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable

and beloved on the very even of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop

torturing me.

An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had

been dull and silent during the last lap — two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths

or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above

the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly

built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we

would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas. José

Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American

tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly

participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why did I

hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves,

and lungs, rely.

Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss

perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half

Irish. I registered, Hays gave me the key and a tinkling smile, and, still twinkling, showed me where to park the car;

Lo crawled out and shivered a little: the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the cabin, she sat

down on a chair at a card table, buried her face in the crook of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I

thought, shamming, no doubt, to evade my caresses; I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper in an

unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill. Lolita dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her

temperature, orally, then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter and after laboriously reducing

the, meaningless to me, degrees Fahrenheit to the intimate centigrade of my childhood, found she had 40.4, which

at least made sense. Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of temperature — even exceeding a

fatal count. And I would have given her a sip of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if,

upon an examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I

undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head to toe. She

complained of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebrae — and I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent

would. Giving up all hope of intercourse, I wrapped her in a laprobe and carried her into the car. Kind Mrs. Hays in

the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the

best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity.

With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and

guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I

was never to see again. Dr. Blue, whose learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it

was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had

forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the “ague” of the ancients. I wondered if I should mention,

with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a minor accident while climbing an awkward

fence with her boy friend, but knowing I was drunk, I decided to withhold the information till later if necessary. To

an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter’s age as “practically sixteen.” While I was not looking,

my child was taken away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a “welcome” mat in a

corner of their damned hospital. I ran up constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to tell her

she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully

rude to a very young and very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black eyes — of Basque

descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd, a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car

and remained in it for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new solitude,

looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumined, very square and low hospital building squatting in the

middle of its lawny block, now up at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute montagne

where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely Joseph Lore was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas — que sais-je! —

or seducing a ewe. Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in times of unusual

stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back

to the motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way. Wide gravel roads criss-crossed

drowsy rectangular shadows. I made out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school

playground; and in another wastelike block there rose in domed silence the pale temple of some local sect. I found

the highway at last, and then the motel, where millions of so-called “millers,” a kind of insect, were swarming

around the neon contours of “No Vacancy”; and, when, at 3 a.m., after one of those untimely hot showers which

like some mordant only help to fix a man’s despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of chestnuts and

roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found

myself unable to assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was separated from my Lolita. All at

once it occurred to me that her illness was somehow the development of a theme — that it had the same taste and

tone as the series of linked impressions which had puzzled and tormented me during our journey; I imagined that

secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or hallucination, or whatever he was, prowling around the hospital —

and Aurora had hardly “warmed her hands,” as the pickers of lavender way in the country of my birth, when I

found myself trying to get into that dungeon again, knocking upon its green doors, breakfastless, stool-less, in

despair.

This was Tuesday, and Wednesday or Thursday, splendidly reacting like the darling she was to some “serum”

(sparrow’s sperm or dugong’s dung), she was much better, and the doctor said that in a couple of days she would be

“skipping” again.

Of the eight times I visited her, the last one alone remains sharply engraved on my mind. It had been a great feat

to come for I felt all hollowed out by the infection that by then was at work on me too. None will know the strain it

was to carry that bouquet, that load of love, those books that I had traveled sixty miles to buy: Browning’s

Dramatic Works, The History of Dancing, Clowns and Columbines, The Russian Ballet, Flowers of the Rockies,

The Theatre Guild Anthology, Tennis by Helen Wills, who had won the National Junior Girl Singles at the age of

fifteen. As I was staggering up to the door of my daughter’s thirteen-dollar-a day private room, Mary Lore, the

beastly young part-time nurse who had taken an unconcealed dislike to me, emerged with a finished breakfast tray,

placed it with a quick crash on a chair in the corridor, and, fundament jigging, shot back into the room — probably

to warn her poor little Dolores that the tyrannical old father was creeping up on crepe soles, with books and

bouquet: the latter I had composed of wild flowers and beautiful leaves gathered with my own gloved hands on a

mountain pass at sunrise (I hardly slept at all that fateful week).

Feeding my Carmencita well? Idly I glanced at the tray. On a yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope.

It had contained something, since one edge was torn, but there was no address on it — nothing at all, save a phony

armorial design with “Ponderosa Lodge” in green letters; thereupon I performed a chassé-croisé with Mary, who

was in the act of bustling out again — wonderful how fast they move and how little they do, those rumpy young

nurses. She glowered at the envelope I had put back, uncrumpled.

“You better not touch,” she said, nodding directionally. “Could burn your fingers.”

Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was:

“Je croyais que c’гtait un bill — not a billet doux.” Then, entering the sunny room, to Lolita: “Bonjour, mon

petit.”

“Dolores,” said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me, though me, the plump whore, and blinking, and starting

to fold very rapidly a white flannel blanket as she blinked: “Dolores, your pappy thinks you are getting letters from

my boy friend. It’s me (smugly tapping herself on the small gilt cross she wore) gets them. And my pappy can

parlay-voo as well as yours.”

She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly painted, hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms

straightened out on neat coverlet, lay innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the bed table, next to a paper napkin

and a pencil, her topaz ring burned in the sun.

“what gruesome funeral flowers,” she said. “Thanks all the same. But do you mind very much cutting out the

French? It annoys everybody.”

Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and garlic, with the Deseret News, which her

fair patient eagerly accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated volumes I had brought.

“My sister Ann,” said Marry (topping information with afterthought), “works at the Ponderosa place.”

Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m’aimes plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the

moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever — and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in

Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing a double game since

she was also fooling sentimental Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her fun-loving

young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse whom I never identified, and the village idiot

who carted cots and coffins into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting room — all

were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with

the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were rather lardy, you know,

Rom, despite all that “snow” and “joy juice”).

My throat hurt. I stood, swallowing, at the window and stared at the mountains, at the romantic rock high up in

the smiling plotting sky.

“My Carmen,” I said (I used to call her that sometimes), “we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get

out of bed.”

“Incidentally, I want all my clothes,” said the gitanilla, humping up her knees and turning to another page.

“…Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in staying here.”

“There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita.

I lowered myself into a cretonne chair and, opening the attractive botanical work, attempted, in the feverhumming

hush of the room, to identify my flowers. This proved impossible. Presently a musical bell softly

sounded somewhere in the passage.

I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed

me earlier) in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However — likewise for reasons of

show — regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of

dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch)

plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I looked at her hand; it dropped. As I was leaving, leaving voluntarily,

Dolores Haze reminded me to bring her next morning… She did not remember where the various things she wanted

were… “Bring me,” she cried (out of sight already, door on the move, closing, closed), “the new gray suitcase and

Mother’s trunk”; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying nit he motel bed she had used for

just a few minutes, and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circumstances was to send the two bags

over with the widow’s beau, a robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo displaying her treasures to Mary… No

doubt, I was a little delirious — and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a solid, for when I

looked out the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw Dolly’s beautiful young bicycle propped up there on

its support, the graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow perched on the saddle

— but it was the landlady’s bike, and smiling a little, and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered

back to my bed, and lay as quiet as a saint —

Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,

On a patch of sunny green

With Sanchicha reading stories

In a movie magazine —

— which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed, and there was some great national

celebration in town judging by the firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five minutes to

two p.m. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.

It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.

Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today?

At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scars — had

been blown through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish,

hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was such a great holiday, or

simply because he wanted to divert a sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the one

pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and

fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his

crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh,

delicious… reclining against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.

I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day and would get into touch with my daughter sometime

tomorrow if I felt probably Polynesian.

He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip twitch amorously.

“Okey-dokey,” big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling, carried my message away, and I went on

drinking, and by morning the fever was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing

gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone. Everything was fine. A bright voice

informed me that yes, everything was fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr.

Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had

paid Dolly’s bill in cash, and told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at Grandpa’s ranch

as agreed.

Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its

neat greenwool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier to its model

school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional

pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one gravel-groaning

sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself telestically — and, telepathically (I hoped), to its

gesticulating owner — that I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the gin kept my heart alive

but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the

reception room, trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and clamoring for Mary who

luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem

to have been sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue, and who eventually stood

up, remarking with a preposterous accent: “Now, who is nevrotic, I ask?” — and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse

presented me with seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan lap robe, and demanded a

receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was

pointing me out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my Lolita to all those apes. But

what else could I do? One simple and stark thought stood out and this was: “Freedom for the moment is

everything.” One false move — and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out

of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand,

I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital

in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly

good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free

man — free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother.

23

A thousand-mile stretch of silk-smooth road separated Kasbeam, where, to the best of my belief, the red fiend had

been scheduled to appear for the first time, and fateful Elphinstone which we had reached about a week before

Independence Day. The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom made more than a hundred and fifty

miles per traveling day, spending the rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at various stopping places, all of

them also prearranged, no doubt. It was that stretch, then, along which the fiend’s spoor should be sought; and to

this I devoted myself, after several unmentionable days of dashing up and down the relentlessly radiating roads in

the vicinity of Elphinstone.

Imagine me, reader , with my shyness, my distaste for any ostentation, my inherent sense of the comme il faut,

imagine me masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile while devising some casual pretext

to flip through the hotel register: “Oh,” I would say, “I am almost positive that I stayed here once — let me look up

the entries for mid-June — no, I see I’m wrong after all — what a very quaint name for a home town, Kawtagain.

Thanks very much.” Or: “I had a customer staying here — I mislaid his address — may I…?” And every once in a

while, especially if the operator of the place happened to be a certain type of gloomy male, personal inspection of

the books was denied me.

I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered,

if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations between

Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend (“N. Petit, Larousse, Ill.”); I had to space and

time my inquiries carefully so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been at least fifty places where

I merely inquired at the desk — but that was a futile quest, and I preferred building up a foundation of

verisimilitude and good will by first paying for an unneeded room. My survey showed that of the 300 or so books

inspected, at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering fiend had stopped even more often than we, or else —

he was quite capable of that — he had thrown in additional registrations in order to keep me well furnished with

derisive hints. Only in one case had he actually stayed at the same motor court as we, a few paces from Lolita’s

pillow. In some instances he had taken up quarters in the same or in a neighboring block; not infrequently he had

lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two bespoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our

departure from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour books and maps, and marking laps and stops with

her lipstick!

I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my

special benefit. At the very first motel office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his entry, among a dozen obviously

human ones, read: Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy connotations could not fail to strike

me, of course. The landlady deigned to inform me that the gentleman had been laid up for five days with a bad cold,

that he had left his car for repairs in some garage or other and that he had checked out on the 4th of July. Yes, a girl

called Ann Lore had worked formerly at the Lodge, but was now married to a grocer in Cedar City. One moonlit

night I waylaid white-shoed Mary on a solitary street; an automaton, she was about to shriek, but I managed to

humanize her by the simple act of falling on my knees and with pious yelps imploring her to help. She did not

know a thing, she swore. Who was this Gratiano Forbeson? She seemed to waver. I whipped out a hundred-dollar

bill. She lifted it to the light of the moon. “He is your brother,” she whispered at last. I plucked the bill out of her

moon-cold hand, and spitting out a French curse turned and ran away. This taught me to rely on myself alone. No

detective could discover the clues Trapp had tuned to my mind and manner. I could not hope, of course, he would

ever leave his correct name and address; but I did hope he might slip on the glaze of his own subtlety, by daring,

say, to introduce a richer and more personal shot of color than strictly necessary, or by revealing too much through

a qualitative sum of quantitative parts which revealed too little. In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in

thoroughly enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. With infinite skill, he swayed and

staggered, and regained an impossible balance, always leaving me with the sportive hope — if I may use such a

term in speaking of betrayal, fury, desolation, horror and hate — that he might give himself away next time. He

never did — though coming damn close to it. We all admire the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously

walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing

scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know.

The clues he left did not establish his identity but they reflected his personality, or at least a certain homogenous

and striking personality; his genre, his type of humor — at its best at least — the tone of his brain, had affinities

with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew

French. he was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine

handwriting. He would change his name but he could not disguise, no matter how he slanted them, his very

peculiar t’s, w’s and l’s. Quelquepart Island was one of his favorite residences. He did not use a fountain pen which

fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed undinist. One mercifully hopes there

are water nymphs in the Styx.

His main trait was his passion for tantalization. Goodness, what a tease the poor fellow was! He challenged my

scholarship. I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all; and I

daresay I missed some elements in that cryprogrammic paper chase. What a shiver of triumph and loathing shook

my frail frame when, among the plain innocent names in the hotel recorder, his fiendish conundrum would

ejaculate in my face! I noticed that whenever he felt his enigmas were becoming too recondite, even for such a

solver as I, he would lure me back with an easy one. “Arsène Lupin” was obvious to a Frenchman who

remembered the detective stories of his youth; and one hardly had to be a Coleridgian to appreciate the trite poke of

“A. Person, Porlock, England.” In horrible taste but basically suggestive of a cultured man — not a policeman, not

a common good, not a lewd salesman — were such assumed names as “Arthur Rainbow” — plainly the travestied

author of Le Bateau Bleu — let me laugh a little too, gentlemen — and “Morris Schmetterling,” of L’Oiseau Ivre

fame (touché, reader!). The silly but funny “D. Orgon, Elmira, NY,” was from Molière, of course, and because I

had quite recently tried to interest Lolita in a famous 18th-century play, I welcomed as an old friend “Harry

Bumper, Sheridan, Wyo.” An ordinary encyclopedia informed me who the peculiar looking “Phineas Quimby,

Lebanon, NH” was; and any good Freudian, with a German name and some interest in religious prostitution,

should recognize at a glance the implication of “Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.” So far so good. That sort of fun was

shoddy but on the whole impersonal and thus innocuous. Among entries that arrested my attention as undoubtable

clues per se but baffled me in respect to their finer points I do not care to mention many since I feel I am groping in

a border-land mist with verbal phantoms turning, perhaps, into living vacationists. Who was “Johnny Randall,

Ramble, Ohio”? Or was he a real person who just happened to write a hand similar to “N.S. Aristoff, Catagela,

NY”? What was the sting in “Catagela”? And what about “James Mavor Morell, Hoaxton, England”?

“Aristophanes,” “hoax” — fine, but what was I missing?

There was one strain running through all that pseudonymity which caused me especially painful palpitations

when I came across it. Such things as “G. Trapp, Geneva, NY.” was the sign of treachery on Lolita’s part. “Aubrey

Beardsley, Quelquepart Island” suggested more lucidly than the garbled telephone message had that the starting

point of the affair should be looked for in the East. “Lucas Picador, Merrymay, Pa.” insinuated that my Carmen had

betrayed my pathetic endearments to the impostor. Horribly cruel, forsooth, was “Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.” The

gruesome “Harold Haze, Tombstone, Arizona” (which at another time would have appealed to my sense of humor)

implied a familiarity with the girl’s past that in nightmare fashion suggested for a moment that my quarry was an

old friend of the family, maybe an old flame of Charlotte’s, maybe a redresser of wrongs (“Donald Quix, Sierra,

Nev.”). But the most penetrating bodkin was the anagramtailed entry in the register of Chestnut Lodge “Ted Hunter,

Cane, NH.”

The garbled license numbers left by all these Persons and Orgons and Morells and Trapps only told me that

motel keepers omit to check if guests’ cars are accurately listed. References — incompletely or incorrectly

indicated — to the cars the fiend had hired for short laps between Wace and Elphinstone were of course useless;

the license of the initial Aztec was a shimmer of shifting numerals, some transposed, others altered or omitted, but

somehow forming interrelated combinations (such as “WS 1564” and “SH 1616,” and “Q32888” or “CU88322”)

which however were so cunningly contrived as to never reveal a common denominator.

It occurred to me that after he had turned that convertible over to accomplices at Wace and switched to the

stage-motor car system, his successors might have been less careful and might have inscribed at some hotel office

the archtype of those interrelated figures. But if looking for the fiend along a road I knew he had taken was such a

complicated vague and unprofitable business, what could I expect from any attempt to trace unknown motorists

traveling along unknown routes?

24

By the time I reached Beardsley, in the course of the harrowing recapitulation I have now discussed at sufficient

length, a complete image had formed in my mind; and through the — always risky — process of elimination I had

reduced this image to the only concrete source that morbid cerebration and torpid memory could give it.

Except for the Rev. Rigor Mortis (as the girls called him), and an old gentleman who taught non-obligatory

German and Latin, there were no regular male teachers at Beardsley School. But on two occasions an art instructor

on the Beardsley College faculty had come over to show the schoolgirls magic lantern pictures of French castles

and nineteenth-century paintings. I had wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly, as was her wont,

had asked me not to, period. I also remembered that Gaston had referred to that particular lecturer as a brilliant

garçon; but that was all; memory refused to supply me with the name of the chateau-lover.

On the day fixed for the execution, I walked though the sleet across the campus to the information desk in

Maker Hall, Beardsley College. There I learned that the fellow’s name was Riggs (rather like that of the minister),

that he was a bachelor, and that in ten minutes he would issue from the “Museum” where he was having a class. In

the passage leading to the auditorium I sat on a marble bench of sorts donated by Cecilia Dalrymple Ramble. As I

waited there, in the prostatic discomfort, drunk, sleep-starved, with my gun in my fist in my raincoat pocket, it

suddenly occurred to me that I was demented and was about to do something stupid. There was not one chance in a

million that Albert Riggs, Ass. Prof., was hiding my Lolita at his Beardsley home, 24 Pritchard Road. He could not

be the villain. It was absolutely preposterous. I was losing my time and my wits. He and she were in California and

not here at all.

Presently, I noticed a vague commotion behind some white statues; a door — not the one I had been staring at

— opened briskly, and amid a bevy of women students a baldish head and two bright brown eyes bobbed,

advanced.

He was a total stranger to me but insisted we had met at a lawn party at Beardsley School. How was my

delightful tennis-playing daughter? He had another class. He would be seeing me.

Another attempt at identification was less speedily resolved: through an advertisement in one of Lo’s magazines

I dared to get in touch with a private detective, an ex-pugilist, and merely to give him some idea of the method

adopted by the fiend, I acquainted him with the kind of names and addresses I had collected. He demanded a

goodish deposit and for two years — two years, reader! — that imbecile busied himself with checking those

nonsense data. I had long severed all monetary relations with him when he turned up one day with the triumphant

information that an eighty-year-old Indian by the name of Bill Brown lived near Dolores, Colo.

25

This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another

internal combustion martyr) might be called “Dolorès Disparue,” there would be little sense in analyzing the three

empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to

convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its

whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.

Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I remembered her — as I saw her constantly and

obsessively in my conscious mind during my daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but

she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That

complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and

would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a

soccer ball’s bladder. I would bind myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies

where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping

in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese

bric-à-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.

One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of teen-magazines. You know the sort. Stone

age at heart; up to date, or at least Mycenaean, as to hygiene. A handsome, very ripe actress with huge lashes and a

pulpy red underlip, endorsing a shampoo. Ads and fads. Young scholars dote on plenty of pleats — que c’était loin,

tout cela! It is your hostess’ duty to provide robes. Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation.

All of us have known “pickers” — one who picks her cuticle at the office party. Unless he is very elderly or very

important, a man should remove his gloves before shaking hands with a woman. Invite Romance by wearing the

Exciting New Tummy Flattener. Trims tums, nips hips. Tristram in Movielove. Yessir! The Joe-Roe marital

enigma is making yaps flap. Glamorize yourself quickly and inexpensively. Comics. Bad girl dark hair fat father

cigar; good girl red hair handsome daddums clipped mustache. Or that repulsive strip with the big gagoon and his

wife, a kiddoid gnomide. Et moi qui t’offrais mon génie… I recalled the rather charming nonsense verse I used to

write her when she was a child: “nonsense,” she used to say mockingly, “is correct.”

The Squirl and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits

Have certain obscure and peculiar habits.

Male hummingbirds make the most exquisite rockets.

The snake when he walks holds his hands in his pockets…

Other things of hers were harder to relinquish. Up to the end of 1949, I cherished and adored, and stained with

my kisses and merman tears, a pair of old sneakers, a boy’s shirt she had worn, some ancient blue jeans I found in

the trunk compartment, a crumpled school cap, suchlike wanton treasures. Then, when I understood my mind was

cracking, I collected those sundry belongings, added to them what had been stored in Beardsley — a box of books,

her bicycle, old coats, galoshes — and on her fifteenth birthday mailed everything as an anonymous gift to a home

for orphaned girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian border.

It is just possible that had I gone to a strong hypnotist he might have extracted from me and arrayed in a logical

pattern certain chance memories that I have threaded through my book with considerably more ostentation than

they present themselves with to my mind even now when I know what to seek in the past. At the time I felt I was

merely losing contact with reality; and after spending the rest of the winter and most of the following spring in a

Quebec sanatorium where I had stayed before, I resolved first to settle some affairs of mine in New York and then

to proceed to California for a thorough search there.

Here is something I composed in my retreat:

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.

Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.

Age: five thousand three hundred days.

Profession: none, or “starlet.”

Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?

Why are you hiding, darling?

(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze,

I cannot get out, said the starling).

Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?

What make is the magic carpet?

Is a Cream Cougar the present craze?

And where are you parked, my car pet?

Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?

Still one of those blue-caped star-men?

Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays,

And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen!

Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts!

Are you still dancin’, darlin’?

(Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts,

And I, in my corner, snarlin’).

Happy, happy is gnarled McFate

Touring the States with a child wife,

Plowing his Molly in every State

Among the protected wild life.

My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,

And never closed when I kissed her.

Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?

Are you from Paris, mister?

L’autre soir un air froid d’opéra m’alita:

Son félé — bien fol est qui s’y fie!

Il neige, le décor s’écroule, Lolita!

Lolita, qu’ai — je fait de ta vie?

Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,

Of hate and remorse, I’m dying.

And again my hairy fist I raise,

And again I hear you crying.

Officer, officer, there they go —

In the rain, where that lighted store is!

And her socks are white, and I love her so,

And her name is Haze, Dolores.

Officer, officer, there they are —

Dolores Haze and her lover!

Whip out your gun and follow that car.

Now tumble out, and take cover.

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.

Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.

Ninety pounds is all she weighs

With a height of sixty inches.

My car is limping, Dolores Haze,

And the last long lap is the hardest,

And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,

And the rest is rust and stardust.

By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac’s masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes

correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of

landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers. I wrote many more poems.

I immersed myself in the poetry of others. But not for a second did I forget the load of revenge.

I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis.

My accursed nature could not change, no matter how my love for her did. On playgrounds and beaches, my sullen

and stealthy eye, against my will, still sought out the flash of a nymphet’s limbs, the sly tokens of Lolita’s

handmaids and rosegirls. But one essential vision in me had withered: never did I dwell now on possibilities of

bliss with a little maiden, specific or synthetic, in some out-of-the-way place; never did my fancy sink its fangs into

Lolita’s sisters, far far away, in the coves of evoked islands. That was all over, for the time being at least. On the

other hand, alas, two years of monstrous indulgence had left me with certain habits of lust: I feared lest the void I

lived in might drive me to plunge into the freedom of sudden insanity when confronted with a chance temptation in

some lane between school and supper. Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a

hysterical unreliable organ. This is how Rita enters the picture.

26

She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a

hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most

appealing ensellure to her supple back — I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one

depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and

Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we

had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly

stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did — and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita,

such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree

or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.

When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband — and a little more recently had been

abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant — the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate.

Her brother was — and no doubt still is — a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician,

mayor and booster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had

been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would

never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason

every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she

knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the

flood-lit drive that encircled it — “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.”

She had a natty little coupé; and in it we traveled to California so as to give my venerable vehicle a rest. her

natural speed was ninety. Dear Rita! We cruised together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer 1952,

and she was the sweetest, simplest, gentles, dumbest Rita imaginable. In comparison to her, Valechka was a

Schlegel, and Charlotte a Hegel. There is no earthly reason why I should dally with her in the margin of this

sinister memoir, but let me say (hi, Rita — wherever you are, drunk or hangoverish, Rita, hi!) that she was the most

soothing, the most comprehending companion that I ever had, and certainly saved me from the madhouse. I told

her I was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl’s bully. Rita solemnly approved of the plan — and in the course of

some investigation she undertook on her own (without really knowing a thing), around San Humbertino, got

entangled with a pretty awful crook herself; I had the devil of a time retrieving her — used and bruised but still

cocky. Then one day she proposed playing Russian roulette with my sacred automatic; I said you couldn’t, it was

not a revolver, and we struggled for it, until at last it went off, touching off a very thin and very comical spurt of

hot water from the hole it made in the wall of the cabin room; I remember her shrieks of laughter.

The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her slow languorous columbine kisses kept me from

mischief. It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said;

it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art. One rather mysterious spree that had interesting

repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my

cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis

on the Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold

conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze — dear Rita

and I awoke to find a third in our room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large

transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty

underwear, and with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front

teeth was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in my raincoat — the

first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses had

been used, which in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches. The door was not properly closed. A

sweater and a pair of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness. He

was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that

somehow we had purloined his (worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest

hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten gyrations, we ewer in Grainball. Half a year

later Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his

personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!

I would not have mentioned this incident had it not started a chain of ideas that resulted in my publishing in the

Cantrip Review an essay on “Mimir and Memory,” in which I suggested among other things that seemed original

and important to that splendid review’s benevolent readers, a theory of perceptual time based on the circulation of

the blood and conceptually depending (to fill up this nutshell) on the mind’s being conscious not only of matter but

also of its own self, thus crating a continuous spanning of two points (the storable future and the stored past). In

result of this venture — and in culmination of the impression made by my previous travaux — I was called from

New York, where Rita and I were living in a little flat with a view of gleaming children taking shower baths far

below in a fountainous arbor of Central Park, to Cantrip College, four hundred miles away, for one year. I lodged

there, in special apartments for poets and philosophers, from September 1951 to June 1952, while Rita whom I

preferred not to display vegetated — somewhat indecorously, I am afraid — in a roadside inn where I visited her

twice a week. Then she vanished — more humanly than her predecessor had done: a month later I found her in the

local jail. She was très digne, had had her appendix removed, and managed to convince me that the beautiful bluish

furs she had been accused of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spontaneous, if somewhat

alcoholic, gift from Roland himself. I succeeded in getting her out without appealing to her touchy brother, and

soon afterwards we drove back to Central Park West, by way of Briceland, where we had stopped for a few hours

the year before.

A curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold of me. I was entering a phase of existence where

I had given up all hope of tracing her kidnapper and her. I now attempted to fall back on old settings in order to

save what still could be saved in the way of souvenir, souvenir que me veux-tu? Autumn was ringing in the air. To

a post card requesting twin beds Professor Hamburg got a prompt expression of regret in reply. They were full up.

They had one bathless basement room with four beds which they thought I would not want. Their note paper was

headed:

The Enchanted Hunters

NEAR CHURCHES NO DOGS

All legal beverages

I wondered if the last statement was true. All? Did they have for instance sidewalk grenadine? I also wondered

if a hunter, enchanted or otherwise, would not need a pointer more than a pew, and with a spasm of pain I recalled

a scene worthy of a great artist: petite nymphe accroupie; but that silky cocker spaniel had perhaps been a baptized

one. No — I felt I could not endure the throes of revisiting that lobby. There was a much better possibility of

retrievable time elsewhere in soft, rich-colored, autumnal Briceland. Leaving Rita in a bar, I made for the town

library. A twittering spinster was only too glad to help me disinter mid-August 1947 from the bound Briceland

Gazette, and presently, in a secluded nook under a naked light, I was turning the enormous and fragile pages of a

coffin-black volume almost as big as Lolita.

Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face

the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it — which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth

soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl’s black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible

eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. What I lusted to get was the printed picture that

had chanced to absorb my trespassing image while the Gazette’s photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock

and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait of the artist as a younger brute. An innocent

camera catching me on my dark way to Lolita’s bed — what a magnet for Mnemosyne! I cannot well explain the

true nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to examine

with a magnifying glass bleak little figures — still life practically, and everybody about to throw up — at an early

morning execution, and the patient’s expression impossible to make out in the print. Anyway, I was literally

gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and

skimmed… Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom,

independent tobacco auctioneer, said that ever since 1925 he had been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and

his petite bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore, 58 Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain

parasites is one sixth of the host. Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century. Misses’ socks, 39 c. Saddle Oxfords

3.98. Wine, wine, wine, quipped the author of Dark Age who refused to be photographed, may suit a Persian

bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time. Dimples are

caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues. Greeks repulse a heavy guerrilla assault — and, ah, at last,

a little figure in white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder was brushing against his ample

form — nothing of myself could I make out.

I went to find Rita who introduced me with her vin triste smile to a pocket-sized wizened truculently tight old

man saying this was — what was the name again, son? — a former schoolmate of hers. He tried to retain her, and

in the slight scuffle that followed I hurt my thumb against his hard head. In the silent painted part where I walked

her and aired her a little, she sobbed and said I would soon, soon leave her as everybody had, and I sang her a

wistful French ballad, and strung together some fugitive rhymes to amuse her:

The place was called Enchanted Hunters. Query:

What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell

endorses to make of Picture Lake a very

blood bath of trees before the blue hotel?

She said: “Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?” and started to cry again, and I marched her

to the car, and we drove on to New York, and soon she was reasonably happy again high up in the haze on the little

terrace of our flat. I notice I have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to

Carntrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming

colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.

27

My letterbox in the entrance hall belonged to the type that allows one to glimpse something of its contents through

a glassed slit. Several times already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through the glass upon an alien handwriting

had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita’s script causing me almost to collapse as I leant against an adjacent urn,

almost my own. Whenever that happened — whenever her lovely, childish scrawl was horribly transformed into

the dull hand of one of my few correspondents — I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my

trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the

ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of

combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight

also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness

of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the

limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill

the gap between the little given and the great promised — the great rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fenêtres!

Hanging above blotched sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my desire

against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take off in the apricot and black humid evening; did

take off — whereupon the lighted image would move and Even would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing

in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper.

Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable

pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me. “Savez-vous qu’à dix ans ma

petite était folle de vous?” said a woman I talked to at a tea in Paris, and the petite had just married, miles away,

and I could not even remember if I had ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis courts, a dozen years

before. And now likewise, the radiant foreglimpse, the promise of reality, a promise not only to be simulated

seductively but also to be nobly held — all this, chance denied me — chance and a change to smaller characters on

the pale beloved writer’s part. My fancy was both Proustianized and Procrusteanized; for that particular morning,

late in September 1952, as I had come down to grope for my mail, the dapper and bilious janitor with whom I was

on execrable terms started to complain that a man who had seen Rita home recently had been “sick like a dog” on

the front steps. In the process of listening to him and tipping him, and then listening to a revised and politer version

of the incident, I had the impression that one of the two letters which that blessed mail brought was from Rita’s

mother, a crazy little woman, whom we had once visited on Cape Cod and who kept writing me to my various

addresses, saying how wonderfully well matched her daughter and I were, and how wonderful it would be if we

married; the other letter which I opened and scanned rapidly in the elevator was from John Farlow.

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters

acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king

banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs.

Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this

or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly,

we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will

never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y

will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and

the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion

of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only

anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator,

if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow’s hysterical letter. I knew his wife had

died but I certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and reliable person

he had always been. Now he wrote that after a brief visit to the U.S. he had returned to South America and had

decided that whatever affairs he had controlled at Ramsdale he would hand over to Jack Windmuller of that town, a

lawyer whom we both knew. He seemed particularly relieved to get rid of the Haze “complications.” He had

married a Spanish girl. He had stopped smoking and had gained thirty pounds. She was very young and a ski

champion. They were going to India for their honeymonsoon. Since he was “building a family” as he put it, he

would have no time henceforth for my affairs which he termed “very strange and very aggravating.” Busybodies —

a whole committee of them, it appeared — had informed him that the whereabouts of little Dolly Haze were

unknown, and that I was living with a notorious divorcee in California. His father-in-law was a count, and

exceedingly wealthy. The people who had been renting the Haze house for some years now wished to buy it. He

suggested that I better produce Dolly quick. he had broken his leg. He enclosed a snapshot of himself and a

brunette in white wool beaming at each other among the snows of Chile.

I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say: Well, at least we shall now track them down — when

the other letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact voice:

Dear Dad:

How’s everything? I’m married. I’m going to have a baby. I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll

come right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write. I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay

our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very specialized corner of the

mechanical field, that’s all I know about it but it’s really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home address

but you may still be mad at me, and Dick must not know. This town is something. You can’t see the morons

for the smog. Please do send us a check, Dad. We could manage with three or four hundred or even less,

anything is welcome, you might sell my old things, because once we go there the dough will just start rolling

1. Writ, please. I have gone through much sadness and hardship.

Yours expecting,

Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)

28

I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan, again alone. Rita had still been dead to the world

when I read that letter and fought the mountains of agony it raised within me. I had glanced at her as she smiled in

her sleep and had kissed her on her moist brow, and had left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which I taped

to her navel — otherwise she might not have found it.

“Alone” did I say? Pas tout à fait. I had my little black chum with me, and as soon as I reached a secluded spot,

I rehearsed Mr. Richard F. Schiller’s violent death. I had found a very old and very dirty gray sweater of mine in

the back of the car, and this I hung up on a branch, in a speechless glade, which I had reached by a wood road from

the now remote highway. The carrying out of the sentence was a little marred by what seemed to me a certain

stiffness in the play of the trigger, and I wondered if I should get some oil for the mysterious thing but decided I

had no time to spare. Back into the car went the old dead sweater, now with additional perforations, and having

reloaded warm Chum, I continued my journey.

The letter was dated September 18, 1952 (this was September 22), and the address she gave was “General

Delivery, Coalmont” (not “Va.,” not “Pa.,” not “Tenn.” — and not Coalmont, anyway — I have camouflaged

everything, my love). Inquiries showed this to be a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from

New York City. At first I planned to drive all day and all night, but then thought better of it and rested for a couple

of hours around dawn in a motor court room, a few miles before reaching the town. I had made up my mind that

the fiend, this Schiller, had been a car salesman who had perhaps got to know my Lolita by giving her a ride in

Beardsley — the day her bike blew a tire on the way to Miss Emperor — and that he had got into some trouble

since then. The corpse of the executed sweater, no matter how I changed its contours as it lay on the back seat of

the car, had kept revealing various outlines pertaining to Trapp-Schiller — the grossness and obscene bonhomie of

his body, and to counteract this taste of coarse corruption I resolved to make myself especially handsome and smart

as I pressed home the nipple of my alarm clock before it exploded at the set hour of six a.m. Then, with the stern

and romantic care of a gentleman about to fight a duel, I checked the arrangement of my papers, bathed and

perfumed my delicate body, shaved my face and chest, selected a silk shirt and clean drawers, pulled on transparent

taupe socks, and congratulated myself for having with me in my trunk some very exquisite clothes — a waistcoat

with nacreous buttons, for instance, a pale cashmere tie and so on.

I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that physicality as a trivial contretemps, wiped my

mouth with a gossamer handkerchief produced from my sleeve, and, with a blue block of ice for heart, a pill on my

tongue and solid death in my hip pocket, I stepped neatly into a telephone booth in Coalmont (Ah-ah-ah, said its

little door) and rang up the only Schiller — Paul, Furniture — to be found in the battered book. Hoarse Paul told

me he did know a Richard, the son of a cousin of his, and his address was, let me see, 10 Killer Street (I am not

going very far for my pseudonyms). Ah-ah-ah, said the little door.

At 10 Killer Street, a tenement house, I interviewed a number of dejected old people and two long-haired

strawberry-blond incredibly grubby nymphets (rather abstractly, just for the heck of it, the ancient beast in me was

casting about for some lightly clad child I might hold against me for a minute, after the killing was over and

nothing mattered any more, and everything was allowed). Yes, Dick Skiller had lived there, but had moved when

he married. Nobody knew his address. “They might know at the store,” said a bass voice from an open manhole

near which I happened to be standing with the two thin-armed, barefoot little girls and their dim grandmothers. I

entered the wrong store and a wary old Negro shook his head even before I could ask anything. I crossed over to a

bleak grocery and there, summoned by a customer at my request, a woman’s voice from some wooden abyss in the

floor, the manhole’s counterpart, cried out: Hunter Road, last house.

Hunter Road was miles away, in an even more dismal district, all dump and ditch, and wormy vegetable garden,

and shack, and gray drizzle, and red mud, and several smoking stacks in the distance. I stopped at the last “house”

— a clapboard shack, with two or three similar ones farther away from the road and a waste of withered weeds all

around. Sounds of hammering came from behind the house, and for several minutes I sat quite still in my old car,

old and frail, at the end of my journey, at my gray goal, finis, my friends, finis, my friends. The time was around

two. My pulse was 40 one minute and 100 the next. The drizzle crepitated against the hood of the car. My gun had

migrated to my right trouser pocket. A nondescript cur came out from behind the house, stopped in surprise, and

started good-naturedly woof-woofing at me, his eyes slit, his shaggy belly all muddy, and then walked about a little

and woofed once more.

29

I got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact, how square that slam sounded in the void of the

sunless day! Woof, commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole

system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a

shuffle, and woosh-woof went the door.

Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. How simple! The moment, the

death I had kept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood. She was frankly and hugely

pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds had passed really, but let me give them as much wooden

duration as life can stand), and her pale-freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all

their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers.

“We — e — ell!” she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis of wonder and welcome.

“Husband at home?” I croaked, fist in pocket.

I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight,

at ever and ever sight.

“Come in,” she said with a vehement cheerful note. Against the splintery deadwood of the door, Dolly Schiller

flattened herself as best she could (even rising on tiptoe a little) to let me pass, and was crucified for a moment,

looking down, smiling down at the threshold, hollow-cheeked with round pommettes, her watered-milk-white arms

outspread on the wood. I passed without touching her bulging babe. Dolly-smell, with a faint fried addition. My

teeth chattered like an idiot’s. “No, you stay out” (to the dog). She closed the door and followed me and her belly

into the dollhouse parlor.

“Dick’s down there,” she said pointing with an invisible tennis racket, inviting my gaze to travel from the drab

parlor-bedroom where we stood, right across the kitchen, and through the back doorway where, in a rather

primitive vista, a dark-haired young stranger in overalls, instantaneously reprieved, was perched with his back to

me on a ladder fixing something near or upon the shack of his neighbor, a plumper fellow with only one arm, who

stood looking up.

This pattern she explained from afar, apologetically (“Men will be men”); should she call him in?

No.

Standing in the middle of the slanting room and emitting questioning “hm’s,” she made familiar Javanese

gestures with her wrists and hands, offering me, in a brief display of humorous courtesy, to choose between a

rocker and the divan (their bed after ten p.m.). I say “familiar” because one day she had welcomed me with the

same wrist dance to her party in Beardsley. We both sat down on the divan. Curious: although actually her looks

had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked — had always looked — like

Botticelli’s russet Venus — the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty. In my pocket my fingers gently let go and

repacked a little at the tip, within the handkerchief it was nested in, my unused weapon.

“that’s not the fellow I want,” I said.

The diffuse look of welcome left her eyes. Her forehead puckered as in the old bitter days:

“Not who?”

“Where is he? Quick!”

“Look,” she said, inclining her head to one side and shaking it in that position. “Look, you are not going to bring

that up.”

“I certainly am,” I said, and for a moment — strangely enough the only merciful, endurable one in the whole

interview — we were bristling at each other as if she were still mine.

A wise girl, she controlled herself.

Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I was her father. He thought she had run away from an

upper-class home just to wash dishes in a diner. He believed anything. Why should I want to make things harder

than they were by raking up all that muck?

But, I said, she must be sensible, she must be a sensible girl (with her bare drum under that thin brown stuff),

she must understand that if she expected the help I had come to give, I must have at least a clear comprehension of

the situation.

“Come, his name!”

She thought I had guessed long ago. It was (with a mischievous and melancholy smile) such a sensational name.

I would never believe it. She could hardly believe it herself.

His name, my fall nymph.

It was so unimportant, she said. She suggested I skip it. Would I like a cigarette?

No. His name.

She shook her head with great resolution. She guessed it was too late to raise hell and I would never believe the

unbelievably unbelievable —

I said I had better go, regards, nice to have seen her.

She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all — “Do you really want to

know who it was? Well, it was —”

And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little

mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has

guessed long ago.

Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without

knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order,

into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe

fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering — she was talking but I sat

melting in my golden peace — of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical

recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now.

She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the only man she had ever been crazy about.

What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. And I

had never counted, of course?

She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible — and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary

— fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known

and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our

poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to

which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood.

I just managed to jerk my knee out of the range of a sketchy tap — one of her acquired gestures.

She asked me not to be dense. The past was the past. I had been a good father, she guessed — granting me that.

Proceed, Dolly Schiller.

Well, did I know that he had known her mother? That he was practically an old friend? That he had visited with

his uncle in Ramsdale? — oh, years ago — and spoken at Mother’s club, and had tugged and pulled her, Dolly, by

her bare arm onto his lap in front of everybody, and kissed her face, she was ten and furious with him? Did I know

he had seen me and her at the inn where he was writing the very play she was to rehearse in Beardsley, two years

later? Did I know — It had been horrid of her to sidetrack me into believing that Clare was an old female, maybe a

relative of his or a sometime lifemate — and oh, what a close shave it had been when the Wace Journal carried his

picture.

The Briceland Gazette had not. Yes, very amusing.

Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever

believe it.

At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest

of beer. Through the doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor.

“Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as a totally strange, and new,

and cheerful, and old, and sad, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing.

Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin. We shook hands. Discreet Bill, who evidently took

pride in working wonders with one hand, brought in the beer cans he had opened. Wanted to withdraw. The

exquisite courtesy of simple folks. Was made to stay. A beer ad. In point of fact, I preferred it that way, and so did

the Schillers. I switched to the jittery rocker. Avidly munching, Dilly plied me with marshmallows and potato chips.

The men looked at her fragile, frileux, diminutive, old-world, youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige

vest, maybe a viscount.

They were under the impression I had come to stay, and Dick with a great wrinkling of brows that denoted

difficult thought, suggested Dolly and he might sleep in the kitchen on a spare mattress. I waved a light hand and

told Dolly who transmitted it by means of a special shout to Dick that I had merely dropped in on my way to

Readsburg where I was to be entertained by some friends and admirers. It was then noticed that one of the few

thumbs remaining to Bill was bleeding (not such a wonder-worker after all). How womanish and somehow never

seen that way before was the shadowy division between her pale breasts when she bent down over the man’s hand!

She took him for repairs to the kitchen. For a few minutes, three or four little eternities which positively welled

with artificial warmth, Dick and I remained alone. He sat on a hard chair rubbing his forelimbs and frowning. I had

an idle urge to squeeze out the blackheads on the wings of his perspiring nose with my long agate claws. He had

nice sad eyes with beautiful lashes, and very white teeth. His Adam’s apple was large and hairy. Why don’t they

shave better, those young brawny chaps? He and his Dolly had had unrestrained intercourse on that couch there, at

least a hundred and eighty times, probably much more; and before that — how long had she known him? No

grudge. Funny — no grudge at all, nothing except grief and nausea. He was now rubbing his nose. I was sure that

when finally he would open his mouth, he would say (slightly shaking his head): “Aw, she’s a swell kid, Mr. Haze.

She sure is. And she’s going to make a swell mother.” He opened his mouth — and took a sip of beer. This gave

him countenance — and he went on sipping till he frothed at the mouth. He was a lamb. He had cupped her

Florentine breasts. His fingernails were black and broken, but the phalanges, the whole carpus, the strong shapely

wrist were far, far finer than mine: I have hurt too much too many bodies with my twisted poor hands to be proud

of them. French epithets, a Dorset yokel’s knuckles, an Austrian tailor’s flat finger tips — that’s Humbert Humbert.

Good. If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subdued,

frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast’s lair was — and then pulled the pistol’s

foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger: I was always a good little follower of the

Viennese medicine man. But presently I became sorry for poor Dick whom, in some hypnotoid way, I was horribly

preventing from making the only remark he could think up (“She’s a swell kid…”).

“And so,” I said, “you are going to Canada?”

In the kitchen, Dolly was laughing at something Bill had said or done.

“And so,” I shouted, “you are going to Canada? Not Canada” — I re-shouted — “I mean Alaska, of course.”

He nursed his glass and, nodding sagely, replied: “Well, he cut it on a jagger, I guess. Lost his right arm in

Italy.”

Lovely mauve almond trees in bloom. A blown-off surrealistic arm hanging up there in the pointillistic mauve.

A flowergirl tattoo on the hand. Dolly and band-aided Bill reappeared. It occurred to me that her ambiguous,

brown and pale beauty excited the cripple. Dick, with a grin of relief stood up. He guessed Bill and he would be

going back to fix those wires. He guessed Mr. Haze and Dolly had loads of things to say to each other. He guessed

he would be seeing me before I left. Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful

of hearing aids?

“Sit down,” she said, audibly striking her flanks with her palms. I relapsed into the black rocker.

“So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?”

She took from the mantelpiece a concave glossy snapshot. Old woman in white, stout, beaming, bowlegged,

very short dress; old man in his shirtsleeves, drooping mustache, watch chain. Her in-laws. Living with Dick’s

brother’s family in Juneau.

“Sure you don’t want to smoke?”

She was smoking herself. First time I saw her doing it. Streng verboten under Humbert the Terrible. Gracefully,

in a blue mist, Charlotte Haze rose from her grave. I would find him through Uncle Ivory if she refused.

“Betrayed you? No.” She directed the dart of her cigarette, index rapidly tapping upon it, toward the hearth

exactly as her mother used to do, and then, like her mother, oh my God, with her fingernail scratched and removed

a fragment of cigarette paper from her underlip. No. She had not betrayed me. I was among friends. Edusa had

warned her that Cue liked little girls, had been almost jailed once, in fact (nice fact), and he knew she knew. Yes…

Elbow in palm, puff, smile, exhaled smoke, darting gesture. Waxing reminiscent. He saw — smiling — through

everything and everybody, because he was not like me and her but a genius. A great guy. Full of fun. Had rocked

with laughter when she confessed about me and her, and said he had thought so. It was quite safe, under the

circumstances, to tell him…

Well, Cue — they all called him Cue —

Her camp five years ago. Curious coincidence — …took her to a dude ranch about a day’s drive from Elephant

(Elphinstone). Named? Oh, some silly name — Duk Duk Ranch — you know just plain silly — but it did not

matter now, anyway, because the place had vanished and disintegrated. Really, she meant, I could not imagine how

utterly lush that ranch was, she meant it had everything but everything, even an indoor waterfall. Did I remember

the red-haired guy we (“we” was good) had once had some tennis with? Well, the place really belonged to Red’s

brother, but he had turned it over to Cue for the summer. When Cue and she came, the others had them actually go

through a coronation ceremony and then — a terrific ducking, as when you cross the Equator. You know.

Her eyes rolled in synthetic resignation.

“Go on, please.”

Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Hollywood and arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the

tennis-match scene of a movie picture based on a play of his — Golden Guts — and perhaps even have her double

one of its sensational starlets on the Klieg-struck tennis court. Alas, it never came to that.

“Where is the hog now?”

He was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects. But it was all drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a

complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not

imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part because she loved him, and he threw her

out.

“What things?”

“Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and tow boys, and three or four men, and the idea was

for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” (Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.)

“What things exactly?”

“Oh, things… Oh, I — really I” — she uttered the “I” as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the

ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down-moving hand. No, she gave it up,

she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her.

That made sense.

“It is of no importance now,” she said pounding a gray cushion with her fist and then lying back, belly up, on

the divan. “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to [she used, in all insouciance really, a

disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler] your beastly boys, because I want

only you. Well, he kicked me out.”

There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and she had found jobs. For almost two years she had —

oh, just drifted, oh, doing some restaurant work in small places, and then she had met Dick. No, she did not know

where the other was. In New York, she guessed. Of course, he was so famous she would have found him at once if

she had wanted. Fay had tried to get back to the Ranch — and it just was not there any more — it had burned to the

ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange —

She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, leaning back on the cushion, one felted foot on the floor. The

wooden floor slanted, a little steel ball would have rolled into the kitchen. I knew all I wanted to know. I had no

intention of torturing my darling. Somewhere beyond Bill’s shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly

and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh

white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at

seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D. — and I

looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever

seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of

the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far

wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds… but thank

God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon

grand pêché radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may

jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I

insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but

still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma

Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No

matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young

velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn — even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your

dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.

“Lolita,” I said, “this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old

car you know so well thee is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five

steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.”

Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi?

“You mean,” she said opening her eyes and raising herself slightly, the snake that may strike, “you mean you

will give us [us] that money only if I go with you to a motel. Is that what you mean?”

“No,” I said, “you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to

live with me, and die with me, and everything with me” (words to that effect).

“You’re crazy,” she said, her features working.

“Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Except, perhaps — well, no matter.” (A reprieve, I wanted

to say but did not.) “Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your… trousseau.”

“No kidding?” asked Dolly.

I handed her an envelope with four hundred dollars in cash and a check for three thousand six hundred more.

Gingerly, uncertainly, she received mon petit cadeau; and then her forehead became a beautiful pink. “You

mean,” she said, with agonized emphasis, “you are giving us four thousand bucks?” I covered my face with my

hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin,

and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist.

“I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. “You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming?

Tell me only this.”

“No,” she said. “No, honey, no.”

She had never called me honey before.

“No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean —”

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life”).

“I think,” she went on — “oops” — the envelope skidded to the floor — she picked it up — “I think it’s oh

utterly grand of you to give us all that dough. It settles everything, we can start next week. Stop crying, please.

You should understand. Let me get you some more beer. Oh, don’t cry, I’m so sorry I cheated so much, but that’s

the way things are.”

I wiped my face and my fingers. She smiled at the cadeau. She exulted. She wanted to call Dick. I said I would

have to leave in a moment, did not want to see him at all, at all. We tried to think of some subject of conversation.

For some reason, I kept seeing — it trembled and silkily glowed on my damn retina — a radiant child of twelve,

sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles at an empty can. I almost said — trying to find some casual remark — “I

wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did she ever get better?” — but stopped in time lest

she rejoin: “I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl…” Finally, I reverted to money matters.

That sum, I said, represented more or less the net rent from her mother’s house; she said: “Had it not been sold

years ago?” No (I admit I had told her this in order to sever all connections with R.); a lawyer would send a full

account of the financial situation later; it was rosy; some of the small securities her mother had owned had gone up

and up. Yes, I was quite sure I had to go. I had to go, and find him, and destroy him.

Since I would not have survived the touch of her lips, I kept retreating in a mincing dance, at every step she and

her belly made toward me.

She and the dog saw me off. I was surprised (this a rhetorical figure, I was not) that the sight of the old car in

which she had ridden as a child and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent. All she remarked was it was getting sort

of purplish about the gills. I said it was hers, I could go by bus. She said don’t be silly, they would fly to Jupiter and

buy a car there. I said I would buy this one from her for five hundred dollars.

“At this rate we’ll be millionnaires next,” she said to the ecstatic dog.

Carmencita, lui demandais-je… “One last word,” I said in my horrible careful English, “are you quite, quite sure

that — well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but — well — some day, any day, you will not

come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that

microscopic hope” (to that effect).

“No,” she said smiling, “no.”

“It would have made all the difference,” said Humbert Humbert.

Then I pulled out my automatic — I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never

even occurred to me to do it.

“Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are

reading this. I mean, such is the formal agreement with the so-called authorities.

Then, as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice to her Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my

car like a fat dolphin, but he was too heavy and old, and very soon gave up.

And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but

unable to cope with my tears.

30

Leaving as I did Coalmont around four in the afternoon (by Route X — I do not remember the number(, I might

have made Ramsdale by dawn had not a short-cut tempted me. I had to get onto Highway Y. My map showed quite

blandly that just beyond Woodbine, which I reached at nightfall, I could leave paved X and reached paved Y by

means of a transverse dirt road. It was only some forty miles long according to my map. Otherwise I would have to

follow X for another hundred miles and then use leisurely looping Z to get to Y and my destination. However, the

short-cut in question got worse and worse, bumpier and bumpier, muddier and muddier, and when I attempted to

turn back after some ten miles of purblind, tortuous and tortoise-slow progress, my old and weak Melmoth got

stuck in deep clay. All was dark and muggy, and hopeless. My headlights hung over a broad ditch full of water.

The surrounding country, if any, was a black wilderness. I sought to extricate myself but my rear wheels only

whined in slosh and anguish. Cursing my plight, I took off my fancy clothes, changed into slacks, pulled on the

bullet-riddled sweater, and waded four miles back to a roadside farm. It started to rain on the way but I had not the

strength to go back for a mackintosh. Such incidents have convinced me that my heart is basically sound despite

recent diagnoses. Around midnight, a wrecker dragged my car out. I navigated back to Highway X and traveled on.

Utter weariness overtook me and hour later, in an anonymous little town. I pulled up at the curb and in darkness

drank deep from a friendly flask.

The rain had been canceled miles before. It was a black warm night, somewhere in Appalachia. Now and then

cars passed me, red tail-lights receding, white headlights advancing, but the town was dead. Nobody strolled and

laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe. I was alone to enjoy the

innocent night and my terrible thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular about acceptable

contents: Sweepings. Paper. No Garbage. Sherry-red letters of light marked a Camera Shop. A large thermometer

with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt on the front of a drugstore. Rubinov’s Jewelry company had a display of

artificial diamonds reflected in a red mirror. A lighted green clock swam in the linenish depths of Jiffy Jeff

Laundry. On the other side of the street a garage said in its sleep-genuflection lubricity; and corrected itself to

Gulflex Lubrication. An airplane, also gemmed by Rubinov, passed, droning, in the velvet heavens. How many

small dead-of-night towns I had seen! This was not yet the last.

Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed. Some way further across the street, neon lights flickered twice

slower than my heart: the outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot, kept bursting, every full second or so, into

emerald life, and every time it went out, pink letters saying Fine Foods relayed it, but the pot could still be made

out as a latent shadow teasing the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made shadow-graphs. This furtive

burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters. I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

31

At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial

Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous

attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent Frenchspeaking

confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism

for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being.

On those frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tenderness and

understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to

transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might

be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be

proven to me — to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that in the infinite

run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her

childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment

of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:

The moral sense in mortals is the duty

We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

32

There was the day, during our first trip — our first circle of paradise — when in order to enjoy my phantasms in

peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a

glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn — to mention only

mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve

(whatever she had set her funny little heart on — a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to

which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror

aslant and door ajar, a look on her face… that look I cannot exactly describe… an expression of helplessness so

perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of

injustice and frustration — and every limit presupposes something beyond it — hence the neutral illumination.

And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better

appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet

and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from

mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her.

And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a

sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and

walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely

and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some

local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:

“You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my

automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite

possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate — dim and

adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable

convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely

embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy

sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed —

an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind.

Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately

detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such

outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child.

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything,

mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little

one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her — after

fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred — I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute

moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in

the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever — for all the world a little

patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation) — and the tenderness would deepen to shame and

despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress

her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my

soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell

again — and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure

— all would be shattered.

Mid-twentieth century ideas concerning child-parent relationship have been considerably tainted by the

scholastic rigmarole and standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket, but I hope I am addressing myself to

unbiased readers. Once when Avis’s father had honked outside to signal papa had come to take his pet home, I felt

obliged to invite him into the parlor, and he sat down for a minute, and while we conversed, Avis, a heavy,

unattractive, affectionate child, drew up to him and eventually perched plumply on his knee. Now, I do not

remember if I have mentioned that Lolita always had an absolutely enchanting smile for strangers, a tender furry

slitting of the eyes, a dreamy sweet radiance of all her features which did not mean a thing of course, but was so

beautiful, so endearing that one found it hard to reduce such sweetness to but a magic gene automatically lighting

up her face in atavistic token of some ancient rite of welcome — hospitable prostitution, the coarse reader may say.

Well, there she stood while Mr. Byrd twirled his hat and talked, and — yes, look how stupid of me, I have left out

the main characteristic of the famous Lolita smile, namely: while the tender, nectared, dimpled brightness played, it

was never directed at the stranger in the room but hung in its own remote flowered void, so to speak, or wandered

with myopic softness over chance objects — and this is what was happening now: while fat Avis sidled up to her

papa, Lolita gently beamed at a fruit knife that she fingered on the edge of the table, whereon she leaned, many

miles away from me. Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father’s neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man

enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw Lolita’s smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of

itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which

made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory

grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone — to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen

by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a

home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing. And I have a neat pendant to that little scene — also in a

Beardsley setting. Lolita, who had been reading near the fire, stretched herself, and then inquired, her elbow up,

with a grunt: “Where is she buried anyway?” “Who?” “Oh, you know, my murdered mummy.” “And you know

where her grave is,” I said controlling myself, whereupon I named the cemetery — just outside Ramsdale, between

the railway tracks and Lakeview Hill. “Moreover,” I added, “the tragedy of such an accident is somewhat

cheapened by the epithet you saw fit to apply to it. If you really wish to triumph in your mind over the idea of

death —” “Ray,” said Lo for hurrah, and languidly left the room, and for a long while I stared with smarting eyes

into the fire. Then I picked up her book. It was some trash for young people. There was a gloomy girl Marion, and

there was her stepmother who turned out to be, against all expectations, a young, gay, understanding redhead who

explained to Marion that Marion’s dead mother had really been a heroic woman since she had deliberately

dissimulated her great love for Marion because she was dying, and did not want her child to miss her. I did not rush

up to her room with cries. I always preferred the mental hygiene of noninterference. Now, squirming and pleading

with my own memory, I recall that on this and similar occasions, it was always my habit and method to ignore

Lolita’s states of mind while comforting my own base self. When my mother, in a livid wet dress, under the

tumbling mist (so I vividly imagined her), had run panting ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet to be felled

there by a thunderbolt, I was but an infant, and in retrospect no yearnings of the accepted kind could I ever graft

upon any moment of my youth, no matter how savagely psychotherapists heckled me in my later periods of

depression. But I admit that a man of my power of imagination cannot plead personal ignorance of universal

emotions. I may also have relied too much on the abnormally chill relations between Charlotte and her daughter.

But the awful point of the whole argument is this. It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during

our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of

incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.

33

Ramsdale revisited. I approached it from the side of the lake. The sunny noon was all eyes. As I rode by in my

mud-flecked car, I could distinguish scintillas of diamond water between the far pines. I turned into the cemetery

and walked among the long and short stone monuments. Bonzhur, Charlotte. On some of the graves there were pale,

transparent little national flags slumped in the windless air under the evergreens. Gee, Ed, that was bad luck —

referring to G. Edward Grammar, a thirty-five-year-old New York office manager who had just been arrayed on a

charge of murdering his thirty-three-year-old wife, Dorothy. Bidding for the perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his

wife and put her into a car. The case came to light when two county policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar’s new

big blue Chrysler, an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily down a hill, just inside their

jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!). The car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with beard

grass, wild strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned. The wheels were still gently spinning in the mellow sunlight

when the officers removed Mrs. G’s body. It appeared to be routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s

battered body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did better.

I rolled on. It was funny to see again the slender white church and the enormous elms. Forgetting that in an

American suburban street a lone pedestrian is more conspicuous than a lone motorist, I left the car in the avenue to

walk unobtrusively past 342 Lawn Street. Before the great bloodshed, I was entitled to a little relief, to a cathartic

spasm of mental regurgitation. Closed were the white shutters of the Junk mansion, and somebody had attached a

found black velvet hair ribbon to the white FOR SALE sign which was leaning toward the sidewalk. No dog

barked. No gardener telephoned. No Miss Opposite sat on the vined porch — where to the lone pedestrian’s

annoyance two pony-tailed young women in identical polka-dotted pinafores stopped doing whatever they were

doing to stare at him: she was long dead, no doubt, these might be her twin nieces from Philadelphia.

Should I enter my old house? As in a Turgenev story, a torrent of Italian music came from an open window —

that of the living room: what romantic soul was playing the piano where no piano had plunged and plashed on that

bewitched Sunday with the sun on her beloved legs? All at once I noticed that from the lawn I had mown a goldenskinned,

brown-haired nymphet of nine or ten, in white shorts, was looking at me with wild fascination in her large

blue-black eyes. I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you

have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with

sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the point of identifying myself when, with a pang of dreamembarrassment,

I became aware of my mud-caked dungarees, my filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my

bum’s bloodshot eyes. Without saying a word, I turned and plodded back the way I had come. An aster-like anemic

flower grew out of a remembered chink in the sidewalk. Quietly resurrected, Miss Opposite was being wheeled out

by her nieces, onto her porch, as if it were a stage and I the star performer. Praying she would not call to me, I

hurried to my car. What a steep little street. What a profound avenue. A red ticket showed between wiper and

windshield; I carefully tore it into two, four, eight pieces.

Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag

more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black

clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim,

impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a

family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s

lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which

had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty

sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked

though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a

luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray,

with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow

with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done o

eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control She thought I was in

California. How was —? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant

young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages,

she would never let her Phyllis, who was now eighteen —

“Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. yes, of course. By the way, did

she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”

Mrs. Chatfiled’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely.

“For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”

I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the

English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said.

There were only two blocks to Windmuller’s office. He greeted me with a very slow, very enveloping, strong,

searching grip. He thought I was in California. Had I not lived at one time at Beardsley? His daughter had just

entered Beardsley College. And how was —? I have all necessary information about Mrs. Schiller. We had a

pleasant business conference. I walked out into the hot September sunshine a contented pauper.

Now that everything had been put out of the way, I could dedicate myself freely to the main object of my visit to

Ramsdale. In the methodical manner on which I have always prided myself, I had been keeping Clare Quilty’s face

masked in my dark dungeon, where he was waiting for me to come with barber and priest: “Réveillez-vous,

Laqueue, il est temps de mourir!” I have no time right now to discuss the mnemonics of physiognomization — I

am on my way to his uncle and walking fast — but let me jot down this: I had preserved in the alcohol of a clouded

memory the toad of a face. In the course of a few glimpses, I had noticed its slight resemblance to a cheery and

rather repulsive wine dealer, a relative of mine in Switzerland. With his dumbbells and stinking tricot, and fat hairy

arms, and bald patch, and pig-faced servant-concubine, he was on the whole a harmless old rascal. Too harmless,

in fact, to be confused with my prey. In the state of mind I now found myself, I had lost contact with Trapp’s image.

It had become completely engulfed by the face of Clare Quilty — as represented, with artistic precision, by an

easeled photograph of him that stood on his uncle’s desk.

In Beardsley, at the hands of charming Dr. Molnar, I had undergone a rather serious dental operation, retaining

only a few upper and lower front teeth. The substitutes were dependent on a system of plates with an inconspicuous

wire affair running along my upper gums. The whole arrangement was a masterpiece of comfort, and my canines

were in perfect health. However, to garnish my secret purpose with a plausible pretext, I told Dr. Quilty that, in

hope of alleviating facial neuralgia, I had decided to have all my teeth removed. What would a complete set of

dentures cost? How long would the process take, assuming we fixed our first appointment for some time in

November? Where was his famous nephew now? Would it be possible to have them all out in one dramatic session?

A white-smocked, gray-haired man, with a crew cut and the big flat cheeks of a politician, Dr. Quilty perched

on the corner of his desk, one foot dreamily and seductively rocking as he launched on a glorious long-range plan.

He would first provide me with provisional plates until the gums settled. Then he would make me a permanent set.

He would like to have a look at that mouth of mine. He wore perforated pied shoes. He had not visited with the

rascal since 1946, but supposed he could be found at his ancestral home, Grimm Road, not far from Parkington. It

was a noble dream. His foot rocked, his gaze was inspired. It would cost me around six hundred. He suggested he

take measurements right away, and make the first set before starting operations. My mouth was to him a splendid

cave full of priceless treasures, but I denied him entrance.

“No,” I said. “On second thoughts, I shall have it all done by Dr. Molnar. His price is higher, but he is of course

a much better dentist than you.”

I do not know if any of my readers will ever have a chance to say that. It is a delicious dream feeling. Clare’s

uncle remained sitting on the desk, still looking dreamy, but his foot had stopped push-rocking the cradle of rosy

anticipation. On the other hand, his nurse, a skeleton-thin, faded girl, with the tragic eyes of unsuccessful blondes,

rushed after me so as to be able to slam the door in my wake.

Push the magazine into the butt. Press home until you hear or feel the magazine catch engage. Delightfully snug.

Capacity: eight cartridges. Full Blued. Aching to be discharged.

34

A gas station attendant in Parkington explained to me very clearly how to get to Grimm Road. Wishing to be sure

Quilty would be at home, I attempted to ring him up but learned that his private telephone had recently been

disconnected. Did that mean he was gone? I started to drive to Grimm Road, twelve miles north of the town. By

that time night had eliminated most of the landscape and as I followed the narrow winding highway, a series of

short posts, ghostly white, with reflectors, borrowed my own lights to indicate this or that curve. I could make out a

dark valley on one side of the road and wooded slopes on the other, and in front of me, like derelict snowflakes,

moths drifted out of the blackness into my probing aura. At the twelfth mile, as foretold, a curiously hooded bridge

sheathed me for a moment and, beyond it, a white-washed rock loomed on the right, and a few car lengths further,

on the same side, I turned off the highway up gravelly Grimm Road. For a couple of minutes all was dank, dark,

dense forest. Then, Pavor Manor, a wooden house with a turret, arose in a circular clearing. Its windows glowed

yellow and red; its drive was cluttered with half a dozen cars. I stopped in the shelter of the trees and abolished my

lights to ponder the next move quietly. He would be surrounded by his henchmen and whores. I could not help

seeing the inside of that festive and ramshackle castle in terms of “Troubled Teens,” a story in one of her

magazines, vague “orgies,” a sinister adult with penele cigar, drugs, bodyguards. At least, he was there. I would

return in the torpid morning.

Gently I rolled back to town, in that old faithful car of mine which was serenely, almost cheerfully working for

1. My Lolita! There was still a three-year-old bobby pin of hers in the depths of the glove compartment. There

was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves

up here and there by the roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I

passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a

gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced

to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding world, — and the next moment a row of trees shut off

the gesticulation.

35

I left Insomnia Lodge next morning around eight and spent some time in Parkington. Visions of bungling the

execution kept obsessing me. Thinking that perhaps the cartridges in the automatic had gone stale during a week of

inactivity, I removed them and inserted a fresh batch. Such a thorough oil bath did I give Chum that now I could

not get rid of the stuff. I bandaged him up with a rag, like a maimed limb, and used another rag to wrap up a

handful of spare bullets.

A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road, but when I reached Pavor Manor, the

sun was visible again, burning like a man, and the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The

elaborate and decrepit house seemed to stand in a kind of daze, reflecting as it were my own state, for I could not

help realizing, as my feet touched the springy and insecure ground, that I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation

business.

A guardedly ironic silence answered my bell. The garage, however, was loaded with his car, a black convertible

for the nonce. I tried the knocker. Re-nobody. With a petulant snarl, I pushed the front door — and, how nice, it

swung open as in a medieval fairy tale. Having softly closed it behind me, I made my way across a spacious and

very ugly hall; peered into an adjacent drawing room; noticed a number of used glasses growing out of the carpet;

decided that master was still asleep in the master bedroom.

So I trudged upstairs. My right hand clutched muffled Chum in my pocket, my left patted the sticky banisters.

Of the three bedrooms I inspected, one had obviously been slept in that night. There was a library full of flowers.

There was a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin on the slippery floor. There were

still other rooms. A happy though struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or

emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his

playmate from locking himself up in a room. Consequently, for at least five minutes I went about — lucidly insane,

crazily calm, an enchanted and very tight hunter — turning whatever keys in whatever locks there were and

pocketing more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lockable locus,

has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood.

Speaking of bathrooms — I was about to visit a third one when master came out of it, leaving a brief waterfall

behind him. The corner of a passage did not quite conceal me. Gray-faced, baggy-eyed, fluffily disheveled in a

scanty balding way, but still perfectly recognizable, he swept by me in a purple bathrobe, very like one I had. He

either did not notice me, or else dismissed me as some familiar and innocuous hallucination — and, showing me

his hairy calves, he proceeded, sleepwalker-wise, downstairs. I pocketed my last key and followed him into the

entrance hall. He had half opened his mouth and the front door, to peer out through a sunny chink as one who

thinks he has heard a half-hearted visitor ring and recede. Then, still ignoring the raincoated phantasm that had

stopped in midstairs, master walked into a cozy boudoir across the hall from the drawing room, through which —

taking it easy, knowing he was safe — I now went away from him, and in a bar-adorned kitchen gingerly

unwrapped dirty Chum, talking care not to leave any oil stains on the chrome — I think I got the wrong product, it

was black and awfully messy. In my usual meticulous way, I transferred naked Chum to a clean recess about me

and made for the little boudoir. My step, as I say, was springy — too springy perhaps for success. But my heart

pounded with tiger joy, and I crunched a cocktail glass underfoot.

Master met me in the Oriental parlor.

“Now who are you?” he asked in a high hoarse voice, his hands thrust into his dressing-gown pockets, his eyes

fixing a point to the northeast of my head. “Are you by any chance Brewster?”

By now it was evident to everybody that he was in a fog and completely at my so-called mercy. I could enjoy

myself.

“That’s right,” I answered suavely. “Je suis Monsieur Brustère. Let us chat for a moment before we start.”

He looked pleased. His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat. I was wearing a black suit, a black

shirt, no tie. We sat down in two easy chairs.

“You know,” he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a

crooked grin, “you don’t look like Jack Brewster. I mean, the resemblance is not particularly striking. Somebody

told me he had a brother with the same telephone company.”

To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage… To look at the black hairs on the back of his

pudgy hands… To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures,

and mess, and music of pain… To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my

darling — oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!

“No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters.”

“He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever.

“Guess again, Punch.”

“Ah,” said Punch, “so you have not come to bother me about those long-distance calls?”

“You do make them once in a while, don’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

I said I had said I thought he had said he had never —

“People,” he said, “people in general, I’m not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it’s absurd the way people

invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre, they use the kitchen, they use the

telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny accent, Captain.”

“Quilty,” I said, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?”

“Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?”

“I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud

Flesh as La Fierté de la Chair. Absurd.”

“She was my child, Quilty.”

In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by anything, but his blustering manner was not quite

convincing. A sort of wary inkling kindled his eyes into a semblance of life. They were immediately dulled again.

“I’m very fond of children myself,” he said, “and fathers are among my best friends.”

He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat his pockets. He attempted to rise from his seat.

“Down!” I said — apparently much louder than I intended.

“You need not roar at me,” he complained in his strange feminine manner. “I just wanted a smoke. I’m dying for

a smoke.”

“You’re dying anyway.”

“Oh, chucks,” he said. “You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you French, mister? Wooly-woo-boo-are?

Let’s go to the barroomette and have a stiff —”

He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him.

“Say!” he drawled (now imitating the underworld numskull of movies), “that’s a swell little gun you’ve got there.

What d’you want for her?”

I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a

handful of cigarettes.

“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une

cigarette? Now we need matches.”

“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know

may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to

understand what is happening to you.”

He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it.

“I am willing to try,” he said. “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a

Gentile’s house, you know. Maybe, you’d better run along. And do stop demonstrating that gun. I’ve an old Stern-

Luger in the music room.”

I pointed Chum at his slippered foot and crushed the trigger. It clicked. He looked at his foot, at the pistol, again

at his foot. I made another awful effort, and, with a ridiculously feeble and juvenile sound, it went off. The bullet

entered the thick pink rug, and I had the paralyzing impression that it had merely trickled in and might come out

again.

“See what I mean?” said Quilty. “You should be a little more careful. Give me that thing for Christ’s sake.”

He reached for it. I pushed him back into the chair. The rich joy was waning. It was high time I destroyed him,

but he must understand why he was being destroyed. His condition infected me, the weapon felt limp and clumsy

in my hand.

“Concentrate,” I said, “on the thought of Dolly Haze whom you kidnapped —”

“I did not!” he cried. “You’re all wet. I saved her from a beastly pervert. Show me your badge instead of

shooting at my foot, you ape, you. Where is that badge? I’m not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd! That

joy ride, I grant you, was a silly stunt but you got her back, didn’t you? Come, let’s have a drink.”

I asked him whether he wanted to be executed sitting or standing.

“Ah, let me think,” he said. “It is not an easy question. Incidentally — I made a mistake. Which I sincerely

regret. You see, I had no fun with your Dolly. I am practically impotent, to tell the melancholy truth. And I gave

her a splendid vacation. She met some remarkable people. Do you happen to know —”

And with a tremendous lurch he fell all over me, sending the pistol hurtling under a chest of drawers.

Fortunately he was more impetuous than vigorous, and I had little difficulty in shoving him back into his chair.

He puffed a little and folded his arms on his chest.

“Now you’ve done it,” he said. “Vous voilà dans de beaux draps, mon vieux.”

His French was improving.

I looked around. Perhaps, if — Perhaps I could — On my hands and knees? Risk it?

“Alors, que fait-on?” he asked watching me closely.

I stooped. He did not moved. I stooped lower.

“My dear sir,” he said, “stop trifling with life and death. I am a playwright. I have written tragedies, comedies,

fantasies. I have made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth-century sexcapades. I’m the author of

fifty-two successful scenarios. I know all the ropes. Let me handle this. There should be a poker somewhere, why

don’t I fetch it, and then we’ll fish out your property.”

Fussily, busybodily, cunningly, he had risen again while he talked. I groped under the chest trying at the same

time to keep an eye on him. All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum

protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in

each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated

as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.

In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or

ninety, live long, my love); and elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns

of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two

large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati,

one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too

much gin. When at last I had possessed myself of my precious weapon, and the scenario writer had been reinstalled

in his low chair, both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle.

I decided to inspect the pistol — our sweat might have spoiled something — and regain my wind before

proceeding to the main item in the program. To fill in the pause, I proposed he read his own sentence — in the

poetical form I had given it. The term “poetical justice” is one that may be most happily used in this respect. I

handed him a neat typescript.

“Yes,” he said, “splendid idea. Let me fetch my reading glasses” (he attempted to rise).

“No.”

“Just as you say. Shall I read out loud?”

“Yes.”

“Here goes. I see it’s in verse.

Because you took advantage of a sinner

because you took advantage

because you took

because you took advantage of my disadvantage…

“That’s good, you know. That’s damned good.”

…when I stood Adam-naked

before a federal law and all its stinging stars

“Oh, grand stuff!”

…Because you took advantage of a sin

when I was helpless moulting moist and tender

hoping for the best

dreaming of marriage in a mountain state

aye of a litter of Lolitas…

“Didn’t get that.”

Because you took advantage of my inner

essential innocence

because you cheated me —

“A little repetitious, what? Where was I?”

Because you cheated me of my redemption

because you took

her at the age when lads

play with erector sets

“Getting smutty, eh?”

a little downy girl still wearing poppies

still eating popcorn in the colored gloam

where tawny Indians took paid croppers

because you stole her

from her wax-browed and dignified protector

spitting into his heavy-lidded eye

ripping his flavid toga and at dawn

leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort

the awfulness of love and violets

remorse despair while you

took a dull doll to pieces

and threw its head away

because of all you did

because of all I did not

you have to die

“Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as I’m concerned.”

He folded and handed it back to me.

I asked him if he had anything serious to say before dying. The automatic was again ready for use on the person.

He looked at it and heaved a big sigh.

“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I

have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing face is

becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything — sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you

bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre, sword or pistol, in Rio or

elsewhere — is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr.

Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégée to join me. It was she made me

remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is

roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence

forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore

disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis,

as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful

marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I

recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all

the royalties from my next play — I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow — you know, as

the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We

have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa — curious name — who comes from the

village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of

police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-

Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never

use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my

wardrobe. Oh, another thing — you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs.

Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a

remarkable lady, a remarkable work — drop that gun — with photographs of eight hundred and something male

organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with

love under pleasant skies — drop that gun — and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not

everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow —”

Feu. This time I hit something hard. I hit the back of a black rocking chair, not unlike Dolly Schiller’s — my

bullet hit the inside surface of its back whereupon it immediately went into a rocking act, so fast and with such zest

that any one coming into the room might have been flabbergasted by the double miracle: that chair rocking in a

panic all by itself, and the armchair, where my purple target had just been, now void of all life content. Wiggling

his fingers in the air, with a rapid heave of his rump, he flashed into the music room and the next second we were

tugging and gasping on both sides of the door which had a key I had overlooked. I won again, and with another

abrupt movement Clare the Impredictable sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous,

fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils

emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he

made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman’s chest near the piano. My next bullet caught him

somewhere in the side, and he rose from his chair higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old faithful,

like some old nightmare of mine, to a phenomenal altitude, or so it seemed, as he rent the air — still shaking with

the rich black music — head thrown back in a howl, hand pressed to his brow, and with his other hand clutching

his armpit as if stung by a hornet, down he came on his heels and, again a normal robed man, scurried out into the

hall.

I see myself following him through the hall, with a kind of double, triple, kangaroo jump, remaining quite

straight on straight legs while bouncing up twice in his wake, and then bouncing between him and the front door in

a ballet-like stiff bounce, with the purpose of heading him off, since the door was not properly closed.

Suddenly dignified, and somewhat morose, he started to walk up the broad stairs, and, shifting my position, but

not actually following him up the steps, I fired three or four times in quick succession, wounding him at every

blaze; and every time I did it to him, that horrible thing to him, his face would twitch in an absurd clownish manner,

as if he were exaggerating the pain; he slowed down, rolled his eyes half closing them and made a feminine “ah!”

and he shivered every time a bullet hit him as if I were tickling him, and every time I got him with those slow,

clumsy, blind bullets of mine, he would say under his breath, with a phony British accent — all the while

dreadfully twitching, shivering, smirking, but withal talking in a curiously detached and even amiable manner: “Ah,

that hurts, sir, enough! Ah, that hurts atrociously, my dear fellow. I pray you, desist. Ah — very painful, very

painful, indeed… God! Hah! This is abominable, you should really not —” His voice trailed off as he reached the

landing, but he steadily walked on despite all the lead I had lodged in his bloated body — and in distress, in dismay,

I understood that far from killing him I was injecting spurts of energy into the poor fellow, as if the bullets had

been capsules wherein a heady elixir danced.

I reloaded the thing with hands that were black and bloody — I had touched something he had anointed with his

thick gore. Then I rejoined him upstairs, the keys jangling in my pockets like gold.

He was trudging from room to room, bleeding majestically, trying to find an open window, shaking his head,

and still trying to talk me out of murder. I took aim at his head, and he retired to the master bedroom with a burst of

royal purple where his ear had been.

“Get out, get out of here,” he said coughing and spitting; and in a nightmare of wonder, I saw this bloodspattered

but still buoyant person get into his bed and wrap himself up in the chaotic bedclothes. I hit him at very

close range through the blankets, and then he lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on

his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished.

I may have lost contact with reality for a second or two — oh, nothing of the I-just-blacked-out sort that your

common criminal enacts; on the contrary, I want to stress the fact that I was responsible for every shed drop of his

bubbleblood; but a kind of momentary shift occurred as if I were in the connubial bedroom, and Charlotte were

sick in bed. Quilty was a very sick man. I held one of his slippers instead of the pistol — I was sitting on the pistol.

Then I made myself a little more comfortable in the chair near the bed, and consulted my wrist watch. The crystal

was gone but it ticked. The whole sad business had taken more than an hour. He was quiet at last. Far from feeling

any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had hoped to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. I could

not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone,

and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck. My hands were hardly in better

condition than his. I washed up as best I could in the adjacent bathroom. Now I could leave. As I emerged on the

landing, I was amazed to discover that a vivacious buzz I had just been dismissing as a mere singing in my ears

was really a medley of voices and radio music coming from the downstairs drawing room.

I found there a number of people who apparently had just arrived and were cheerfully drinking Quilty’s liquor.

There was a fat man in an easy chair; and two dark-haired pale young beauties, sisters no doubt, big one and small

one (almost a child), demurely sat side by side on a davenport. A florid-faced fellow with sapphire-blue eyes was

in the act of bringing two glasses out of the bar-like kitchen, where two or three women were chatting and chinking

ice. I stopped in the doorway and said: “I have just killed Clare Quilty.” “Good for you,” said the florid fellow as he

offered one of the drinks to the elder girl. “Somebody ought to have done it long ago,” remarked the fat man.

“What does he say, Tony?” asked a faded blonde from the bar. “He says,” answered the florid fellow, “he has killed

Cue.” “Well,” said another unidentified man rising in a corner where he had been crouching to inspect some

records, “I guess we all should do it to him some day.” “Anyway,” said Tony, “he’d better come down. We can’t

wait for him much longer if we want to go to that game.” “Give this man a drink somebody,” said the fat person.

“What a beer?” said a woman in slacks, showing it to me from afar.

Only the two girls on the davenport, both wearing black, the younger fingering a bright something about her

white neck, only they said nothing, but just smiled on, so young, so lewd. As the music paused for a moment, there

was a sudden noise on the stairs. Tony and I stepped out into the hall. Quilty of all people had managed to crawl

out onto the landing, and there we could see him, flapping and heaving, and then subsiding, forever this time, in a

purple heap.

“Hurry up, Cue,” said Tony with a laugh. “I believe, he’s still —” He returned to the drawing room, music

drowned the rest of the sentence.

This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty. With a heavy heart I left the

house and walked though the spotted blaze of the sun to my car. Two other cars were parked on both sides of it,

and I had some trouble squeezing out.

36

The rest is a little flattish and faded. Slowly I drove downhill, and presently found myself going at the same lazy

pace in a direction opposite to Parkington. I had left my raincoat in the boudoir and Chum in the bathroom. No, it

was not a house I would have liked to live in. I wondered idly if some surgeon of genius might not alter his own

career, and perhaps the whole destiny of mankind, by reviving quilted Quilty, Clare Obscure. Not that I cared; on

the whole I wished to forget the whole mess — and when I did learn he was dead, the only satisfaction it gave me,

was the relief of knowing I need not mentally accompany for months a painful and disgusting convalescence

interrupted by all kinds of unmentionable operations and relapses, and perhaps an actual visit from him, with

trouble on my part to rationalize him as not being a ghost. Thomas had something. It is strange that the tactile sense,

which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moment our main, if not only, handle to

reality. I was all covered with Quilty — with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding.

The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me — not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or

anything like that, but merely as a novel experience — that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as

well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the

feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by

the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the

wrong side of the road. In a way, it was a very spiritual itch. Gently, dreamily, not exceeding twenty miles an hour,

I drove on that queer mirror side. Traffic was light. Cars that now and then passed me on the side I had abandoned

to them, honked at me brutally. Cars coming towards me wobbled, swerved, and cried out in fear. Presently I found

myself approaching populated places. Passing through a red light was like a sip of forbidden Burgundy when I was

a child. Meanwhile complications were arising. I was being followed and escorted. Then in front of me I saw two

cars placing themselves in such a manner as to completely block my way. With a graceful movement I turned off

the road, and after two or three big bounces, rode up a grassy slope, among surprised cows, and there I came to a

gentle rocking stop. A kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis linking up two dead women.

I was soon to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow) — and was, indeed, looking

forward to surrender myself to many hands, without doing anything to cooperate, while they moved and carried me,

relaxed, comfortable, surrendering myself lazily, like a patient, and deriving an eerie enjoyment from my limpness

and the absolutely reliable support given me by the police and the ambulance people. And while I was waiting for

them to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked a last mirage of wonder and hopelessness. One day, soon after her

disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now

accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of

a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then,

thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of

the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its

arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system.

As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small

mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between

blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the

city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great

timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors — for there are colors and shades that

seem to enjoy themselves in good company — both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was

that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I

stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but

these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I

heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of

blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic — one could hear

now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy

wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood

listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure

murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side,

but the absence of her voice from that concord.

This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green

flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care

to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for

myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and

“Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.

When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this

well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of

course, but my soul. In mind-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use

parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.

For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude

will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least

thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive

me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I

wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing

hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to

your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it

will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come

at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had

to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have

him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable

pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

On a book entitle Lolita

After doing my impersonation of suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments

coming straight from me may strike one — may strike me, in fact — as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov

talking about his own book. A few points, however, have to be discussed; and the autobiographic device may

induce mimic and model to blend.

Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as “What is the author’s purpose?” or still worse “What

is the guy trying to say?” Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other

purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such

ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination — which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining

one trick by performing another.

The first little throb of Lolita went through me late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid

up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow

prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist,

produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.

The impulse I record had no textual connection with the ensuing train of thought, which resulted, however, in a

prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long. I wrote it in Russian, the language in which I

had been writing novels since 1924 (the best of these are not translated into English, and all are prohibited for

political reasons in Russia). The man was a Central European, the anonymous nymphet was French, and the loci

were Paris and Provence. I had him marry the little girl’s sick mother who soon died, and after a thwarted attempt

to take advantage of the orphan in a hotel room, Arthur (for that was his name) threw himself under the wheels of a

truck. I read the story one blue-papered wartime night to a group of friends — Mark Aldanov, two social

revolutionaries, and a woman doctor; but I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving

to America in 1940.

Around 1949, in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing, which had never quite ceased, began to plague me

again. Combination joined inspiration with fresh zest and involved me in a new treatment of the theme, this time in

English — the language of my first governess in St. Petersburg, circa 1903, a Miss Rachel Home. The nymphet,

now with a dash of Irish blood, was really much the same lass, and the basic marrying-her-mother idea also

subsisted; but otherwise the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel.

The book developed slowly, with many interruptions and asides. It had taken me some forty years to invent

Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America. The obtaining of such local

ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average “reality” (one of the few words which mean nothing

without quotes) into the brew of individual fancy, proved at fifty a much more difficult process than it had been in

the Europe of my youth when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best. Other books intervened.

Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the

shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the

destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life.

Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting. The specimens are deposited at scientific institutions, such as

the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard or the Cornell University collection. The locality labels pinned

under these butterflies will be a boon to some twenty-first-century scholar with a taste for recondite biography. It

was at such of our headquarters as Telluride, Colorado; Afton, Wyoming; Portal, Arizona; and Ashland, Oregon,

that Lolita was energetically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days. I finished copying the thing out in

longhand in the spring of 1954, and at once began casting around for a publisher.

At first, on the advice of a wary old friend, I was meek enough to stipulate that the book be brought out

anonymously. I doubt that I shall ever regret that soon afterwards, realizing how likely a mask was to betray my

own cause, I decided to sign Lolita. The four American publishers, W, X, Y, Z, who in turn were offered the

typescript and had their readers glance at it, were shocked by Lolita to a degree that even my wary old friend F.P.

had not expected.

While it is true that in ancient Europe, and well into the eighteenth century (obvious examples come from

France), deliberate lewdness was not inconsistent with flashes of comedy, or vigorous satire, or even the verve of a

fine poet in a wanton mood, it is also true that in modern times the term “pornography” connotes mediocrity,

commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of

aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the traditional word

for direct action upon the patient. Old rigid rules must be followed by the pornographer in order to have his patient

feel the same security of satisfaction as, for example, fans of detective stories feel — stories where, if you do not

watch out, the real murderer may turn out to be, to the fan’s disgust, artistic originality (who for instance would

want a detective story without a single dialogue in it?). Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the

copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust. The novel must

consist of an alternation of sexual scenes. The passages in between must be reduced to sutures of sense, logical

bridges of the simplest design, brief expositions and explanations, which the reader will probably skip but must

know they exist in order not to feel cheated (a mentality stemming from the routine of “true” fairy tales in

childhood). Moreover, the sexual scenes in the book must follow a crescendo line, with new variations, new

combinations, new sexes, and a steady increase in the number of participants (in a Sade play they call the gardener

in), and therefore the end of the book must be more replete with lewd lore than the first chapters.

Certain techniques in the beginning of Lolita (Humbert’s Journal, for example) misled some of my first readers

into assuming that this was going to be a lewd book. They expected the rising succession of erotic scenes; when

these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored and let down. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why not

all the four firms read the typescript to the end. Whether they found it pornographic or not did not interest me.

Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at

least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a

Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren;

and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.

Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I

turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and

arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, “realistic” sentences (“He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I

guess God acts crazy.” Etc.). Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due

partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary

mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as

“Old Europe debauching young America,” while another flipper saw in it “Young America debauching old

Europe.” Publisher X, whose advisers got so bored with Humbert that they never got beyond page 188, had the

naïveté to write me that Part Two was too long. Publisher Y, on the other hand, regretted there were no good

people in the book. Publisher Z said if he printed Lolita, he and I would go to jail.

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and

the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose

the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a

past master’s chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown. I presume there exist readers who find

titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the

thumbs of tense mediocrities and called “powerful” and “stark” by the reviewing hack. There are gentle souls who

would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of

didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only

insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere,

connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not

many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is

topical trash corning in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes

along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.

Another charge which some readers have made is that Lolita is anti-American. This is something that pains me

considerably more than the idiotic accusation of immorality. Considerations of depth and perspective (a suburban

lawn, a mountain meadow) led me to build a number of North American sets. I needed a certain exhilarating milieu.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. But in regard to philistine vulgarity there is no intrinsic

difference between Palearctic manners and Nearctic manners. Any proletarian from Chicago can be as bourgeois

(in the Flaubertian sense) as a duke. I chose American motels instead of Swiss hotels or English inns only because

I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy. On the

other hand, my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there are many things, besides nymphets, in

which I disagree with him. And all my Russian readers know that my old worlds — Russian, British, German,

French — are just as fantastic and personal as my new one is.

Lest the little statement I am making here seem an airing of grudges, I must hasten to add that besides the lambs

who read the typescript of Lolita or its Olympia Press edition in a spirit of “Why did he have to write it?” or “Why

should I read about maniacs?” there have been a number of wise, sensitive, and staunch people who understood my

book much better than I can explain its mechanism here.

Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting

presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch applied to one’s private

thermostat instantly results in a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an

ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its

prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain points, byroads,

favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys more tenderly than the rest of one’s book. I have not

reread Lolita since I went through the proofs in the spring of 1955 but I find it to be a delightful presence now that

it quietly hangs about the house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze. And when I thus

think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out for special delectation such images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of

Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying “waterproof,” or Lolita in slow motion advancing toward Humbert’s gifts, or

the pictures decorating the stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbeam barber (who cost me a month of work),

or Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller

dying in Gray Star (the capital town of the book), or the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain

trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov). These are the nerves of the novel.

These are the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted — although I realize

very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed, or never even reached, by those who

begin reading the book under the impression that it is something on the lines of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

or Les Amours de Milord Grosvit. That my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a

pervert is quite true. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school

boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated

versions.

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author. And yet one of my very few intimate friends, after reading Lolita, was sincerely worried that I (I!) should be living “among such depressing people” — when the only discomfort I really experienced was to live in my workshop among discarded limbs and unfinished torsos.

After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

November 12, 1956