Vladimir Nabokov

revisiting Grainball (cavalier servant in Lolita)

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 25 January, 2021

Describing his life with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Rita’s brother, the mayor and boaster of Grainball:

 

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 Tiger-moth, 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 boaster 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 planand 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 herused 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! (2.26)

 

Grainball = grain + ball = brain + Gall. The founder of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) was a German neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain. In the drafts of Graf Nulin (“Count Null,” 1825) Pushkin mentions mestnoy pamyati organ (an organ of local memory) that the Count had, according to Gall’s system:

 

Граф местной памяти орган
Имел по Галевой примете,
Он в темноте, как и при свете,
Нашёл бы дверь, окно, диван.

 

In a letter of March 7 (?), 1826, to Pletnyov Pushkin calls his poem “Count Nulin” povest’ v rode Beppo (“a tale in the genre of Beppo”):

 

Знаешь ли? уж если печатать что, так возьмёмся за Цыганов. Надеюсь, что брат по крайней мере их перепишет ― а ты пришли рукопись ко мне ― я доставлю предисловие и м. б. примечания ― и с рук долой. А то всякой раз, как я об них подумаю или прочту слово в журн., у меня кровь портится ― в собрании же моих поэм для новинки поместим мы другую повесть в роде Верро, которая у меня в запасе.

 

In Beppo: A Venetian Story (1817) Lord Byron mentions cavalier servente:

 

Shakspeare described the sex in Desdemona

As very fair, but yet suspect in fame,

And to this day from Venice to Verona

Such matters may be probably the same,

Except that since those times was never known a

Husband whom mere suspicion could inflame

To suffocate a wife no more than twenty.

Because she had a "cavalier servente." (XVII)

 

“Cavalier Servente”: socially accepted lover of a married woman. See Don Juan III 190, and IX Stanza 51. Scott uses the term in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) Chapter XXII: but seems not to comprehend its implications. Hobhouse’s diary, Thursday July 31 1817: I set out at 9, changed horses at Dolo, and arrived at Mira and Byron’s house on the Brenta by half-past eleven – I saw my friend well and in spirits – Mr Matthew Lewis [author of “The Monk”] was in the house with him – and part of the house was occupied by Signora Zagati [sic: for Segati] of Venice the drapier’s lady – who in a country where women gain character by having a cavalier servente of rank has risen since she has been companion in ordinary to Byron – It is amusing to hear her talk about “cattive donne” [“wicked women”] with the greatest simplicity – Signor Piero her husband visits her on a Saturday and Sunday and attends another lady. (B.L.Add.Mss. 47234 f.4).

 

A town near Venice, Dolo brings to mind Dolores (Lolita's name on the dotted line).

 

According to Humbert, when he first met Rita, she had but recently divorced her third husband – and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant.

 

Describing his life with Rita, Humbert mentions Rita’s vin triste smile:

 

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 park 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

endorse 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 Cantrip, 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. (2.26)

 

Le vin triste is a poem by Jean Richepin from his collection La chanson des gueux (“The Song of the Poor,” 1881). In Richepin’s prose drama La Gitane ("The Gypsy," 1900) the heroine’s name is Rita. In the same letter to Pletnyov in which he calls Graf Nulin "a tale in the genre of Beppo" Pushkin mentions his poem Tsygany ("The Gypsies," 1824). The characters in it include Zemfira (Aleko's Gypsy wife). At the Elphinstone hospital Lolita and nurse Mary Lore are plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against Humbert's hopeless love:

 

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 everand 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 roomall 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. (2.22)