Describing his life with Lolita in Beardsley (a small University town), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions Butler’s Academy for Boys:
I did my best, your Honour, 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 exectuvie’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 brdello.
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 triplethe 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 régime 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 housesof schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if 'only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.' (2.8)
Butler's Academy for Boys makes one think of Samuel Butler (an English poet and satirist, 1613-80), the author of Hudibras (1663), a satirical poem. As Butler describes the key points of Hudibras's very formal university learning—logic, rhetoric, geometry, algebra, arithmetic and theology—he mocks the trivial and purely verbal uses that Hudibras makes of these:
He was in Logick a great Critick,
Profoundly skill'd in Analytick.
He could distinguish, and divide
A hair 'twixt South and South-west side:
On either which he would dispute,
Confute, change hands, and still confute. [...]
All this by Syllogism, true
In mood and figure, he would doe. [...]
For Rhetorick, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope...
But when he pleased to show 't, his speech
In loftiness of sound was rich,
A Babylonish dialect
Which learned Pedants much affect:
'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin (Part One, Canto I, ll. 65-97)
In mathematics he was greater
Than Tycho Brahe or Erra Pater
For he by geometric scale
Could take the size of pots of ale;
Resolve by sines and tangents straight
If bread or butter wanted weight;
And wisely tell what hour o' th' day
The clock does strike, by algebra. (ll. 119-126)
Humbert is afraid that his wife Charlotte (Lolita's mother) will bundle off her daughter to St. Algebra:
There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake - not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.
We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were making our way down a path cut through the pine forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip “in the ebony” (as John had quipped) at five o’clock in the morning last Sunday.
“The water,” I said, “must have been quite cold.”
“That is not the point,” said the logical doomed dear. “He is subnormal, you see. And,” she continued (in that carefully phrased way of hers that was beginning to tell on my health), “I have a very definite feeling our Louise is in love with that moron.”
Feeling. “We feel Dolly is not doing as well” etc. (from an old school report).
The Humberts walked on, sandaled and robed.
“Do you know, Hum: I have one most ambitious dream,” pronounced Lady Hum, lowering her head - shy of that dream – and communing with the tawny ground. “I would love to get hold of a real trained servant maid like that German girl the Talbots spoke of; and have her live in the house.”
“No room,” I said.
“Come,” she said with her quizzical smile, “surely, chéri, you underestimate the possibilities of the Humbert home. We would put her in Lo’s room. I intended to make a guestroom of that hole anyway. It’s the coldest and meanest in the whole house.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, the skin of my cheekbones tensing up (this I take the trouble to note only because my daughter’s skin did the same when she felt that way: disbelief, disgust, irritation).
“Are you bothered by Romantic Associations?” queried my wife – in allusion to her first surrender.
“Hell no,” said I. “I just wonder where will you put your daughter when you get your guest or your maid.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Humbert, dreaming, smiling, drawing out the “Ah” simultaneously with the raise of one eyebrow and a soft exhalation of breath. “Little Lo, I’m afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all. Little Lo goes straight from camp to a good boarding school with strict discipline and some sound religious training. And then – Beardsley College. I have it all mapped out, you need not worry.”
She went on to say that she, Mrs. Humbert, would have to overcome her habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalen’s sister who taught at St. Algebra. The dazzling lake emerged. I said I had forgotten my sunglasses in the car and would catch up with her. (1.20)
The name of Miss Phalen’s sister, Euphemia seems to hint at Charlotte Lennox's epistolary novel Euphemia (1790). A Scottish writer, Charlotte Lennox (1720-1804) is the author of The Female Quixote (1752). Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Cervantes' novel, Hudibras and his squire Ralpho set out to combat those whom they consider to be their enemies.
A full namesake of the author of Hudibras, Samuel Butler (an English novelist and critic, 1835-1902) is best known for his satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872). Erewhon is nowhere ("absolutely nowhere," a phrase used by Humbert) in reverse:
In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garmentsswooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go. (1.33)
"A Babylonish dialect" in Samuel Butler's Hudibras brings to mind some Spanish or Babylonian blood that Rita (Humbert's girlfriend whom he picked up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York) had:
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 drakishly 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. (2.26)
The amnesic stranger whom Humbert and Rita discover in their hotel room speaks with an accent that Rita recognizes as pure Brooklynese:
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 were 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! (ibid.)