Nobody answers the bell, when Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) visits Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita’s married name) in Coalmont:
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.
“Weeell!” 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. (2.29)
This re-nonsense (Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne) brings to mind Valeria's Nonsense passport:
This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her only asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of comfort in our small squalid flat: two rooms, a hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other, a tiny kitchen, a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me. We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir, I working at a rickety table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. The grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow drove me mad; but with Valeria’s help I did find after all some legal outlets to my fantastic predicament. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu and had most of our meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on the table cloth and a good deal of foreign babble. And next door, an art dealer displayed in his cluttered window a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American estampe - a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds.
These burst. In the summer of 1939 mon oncle d’Amérique died bequeathing me an annual income of a few thousand dollars on condition I came to live in the States and showed some interest in his business. This prospect was most welcome to me. I felt my life needed a shake-up. There was another thing, too: moth holes had appeared in the plush of matrimonial comfort. During the last weeks I had kept noticing that my fat Valeria was not her usual self; had acquired a queer restlessness; even showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate. When I informed her we were shortly to sail for New York, she looked distressed and bewildered. There were some tedious difficulties with her papers. She had a Nansen, or better say Nonsense, passport which for some reason a share in her husband’s solid Swiss citizenship could not easily transcend; and I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the préfecture, and other formalities, that had made her so listless, despite my patiently describing to her America, the country of rosy children and great trees, where life would be such an improvement on dull dingy Paris. (1.8)
and Colonel Maximovich's mispronounced apologies (j’ai demandé pardonne - excuse me - est-ce que j’ai puis - may I - and so forth):
But we never were. Valechka - by now shedding torrents of tears tinged with the mess of her rainbow make-up, started to fill anyhow a trunk, and two suitcases, and a bursting carton, and visions of putting on my mountain boots and taking a running kick at her rump were of course impossible to put into execution with the cursed colonel hovering around all the time. I cannot say he behaved insolently or anything like that; on the contrary, he displayed, as a small sideshow in the theatricals I had been inveigled in, a discreet old-world civility, punctuating his movements with all sorts of mispronounced apologies (j’ai demandé pardonne - excuse me - est-ce que j’ai puis - may I - and so forth), and turning away tactfully when Valechka took down with a flourish her pink panties from the clothesline above the tub; but he seemed to be all over the place at once, le gredin , agreeing his frame with the anatomy of the flat, reading in my chair my newspaper, untying a knotted string, rolling a cigarette, counting the teaspoons, visiting the bathroom, helping his moll to wrap up the electric fan her father had given her, and carrying streetward her luggage. I sat with arms folded, one hip on the window sill, dying of hate and boredom. At last both were out of the quivering apartment - the vibration of the door I had slammed after them still rang in my every nerve, a poor substitute for the backhand slap with which I ought to have hit her across the cheekbone according to the rules of the movies. Clumsily playing my part, I stomped to the bathroom to check if they had taken my English toilet water; they had not; but I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon. Actually I daresay it was nothing but middle-class Russian courtesy (with an oriental tang, perhaps) that had prompted the good colonel (Maximovich! his name suddenly taxies back to me), a very formal person as they all are, to muffle his private need in decorous silence so as not to underscore the small size of his host’s domicile with the rush of a gross cascade on top of his own hushed trickle. But this did not enter my mind at the moment, as groaning with rage I ransacked the kitchen for something better than a broom. Then, canceling my search, I dashed out of the house with the heroic decision of attacking him barefisted; despite my natural vigor, I am no pugilist, while the short but broad-shouldered Maximovich seemed made of pig iron. The void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife’s departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works. The one to which I am restricted these days, despite my lawyer’s favors, is a good example of the inane eclecticism governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N. Y., G. W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the Children’s Encyclopedia (with some nice photographs of sunshine-haired Girl Scouts in shorts), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who’s Who in the Limelight actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume, I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love. I transcribe most of the page:
Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N. Y. Made debut in Sunburst . Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Girl in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Mushroom, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You.
Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N. J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography, pets.
Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied for stage at American Academy. First played in Ottawa in 1900. Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers. Has disappeared since in [a list of some thirty plays follows].
How the look of my dear love’s name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with helpless pain! Perhaps, she might have been an actress too. Born 1935. Appeared (I notice the slip of my pen in the preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence) in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! (ibid.)
In correct French "I apologize" would be j'ai demandé pardon. In a dialogue with the stranger on the porch of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) Humbert twice repeats the phrase "I beg your pardon:"
Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
“Where the devil did you get her?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: the weather is getting better.”
“Seems so.”
“Who’s the lassie?”
“My daughter.”
“You lie - she’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: July was hot. Where’s her mother?”
“Dead.”
“I see. Sorry. By the way, why don’t you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then.”
“We’ll be gone too. Good night.”
“Sorry. I’m pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?”
“Not now.”
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotels - and his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus. (1.28)
The Persians (who say that sleep is a rse) bring to mind Percy Elphinstone, the author of A vagabond in Italy (a coruscating trifle in the prison library that Humbert is allowed to use) and Venice Revisited. In an interview to the Briceland Gazette the author of Dark Age (Clare Quilty) mentioned a Persian bubble bird:
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 figuresstill life practically, and everybody about to throw upat 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. (2.26)
By a Persian bubble bird the playwright probably meant a nightingale. In Omar Khayyam's Quatrain 6 the Nightingale cries to the Rose "Wine! Wine! Wine! Red Wine!”:
And David’s lips are lockt; but in divine
High-piping Pehlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!
Red Wine!” – the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That sallow cheek of hers t’ incarnadine.
A Persian poet and astronomer, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) said: "How sad, a heart that does not know how to love, that does not know what it is to be drunk with love. If you are not in love, how can you enjoy the blinding light of the sun, the soft light of the moon." Describing the unkempt lawn of the Haze house in Ramsdale, Humbert says that most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons:
The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog - I loathe dogs - had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras! There are some eructations that sound like cheersat least, mine did. An old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor’s garbage receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down, down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite’s ivied brick house and high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored. The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices. Leslie, old Miss Opposite’s gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented by gesture, that I was mighty energetic today. The fool dog of the prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car - not Charlotte’s. The prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with little to halt, bright hair - a nymphet, by Pan! - ran back down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. And Mrs. Humbert’s residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman’s dog tearing alongside. There was a smiling pauseand then, with a flutter in my breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo’s room. By sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it. (1.17)
Incarnadine zebras (as Humbert calls the folding chairs) bring to mind "That sallow cheek of hers t’ incarnadine" (the last line of Omar Khayyam's Quatrain 6). Lolita mother, Charlotte Haze is a namesake of Charlotte Corday (1768-93), a figure of the French Revolution who on July 13, 1893, stabbed Jean-Paul Marat (a French revolutionary leader, 1743-93) in his bath. Describing his life in Paris with Valeria, Humbert mentions a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which he felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab him. In Garshin's novella Nadezhda Nikolaevna (1885) Lopatin finds in Nadezhda Nikolaevna (a prostitute) the model for his portrait of Charlotte Corday. The characters in Garshin's novella include Bessonov, Nadezhda Nikolaevna's former lover and murderer. Bessonnitsa is Russian for insomnia. Quilty's "sleep is a rose" brings to mind Garshin's Skazka o zhabe i roze ("The Tale of the Toad and the Rose," 1884).
White-necked maiden (as Humbert calls Charlotte Corday) seems to hint at Charlotte's nezhnaya sheya (tender neck) mentioned in Garshin's story by Lopatin:
О, Шарлотта, Шарлотта! Благословлять или проклинать тот час, когда мне пришла в голову мысль написать тебя?
А Бессонов был всегда против этого. Когда я в первый раз сказал ему о своем намерении, он пожал плечами и недовольно усмехнулся.
— Шальные вы люди, господа российские живописцы, — сказал он. — Мало у нас своего! Шарлотта Корде! Какое вам дело до Шарлотты? Разве вы можете перенести себя в то время, в ту обстановку?
Может быть, он был и прав... Но только образ французской героини так занимал меня, что я не мог не приняться за картину. Я задумал написать ее во весь рост, одну, стоящую прямо перед зрителями, с глазами, устремленными перед собой; она уже решилась на свой подвиг-преступление, и это написано только на ее лице: рука, которая несет смертельный удар, пока еще висит бессильно и нежно выделяется своею белизною на темно-синем суконном платье; кружевная пелеринка, завязанная накрест, оттеняет нежную шею, по которой завтра пройдет кровавая черта... Я помню, как ее образ создался в моей душе... Я прочел ее историю в одной сентиментальной и, может быть, лживой книге, у Ламартина; из ложного пафоса болтливого и любующегося своим языком и манерой француза для меня ясно и отчетливо вышла чистая фигура девушки — фанатика добра. Я перечитал о ней все, что мог достать, пересмотрел несколько ее портретов и решился написать картину. (Chapter II)
"Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons." At the beginning of his essay on Garshin in The Silhouettes of Russian Writers the critic Yuli Ayhenvald mentions Garshin's ne solnechnye, a lunnye stranitsy (not solar, but lunar pages):
Больше трех десятилетий прошло, как умер Гаршин, но его печальный и прекрасный образ с "лучистыми глазами и бледным челом" не тускнеет и для тех, кто еще в ранней юности воспринял весть о "странном стуке" его смертельного падения в пролет высокой лестницы. Рассеялась романтика той дальней поры, рассеялось очень многое, а вокруг имени Гаршина сохраняется прежний ореол, и для нас точно "спит земля в сияньи голубом", когда перечитываешь его не солнечные, а лунные страницы. Та элегия Эрнста, которой уже не играет старый скрипач из "Надежды Николаевны", потому что у него теперь четыре сына и одна дочь, и он вынужден отдавать свое музыкальное искусство такому учреждению, где нужна не элегия Эрнста, — она, транспонированная в рассказы, никогда не умолкала в творце "Attalea princeps", порождая свои меланхолические отклики и в его читателях. Но в то же время он разумен и здоров, его очерки не судорожны и нервны, и в стиле их совсем нет той болезненности и безумства, которые характеризовали самого автора как личность. Гаршин прост и прозрачен, доступен юмору, не любит затейливых линий. Он рассказывает о тьме, но рассказывает о ней светло. У него — кровь, убийство, самоубийство, ужас войны, ее страшные "четыре дня", ее бесчисленные страшные дни, исступление, сумасшествие, но все эти необычайности подчинены верному чувству меры. У Гаршина — та же стихия, что и у Достоевского; только, помимо размеров дарования, между ними есть и та разница, что первый, как писатель, — вне своего безумия, а последний — значительно во власти своего черного недуга. Жертва иррациональности, Гаршин все-таки ничего больного и беспокойного не вдохнул в свои произведения, никого не испугал, не проявил неврастении в себе, не заразил ею других. Гаршин преодолел свои темы. Но не осилил он своей грусти. Скорбь не давит, не гнетет его, он может улыбаться и шутить, он ясен — и тем не менее в траур облечено его сердце, и тем не менее он как будто представляет собою живой кипарис нашей литературы.
Ayhenvald calls Vsevolod Garshin (1855-88) "the live cypress of our literature." The critic mentions that elegy of Ernst (Paganini's pupil and and rival) which the old violinist in Nadezhda Nikolaevna will never play again, because he has four sons and one daughter. Humbert's and Lolita's address at Beardsley, 14 Thayer Street, seems to hint at Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817-97), the author The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven (1866-79), the first scholarly biography of Beethoven (a German composer and pianist, 1770-1827). The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, marked Quasi una fantasia, Op. 27, No. 2, is a piano sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven, completed in 1801 and dedicated in 1802 to his pupil Countess Julie "Giulietta" Guiccardi. Although known throughout the world as the Moonlight Sonata (Mondscheinsonate), it was not Beethoven who named it so. The name grew popular later, likely long after Beethoven's death. Quasi una fantasia brings to mind Stella Fantasia (Lolita’s classmate who marries Murphy):
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 Laselle, 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 Phillys, 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. Chatfield’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. (2.33)
Quasi una fantasia (1855) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet (the son of Afanasiy Shenshin and Charlotte Becker). Charlotte Becker is the maiden name of Lolita's mother. Describing his visit to Ramsdale in September 1952, Humbert mentions a Turgenev story (Three Meetings, 1852) in which a torrent of Italian music comes from an open window:
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 golden-skinned, 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 dream-embarrassment, 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. (2.33)
The hotel's name, The Enchanted Hunters, seems to combine two titles, Leskov's Ocharovannyi strannik ("Enchanted Wanderer," 1873) and Turgenev's Zapiski okhotnika ("A Hunter's Notes," 1851).
Humbert's re-nonsense and Valeria's Nonsense passport bring to mind the rather charming nonsense verse that Humbert used to write for Lolita:
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’tait 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 genie … 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 Squire 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… (2.25)