Describing his attempt to find a photograph of Lolita’s abductor in an old issue of the Briceland Gazette, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) quotes the beginning of Verlaine's sonnet Nevermore (1866), "Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu? (Remembrance, remembrance, what do you want of me?):"
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. (2.26)
In his collection of essays Les Poètes Maudits ("The Accursed Poets," 1884) Paul Verlaine (a French poet, 1844-1896) depicts himself as pauvre Lélian (poor Lélian). An anagram of Paul Verlaine, pauvre Lélian brings to mind Countess Lilian Dunquerke (note the central position of 'q' in Dunquerke), a character in Erich Maria Remarque's novel Station am Horizont ("Station at the Horizon") published in 1927-28 in a German sports magazine Sport im Bild. The novel describes the search for love of a veteran and former race car driver, Kai, who is torn between Barbara, a girl from the village, Maud, an American middle-class woman, and Lilian Dunquerke, a countess. In the Briceland Gazette Humbert reads that Dunkerque (a small coastal town in northern France) was fortified in the tenth century. One of Clare Quilty's hobbies is fast cars:
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. (1.8)
The name of Clare Quilty's coauthor, Vivian Darkbloom is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert's manuscript), after her friend's death Vivian Darkbloom has written a biography, 'My Cue:'
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore. “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. ‘Vivian Darkbloom’ has written a biography, ‘My Cue,’ to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
John Ray, Jr. brings to mind un rayon monotone (a monotonous ray) in Verlaine's sonnet Nevermore (whose title was borrowed from E. A. Poe's poem The Raven, 1845):
Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu ? L’automne
Faisait voler la grive à travers l’air atone,Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotoneSur le bois jaunissant où la bise détone. Nous étions seul à seule et marchions en rêvant,Elle et moi, les cheveux et la pensée au vent.Soudain, tournant vers moi son regard émouvant :« Quel fut ton plus beau jour ? » fit sa voix d’or vivant, Sa voix douce et sonore, au frais timbre angélique.Un sourire discret lui donna la réplique,Et je baisai sa main blanche, dévotement. — Ah ! les premières fleurs, qu’elles sont parfumées !Et qu’il bruit avec un murmure charmantLe premier oui qui sort de lèvres bien-aimées !
Memory, memory, what do you want of me? Autumn
Makes the thrush fly through colourless air,
And the sun casts its monotonous glare
On the yellowing woods where the north winds hum.
We were alone, and walking in dream,
She and I, hair and thoughts wind-blown.
Then, turning her troubling gaze on me,
‘Your loveliest day?’ in her voice of fine gold,
Her voice, with its angel’s tone, fresh, vibrant, sweet.
I gave her my answer, a smile so discreet,
And kissed her white hand with devotion.
– Ah! The first flowers, what a fragrance they have!
And how charming the murmured emotion
Of a first ‘yes’ let slip from lips that we love!
In his foreword to Humbert’s manuscript John Ray, Jr. compares the author’s bizarre cognomen to a mask through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of he District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H. H.”‘s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask - through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow - had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to “H. H.”‘s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading lamp.
In his poem Clair de lune ("Moonlight," 1869) Paul Verlaine mentions charmant masques et bergamasques (charming masks and dancers):
Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.
Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.
Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masquerades and dancers are promenading,
Playing the lute and dancing, and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.
While singing in a minor key
Of victorious love, and the pleasant life
They seem not to believe in their own happiness
And their song blends with the light of the moon,
With the sad and beautiful light of the moon,
Which sets the birds in the trees dreaming,
And makes the fountains sob with ecstasy,
The slender water streams among the marble statues.
Pauvre Lélian and Countess Lilian Dunquerke bring to mind "Lili Marleen" (a popuar German love song, 1938). The song is well known in a version performed by Marlene Dietrich (a German-American film actress, 1901-92). Humbert describes Lolita's mother Charlotte (who proudly shows to Humbert the lilies in her garden) as "a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich:"
The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s “Arlésienne.” A door ajar to the right afforded a glimpse of a living room, with some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet and a striped sofa along the wall. There was a staircase at the end of the hallway, and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how hot it had been out-of-doors) and staring, to stare at something, at an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came from the upper landing the contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who leaning over the banisters inquired melodiously, “Is that Monsieur Humbert?” A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in addition. Presently, the lady herselfsandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that ordercame down the steps, her index finger still tapping upon her cigarette.
I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with. The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich. Patting her bronze-brown bun, she led me into the parlor and we talked for a minute about the McCoo fire and the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Her very wide-set sea-green eyes had a funny way of traveling all over you, carefully avoiding your own eyes. Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow; and uncoiling herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept making spasmodic dashes at three ashtrays and the near fender (where lay the brown core of an apple); whereupon she would sink back again, one leg folded under her. She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul; women who are completely devoid of humor; women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished. I was perfectly aware that if by any wild chance I became her lodger, she would methodically proceed to do in regard to me what taking a lodger probably meant to her all along, and I would again be enmeshed in one of those tedious affairs I knew so well. (1.10)
In Joseph von Sternberg's musical comedy-drama film Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930) Marlene Dietrich played Lola Lola, the headliner at the cabaret called The Blue Angel. Dr Blue is the chief physician at the Elphinstone hospital. According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of aigue in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949. Everything what happens after Lolita's sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.).
In the Russian Lolita (1967) Camp Q (to which Lolita is sent by her mother and where she is seduced by Charlie Holmes, the camp mistress's son) becomes lager' Kuvshinka (kuvshinka means in Russian 'water lily'):
Сердясь на себя, что трачу попусту время, я устремился в гостиницу, - ту самую, в которую заехал с новым чемоданом пять лет тому назад. Взял комнату с ванной, назначил по телефону два свидания - деловое и медицинское, - побрился, выкупался, надел черный костюм и спустился в бар. Там ничего не изменилось. Узкий зал был залит все тем же тусклым, невозможно-гранатовым светом - которым когда-то в Европе отличались притоны, но который здесь просто "создавал настроение" в приличном, "семейном" отеле. Я сел за тот же столик, за которым сидел в самом начале моего пребывания в Рамздэле, в тот день, когда, став жильцом Шарлотты, я нашел нужным отпраздновать новоселье тем, что по-светски с ней распил полбутылки шампанского, - чем роковым образом покорил ее бедное, полное до краев сердце. Как и тогда, лакей с лицом как луна распределял по астральной схеме пятьдесят рюмочек хереса на большом подносе для свадебного приема (Мурфи, этот раз, сочетался браком с Фантазией). Без восьми три. Идя через холл, я должен был обойти группу дам, которые с mille graces прощались и расходились после клубного завтрака. Одна из них с приветственным клекотом набросилась на меня. Это была толстая, низенькая женщина, вся в жемчужно-сером, с длинным, серым пером на шляпке. Я узнал в ней миссис Чатфильд. Она напала на меня с приторной улыбкой, вся горя злобным любопытством (не проделал ли я, например, с Долли того, что Франк Ласелль, пятидесятилетний механик, проделал с одиннадцатилетней Салли Горнер в 1948-ом году). Очень скоро я это жадное злорадство совершенно взял под контроль. Она думала, что я живу в Калифорнии. А как поживает - ? С изысканнейшим наслаждением, я сообщил ей, что моя падчерица только что вышла за блестящего молодого инженера-горняка, выполняющего секретное правительственное задание в северо-западном штате. Взятая врасплох, она возразила, что не одобряет таких ранних браков, что никогда бы она не позволила своей Филлис, которой теперь восемнадцать лет -
"Ах, конечно", сказал я спокойно. "Конечно, помню Филлис. Филлис и лагерь Кувшинка. Да, конечно. Кстати, ваша дочурка никогда не рассказывала вам, как Чарли Хольмс развращал там маленьких пансионерок своей гнусной матери?"
"Стыдно!", крикнула миссис Чатфильд, "как вам не стыдно, мистер Гумберт! Бедного мальчика только что убили в Корее".
"В самом деле", сказал я (пользуясь дивной свободою, свойственной сновидениям). "Вот так судьба! Бедный мальчик пробивал нежнейшие, невосстановимейшие перепоночки, прыскал гадючьим ядом - и ничего, жил превесело, да еще получил посмертный орденок. Впрочем, извините меня, мне пора к адвокату".
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 to 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)