Describing his life with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions his world, umber and black Humberland:
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 wouldinvariably, with icy precisionplump 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 impressin 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. (2.3)
John Ray, Jr. (the author of the foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Humbert's "umber and black Humberland" and Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized on Tuesday, June 28, 1949) bring to mind A Dream of Elfland (1910), a poem by Henrietta Cordelia Ray (a black American poet, 1852-1916):
Sweet elfin music comes to me,
Across a glen embowered deep,
In rugged green. What fantasy
Did give it voice--like dreams in sleep--
Through fluted winds? An airy flood
Of cadences, dainty and soft
As rose leaves flutt'ring to the sod,
Enfolds the sense and feelings oft.
Through what air-woven lyres blow
The winsome elves? Chords interlaced
In sweetest rhythm lull me so,
Surely Titania must have graced
That weird rehearsal. Did they sup
On drowsy poppy flowers, ere
They sent vibrations o'er the strings,--
A breath of music, passing rare?
The elves, they strike such witching strains
They lull sad Sorrow fast asleep;
What heart is torn, what soul complains,
While they each sense in music steep!
Unwind your sylvan symphonies,
Ye weird musicians, breeze-like play,
Until your dulcet harmonies
Waft us to magic isles away.
At the beginning of her poem June, from the cycle The Procession of the Seasons, Henrietta Cordelia Ray repeats the word "roses" three times:
Roses, roses, roses,
Creamy, fragrant, dewy!
See the rainbow shower!
Was there e'er so sweet a flower?
I'm the rose-nymph, June they call me.
Sunset's blush is not more fair
Than the gift of bloom so rare
Mortal, that I bring to thee!
"Roses, roses, roses" bring to mind "give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time" (Clare Quilty's words to the reporter):
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)
On the pillared porch of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) a stranger (apparently, Clare Quilty) tells Humbert that his child needs a lot of sleep and that sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. He also says that July was hot. A playwright and pornographer whom Humbert murders for abducting Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital, Clare Quilty was born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Here is Henrietta Cordelia Ray's poem August:
Haste to the mighty ocean,
List to the lapsing waves;
With what a strange commotion
They seek their coral caves.
From heat and turmoil let us oft return
The ocean's solemn majesty to learn.