One of the teen-magazines that Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) destroys after Lolita's abduction from the Elphinstone hospital says that unattached details take all the sparkle out of one's conversation:
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’était 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 génie … 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)
The Chinese idiom 画蛇添足 (huà shé tiān zú) means "to draw a snake and add feet to it". It is used as a metaphor to extra unnecessary behaviors. It tells us that there is no need to overdo something. The unattached details that take all the sparkle out of one's conversation bring to mind an embarrassment of riches mentioned by Humbert when he describes his life with Rita (a girl whom he picked up one depraved May evening at a roadside bar somewhere between Montreal and New York):
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)
According to Humbert, Rita had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. An American movie actress, Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino, 1918-87) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest child of two dancers (her father was a Gypsy from Andalusia). Rita Hayworth was the second wife of Orson Welles (1915-85), an American director, actor, writer, producer, and magician. In 1938, his radio anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air gave Welles the platform to find international fame as the director and narrator of a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, which caused some listeners to believe that a Martian invasion was in fact occurring. Before he turned himself invisible, Griffin (the main character in Wells's novel The Invisible Man), was already an albino (Jack Humbertson is a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears). In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN mentions Wells's visit to the Nabokovs' St. Petersburg house before World War One and a game of fives with Wells. Five used glasses in Humbert's and Rita's hotel room make one think of this game. As a schoolboy, Humbert played rackets and fives:
I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous Le Beauté Humaine that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycée in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult. (1.2)
Lolita (whom Humbert sometimes calls "my Carmen" and "my Carmencita," after the heroine of a novella by Prosper Mérimée) is an avid reader of the movie magazines:
I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. Howeverlikewise for reasons of showregulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I looked at her hand; it dropped. As I was leaving, leaving voluntarily, Dolores Haze reminded me to bring her next morning… She did not remember where the various things she wanted were… “Bring me,” she cried (out of sight already, door on the move, closing, closed), “the new gray suitcase and Mother’s trunk”; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying nit he motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circumstances was to send the two bags over with the widow’s beau, a robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo displaying her treasures to Mary… No doubt, I was a little delirious - and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a solid, for when I looked out the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw Dolly’s beautiful young bicycle propped up there on its support, the graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow perched on the saddle - but it was the landlady’s bike, and smiling a little, and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed, and lay as quiet as a saint
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine
which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed, and there was some great national celebration in town judging by the firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five minutes to two p. m. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it. (2.22)
Humbert parodies four lines in Robert Browning's poem Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister (1842). In Gogol's story Zapiski sumasshedshego ("The Notes of a Madman," 1835) Poprishchin says that Spain and China are one and the same land, write out 'China' and and you will get 'Spain.' The amnesic stranger in Humbert's and Rita's hotel room seems to be someone's runaway male organ (an allusion to Major Kovalyov's runaway nose in Gogol's story "The Nose," 1935). Rita’s brother, the mayor and boaster of Grainball, is a cross between Khlestakov (the main character in Gogol's play The Inspector, 1836), a boaster, and the Town Mayor (a character in the same play).
A blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears, "Jack Humbertson" also makes one think of the White Rabbit, a character in Lewis Carroll's Alice Adventures in Wonderland (1865). In his nonsense verse Humbert mentions the Rabs and their Rabbits.