"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 the 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.
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the
destinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story, a few details may be
given as received from Mr. "Windmuller," or "Ramsdale," who desires his
identity suppressed so that "the long shadow 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 settlemen in the remotest
Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be
publshed 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.
Viewed simply as a novel, "Lolita" deals with situations and emotions
that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression
been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single
obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine
who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a
lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by
their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, an
editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might
call "aphrodisiac" (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered
December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably
more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of "Lolita"
altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of
sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in
the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than
a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the
same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that "H.H."'s impassioned
confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult
males--a "conservative" estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann
(verbal communication)--enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special
experience "H.H." describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist
gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there
would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this
book.
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in
his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a
synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original,
and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.
I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, is is
abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and
jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to
attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on
the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty
that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of
diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically
his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that
makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
As a case history, "Lolita" will become, no doubt, a classic in
psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects;
and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary
worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for
in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward
child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac--these are not only vivid
characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point
out potent evils. "Lolita" should make all of us--parents, social workers,
educators--apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the
task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.
John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.
Widworth, Mass
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:
the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap,
at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one
sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on
the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact,
there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a
certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as
many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always
count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the
seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this
tangle of thorns.
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going
person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and
Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass
around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a
luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold
wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl,
daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset
parsons, experts in obscure subjects--paleopedology and Aeolian harps,
respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic,
lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest
past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over
which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the
sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of
day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly
entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer
dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
My mother's elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had
married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of
unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been
in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it
one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was
extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity--the fatal rigidity--of some of
her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a
better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a
waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She
said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her
husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America,
where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright would of illustrated books,
clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe,
a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From
the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me,
everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed
towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay
my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, took
me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to
me Don Quixote and Les Miserables, and I adored and respected
him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his
various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and
cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.
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 La Beautи
Humaine that 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 lycиe 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.
Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English,
half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today
than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of
visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory
of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general
terms as: "honey-colored skin," "think arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long
lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with
shut eyes, on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely
optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and
this is how I see Lolita).
Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying
she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends
of my aunt's, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from
Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born
Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of
peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it
pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of
intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if
much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality
of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The
softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She
wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a
famous spy.
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love
with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual
possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and
assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we
were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an
opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her
garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out
of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage.
There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl
all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every
blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden
in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking
nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious
journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us
sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete
contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of
exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed
at each other, could bring relief.
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years,
there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and
the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer
courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk cafe. Annabel did not
come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat
glacи, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were
about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the
sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat
apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a
moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white
shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph
was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before
we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of
pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we
escaped from the cafe to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand,
and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave,
had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of
sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of
possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and
his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement,
and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep
asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the
rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the
...
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