In the text mailed by Sandy Klein we find:
"
These men and women are not from Mars or Venus but a red planet in
which ordinary things become extraordinarily sexual. As if they wear sex
goggles, any place or person may become appealing for unleashing the gargantuan
girth of their appetite. Not to mention inanimate objects. For one thing, Lolita
would be impossible to read since even the title curls off the tongue, and
though the pedophiliac context is unappealing to the majority, Nabokov’s
seductive pen pulsates pure sexual desire for nymphs and sex
addicts."
Ciara Fernandez "Between the Sheets: Needy Nymphs Abound" at
the
http://www.tsl.pomona.edu/?page=lifestyle&article=1688&issue=60
It took me sometime to realize that the comment above was not intended as a
criticism but offered a description of the "red planet" people who suffer under
an excess of erotic fantasy. I had just been searching through "Lolita" to find
clues about VN's game of musky "muscat" to investigate some
"Freudian traps" that run along similar lines as Quilty's persecution of
Humbert (a game that "fore-shadows" Pale Fire's slow persecution by
Gradus in Quilty's protean car-change that contrasts with his
identifiable and ever present "mustache".)
A trip along
"the musk and the mud, the dirt and the death" led me to my first
trap in "Lolita" by VN's curious inversion of the
standard "freudian symbolism". Instead of luring the reader into a
regressive quest for red caves or padded rooms, like the one
in "The Last Tango in Paris" movie,
Nabokov describes the phoetus inside the mother as a
"tiny madman in his padded cell."
( it reminded me
of Beckett's 1955 observation: " we are all born mad, some remain so",
in "Waiting for Godot"). Here are the lines in HH's Friday entry:
'Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery
of the Menarche? Bloated feelings. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from the
roof. Grandma is visiting. "Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls' magazine] starts
to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have to be bedded
down there." The tiny madman in his padded cell (...) At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a
sidelong gleam of motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been describing,
in a flippant vein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite
decided to grow): "Better don't if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty."
.'
More descriptions of Quilty, his
"Trappian" mustache and gray cars:
1. I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen,
the exact day when I first knew with utter certainty that the red convertible
was following us (...). I simply ignored the fact that our quiet pursuer, in his
converted state, stopped a little behind us at a café or bar(...). As I was in
the act of signing a traveler's check ... and saw a terrible thing. A
broad-backed man, baldish, in an oatmeal coat and dark-brown trousers, was
listening to Lo (...) I saw him scratch his cheek and nod, and turn, and
walk back to his convertible, a broad and thickish man of my age, somewhat
resembling Gustave Trapp, a cousin of my father's in Switzerland — same smoothly
tanned face, fuller than mine, with a small dark mustache and a rosebud
degenerate mouth.
2. The driver behind me, with his stuffed
shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his
convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk
connected it with out shabby vehicle.
3. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread
crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb...When after a few grim stoppages and a bit
of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had
disappeared.
4. A veritable Proteus of the highway, with
bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another (...) He seemed to
patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream
convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading
into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then he turned to other makes and passed
through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades(...) grays, however, remained his
favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort
out properly such ghosts as Chrysler's Shell Gray, Chevrolet's Thistle Gray,
Dodge's French Gray...
5.
The necessity
of being constantly on the lookout for his little mustache and open shirt (...)
led me to a profound study of all cars on the road — behind, before, alongside,
coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun:....The gray car slowing up
before us, the gray car catching up with us.
6.
There he
stood( ...) his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like
a symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping(...)
I could sense
the musk of her excitement (...) as he leaned against a tree in which a
multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards a marvelous
transformation took place. He was no longer the satyr but a very good-natured
and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned more than once
(...) This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the towel on his name walked
back with false insouciance to the pool.
7.His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my
raincoat (...) "You know," he said, scratching loudly his
fleshy and gritty gray cheek (...) To have him trapped, after those years of
repentance and rage...