Describing Lolita's illness and hospitalization in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit:
Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish. I registered, Hays gave me the key and a tinkling smile, and, still twinkling, showed me where to park the car; Lo crawled out and shivered a little: the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the cabin, she sat down on a chair at a card table, buried her face in the crook of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I thought, shamming, no doubt, to evade my caresses; I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill. Lolita dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her temperature, orally, then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter and after laboriously reducing the, meaningless to me, degrees Fahrenheit to the intimate centigrade of my childhood, found she had 40.4, which at least made sense. Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of temperature - even exceeding a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon an examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head to toe. She complained of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebrae - and I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of intercourse, I wrapped her in a laprobe and carried her into the car. Kind Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. Dr. Blue, whose learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the “ague” of the ancients. I wondered if I should mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a minor accident while climbing an awkward fence with her boy friend, but knowing I was drunk, I decided to withhold the information till later if necessary. To an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter’s age as “practically sixteen.” While I was not looking, my child was taken away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a “welcome” mat in a corner of their damned hospital. I ran up constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to tell her she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black eyesof Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd, a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car and remained in it for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new solitude, looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumined, very square and low hospital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now up at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute montagne where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely Joseph Lore was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas - que sais-je! - or seducing a ewe. Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in times of unusual stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back to the motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way. Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangual shadows. I made out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school playground; and in another wastelike black there rose in domed silence the pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the motel, where millions of so-called “millers,” a kind of insect, were swarming around the neon contours of “No Vacancy”; and, when, at 3 a. m., after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to fix a man’s despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was separated from my Lolita. All at once it occurred to me that her illness was somehow the development of a theme - that it had the same taste and tone as the series of linked impressions which had puzzled and tormented me during our journey; I imagined that secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or hallucination, or whatever he was, prowling around the hospital - and Aurora had hardly “warmed her hands,” as the pickers of lavender say in the country of my birth, when I found myself trying to get into that dungeon again, knocking upon its green doors, breakfastless, stool-less, in despair. (2.22)
Der Erlkönig (1782) is a famous poem by J. W. von Goethe (a German poet, 1749-1832). Humbert compares a little old woman whom Mrs. Hays had lent him, to a portable witch, perhaps Erlkönig's daughter. Erlkönigs Tochter ("Erlkönig's Daughter," 1779) is a ballad by J. G. von Herder (a German philosopher, 1744-1803). In his poem Cauchemar ("Nightmare") included in Poèmes saturniens (1866) Paul Verlaine (a French poet, 1844-1896) calls his dream rider "cavalier des ballades d’Allemagne (horseman of the German ballads):"
J’ai vu passer dans mon rêve
— Tel l’ouragan sur la grève,
D’une main tenant un glaive
Et de l’autre un sablier,
Ce cavalier
Des ballades d’Allemagne
Qu’à travers ville et campagne,
Et du fleuve à la montagne,
Et des forêts au vallon,
Un étalon
Rouge-flamme et noir d’ébène,
Sans bride, ni mors, ni rêne,
Ni hop ! ni cravache, entraîne
Parmi des râlements sourds
Toujours ! toujours !
Un grand feutre à longue plume
Ombrait son œil qui s’allume
Et s’éteint. Tel, dans la brume,
Éclate et meurt l’éclair bleu
D’une arme à feu.
Comme l’aile d’une orfraie
Qu’un subit orage effraie,
Par l’air que la neige raie,
Son manteau se soulevant
Claquait au vent,
Et montrait d’un air de gloire
Un torse d’ombre et d’ivoire,
Tandis que dans la nuit noire
Luisaient en des cris stridents
Trente-deux dents.
Aurora had hardly “warmed her hands,” when Humbert finds myself trying to get into the hospital. Puisque l’aube grandit, puisque voici l’aurore ("Since the dawn is breaking, since day is here") is a poem by Paul Verlaine included in La Bonne Chanson (1870):
Puisque l’aube grandit, puisque voici l’aurore,
Puisque, après m’avoir fui longtemps, l’espoir veut bien
Revoler devers moi qui l’appelle et l’implore,
Puisque tout ce bonheur veut bien être le mien,
C’en est fait à présent des funestes pensées,
C’en est fait des mauvais rêves, ah ! c’en est fait
Surtout de l’ironie et des lèvres pincées
Et des mots où l’esprit sans l’âme triomphait.
Arrière aussi les poings crispés et la colère
A propos des méchants et des sots rencontrés ;
Arrière la rancune abominable ! arrière
L’oubli qu’on cherche en des breuvages exécrés !
Car je veux, maintenant qu’un Être de lumière
A dans ma nuit profonde émis cette clarté
D’une amour à la fois immortelle et première,
De par la grâce, le sourire et la bonté,
Je veux, guidé par vous, beaux yeux aux flammes douces,
Par toi conduit, ô main où tremblera ma main,
Marcher droit, que ce soit par des sentiers de mousses
Ou que rocs et cailloux encombrent le chemin ;
Oui, je veux marcher droit et calme dans la Vie,
Vers le but où le sort dirigera mes pas,
Sans violence, sans remords et sans envie :
Ce sera le devoir heureux aux gais combats.
Et comme, pour bercer les lenteurs de la route,
Je chanterai des airs ingénus, je me dis
Qu’elle m’écoutera sans déplaisir sans doute ;
Et vraiment je ne veux pas d’autre Paradis.
While puisque (since), the poem's first word repeated in the opening stanza four times, brings to mind Pisky (a town in Midwest where Lolita was born on January 1, 1935), pas d'autre Paradis (no other Paradise) at the end of the poem makes one think of Humbert's elected paradise:
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 would - invariably, with icy precision - plump 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)
The Earthly Paradise (1870) is an epic poem (a lengthy collection of retellings of various myths and legends from Greece and Scandinavia) by William Morris (an English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist, 1834-1896). On the other hand, Ray Zemnoy ili Son v zimnyuyu noch' ("The Earthly Paradise, or A Midwinter Night's Dream," 1903) is an utopian novel set in the 27th century on a Polynesian island by Konstantin Merezhkovski (a zoologist and pedophile, 1855-1921). At the Silver Spur Court (a motel in Elphinstone) Humbert asks big Frank (Mrs. Hays's beau) to tell nurse Mary Lore over the 'phone that he will get into touch with his daughter sometime tomorrow if he feels probably Polynesian:
I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scars - had been blown through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish, hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious… reclining against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.
I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day and would get into touch with my daughter sometime tomorrow if I felt probably Polynesian.
He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip twitch amorously.
“Okey-dokey,” big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling, carried my message away, and I went on drinking, and by morning the fever was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone. Everything was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything was fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr. Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had paid Dolly’s bill in cash, and told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at Grandpa’s ranch as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat greenwool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier to its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one gravelgroaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself telestically - and, telepathically (I hoped), to its gesticulating owner - that I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the reception room, trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and clamoring for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem to have been sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue, and who eventually stood up, remarking with a preposterous accent: “Now, who is neurotic, I ask?”and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented me with seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my Lolita to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and stark thought stood out and this was: “Freedom for the moment is everything.” One false move - and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man - free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother. (2.22)
In his essay Noveyshaya lirika ("The Newest Lyrical Poetry," 1894) Dmitri Merzhkovski (a Russian writer and poet, Konstantin's younger brother, 1865-1941) speaks, among other contemporary French poets, of Paul Verlaine and mentions Verlaine's tragic mask of a poète maudit (accursed poet):
Поль Верлен -- человек, не обладающий ни тем огромным научным образованием, ни тем могуществом таланта, которые делают Леконта де Лилля одним из величайших поэтов Франции. В природе этого нежного, задумчивого лирика, на котором всегда очень плохо держалась трагическая маска poète maudit, есть женственная мягкость, но и женственная слабость. Он отнюдь не выразитель, а только чуткий предвозвестник Нового Идеализма, один из бледных, чуть брезжущих лучей той зари, которую мы еще не имеем права назвать Возрождением. Главный недостаток Верлена -- отсутствие умственной и нравственной силы, отсутствие философской глубины. Он ищет нового в старом, даже дряхлом, жизни -- в могилах, возрождения в католицизме. Подобно большинству своих собратий, он не был достаточно крепок и здоров, чтобы бороться с каплей того духовного яда, которым их заразило разложение латинской культуры. Стоило ли возмущаться против Французской Академии, чтобы через несколько лет с покаянными слезами вернуться в католическую церковь? Что-то надорванное и расслабленное чувствуется в обращении некогда гордого отщепенца, поклонника Бодлэра, "демонического" поэта в лоно средневекового мистицизма. Если неоромантики изберут такой путь, то, конечно, будущность не за ними! (III. "Verlaine and the Neoromantics")
In his foreword to Humbert 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.
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,” of “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.
According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert Humbert (who had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) by forty days and 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 ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949, and everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital with Quilty, 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.). According to Merezhkovski (see the above quote), Verlaine is "one of the pale, faintly glimmering rays of that dawn which we have no right yet to call Renaissance."