In the opening pages of Tropic of Capricorn (1939):
“I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start. It’s as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system” (p. 10).
And in the opening pages of Lolita (1955):
“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open” (p. 18).
Both published by the same bloodline...father and son.
Corfu in Lolita
Dolores Haze (Lolita's full name) was born on January 1, 1935 (under the sign of Capricorn). Eleven years earlier, Annabel Leigh (HH's first love) died of typhus in Corfu:
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 glacé, 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. (1.3)
From Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi (1941):
For months prior to this conversation I had been receiving letters from Greece from my friend Lawrence Durrell who had practically made Corfu his home. His letters were marvelous too, and yet a bit unreal to me. Durrell is a poet and his letters were poetic: they caused a certain confusion in me owing to the fact that the dream and the reality, the historical and the mythological, were so artfully blended. Later I was to discover for myself that this confusion is real and not due entirely to the poetic faculty. But at the time I thought he was laying it on, that it was his way of coaxing me to accept his repeated invitations to come and stay with him.
An expatriate British writer, Lawrence Durrell (1912-90) was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell (1925-95). Henry Miller was influenced by D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. From D. H. Lawrence's essay Pan in America (1934):
Lurking among leafy recesses, he was almost more demon than god. To be feared, not loved or approached. A man who should see Pan by daylight fell dead, as if blasted by lightning.
Yet you might dimly see him in the night, a dark body within the darkness. And then, it was a vision filling the limbs and the trunk of a man with power, as with new, strong-mounting sap. The Pan-power! You went on your way in the darkness secretly and subtly elated with blind energy, and you could cast a spell, by your mere presence, on women and on men. But particularly on women.
Humbert's mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning). In his Postscript to Russian 'Lolita' (1967) VN calls Hemingway "the modern substitute of Mayne Reid:"
С тех пор «Лолита» переводилась на многие языки: она вышла отдельными изданиями в Арабских странах, Аргентине, Бразилии, Германии, Голландии, Греции, Дании, Израиле, Индии, Италии, Китае, Мексике, Норвегии, Турции, Уругвае, Финляндии, Франции, Швеции и Японии. Продажу ее только что разрешили в Австралии, но она все еще запрещена в Испании и Южно-Африканской Республике. Не появлялась она и в пуританских странах за железным занавесом. Из всех этих переводов я отвечаю, в смысле точности и полноты, только за французский, который я сам проверил до напечатания. Воображаю, что сделали с бедняжкой египтяне и китайцы, а еще яснее воображаю, что сделала бы с ней, если бы я допустил это, «перемещенная дама», недавно научившаяся английскому языку, или американец, который «брал» русский язык в университете. Вопрос же — для кого, собственно, «Лолита» переводится, относится к области метафизики и юмора. Мне трудно представить себе режим, либеральный ли или тоталитарный, в чопорной моей отчизне, при котором цензура пропустила бы «Лолиту». Кстати, не знаю, кого сейчас особенно чтят в России — кажется, Гемингвея, современного заместителя Майн Рида, да ничтожных Фолкнера и Сартра, этих баловней западной буржуазии. Зарубежные же русские запоем читают советские романы, увлекаясь картонными тихими донцами на картонных же хвостах-подставках или тем лирическим доктором с лубочно-мистическими позывами, мещанскими оборотами речи и чаровницей из Чарской, который принес советскому правительству столько добротной иностранной валюты.
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN says that his paternal grandmother, born Baroness von Korf, believed that the island Corfu was named after her ancestor, a crusader. In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor mentions his fear of switching from Pan to Simplizissimus (in the English version, from Pan to Punch):
Там и сям, в будни негусто, попадались более или менее оранжевые тела. Всматриваться он избегал, боясь перехода от Пана к Симплициссимусу. Но иногда, рядом с школьным портфелем и сверкающим велосипедом, прислоненным к стволу, лежала одинокая нимфа, раскинув обнаженные до пахов, замшево-нежные ноги, заломив руки, показывая солнцу блестящие мышки; стрела соблазна едва успевала пропеть и вонзиться, как уже он замечал, что, на некотором расстоянии, в трех, одинаково отдаленных точках, образующих магический треугольник вокруг (чьей?) добычи, виднеются среди стволов три неподвижных ловца, друг другу незнакомых: два молодых (этот ничком, тот на боку) и старый господин в жилете, с резинками на рукавах рубашки, плотно сидящий на траве, неподвижный, вечный, с грустными, но терпеливыми глазами; и казалось эти три ударяющих в одну точку взгляда наконец, с помощью солнца, прожгут дырку в черном купальном трико бедной немецкой девочки, не поднимающей маслом смазанных век.
Here and there, thinly on weekdays, there occurred more or less orange bodies. He avoided looking closely for fear of switching from Pan to Punch. But sometimes, next to a school satchel and beside her shiny bicycle propped against a tree trunk, a lone nymph would sprawl, her legs bared to the crotch and suede-soft to the eye, and her elbows thrown back, with the hair of her armpits glistening in the sun; temptation’s arrow had hardly had time to sing out and pierce him before he noticed, a short distance away at three equidistant points, forming a magic triangle (around whose prize?) and strangers to one another, three motionless hunters visible in between the tree trunks: two young fellows (one lying prone, the other on his side) and an elderly man, coatless, with armbands on his shirt-sleeves, sitting solidly on the grass, motionless and eternal, with sad but patient eyes; and it seemed that these three pairs of eyes striking the same spot would finally, with the help of the sun, burn a hole in the black bathing tights of that poor little German girl, who never raised her ointment-smeared lids. (Chapter Five)
During his last supper in Berlin Shchyogolev (Fyodor's landlord, Zina Mertz's step-father) quips "Nynche - pan, zavtra - papan (Happy today, pappy tomorrow)," a play on the idiom libo pan, libo propal (either sink or swim):
"...Да, так-то, дорогой, меняется судьба человечья, печенка овечья. Думал ли я, что вдруг улыбнется счастье, -- тьфу, тьфу, тьфу, не сглазить. Еще этой зимой ведь прикидывал: зубы на полку али продать Марианну Николаевну на слом?... Полтора года, как-никак, прожили с вами вместе, душа -- извините за выражение -- в душу, а завтра расстанемся, -- вероятно, навсегда. Судьба играет человеком. Нынче -- пан, завтра -- папан".
“… Yes, that’s how it is, my dear chap, one twist of fate, and the king is mate. I never thought that fortune would smile on me—touch wood, touch wood. Why, only last winter I was wondering what to do: tighten my belt or sell Marianna Nikolavna for scrap? You and I had a year and a half of cohabitation, if you’ll excuse the expression, and tomorrow we part—probably forever. Man is fate’s plaything. Happy today, pappy tomorrow.” (ibid.)
Shchyogolev tells Fyodor that, if he had time, he would have written a novel:
Однажды, заметив исписанные листочки на столе у Федора Константиновича, он сказал, взяв какой-то новый, прочувствованный тон: "Эх, кабы у меня было времячко, я бы такой роман накатал... Из настоящей жизни. Вот представьте себе такую историю: старый пес, - но еще в соку, с огнем, с жаждой счастья, - знакомится с вдовицей, а у нее дочка, совсем еще девочка, - знаете, когда еще ничего не оформилось, а уже ходит так, что с ума сойти. Бледненькая, легонькая, под глазами синева, - и конечно на старого хрыча не смотрит. Что делать? И вот, недолго думая, он, видите ли, на вдовице женится. Хорошо-с. Вот, зажили втроем. Тут можно без конца описывать - соблазн, вечную пыточку, зуд, безумную надежду. И в общем - просчет. Время бежит-летит, он стареет, она расцветает, - и ни черта. Пройдет, бывало, рядом, обожжет презрительным взглядом. А? Чувствуете трагедию Достоевского? Эта история, видите ли, произошла с одним моим большим приятелем, в некотором царстве, в некотором самоварстве, во времена царя Гороха. Каково?" - и Борис Иванович, обрати в сторону темные глаза, надул губы и издал меланхолический лопающийся звук.
Once, when he had noticed some written-up sheets of paper on Fyodor’s desk, he said, adopting a new heartfelt tone of voice: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” and Boris Ivanovich, turning his dark eyes away, pursed his lips and emitted a melancholy, bursting sound. (Chapter Three)
Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn bring to mind a tropical setting mentioned in Lolita by Quilty:
“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing face is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everythingsex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre , sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhereis not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégé to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables . You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next playI have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa - curious name - who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thingyou are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable workdrop that gunwith photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skiesdrop that gunand moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow” (2.35)
Clare Quilty is the author (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom) of The Lady who Loved the Lightning. Describing his hopeless situation, Humbert Humbert mentions some classical poison from a hollow agate:
Perhaps if the year were 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. (1.20)
Enchanted Hunters in Lolita
Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together in The Enchanted Hunters, a hotel in Briceland. Marousi or Maroussi, also known as Amarousio (Αμαρούσιο), is a city and a suburb in the northeastern part of the Athens urban area, Greece. Marousi dates back to the era of the ancient Athenian Republic; its ancient name was Athmonon and it represented one of the 10 Athenian sub-cities. The area held a main ancient temple, where Amarysia Artemis, the goddess of hunting, was adored. Consequently the city's modern name derives from that of the goddess, Amarysia, which denotes the origin of the worship back in Amarynthos, Euboea. Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi is an impressionist travelogue that was first published in 1941 by Colt Press of San Francisco. Set in pre-Second World War Greece of 1939, it is ostensibly an exploration of the "Colossus" of the title, George Katsimbalis, a poet and raconteur. VN's coeval, George Katsimbalis (1899-1978) had a sister, Soso, who committed suicide as a young adult. Soso Dzhugashvili is Joseph Stalin's real name. The raconteur is someone who tells funny or interesting stories. In a poem that he composed for Rita Humbert mentions Diana (the Roman goddess of hunting who equated with the Greek goddess Artemis):
The place was called Enchanted Hunters. Query:
What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell
endorse to make of Picture Lake a very
blood bath of trees before the blue hotel?
colossus, colossus Tolstoy in Pnin
Humbert Humbert was born in 1910, in Paris. Leo Tolstoy died in 1910. In VN's novel Pnin (1957) Pnin mentions the wife of colossus, colossus Tolstoy who liked much better than him a stoopid moozishan with red noz:
With apologies for his 'negligent toilet', Pnin showed the film to a group of students--and Betty Bliss, a graduate working in Comparative Literature where Pnin was assisting Dr Hagen, announced that Timofey Pavlovich looked exactly like Buddha in an oriental moving picture she had seen in the Asiatic Department. This Betty Bliss, a plump maternal girl of some twenty-nine summers, was a soft thorn in Pnin's ageing flesh. Ten years before she had had a handsome heel for a lover, who had jilted her for a little tramp, and later she had had a dragging, hopelessly complicated, Chekhovian rather than Dostoyevskian affair with a cripple who was now married to his nurse, a cheap cutie. Poor Pnin hesitated. In principle, marriage was not excluded. In his new dental glory, he went so far one seminar session, after the rest had gone, as to hold her hand on his palm and pat it while they were sitting together and discussing Turgenev's poem in prose: 'How fair, how fresh were the roses.' She could hardly finish reading, her bosom bursting with sighs, the held hand aquiver. 'Turgenev,' said Pnin, putting the hand back on the table, 'was made by the ugly, but adored by him, singer Pauline Viardot to play the idiot in charades and tableaux vivants, and Madam Pushkin said: "You annoy me with your verses, Pushkin"--and in old age--to think only!--the wife of colossus, colossus Tolstoy liked much better than him a stoopid moozishan with a red noz!' (Chapter Two, 4)
The author of The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller traveled to Greece from Paris, a city where he lived in the 1930s. Btw., The William Henry Miller Inn is one of the most iconic buildings in the heart of downtown Ithaca, NY. Cornell University (where VN taught) is a private Ivy League land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. Pnin's parents died of typhus in 1917. At the end of 1923 or beginning of 1924 Annabel Leigh (HH's first love) died of typhus in Corfu. From 1925 Pnin habitated in Paris, abandoned France at the beginning of Hitler war.
Mona Dahl in Lolita
The characters in Lolita include Mona Dahl, Lolita’s best friend at Beardsley College who plays the Poet in Quilty’s “Enchanted Hunters.” In his Foreword to Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. says that Mona Dahl is now a student in Paris. Mona is a character (the author's wife) in Henry Miller's The Rosy Crucifixion, a trilogy consisting of Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1959). Sexus was put out in Paris as two volumes by Obelisk Press in 1949. It created a big stir, and was banned the following year, with the publisher fined and given a prison sentence. Plexus (it brings to mind Humbert's "tangle of thorns") was first published in English in 1953 by Olympia Press as a two-volume set (as two years later Lolita would be).
Mona Dahl's last name may hint at Roald Dahl (1916-90), a British author of popular children's literature and short stories, a poet, screenwriter and a wartime fighter ace. Dahl's short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, macabre, often darkly comic mood, featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters.
May, June, July & Dark Age in Lolita
Thirty-seven-year-old Humbert comes to Ramsdale and falls in love with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze at the end of May 1947:
May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the Carolinas. That day an epidemic of “abdominal flu” (whatever that is) forced Ramsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check the weather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before that I moved into the Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose to reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he swallowed) covers most of June. (1.11)
The "real" name of Mona (a character in Henry Miller's The Rosy Crucifixion) is June Mansfield (born Juliet Edith Smerdt, or Smerth, 1902-79), Henry Miller's second wife. Smert' is Russian for death (smerd means "serf"). As a boy Humbert wanted to be a famous spy:
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. (1.3)
On the porch of the Enchanted Hunters Quilty tells Humbert that July was hot:
I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps, looking at the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black night, full of ripple and stir. All I would do - all I would dare do - would amount to such a trifle… Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
“Where the devil did you get her?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: the weather is getting better.”
“Seems so.”
“Who’s the lassie?”
“My daughter.”
“You lie - she’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: July was hot. Where’s her mother?”
“Dead.”
“I see. Sorry. By the way, why don’t you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then.”
“We’ll be gone too. Good night.”
“Sorry. I’m pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?”
“Not now.”
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotelsand his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus. (1.28)
Clare Quilty (with whom Lolita escapes from the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949) is the author of Dark Age:
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. (2.26)
Henry Miller says somewhere: “If ever there was a guilty age, this is it. Guilt and hysteria. And at the bottom of it all, like an evil dragon, lies Fear.”
Fear brings to mind Pavor Manor (as Humbert calls Quilty's house near Parkington). Btw., McCoo's Ramsdale house and Duk Duk Ranch (to which Quilty takes Lolita) destroyed by fire make one think of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus destroyed by Herostratus (a mad arsonist).
“Nobody said anything.”
I have always been struck by Nabokov’s use of the Salingerian colloquialism: “Nobody said anything.” *
“Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place.”
In Franny and Zooey, Bessie Glass uses the phrase, but exactly:
“Sometimes I could almost murder Buddy for not having a phone,” she said. “It’s so unnecessary. How can a grown man live like that – no phone, no anything? No one has any desire to invade his privacy, if that’s what he wants, but I certainly don’t think it’s necessary to live like a hermit.” She stirred irritably, and crossed her legs. “It isn’t even safe, for heaven’s sake! Suppose he broke his leg or something like that. Way off in the woods like that. I worry about it all the time.”
“You do, eh? Which do you worry about? His breaking a leg or his not having a phone when you want him to?”
“I worry about both, young man, for your information.”
“Well…don’t. Don’t waste your time. You’re so stupid, Bessie. Why are you so stupid? You know Buddy, for God’s sake. If he were twenty miles in the woods, with both legs broken and a goddamn arrow sticking out of his back, he’d crawl back to his cave just to make certain nobody sneaked in to try on his galoshes while he was out.”
A short, pleasurable, if somewhat ghoulish, guffaw sounded behind the curtain. “Take my word for it. He cares too much about his goddamn privacy to die in any woods.”
“Nobody said anything about dying,” Mrs. Glass said.