The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (70 page)

Gobbert
: a corrected author’s error (one
b
in the 1958 edition). André H. Gobbert was a French tennis champion c. World War I. “I saw him beaten by Patterson in 1919 or 1920 at Wimbledon,” recalled Nabokov.
“He had a tremendous (old-fashioned) serve, but would double fault up to four times in a game. Big dark fellow, doubled with Decugis against Brookes and Patterson, I think” (see
Decugis or Borman
).

ange gauche
: French; awkward angel.

simulacrum
: an unreal semblance (a favorite word of H.H.’s; see
here
and
here
).

a tall man
: a mirage of Quilty. The subsequent teasing ambiguity as to whether H.H.’s pursuer is “real” or an autoscopic hallucination (see
here
) parodies Golyadkin, Jr., and the central problem of Dostoevsky’s
The Double
(the narrator of
Despair
considers
The Double
as a title for his book, “But Russian literature possessed one already,” he says [p. 201]). For Quilty, see
Quilty, Clare
.

diaphanous
: delicate to the extent of being transparent or translucent.

pavonine
: like a peacock; iridescent.

oculate
: eye-spotted.

ramparts of ancient Europe
: translation and paraphrase of line 84 of Rimbaud’s
Le Bâteau ivre
(“The Drunken Boat” [1871]): “
Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets
” (“I long for Europe with its ancient quays” [ramparts]). Rimbaud’s use of “
parapets
” is shortly reinforced in an echo of the phrase (
parapets of Europe
). See
touché, reader!
for another allusion to this poem. Nabokov translated it into Russian in
The Rudder
, December 16, 1928. Rimbaud’s poem is transmuted, along with almost everything else, in
Ada
’s anti-world; Van Veen receives a message “in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s
Bâteau Ivre
, the one with a jester drinking in the riggings (poor old Dan [Veen] thought that it had something to do with Brant’s satirical poem!)” (p. 331). Ada and Van know by heart Rimbaud’s
Mémoire
, and it is one of two texts they use for their coded letters (p. 161). For more on Rimbaud, see
Peacock, Rainbow
.

caravansaries
: from a Persian word; in the East, an inn in the form of a bare building surrounding a court, where caravans stop for the night.

well-drawn … bobby-soxer
:
Penny
, the comic strip created by Harry Haenigsen in 1943. For other allusions to comic strips, see
Jutting Chin … funnies
,
Comics
, and
gagoon … kiddoid gnomide
. As responsive as he was scholarly, Nabokov the literary
anatomist was also amused and delighted by “lower” forms of art, and was not above making selective use of such materials in his writing. No one, he laments in the Foreword to the revised
Speak, Memory
, “discovered the name [in the first edition] of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him in the last sentence of Section Two, Chapter Eleven. It is most embarrassing for a writer to have to point out such things himself” (p. 15). The tribute is to Otto Soglow, creator of
The Little King
: “The ranks of words I reviewed were again
so glow
ing, with their puffed-out little chests and trim uniforms … [italics mine—A.A.]” (p. 219). John Held, Jr., is also alluded to (p. 265). “Who will bother to notice,” wonders Nabokov in the Introduction to
Bend Sinister
, “that the urchins in the yard (Chapter Seven) have been drawn by Saul Steinberg” (p. xviii). In
Ada
, an 1871 Sunday supplement of the
Kaluga Gazette
“feature[s] on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed)”—based, in reality, on an old French comic strip (p. 6). At the end of
Ada
, ninety-seven-year-old Van Veen describes how he “look[s] forward with juvenile zest to the delightful effect of a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the ‘funnies’ of his boyhood” (p. 570).

areolas
: the more-or-less shaded narrow areas around the nipples.

recedent
: a heraldic term, to match
pursuant.

“We … in this bottle
”
: the “quip” derives from the fact that the mariners could not possibly know they lived in the Middle Ages, just as the reader of this annotation has no idea what the twenty-sixth century will call our epoch.

umber … Humberland
: the pun (see
“Humbert Humbert”
) turns on the not-uncommon place name of Northumberland (England; New Hampshire; Virginia; Pennsylvania).

Frigid Queen … Princess
: the actual name of a milk bar, recorded by Nabokov in a little black notebook. The “Princess” alludes to “Annabel Lee” (
princedom by the sea
), who, fused with Freud, is once more in the novel’s foreground: “
the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or whatnot
.”

hors concours
: out of the competition: when something is exhibited at a show (e.g., livestock, tulips) but is so superior to the rest of the exhibition that it is barred from receiving the awards or prizes.

leporine fascination
: like a hare. The “able psychiatrist” is being hypnotized as a rabbit is by a serpent (H.H.).

manatee
: any of several aquatic mammals, such as the sea cow.

Arcadian … wilds
: from Arcadia, the idyllic rural region of Greece and the classic image of pastoral simplicity. “Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture,” notes Kinbote in
Pale Fire
(p. 174).

rill
: a very small brook.

cabanes
: huts; simple dwellings.

que dis-je
: French; what am I saying?

marmot
: any rodent of the genus Marmota, such as the woodchuck.

Venus came and went
: H.H. is being verbally playful about a sexual climax.

un monsieur très bien
: French; a proper gentleman (a very pompous and bourgeois expression).

hospitalized … by now
: reference to H.H.’s
Western-style fight
with Quilty on p. 299.

strumstring
: H.H.’s coinage; the crooner is Gene Autry (1907–      ).

harpies
: from classical mythology; foul creatures, part woman, part bird, that stole the souls of the dead, or defiled or seized their victims’ food.

orchideous masculinity
: belonging to the natural order of plants akin to genus
Orchis.
Its Greek etymology adds a comic dimension, for
orchis
means “testicle” as well as the plant. The
hideous
increases the humor.

parapets of Europe
: a Rimbaud echo; see
ramparts of ancient Europe
.

Oriental tale
: invented by Nabokov.

Beardsley
: after Aubrey Beardsley; see
McFate, Aubrey
.

Woerner’s Treatise
: it exists, Nabokov told the annotator.

A Girl of the Limberlost
: by Gene Stratton Porter (1863–1924), it was once a great favorite of schoolgirls (published 1914).
Little Women
(1869), by Louisa May Alcott (1832–1882), continues to be read.

ganglia
: plural of
ganglion
, an anatomical and zoological word; “a mass of nerve tissue containing nerve cells, a nerve center”; a center of strength and energy.

dans … l’âge
: French; in a mature age (when he is most robust).

vieillard encore vert
: French; literally, “an old man still green”—that is, sexually potent.

Know Your Own Daughter
: the “biblical title” is real, said Nabokov, although it has been impossible to document. Many similar titles exist, all lending themselves to
double-entendre
: Frances K. Martin,
Know Your Child
(1946); C. Lewis,
How Well Can We Know Our Children?
(1947); C. W. Young,
Know Your Pupil
(1945); and E. D. Adlerblum,
Know Your Child Through His Play
(1947). See
A Guide to … Development
.

The Little Mermaid
: anyone familiar with this fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), the Danish fabulist, knows that H.H.’s gift has been carefully chosen, and that there are several ironies involved. The little mermaid longs to “enchant a mortal heart”—namely, the prince—and thus win an immortal soul. Lolita has succeeded all too well; but neither H.H., Quilty, nor her husband Dick Schiller, who will carry her off to Alaska, qualifies as prince in the fairy tale
Lolita.
At the end of Andersen’s tale, the mermaid has been transposed into one of the freely circulating children of the air, who must float for three hundred years before they are admitted into the kingdom of heaven. But they can get in earlier, as one explains as the tale concludes: “Unseen we float into the houses of mortals where there are children, and for every day that we find a good child who makes his parents happy and deserves their love, God shortens our period of trial. The child does not know when we fly through the room, and when we smile over it with joy a year is taken from the three hundred. But if we see a naughty and wicked child, we must weep tears of sorrow, and each tear adds a day to our period of trial” (from
The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Other Fairy Tales
, Alfred and Mary Elizabeth David, eds., New York, 1964, p. 274). H.H., who later sheds “merman tears” (
merman
), no doubt hopes that Lolita will take this to heart. See also
Keys
, p. 134n. For the fairy-tale theme, see
Percy Elphinstone
.

casé
: settled.

27,000 miles
: see
traveled 14,000 … New York
.

rentier
: a man who lives from the interest of. his invested capital (generally applies to an old, retired man).

her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad’s
: The bi-iliac are the two most prominent points of the crests of the iliac bones. H.H. is toying with the last line of “To an Athlete Dying Young” (“The garland briefer than a girl’s”) from
A Shropshire Lad
(1896), by A. E. Housman (1850–1936), the English poet and Cambridge classics don (see
Speak, Memory
, p. 273;
Pale Fire
, p. 269). The poem’s aura is homosexual, but its theme of loss pertains to H.H., and his sense of youth’s transience.
His
athlete (roller-skating, tennis) is figuratively dying in this passage; the nymphet is
growing.
H.H. can appreciate the double lives (Housman tried marriage), the anguish and legalized persecution suffered especially by homosexuals in England (Oscar Wilde was jailed in 1895). Gaston Godin’s garret (
large photographs
) is built on this Housman.

habitus
: a not uncommon Latin noun meaning moral condition, state, disposition, character, etc.

Miss Cormorant
: she is named after the voracious sea bird.

recueillement
: self-communion, “collectedness.”

harems and slaves
: of course she can care, and H.H. has compared her lot to theirs.

Lester … Fabian
: their respective first and final syllables form “lesbian” (see also
Keys
, p. 96). See
Miss Horn … Miss Cole
for a similar effect.

Gaston Godin
: his “
Beardsley existence
” is also figurative, for he might well have been drawn by Aubrey Beardsley. H.H.’s caricature resembles the famous cover drawing of “Ali Baba” (for a projected edition of
The Forty Thieves
, never undertaken [1897]), as well as Oscar
Wilde, whose post-prison alias is bestowed on H.H.’s car (see
Melmoth
). Gaston is
fin de siècle
in many ways, as
this passage
make clear.

mes goûts
: French; my tastes.

He always wore black
: H.H.’s attire; see
here
.

large photographs
: they constitute a veritable pantheon of homosexual artists: André Gide (1869–1951), French writer, author of
Les Faux-Monnayeurs
(
The Counterfeiters
, 1925), winner of the Nobel Prize in 1947; Pëtr Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), Russian composer, whose “vile” and “silly” opera
Eugene Onegin
Nabokov could not abide;
Onegin
Commentary, Vol. II, p. 333); Norman Douglas (1868–1952), English writer, author of
South Wind
(1917); Waslaw Nijinsky (1890–1950), Russian ballet dancer of Polish descent (see p. 302), afflicted with insanity, and an associate of Diaghilev (who in
Ada
is the ballet master Dangleleaf [p. 430]); and Marcel Proust (see
Proustian theme … Bailey”
).

two other … writers
: one of whom, W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), author of
Of Human Bondage
(1915), would have been named had he not been still alive, said Nabokov. The other, Nabokov told me, is the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973). “These poor people,” says H.H. (p. 184).