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“The process of bathing took place on another part of the beach. Professional bathers, burly Basques in black bathing suits, were there to help ladies and children enjoy the terrors of the surf. Such a baigneur would place the client with his back to the incoming wave and hold him by the hand as the rising, rotating mass of foamy, green water violently descended from behind, knocking one off one’s feet with a mighty wallop. After a dozen of these tumbles, the baigneur, glistening like a seal, would lead his panting, shivering, moistly snuffling charge landward, to the flat foreshore, where an unforgettable old woman with gray hairs on her chin promptly chose a bathing robe from several on a clothesline. In the security of a little cabin, one would be helped by yet another attendant to peel off one’s soggy, sand-heavy bathing suit. It would plop onto the boards, and, still shivering, one would step out of it and trample on it’s bluish, diffuse stripes. The cabin smelled of pine. The attendant, a hunchback with beaming wrinkles, brought a basin of steaming-hot water, in which one immersed one’s feet. From him I learned, that “butterfly” in the Basque language is misericoletea-- or at least sounded so (among the seven words I have found in dictionaries the closest apporach is micheletea)” (p. 138, iBook edition).

In this passage, Nabokov describes being in Biarritz on vacation as a child. It reads as an almost allegory for his experience with the coming revolution-- he is the “client,” and his father is the “baigneur,” leading him through the revolution and keeping him safe in the “terrors of the surf.” The “rotating mass of foamy, green water violently descended from behind,” echoes the sentiments felt during the revolution, a red “mass of foamy... water” that surprises the family. “After a dozen of these tumbles,” or, after being forced into exile, eventually settling in western europe, “the baigneur,” or Nabokov’s father, “would lead his panting, shivering, moistly snuffling charge landward,” or out of Russia, to somewhere safe. The Nabokovs fled from place to place, like in this passage, from the ocean to the shore to the changing cabin. 

Chapter 3 Revision

Have you met Annabel? No? Me neither. I never did. The reason I ask is that I was watching the news the other day, and there was this story about this man who had killed another man and had kidnapped his own daughter and was awaiting trial in jail. He had a very strange name, one that was so familiar to me because of its strangeness, but I could not place it immediately. 

I realized that I met Humbert Humbert about thirty years ago, while I was a child and he was a child, while on vacation for the summer in the Riviera with my father’s cousin, Dr. James Cooper. Uncle James (as I called him, he was always more uncle to me than second cousin or first cousin once removed or whatever our relation actually was) was attempting to woo a woman, whose name I do not remember for it was a particularly normal one, and this woman was Humbert Humbert’s aunt. 

Uncle James, when he met Humbert’s aunt, wanted to spend time with her, and not me, which is something I understand in retrospect. Humbert’s aunt, when she met my uncle, wanted to spend time with him and not with Humbert, something I really, truly, understand in retrospect. So, us being close in age, separated by about two years, I his elder, we were natural play mates. 

When they introduced us, Uncle James and Humbert’s aunt, they told us to go play on the beach. And Humbert asked me, before even asking my name, before the obvious pleasantries of ‘where are you from?’ or the obvious criticism of my uncle for attempting to sleep with his aunt, he asked me, “Have you met Annabel?”

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “She’s mine.”

Humbert and I became playmates by necessity. It is no fun to be a child surrounded only by adults who don’t want you around. Humbert and I would often go to the beach, sometimes play in the surf, but mostly just sit on the beach, talking about the unimportant matters that children talk about. He would lift handfuls of sand and sift it through his fingers, allowing the sand to settle on his legs. I was never sure what he was looking for. We would sit on the beach and talk for hours, he playing with the sand, I watching him, skeptically, as he continued to comb the beach. Humbert loved tennis, I remember that now, and talked about it at length, sometimes even finding drift wood on the beach and swinging at the small jelly fish that washed up, attempting to drive them back into the ocean but usually – splat – they wouldn’t make it back to the water.

I remember one afternoon, he and I walked the length of the beach, talking about  what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him I planned to be a doctor in some Asiatic country, where people needed helping and I could make a difference. He didn’t acknowledge me, instead noticing something maybe twenty feet ahead of us, lying on the sand. He ran up, leaving me behind, examined the overturned horseshoe crab, alive, “It’s legs are still moving!” He screamed back to me.

Then he jumped and landed with all his weight on the crab, cracking its exoskeleton in pieces, spilling its crab innards. He looked back at me and, with a devious half-smile, announced, “I’m going to be a secret agent.” My sunglasses fell off and I did not pick them up again. They became two eyes permanently on the beach; the image of a helpless animal being crushed forever burned into their tinted retinas.

My uncle James invited Humbert’s aunt and Humbert to our villa, which was not far from the hotel that Humbert’s family owned and operated, one night for dinner. We ate, the four of us, at the table, and when dinner was over the adults ordered us to go play. Humbert looked at me, announced he was preoccupied, too preoccupied to play with me, went into the small bag he had brought with him, removed a book of Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, and went out to sit in the garden. 

I did not follow immediately. Instead, I went to my room, picked a book, and began reading by my window. I could see Humbert at the far end of the garden, lying on his stomach, book open on the ground, raising and lowering his hips in rhythm.

I went downstairs, through the study to avoid the adults in the living room, and out into the garden. “Humbert?” I said. “What are you doing?”

Humbert quickly rose from the ground, embarrassment on his cheeks, holding the book of poems across his groin. He got angry, screamed at me some unintelligible mad rantings, until his aunt heard and came outside. My uncle followed.

Their evening ruined, the adults were upset with us children. When they asked what we had been doing, I told them I had only just come out here a minute ago, Humbert accused me of lying, and our forced friendship became a forced acquaintanceship. We were still made to play together on a regular basis, but now we would be watched incessantly, which was fine by me because I was not sure how many more living and semi-living sea creatures I could watch Humbert kill on the beach.

Now when we went to the beach we were allowed out of earshot but never out of sight. Our days became tedious, Humbert talking about this Annabel I had never met, would never meet, while I tried my best to ignore him. 

The last day of the summer could not come quickly enough. I was ready to move onto our next engagement, but my uncle was sad to be leaving Humbert’s aunt, so one final dinner was arranged. The four of us ate at a sidewalk cafe that night, My uncle and Humbert’s aunt and I on one side of the table, Humbert on the other, nose in his book, separate from us. 

I ate a chocolate glacé for dessert and Humbert stopped reading for a moment to watch me enjoy it. Then, suddenly, he was gone, and his aunt and my uncle did not seem to care. I certainly did not.

The next day my uncle and I boarded a boat bound for Greece. I stayed for three weeks with him on that island, Corfu, before it was time for me to go back to England and back to school. Three months later, my uncle died of typhus.

Restoration

The poem, Restoration, deals with some very similar themes to those of Lolita. The first lines, "To think that any fool may tear/ by chance the web of when and where" sound as if they describe Humbert Humbert. The entire "memoir" is HH attempting to change "the web of when and where." We know that he is a not entirely trustworthy narrator, but we must also take him at his word because his word is all we have. What we definitely do know, is that the story probably does not take the trajectory he tells us.

The third stanza, too, reads as if describing Lolita and HH. "My little daughter wakes in tears:/ She fancies that her bed is drawn/ into a dimness which appears/ to be the deep of all her fears/ but which, in point of fact, is dawn." This sound like it could be describing any night HH and Lolita are together. She is sad and scared, but HH thinks she is misguided. He believes himself to be the "dawn," and her fears are misplaced/unnecessary.

In the final stanza, in true Humbertian form, effectively says he will fuck the world: "So I would unrobe,/ turn inside out, pry open, probe/ all matter, everything you see,/ the skyline and its saddest tree,/ the whole inexplicable globe,/ to find the true, the ardent core." The only way to get to the truest true, that "ardent core," is to unrobe and "probe all matter."

The Dangers of Fiction

In his essay, Lolita and the Dangers of Fiction, Matthew Winston discusses Lolita as a work of fiction, but still within it's own world. To be clear, Winston refers to Nabokov as the author only in the first and last sentences. Through out the rest of the essay, the author referred to is Humbert Humbert. This places Lolita firmly in the dangerous world of fiction. Winston's essay focuses mostly on Humbert as a narrator, and what this "autobiography" achieves. We are given glimpses of Humbert as narrator and we are asked whether or not to trust him. There is an end game to this book, from Humbert's point of view, and it is not really to prove his innocence. Winston tells us as much, as does Humbert, when in the third paragraph of the novel, he says "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." Winston says of the line: "the murderer, madman, and pedophile is balanced against the artistic creator, stylist, lover of language, and master of literary allusion," (421). But what is Humbert's true end game, then? It is an attempt at immortality. By writing Lolita, in this fictional world in which Humbert is more than a character, he forces these people, places, and events to live on forever, each time the story is reread. There is no way to know what is "true" and what's not in the story. Humbert is an untrustworthy narrator from the beginning. As Winston says, he has a "predilection for seeing his life through a veil of literature. To begin with, he tends to view himself as a character in a work of fiction," (423). We know as soon as he invokes Poe's Annabel Lee that he is probably not telling us the truth, and we know that he is attempting to fill the whole left by Annabel with Lolita. He thinks he's living in a fairy tale. And what stories last longer than fairy tales?

Uses of Imagery

"In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards—presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy." Here, Humbert physicalizes his memory of Annabel. It appears to him "like playing cards," a way for him to explain to himself why they don't appear exactly true. His memory is almost out of order, like a deck of cards that needs shuffling. "We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country, that, by then, in retrospect, was no more than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep." The journey is a humongous, disgusting slug, leaving a trail of slime able to defile an entire country! Here, Humbert is honest with himself and the reader. The ugly metaphor is apt to describe what the ugly act he is committing. He isn't convincing himself of anything; he's being fully truthful.

transformation

Issue: Transformation "But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child, "enfant charmante et fourbe," dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her. So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles." "'There is another man in my life.' Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed me, I confess. To beat her up in the street, there and then, as an honest vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of secret sufferings had taught me superhuman self-control. So I ushered her into a taxi which had been invitingly creeping along the curb for some time, and in this comparative privacy I quietly suggested she comment her wild talk. A mounting fury was suffocating me--not because I had any particular fondness for that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because matters of legal and illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide, and here she was, Valeria, the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way of my comfort and fate. I demanded her lover's name. I repeated my question; but she kept up a burlesque babble, discoursing on her unhappiness with me and announcing plans for an immediate divorce. "Mais qui est-ce?" I shouted at last, striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even wincing, stared at me as if the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug and pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver. He pulled up at a small cafè and introduced himself. I do not remember his ridiculous name but after all those years I still see him quite clearly--a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut; there were thousands of them plying that fool's trade in Paris. We sat down at a table; the Tsarist ordered wine, and Valeria, after applying a wet napkin to her knee, went on talking--into me rather than to me; she poured words into this dignified receptacle with a volubility I had never suspected she had in her. And every now and then she would volley a burst of Slavic at her stolid lover. The situation was preposterous and became even more so when the taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began to unfold his views and plans. With an atrocious accent to his careful French, he delineated the world of love and work into which he proposed to enter hand in hand with his child-wife Valeria. She by now was preening herself, between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent, and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to another even wiser one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or should read. "I think," - he said, "She will like Jean Christophe?" Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich." (The transformation here is two-fold: HHs tone transforms from anger to indifference, and his memory transforms from not knowing the "ridiculous name" to ending the passage with it.) "A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron would of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had possessed her--and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder."