FOREWORD"Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male," such were thetwo titles under which the writer of the present note received the strangepages it preambulates. "Humbert Humbert," their author, had died in legalcaptivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days beforehis trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation,Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in askingme to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client'swill which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matterspertaining to the preparation of "Lolita" for print. Mr. Clark's decisionmay have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had justbeen awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work ("Do the Senses makeSense?") wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed. My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for thecorrection of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenaciousdetails that despite "H.H."'s own efforts still subsisted in his text assignposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste wouldconceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact.Its author's bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, thismask--through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow--had to remain unliftedin accordance with its wearer's wish. While "Haze" only rhymes with theheroine's real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with theinmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader willperceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. Referencesto "H.H."'s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papersfor September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued tocome under my reading lamp. For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow thedestinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story, a few details may begiven as received from Mr. "Windmuller," or "Ramsdale," who desires hisidentity suppressed so that "the long shadow of this sorry and sordidbusiness" should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. Hisdaughter, "Louise," is by now a college sophomore, "Mona Dahl" is a studentin Paris. "Rita" has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida.Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborngirl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlemen in the remotestNorthwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to bepublshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it herbest book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that noghosts walk. Viewed simply as a novel, "Lolita" deals with situations and emotionsthat would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expressionbeen etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a singleobscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistinewho is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms alavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked bytheir absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, aneditor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind mightcall "aphrodisiac" (see in this respect the monumental decision renderedDecember 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerablymore outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of "Lolita"altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse ofsensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones inthe development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less thana moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes thesame claim; the learned may counter by asserting that "H.H."'s impassionedconfession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adultmales--a "conservative" estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann(verbal communication)--enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the specialexperience "H.H." describes with such despare; that had our demented diaristgone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, therewould have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been thisbook. This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed inhis own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but asynonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original,and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, is isabject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity andjocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive toattractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions onthe people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honestythat throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins ofdiabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magicallyhis singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita thatmakes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! As a case history, "Lolita" will become, no doubt, a classic inpsychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects;and still more important to us than scientific significance and literaryworth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; forin this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the waywardchild, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac--these are not only vividcharacters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they pointout potent evils. "Lolita" should make all of us--parents, social workers,educators--apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to thetask of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. Widworth, Mass* PART ONE *1Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap,at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in onesock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores onthe dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact,there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, acertain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About asmany years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can alwayscount on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what theseraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at thistangle of thorns.2I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-goingperson, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French andAustrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to passaround in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned aluxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had soldwine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl,daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorsetparsons, experts in obscure subjects--paleopedology and Aeolian harps,respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic,lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkestpast, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, overwhich, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), thesun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants ofday suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenlyentered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summerdusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. My mother's elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's hadmarried and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind ofunpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had beenin love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of itone rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I wasextremely fond of her, despite the rigidity--the fatal rigidity--of some ofher rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, abetter widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and awaxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. Shesaid she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Herhusband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America,where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate. I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright would of illustrated books,clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe,a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. Fromthe aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me,everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listedtowards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not paymy father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, tookme out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read tome Don Quixote and Les Miserables, and I adored and respectedhim and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss hisvarious lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me andcooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness. I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there Iplayed rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect termswith schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that Ican remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is,before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purelytheoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the schoolwith an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actresswhom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interestingreactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl andumbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon's sumptuous La BeautиHumaine that that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-boundGraphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonairmanner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex;this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycиe inLyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of thatyear, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobodyto complain to, nobody to consult.3Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English,half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly todaythan I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds ofvisual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratoryof your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such generalterms as: "honey-colored skin," "think arms," "brown bobbed hair," "longlashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, withshut eyes, on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutelyoptical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (andthis is how I see Lolita). Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to sayingshe was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friendsof my aunt's, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far fromHotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (bornVanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked ofperipheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting itpour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those ofintelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt ifmuch individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the pluralityof inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. Thesoftness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. Shewanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be afamous spy. All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in lovewith each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutualpossession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing andassimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there wewere, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found anopportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in hergarden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be outof earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage.There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawlall morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of everyblessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hiddenin the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalkingnearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautiousjourney; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted ussufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incompletecontacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state ofexasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawedat each other, could bring relief. 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 andthe staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summercourted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk cafe. Annabel did notcome out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolatglacи, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair wereabout all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid thesunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhatapart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: amoody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored whiteshorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photographwas taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes beforewe made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest ofpretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) weescaped 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 ofsunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point ofpossessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea andhis brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement,and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
