Edgar Allen Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

-- "Alone" (1829) by Edgar Allan Poe

PIcs

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Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando, One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

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Lo (1,2) La Beaute Humaine

Before we get to the Annabel chapter, we get one more note, about his schooldays and the early stirrings of puberty.

_ _ _

I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous La Beaute Humaine that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, 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 lycee in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters; but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

_ _ _

Aww, his father was not there during that critical summer when he most needed the helpful guidance of the sexually experienced man, when he meets his little Annabel (he was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea) and he is ready to move beyond pictures.

As for the wink and nod of the day, La Beaute Humaine, “The Human Beauty”, is not a real book, and the name of the author, Pichon, is French slang for for the female breast, some titty {Appel’s note}.

On a personal note, although Nabokov is probably right in assuming we are all anxious to get on with the action, I think I would have liked to see him expand on the scene of the debonair father relating the birds and the bees to little Humbert. I cannot help but think that this is a missed opportunity to strike comic gold.