Lo (1,11) In the Haze Home

In this chapter, we get the homelife of Humbert in the Haze household with his dream nymphet so very near. In the interest of compressing time and narrative, Nabokov uses the conceit of having Humbert relate scenes from these crazy summer days through his old diary entries. Here are a couple of excerpts from those entries.

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Very warm day. From a vantage point (bathroom window) saw Dolores taking things off a clothesline in the apple-green light behind the house. Strolled out. She wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body.

[On another day.]

Saw her going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose. Why does the way she walks - a child, mind you, a mere child! - excite me so abominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind of wiggly looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall. The ghost of a drag. Very infantile, infinitely meretricious.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

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It pays to look up the word ‘meretricious’. I was thinking that it meant ‘lying’, but the word carries richer shades of meaning. According to Dictionary.com, it means:

1. alluring by a show of flashy or vulgar attractions; tawdry.

2. based on pretense, deception, or insincerity.

3. pertaining to or characteristic of a prostitute.

Lo (1,11) Of Poe and Virginia

During one of his ravings, meditating over the median age of girls budding into pubescence, Humbert alludes again to Edgar Allan Poe and his little teen bride. Mr. Appel gives us a helpful footnote on some of the details.

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Poe was born January 19, 1809. He was therefore twenty-seven when in 1836 he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who died of a lingering disease in 1847. She was the inspiration for many of his poems.

-- Alfred Appel, Jr., “The Annotated Lolita”

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Nabokov was supposedly prepared to carry the Poe allusion much further than he did. Mr. Appel relates, “Nabokov told me that he originally intended to call Lolita ‘Virginia’ and title the book Ginny.” Readers and the whole world of literature can be thankful that Nabokov was able to break free of Poe’s hold on him. Lolita is perfect, all three trips of the tongue of it.