Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In the early 1880s, members of Roman high society began to talk of a only faithful!" young journalist who had arrived on the scene, a certain Gabriele D'An- — THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE MARSHAL DUKE OF RICHELIEU, nunzio. This was strange in itself, for Italian royalty had only the deepest TRANSLATED BY F. S. FLINT contempt for anyone outside their circle, and a newspaper society reporter was almost as low as you could go. Indeed well-born men paid D'Annunzio little attention. He had no money and few connections, coming from a strictly middle-class background. Besides, to them he was downright ugly—short and stocky, with a dark, splotchy complexion and bulging eyes. The men thought him so unappealing they gladly let him mingle with their wives and daughters, certain that their women would be safe with this gar-goyle and happy to get this gossip hunter off their hands. No, it was not the men who talked of D'Annunzio; it was their wives. 22 • The Art of Seduction His very successes in love, Introduced to D'Annunzio by their husbands, these duchesses and mar-even more than the chionesses would find themselves entertaining this strange-looking man, marvellous voice of this and when he was alone with them, his manner would suddenly change. little, bald seducer with a nose like Punch, swept Within minutes these ladies would be spellbound. First, he had the most along in his train a whole magnificent voice they had ever heard—soft and low, each syllable articu-procession of enamoured lated, with a flowing rhythm and inflection that was almost musical. One women, both opulent and woman compared it to the ringing of church bells in the distance. Others tormented. D'Annunzio had successfully revived the said his voice had a "hypnotic" effect. The words that voice spoke were in-Byronic legend: as he teresting as well—alliterative phrases, charming locutions, poetic images, passed by full-breasted and a way of offering praise that could melt a woman's heart. D'Annunzio women, standing in his way as Boldoni would had mastered the art of flattery. He seemed to know each woman's weak-paint them, strings of ness: one he would call a goddess of nature, another an incomparable artist pearls anchoring them to in the making, another a romantic figure out of a novel. A woman's heart life— princesses and actresses, great Russian would flutter as he described the effect she had on him. Everything was ladies and even middle- suggestive, hinting at sex or romance. That night she would ponder his class Bordeaux words, recalling little in particular that he had said, because he never said housewives—t hey would offer themselves up to him. anything concrete, but rather the feeling it had given her. The next day she would receive from him a poem that seemed to have been written spe- — P H I L I P P E JULLIAN, PRINCE OF AESTHETES: COUNT ROBERT cifically for her. (In fact he wrote dozens of very similar poems, slightly DE MONTESQUIEOU, TRANSLATED

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Like us, chimps and bonobos are African great apes. Like all apes, they have no tail. They spend a good part of their lives on the ground and are both highly intelligent, intensely social creatures. For bonobos, a turbocharged sexuality utterly divorced from reproduction is a central feature of social interaction and group cohesion. Anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that bonobos get a “reproductive payoff that compensates them for their wasteful approach to hitting the ovulatory target.” The payoff is “a more intense form of social cooperation between males and females” leading to “a more intensely cooperative social group, a more secure milieu for rearing infants, and hence a higher degree of reproductive success for sexier males and females.”3 The bonobo’s promiscuity, in other words, confers significant evolutionary benefits on the apes. The only monogamous ape, the gibbon, lives in Southeast Asia in small family units consisting of a male/female couple and their young—isolated in a territory of thirty to fifty square kilometers. They never leave the trees, have little to no interaction with other gibbon groups, not much advanced intelligence to speak of, and infrequent, reproduction-only copulation. Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except—if the standard narrative is to be believed—us. Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, “Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”4 Primates and Human Nature If Thomas Hobbes had been offered the opportunity to design an animal that embodied his darkest convictions about human nature, he might have come up with something like a chimpanzee. This ape appears to confirm every dire Hobbesian assumption about the inherent nastiness of pre-state existence. Chimps are reported to be power-mad, jealous, quick to violence, devious, and aggressive. Murder, organized warfare between groups, rape, and infanticide are prominent in accounts of their behavior. Once these chilling observations were published in the 1960s, theorists quickly proposed the “killer ape” theory of human origins. Primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson summarize this demonic theory in stark terms, finding in chimpanzee behavior evidence of ancient human blood-lust, writing, “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”5

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Don’t get us wrong. Darwin knew plenty, and he deserves his place in the pantheon of great thinkers. If you’re a Darwin-basher looking for support, you’ll find little here. Charles Darwin was a genius and a gentleman for whom we have endless respect. But as is often the case with gentleman geniuses, he was a bit clueless when it came to women. In questions of human sexual behavior, Darwin had little to go on other than conjecture. His own sexual experience appears to have been limited to his vehemently proper wife, Emma Wedgwood, who was also his first cousin. During his circumnavigation of the globe on the Beagle, the young naturalist appears never to have gone ashore in search of the sexual and sensual pleasures pursued by many seafaring men of that era. Darwin was apparently far too inhibited for the decidedly hands-on data collection Herman Melville hinted at in his best-selling novels Typee and Omoo, or to sample the dusky South Pacific pleasures that had inspired the sexually frustrated crew of The Bounty to mutiny. Darwin was far too buttoned-up for such carnal pursuits. His by-the-book approach to such matters is evident in his careful consideration of marriage in the abstract, before he even had any particular woman in mind. He sketched out the pros and cons in his notebook: Marry and Not Marry. On the Marry side he listed, “Children—(if it Please God)—Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,—object to be loved and played with.—Better than a dog anyhow…female chit-chat…but terrible loss of time.” On the other side of the page, Darwin listed concerns such as “Freedom to go where one liked—choice of Society & little of it…. Not forced to visit relatives & to bend in every trifle…fatness & idleness—Anxiety & responsibility…. Perhaps my wife wont [sic] like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool.”12 Though Darwin proved to be a very loving husband and father, these pros and cons of marriage suggest he very seriously considered opting for the companionship of a dog instead. The Flintstonization of Prehistory “Judging from the social habits of man as he now exists” is anything but a reliable method for understanding prehistory (though admittedly, Darwin had little else to go on). The search for clues to the distant past among the overwhelming detail of the immediate present tends to generate narratives closer to self-justifying myth than to science.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  While at Wellesley he also worked on Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Nabokov’s several books in English had meanwhile earned him the quiet respect of discerning readers, but Lolita was the first to attract wide attention. Its best-sellerdom and film sale in 1958 enabled Nabokov to resign his teaching position and devote himself to his writing in Montreux, Switzerland, where he took up residence in 1960. When the first edition of The Annotated Lolita went to press, he was working on a new novel (Transparent Things) and a history of the butterfly in Western art, and planning for the future publication of several works, including his Cornell lectures, his screenplay of Lolita (only parts of which were used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film), and a selection of his Russian poems, translated by Nabokov and about to be published, together with his chess problems, as Poems and Problems . Lolita had made Lolita famous, rather than Nabokov. Although praised by influential critics, Lolita was treated as a kind of miracle of spontaneous generation, for Nabokov’s oeuvre was like an iceberg, the massive body of his Russian novels, stories, plays, and poems remaining untranslated and out of sight, lurking beneath the visible peaks of Lolita and Pnin (1957). But in those eleven years since Putnam’s had published Lolita , twenty-one Nabokov titles had appeared, including six works translated from the Russian, three out-of-print novels, two collections of stories, Pale Fire (1962), the monumental four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964), Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966)—a considerably revised and expanded version of the memoir first issued in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence —and Ada (1969), his fifteenth novel, whose publication celebrated his seventieth birthday. The publication of Mary (1926) and Glory (1931), then being Englished by, respectively, Michael Glenny and Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, would complete the translation of his Russian novels. This extraordinary outburst of Nabokoviana highlights the resolute spirit of the man who published his masterpieces, Lolita and Pale Fire , at the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three, respectively. Nabokov had endured the exigencies of being an émigré writer when the Western world seemed interested only in his inferior Soviet contemporaries, and emerged not only as a major Russian writer but as the most important living American novelist. No doubt some academic pigeonholers still worried about Nabokov’s nationality and where to “place” him, but John Updike had solved this synthetic problem when he described Nabokov as “the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship.” 3 Not since Henry James, an émigré in his own right, had an American citizen created so formidable a corpus of work.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  This is an art Which does mend nature—change it rather; but The art itself is nature. (Shakespeare’s plea for open enrollment and/or miscegenation?) The kids began to get restless a few pages later and by then it was getting too cold to sit in one place anyway, so we packed up and moved on shortly after they did. “Wasn’t that great, darling?” I asked as we made our way out of the park. Brian laughed. “Vox populi is, in the main, a grunt,” he said. It was one of his favorite maxims; I don’t know where he got it. Later I discovered that my wallet was missing from the handbag which had lain open on the bench as we read. I wasn’t sure whether the kids lifted it or whether I’d lost it earlier and not noticed. For one mad moment I thought that maybe Brian took it to prove a point about “the common man.” Like my mother, Brian was a Hobbesian. At least until he discovered he was Jesus Christ and underwent a conversion of character and belief. His madness? What were the first signs of it? It’s hard to say. An old college friend recently told me that she knew from the start there was something odd about Brian and “would never have gotten involved with him.” But it was precisely Brian’s strangeness that I liked. He was eccentric, he was not like anyone else, he saw the world through a poet’s eyes (though he had little talent for writing poetry). He saw the universe as animated, as inhabited by spirits. Fruit spoke to him. When he peeled an apple he would make it seem to cry by means of ventriloquism. He used the same ventriloquist’s routine on tangerines and oranges and even bananas—making them sing and speak and even declaim in verse. He transformed his voice and his face to suit his moods. Sometimes he was Edward G. Robinson as Al Capone, sometimes Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, sometimes Grimfalcon the Elf (a character we invented together), sometimes Shakewoof (another imaginary friend: part Shakespeare, part snuggly sheepdog—a sort of poetry-writing hound).... Our long days and nights together were a series of routines, impersonations, playlets—with Brian doing most of the playing. I was such a good audience! We could walk and walk and walk and walk—from Columbia to the Village, across the Brooklyn Bridge (reciting Hart Crane, of course) and then all the way back to Manhattan—and never be bored. We never sat at a restaurant table in silence like grim young married couples do. We were always talking and laughing. Until we got married that is. Marriage ruined everything. Four years of being lovers and best friends and Shakespearean scholars together—and we blew it by getting married. I never wanted to. Marriage always seemed to be something I’d have plenty of time for in the future. The distant future. But Brian wanted to own my soul. He was afraid I’d fly away.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In politics, Talleyrand essentially played the role of the Ideal Lover with Napoleon, whose ideal in both a cabinet minister and a friend was a man who was aristocratic, smooth with the ladies—all the things that Napoleon himself was not. In 1798, when Talleyrand was the French for- eign minister, he hosted a party in Napoleon's honor after the great gen- eral's dazzling military victories in Italy. To the day Napoleon died, he remembered this party as the best he had ever attended. It was a lavish af- fair, and Talleyrand wove a subtle message into it by placing Roman busts around the house, and by talking to Napoleon of reviving the imperial glo- ries of ancient Rome. This sparked a glint in the leader's eye, and indeed, a few years later, Napoleon gave himself the title of emperor—a move that The Ideal Lover • 39 only made Talleyrand more powerful. The key to Talleyrand's power was his ability to fathom Napoleon's secret ideal: his desire to be an emperor, a dictator. Talleyrand simply held up a mirror to Napoleon and let him glimpse that possibility. People are always vulnerable to insinuations like this, which stroke their vanity, almost everyone's weak spot. Hint at some- thing for them to aspire to, reveal your faith in some untapped potential you see in them, and you will soon have them eating out of your hand. If Ideal Lovers are masters at seducing people by appealing to their higher selves, to something lost from their childhood, politicians can bene- fit by applying this skill on a mass scale, to an entire electorate. This was what John F. Kennedy quite deliberately did with the American public, most obviously in creating the "Camelot" aura around himself. The word "Camelot" was applied to his presidency only after his death, but the ro- mance he consciously projected through his youth and good looks was fully functioning during his lifetime. More subtly, he also played with America's images of its own greatness and lost ideals. Many Americans felt that with the wealth and comfort of the late 1950s had come great losses; ease and conformity had buried the country's pioneer spirit. Kennedy appealed to those lost ideals through the imagery of the New Frontier, which was ex- emplified by the space race. The American instinct for adventure could find outlets here, even if most of them were symbolic. And there were other calls for public service, such as the creation of the Peace Corps. Through appeals like these, Kennedy resparked the uniting sense of mission that had gone missing in America during the years since World War II. He also attracted to himself a more emotional response than presidents com- monly got.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  One, however, was not enough, she went on; she required several planes, and a helicopter, and her own per- sonal pilot, a good one. He agreed to everything. The leader of Indonesia seemed to be not just intimidated by Adams but totally under her spell. He praised her intelligence and wit. At one point he confided, "Do you know why I'm doing this biography? . . . Only because of you, that's why." He paid attention to her clothes, complimenting her outfits, noticing any change in them. He was more like a fawning suitor than the "Hitler of Asia." Inevitably, of course, he made passes at her. She was an attractive woman. First there was the hand on top of her hand, then a stolen kiss. She spurned him every time, making it clear she was happily married, but she was worried: if all he had wanted was an affair, the whole book deal could fall apart. Once again, though, her straightforward strategy seemed the right one. Surprisingly, he backed down without anger or resentment. He promised that his affection for her would remain platonic. She had to admit that he was not at all what she had expected, or what had been described to her. Perhaps he liked being dominated by a woman. The interviews continued for several months, and she noticed slight changes in him. She still addressed him familiarly, spicing the conversation with brazen comments, but now he returned them, delighting in this kind of saucy banter. He assumed the same lively mood that she strategically forced on herself. At first he had dressed in military uniform, or in his Ital- ian suits. Now he dressed casually, even going barefoot, conforming to the casual style of their relationship. One night he remarked that he liked the color of her hair. It was Clairol, blue-black, she explained. He wanted to have the same color; she had to bring him a bottle. She did as he asked, imagining he was joking, but a few days later he requested her presence at the palace to dye his hair for him. She did so, and now they had the exact same hair color. The book, Sukarno: An Autobiography as Told to Cindy Adams, was pub- lished in 1965. To American readers' surprise, Sukarno came across as re- markably charming and lovable, which was indeed how Adams described him to one and all. If anyone argued, she would say that they did not know him the way she did. Sukarno was well pleased, and had the book distrib- uted far and wide. It helped gain sympathy for him in Indonesia, where he was now being threatened with a military coup. And Sukarno was not surprised—he had known all along that Adams would do a far better job with his memoirs than any "serious" journalist. Interpretation. Who was seducing whom? It was Sukarno who was doing the seducing, and his seduction of Adams followed a classical sequence.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  After this introduction, the wives were escorted into another room, where they again took tea, and then were led into a banqueting hall, where the empress now sat on a chair of yellow satin—yellow being the imperial color. She spoke to them for a while; she had a beautiful voice. (It was said that her voice could literally charm birds out of trees.) At the end of the conversation, she took the hand of each woman again, and with much emotion, told them, "One family—all one family." The women then saw a performance in the imperial theater. Fi- nally the empress received them one last time. She apologized for the per- formance they had just seen, which was certainly inferior to what they were used to in the West. There was one more round of tea, and this time, as the wife of the American ambassador reported it, the empress "stepped forward and tipped each cup of tea to her own lips and took a sip, then lifted the cup on the other side, to our lips, and said again, 'One family—all one family' " The women were given more gifts, then were escorted back to their sedan chairs and borne out of the Forbidden City. The women relayed to their husbands their earnest belief that they had all been wrong about the empress. The American ambassador's wife re- ported, "She was bright and happy and her face glowed with good will. There was no trace of cruelty to be seen. . . . Her actions were full of free- dom and warmth. . . . [We left] full of admiration for her majesty and hopes for China." The husbands reported back to their governments: the emperor was fine, and the empress could be trusted. Interpretation. The foreign contingent in China had no idea what was really happening in the Forbidden City. In truth, the emperor had con- spired to arrest and possibly murder his aunt. Discovering the plot, a terri- ble crime in Confucian terms, she forced him to sign his own abdication, had him confined, and told the outside world that he was ill. As part of his punishment, he was to appear at state functions and act as if nothing had happened. The empress dowager loathed Westerners, whom she considered bar- barians. She disliked the ambassadors' wives, with their ugly fashions and simpering ways. The banquet was a show, a seduction, to appease the West- adjacent wharfs.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Nabokov thought it had been on Jack Paar’s television show, while her husband—the scientist, linguist, and author of fifteen novels, who has written and published in three languages, and whose vast erudition is most clearly evidenced by the four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin , with its two volumes of annotations and one-hundred-page “Note on Prosody”—held out for the Ed Sullivan show. Not only was nothing lost on Nabokov, but, like the title character in Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” he seemed to remember everything. At dinner the first evening of my 1966 visit, we reminisced about Cornell and his courses there, which were extraordinary and thoroughly Nabokovian, even in the smallest ways (witness the “bonus system” employed in examinations, allowing students two extra points per effort whenever they could garnish an answer with a substantial and accurate quotation [“a gem”] drawn from the text in question). Skeptically enough, I asked Nabokov if he remembered my wife, Nina, who had taken his Literature 312 course in 1955, and I mentioned that she had received a grade of 96. Indeed he did, since he had always asked to meet the students who performed well, and he described her accurately (seeing her in person in 1968, he remembered where she had sat in the lecture hall). On the night of my departure I asked Nabokov to inscribe my Olympia Press first edition of Lolita . With great rapidity he not only signed and dated it but added two elegant drawings of recently discovered butterflies, one identified as “ Flammea palida ” (“Pale Fire”) and, below it, a considerably smaller species, labeled “Bonus bonus.” 19 Delighted but in part mystified, I inquired, “Why ‘Bonus bonus’?” Wrinkling his brow and peering over his eyeglasses, a parody of a professor, Nabokov replied in a mock-stentorian voice, “Now your wife has 100!” After four days and some twelve hours of conversation, and within an instant of my seemingly unrelated request, my prideful but passing comment had come leaping out of storage. So too was Nabokov’s memory able to draw on a lifetime of reading—a lifetime in the most literal sense. 20 When asked what he had read as a boy, Nabokov replied: “Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian, and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The sacrifices you are making must be visible; talk- ing about them, or explaining what they have cost you, will seem like brag- ging. Lose sleep, fall ill, lose valuable time, put your career on the line, spend more money than you can afford. You can exaggerate all this for ef- fect, but don't get caught boasting about it or feeling sorry for yourself: cause yourself pain and let them see it. Since almost everyone else in the world seems to have an angle, your noble and selfless deed will be irresistible. 3. Throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century, Gabriele D'Annunzio was considered one of Italy's premier novelists and play- wrights. Yet many Italians could not stand the man. His writing was florid, and in person he seemed full of himself, overdramatic—riding horses naked on the beach, pretending to be a Renaissance man, and more of the kind. His novels were often about war, and about the glory of facing and defeat- ing death—an entertaining subject for someone who had never actually done so. And so, at the start of World War I, no one was surprised that D'Annunzio led the call for Italy to side with the Allies and enter the fray. Everywhere you turned, there he was, giving a speech in favor of war— a campaign that succeeded in 1915, when Italy finally declared war on Germany and Austria. D'Annunzio's role so far had been completely pre- dictable. But what did surprise the Italian public was what this fifty-two- year-old man did next: he joined the army. He had never served in the military, boats made him seasick, but he could not be dissuaded. Eventually the authorities gave him a post in a cavalry division, hoping to keep him out of combat. Italy had little experience in war, and its military was somewhat chaotic. The generals somehow lost track of D'Annunzio—who, in any readily imagine that between two subjects so perfect as these it knew little pause until it had them at its will, and had so filled them with its clear light, that thought, wish, and speech were all aflame with it. Youth, begetting fear in the young lord, led him to urge his suit with all the gentleness imaginable; but she, being conquered by love, had no need of force to win her. Nevertheless, shame, which tarries with ladies as long as it can, for some time restrained her from declaring her mind. But at last the heart's fortress, which is honor's abode, was shattered in such sort that the poor lady consented to that which she had never been minded to refuse. • In order, however, to make trial of her lover's patience, constancy, and love, she granted him what he sought on a very hard condition, assuring him that if he fulfilled it she would love him perfectly forever; whereas, if he failed in it, he would certainly never win her as long as he lived.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  humans are social creatures who are always imitating one another. At cer-from taking precautions. " tain points in history it may be fashionable to be different and rebellious, — C . J . B U L L I E T , but if a lot of people are playing that role, there is nothing different or re-VENUS CASTINA bellious about it. We should never complain about most people's slavish conformity, however, for it offers untold possibilities of power and seduction to those Beau Brummell was who are up for a few risks. Dandies have existed in all ages and cultures (Al-regarded as unbalanced in cibiades in ancient Greece, Korechika in late-tenth-century Japan), and his passion for daily wherever they have gone they have thrived on the conformist role playing ablutions. His ritualistic morning toilet took upward of others. The Dandy displays a true and radical difference from other peo-of five hours, one hour ple, a difference of appearance and manner. Since most of us are secretly spent inching himself into oppressed by our lack of freedom, we are drawn to those who are more his skin-tight buckskin fluid and flaunt their difference. breeches, an hour with the hairdresser and another two Dandies seduce socially as well as sexually; groups form around them, hours tying and "creasing their style is wildly imitated, an entire court or crowd will fall in love down" a series of starched with them. In adapting the Dandy character for your own purposes, re-cravats until perfection was achieved. But first of all member that the Dandy is by nature a rare and beautiful flower. Be differ-two hours were spent ent in ways that are both striking and aesthetic, never vulgar; poke fun at scrubbing himself with current trends and styles, go in a novel direction, and be supremely uninter-fetish zeal from head to toe in milk, water and eau de ested in what anyone else is doing. Most people are insecure; they will Cologne. . . . Beau wonder what you are up to, and slowly they will come to admire and imi-Brummell said he used tate you, because you express yourself with total confidence. only the froth of champagne to polish his The Dandy has traditionally been defined by clothing, and certainly Hessian boots. He had most Dandies create a unique visual style. Beau Brummel, the most famous 365 snuff boxes, those Dandy of all, would spend hours on his toilette, particularly the inimitably suitable for summer wear styled knot in his necktie, for which he was famous throughout early-being quite unthinkable in winter, and the fit of his nineteenth-century England. But a Dandy's style cannot be obvious, for gloves was achieved by Dandies are subtle, and never try hard for attention—attention comes to entrusting their cut to two them. The person whose clothes are flagrantly different has little imagina-firms—o ne for the fingers, the other for the thumbs. tion or taste. Dandies show their difference in the little touches that mark The Dandy • 49

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  If you make a clean quick break, in the long run they will appreciate it. The more you apologize, the more you insult their pride, stirring up negative feelings that will reverberate for years. Spare them the disingenuous explanations that only complicate matters. The victim should be sacrificed, not tortured. 6. After fifteen years under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French were exhausted. Too many wars, too much drama. When Napoleon was defeated in 1814, and was imprisoned on the island of Elba, the French were more than ready for peace and quiet. The Bourbons—the royal family deposed by the revolution of 1789—returned to power. The king was Louis XVIII; he was fat, boring, and pompous, but at least there would be peace. Then, in February of 1815, news reached France of Napoleon's dra- matic escape from Elba, with seven small ships and a thousand men. He Beware the Aftereffects • 427 could head for America, start all over, but instead he was just crazy enough to land at Cannes. What was he thinking? A thousand men against all the armies of France? He set off toward Grenoble with his ragtag army. One at least had to admire his courage, his insatiable love of glory and of France. Then, too, the French peasantry were spellbound at the sight of their former emperor. This man, after all, had redistributed a great deal of land to them, which the new king was trying to take back. They swooned at the sight of his famous eagle standards, revivals of symbols from the revolution. They left their fields and joined his march. Outside Grenoble, the first of the troops that the king sent to stop Napoleon caught up with him. Napoleon dismounted and walked on foot toward them. "Soldiers of the Fifth Army Corps!" he cried out. "Don't you know me? If there is one among you who wishes to kill his emperor, let him come forward and do so. Here I am!" He threw open his gray cloak, inviting them to take aim. There was a moment of silence, and then, from all sides, cries rang out of "Vive l'Empereur!" In one stroke, Napoleon's army had doubled in size. The march continued. More soldiers, remembering the glory he had given them, changed sides. The city of Lyons fell without a battle. Generals with larger armies were dispatched to stop him, but the sight of Napoleon at the head of his troops was an overwhelmingly emotional experience for them, and they switched allegiance. King Louis fled France, abdicating in the process. On March 20, Napoleon reentered Paris and returned to the palace he had left only thirteen months before—all without having had to fire a single shot. The peasantry and the soldiers had embraced Napoleon, but Parisians were less enthusiastic, particularly those who had served in his government.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  tailoring each one for its intended victim.) BY J O H N HAYLOCK AND FRANCIS KING A few years after D'Annunzio began work as a society reporter, he married the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Gallese. Shortly thereafter, with the unshakeable support of society ladies, he began publishing novels and books of poetry. The number of his conquests was remarkable, and In short, nothing is so sweet as to triumph over also the quality—not only marchionesses would fall at his feet, but great the Resistance of a artists, such as the actress Eleanor Duse, who helped him become a re-beautiful Person; and in spected dramatist and literary celebrity. The dancer Isadora Duncan, an-that I have the Ambition of Conquerors, who fly other who eventually fell under his spell, explained his magic: "Perhaps the perpetually from Victory to most remarkable lover of our time is Gabriele D'Annunzio. And this Victory and can never notwithstanding that he is small, bald, and, except when his face lights up prevail with themselves to put a bound to their with enthusiasm, ugly But when he speaks to a woman he likes, his face is Wishes. Nothing can transfigured, so that he suddenly becomes Apollo. . . . His effect on women restrain the Impetuosity of is remarkable. The lady he is talking to suddenly feels that her very soul and my Desires; I have an being are lifted." Heart for the whole Earth; and like Alexander, I could At the outbreak of World War I, the fifty-two-year-old D'Annunzio wish for New Worlds joined the army. Although he had no military experience, he had a flair for wherein to extend my the dramatic and a burning desire to prove his bravery. He learned to fly Amorous Conquests. and led dangerous but highly effective missions. By the end of the war, he —MOLIÈRE, DON JOHN OR THE LIBERTINE, TRANSLATED BY was Italy's most decorated hero. His exploits made him a beloved national JOHN OZELL figure, and after the war, crowds would gather outside his hotel wherever in Italy he went. He would address them from a balcony, discussing politics, railing against the current Italian government. A witness of one of these speeches, the American writer Walter Starkie, was initially disappointed at the appearance of the famous D'Annunzio on a balcony in Venice; he was short, and looked grotesque. "Little by little, however, I began to sink under the fascination of the voice, which penetrated into my consciousness. . . . The Rake • 23 Never a hurried, jerky gesture. . . . He played upon the emotions of the Among the many modes of crowd as a supreme violinist does upon a Stradivarius. The eyes of the handling Don Juan's effect on women, the motif of the

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Electra : “The name is based on that of a close ally of the Clouded Yellow butterfly,” said Nabokov, “and has nothing to do with the Greek Electra.” See Edusa Gold . For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr. . Ned Litam : the anagrammatic (it reads backwards) pseudonym under which the great tennis player William T. (Bill) Tilden II wrote fiction. See a famous coach … with a harem of ball boys , where Lolita takes lessons from him. endorsing a Dromedary : like Quilty; see Morell … “conquering hero” . Note how H.H. is continually providing oblique clues; see Quilty, Clare for a summary of Quilty allusions. fifty-three : the 1958 edition omitted the hyphen; the error has been corrected. susceptible to the magic of games … I saw the board : H.H. is speaking for his maker, who would hope that the reader shares this limpid view of the gameboard that is Lolita. stratagems : “beautiful word, stratagem—a treasure in a cave,” writes Nabokov in Gogol (p. 59). tessellated : laid with checkered work or adorned with mosaic. Champion, Colorado : an actual town, chosen by Nabokov because this is a championship game—H.H.’s attempts to fix in prose the beauty of the nymphet. Decugis or Borman : Max Decugis was a great European tennis player who often teamed with Gobbert (see Gobbert ). They were Wimbledon men’s doubles champions in 1911. Paul de Borman was the Belgian champion in the first decade of this century. Nabokov recalled, “He was left-handed, and one of the first Europeans to use a sliced (or twist) service. There is a photograph of him in the Wallis Myers book on tennis (c. 1913).” I could not find the Myers book, but Decugis and Borman are discussed in George W. Beldman and P. A. Vaile’s Great Lawn Tennis Players (New York, 1907). Beldman deplores Borman’s lack of aggressiveness and poor position (resulting from the way he used his body to achieve his spins and cut shots), and writes of him, inimitably, “I do not know that he has a single perfect stroke, yet in every shot he made there was education for him who was able to take it” (pp. 350–351). Nabokov took it, and immortalized Borman in Lolita. At first wince (to quote H.H.), such minutiae may seem no better than Kinbotisms, but they are calmly offered as an example of the precise manner in which Nabokov’s memory speaks to him and, as well, to suggest how he does indeed stock his “imaginary garden with real toads” (see Parody of a hotel corridor … and death ). He was in fact a life-long tennis enthusiast and supplemented his meagre income as an émigré by giving tennis lessons to wealthy Berliners.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  "sincerity" (sincerity can be feigned, and is just one stratagem among others). This only works, however, when you sense that the target is easily yours. If not, the defenses and suspicions you raise by direct attack will make your seduction impossible. When in doubt, indirection is the better route. Enter Their Spirit Most people are locked in their own worlds, making them stubborn and hard to persuade. The way to lure them out of their shell and set up your seduction is to enter their spirit. Play by their rules, enjoy what they enjoy, adapt yourself to their moods. In doing so you will stroke their deep-rooted narcissism and lower their defenses. Hypnotized by the mirror image you present, they will open up, becoming vulnerable to your subtle influence. Soon you can shift the dynamic: once you have entered their spirit you can make them enter yours, at a point when it is too late to turn back. Indulge your targets' every mood and whim, giving them nothing to react against or resist. The Indulgent Strategy In October of 1961, the American journalist Cindy Adams was granted an exclusive interview with President Sukarno of Indonesia. It was a remarkable coup, for Adams was a little-known journalist at the time, while Sukarno was a world figure in the midst of a crisis. A leader of the fight for Indonesia's independence, he had been the country's president since 1949, when the Dutch finally gave up the colony. By the early 1960s, his daring foreign policy had made him hated in the United States, some calling him You're anxious to keep your mistress? \ Convince the Hitler of Asia. her she's knocked you all of Adams decided that in the interests of a lively interview, she would not a heap \ With her stunning be cowed or overawed by Sukarno, and she began the conversation by jok- looks. If it's purple she's wearing, praise purple; \ ing with him. To her pleasant surprise, her ice-breaking tactic seemed to When she's in a silk dress, work: Sukarno warmed up to her. He let the interview run well over an say silk \ Suits her best of hour, and when it was over he loaded her with gifts. Her success was re- all. . . Admire \ Her singing voice, her gestures markable enough, but even more so were the friendly letters she began as she dances, \ Cry to receive from Sukarno after she and her husband had returned to New "Encore!" when she stops. York. A few years later, he proposed that she collaborate with him on his You can even praise \ Her autobiography. performance in bed, her talent for love-making— \

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Making your deed as dashing and chivalrous as possible will elevate the restrained her from declaring her mind. But at seduction to a new level, stir up deep emotions, and conceal any ulterior last the heart's fortress, motives you may have. The sacrifices you are making must be visible; talk- which is honor's abode, was ing about them, or explaining what they have cost you, will seem like brag- shattered in such sort that ging. Lose sleep, fall ill, lose valuable time, put your career on the line, the poor lady consented to that which she had never spend more money than you can afford. You can exaggerate all this for ef- been minded to refuse. • In fect, but don't get caught boasting about it or feeling sorry for yourself: order, however, to make cause yourself pain and let them see it. Since almost everyone else in trial of her lover's patience, constancy, and love, she the world seems to have an angle, your noble and selfless deed will be granted him what he irresistible. sought on a very hard condition, assuring him that if he fulfilled it she would love him perfectly 3. Throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century, Gabriele forever; whereas, if he D'Annunzio was considered one of Italy's premier novelists and play- failed in it, he would certainly never win her as wrights. Yet many Italians could not stand the man. His writing was florid, long as he lived. And the and in person he seemed full of himself, overdramatic—riding horses naked condition was this: she on the beach, pretending to be a Renaissance man, and more of the kind. would be willing to talk His novels were often about war, and about the glory of facing and defeat- with him, both being in bed together, clad in their ing death—an entertaining subject for someone who had never actually linen only, but he was to done so. And so, at the start of World War I, no one was surprised that ask nothinginore from her D'Annunzio led the call for Italy to side with the Allies and enter the fray. than words and kisses. • He, thinking there was no Everywhere you turned, there he was, giving a speech in favor of war— joy to be compared to that a campaign that succeeded in 1915, when Italy finally declared war on which she promised him, Germany and Austria. D'Annunzio's role so far had been completely pre- agreed to the proposal, and that evening the promise dictable. But what did surprise the Italian public was what this fifty-two-was kept; in such wise year-old man did next: he joined the army. He had never served in the that, despite all the caresses military, boats made him seasick, but he could not be dissuaded. Eventually she bestowed on him and the authorities gave him a post in a cavalry division, hoping to keep him the temptations that beset him, he would not break out of combat.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Adult imps are seductive because of how different they are from the rest child, still wrapped in his of us. Breaths of fresh air in a cautious world, they go full throttle, as if The Natural • 57 their impishness were uncontrollable, and thus natural. If you play the part, swaddling bands and do not worry about offending people now and then—you are too lovable feigning sleep. "What an absurd charge!" she cried. and inevitably they will forgive you. Just don't apologize or look contrite, But Apollo had already for that would break the spell. Whatever you say or do, keep a glint in your recognized the hides. He eye to show that you do not take anything seriously. picked up Hermes, carried him to Olympus, and there formally accused him of theft, offering the hides as The wonder. A wonder child has a special, inexplicable talent: a gift for evidence. Zeus, loth to music, for mathematics, for chess, for sport. At work in the field in which believe that his own newborn son was a thief they have such prodigal skill, these children seem possessed, and their ac- encouraged him to plead tions effortless. If they are artists or musicians, Mozart types, their work not guilty, but Apollo seems to spring from some inborn impulse, requiring remarkably little would not be put off and Hermes, at last, weakened thought. If it is a physical talent that they have, they are blessed with un- and confessed. • "Very usual energy, dexterity, and spontaneity. In both cases they seem talented well, come with me," he beyond their years. This fascinates us. said, "and you may have Adult wonders are often former wonder children who have managed, your herd. I slaughtered only two, and those I cut remarkably, to retain their youthful impulsiveness and improvisational skills. up into twelve equal True spontaneity is a delightful rarity, for everything in life conspires to rob portions as a sacrifice to the us of it—we have to learn to act carefully and deliberately, to think about twelve gods" • " Twelve gods?" asked Apollo. how we look in other people's eyes. To play the wonder you need some "Who is the twelfth?" • skill that seems easy and natural, along with the ability to improvise. If in "Your servant, sir" replied fact your skill takes practice, you must hide this and learn to make your Hermes modestly. "I ate no more than my share, work appear effortless. The more you hide the sweat behind what you do, though I was very hungry, the more natural and seductive it will appear. and duly burned the rest. " • The two gods [ Hermes and Apollo] returned to Mount Cyllene, where

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The embodiment of the Ideal Lover for the 1920s was Rudolph Valentino, or at least the image created of him in film. Everything he did—the gifts, the flowers, the dancing, the way he took a woman's hand—showed a scrupulous attention to the details that would signify how much he was thinking of her. The image was of a man who made courtship take time, transforming it into an aesthetic experience. Men hated Valentino, because women now expected them to match the ideal of patience and attentiveness that he represented. Yet nothing is more seductive than patient attentiveness. It makes the affair seem lofty, aesthetic, not really about sex. The power of a Valentino, particularly nowadays, is that people like this are so rare. The art of playing to a woman's ideal has almost disappeared—which only makes it that much more alluring. If the chivalrous lover remains the ideal for women, men often idealize the Madonna/whore, a woman who combines sensuality with an air of spirituality or innocence. Think of the great courtesans of the Italian Renaissance, such as Tullia d'Aragona—essentially a prostitute, like all courtesans, but able to disguise her social role by establishing a reputation as a poet and philosopher. Tullia was what was then known as an "honest courtesan." Honest courtesans would go to church, but they had an ulterior motive: for men, their presence at Mass was exciting. Their houses were pleasure palaces, but what made these homes so visually delightful was their artworks and shelves full of books, volumes of Petrarch and Dante. For the man, the thrill, the fantasy, was to sleep with a woman who was sexual yet had the ideal qualities of a mother and the spirit and intellect of an artist. Where the pure prostitute excited desire but also disgust, the honest courtesan made sex seem elevated and innocent, as if it were happening in the Garden of Eden. Such women held immense power over men. To this day they remain an ideal, if for no other reason than that they offer such a range of pleasures. The key is ambiguity—to combine the appearance of sensitivity to the pleasures of the flesh with an air of innocence, spirituality, a poetic sensibility. This mix of the high and the low is immensely seductive.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  hallmarks of a true lover longer than the others. Of course the major was a decorated soldier, well and of a perfect knight educated, an accomplished dancer, and one of the most handsome men in were almost identical. The the army. But Pauline, thirty years old at the time, had had affairs with lover was bound to serve dozens of men who could have matched that resume. and obey his lady as a knight served his lord. In A few days after the affair began, the imperial dentist arrived chez both cases the pledge was of Pauline. A toothache had been causing her sleepless nights, and the dentist a sacred nature. saw he would have to pull out the bad tooth right then and there. No — N I N A EPTON, painkillers were used at the time, and as the man began to take out his vari-LOVE AND THE FRENCH ous instruments, Pauline grew terrified. Despite the pain of the tooth, she changed her mind and refused to have it pulled. Major Canouville was lounging on a couch in a silken robe. Taking all In one of the goodly towns of the kingdom of France this in, he tried to encourage her to have it done: "A moment or two of there dwelt a nobleman of pain and it's over forever. . . . A child could go through with it and not ut-good birth, who attended ter a sound." "I'd like to see you do it," she said. Canouville got up, went the schools that he might over to the dentist, chose a tooth in the back of his own mouth, and or-learn how virtue and honor are to be acquired among dered that it be pulled. A perfectly good tooth was extracted, and Canou-virtuous men. But ville barely batted an eyelash. After this, not only did Pauline let the dentist although he was so do his job, her opinion of Canouville changed: no man had ever done any-accomplished that at the age of seventeen or eighteen thing like this for her before. years he was, as it were, The affair had been going to last but a few weeks; now it stretched on. both precept and example Napoleon was not pleased. Pauline was a married woman; short affairs to others, Love failed not to add his lesson to the rest; were allowed, but a deep attachment was embarrassing. He sent Canouville and, that he might be the to Spain, to deliver a message to a general there. The mission would take better harkened to and weeks, and in the meantime Pauline would find someone else. received, concealed himself in the face and the eyes of Canouville, though, was not your average lover. Riding day and night, the fairest lady in the without stopping to eat or sleep, he arrived in Salamanca within a few days.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  On Sunday mornings, he went to the county juvenile hall in Downey to instruct young men for their first Communion, something that usually occurs in the second grade. My father also arranged the more elaborate ceremonies of the year at our parish church. No one else in the parish knew how. My father had been a member of a religious order. He had been a sacristan and knew the rubrics of the Holy Week services that took place only once a year. My father instructed the boys who served on the altar, including my brother and me. He explained to the pastor and his assistants how they should walk in procession and what each should do during the ceremony. On the afternoon before Easter Sunday, he laid out the priests’ vestments, the beeswax candles, and the charcoal for lighting the new fire of Easter.