Anxiety

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 On Beauty (2005)

  Howard, dazed, made his way back to his chair. On the way, he was passed by his daughter, who had just entered the room. Zora squeezed his arm and grinned at him, presuming he had just acquitted himself as well as she was about to. She took a chair next to Liddy Cantalino. She held a pristine pile of paper in her lap. She looked powerful, lit from within by her own fearsome youth. ‘Now,’ said Jack, ‘one of our students, as you see, is with us – she is going to be talking to us about an issue she feels passionate about, as I understand it, and which Professor Kipps touched on earlier – our ‘‘discretionary’’ students, if we can put it that way . . . but before we get on to that, there’s some standard college business to be attended to . . .’ Jack reached out for a piece of paper that Liddy had already drawn from the pile and extended to him. ‘Thank you, Liddy. Publications! Always happy news. And publications next year will include Dr J. M. Wilson’s ‘‘ Windmills of My Mind ’’: Pursuing the Dream of Natural Energy , Branvain Press, which is due for publication in May; Dr Stefan Guilleme’s ‘‘ Paint It Black’’: Adventures in Minimalist America , Yale University Press, in October; Borders and Intersections, or Dancing with Anansi: A Study in Caribbean Mythemes by Professor Erskine Jegede, published by our own Wellington Press this August . . .’ Through this list of triumphant forthcoming publications Howard doodled his way through two sides of paper, waiting for the inevitable, now almost traditional reference to himself. ‘And we await . . . we await,’ said Jack wistfully, ‘Dr Howard Belsey’s Against Rembrandt: Interrogating a Master , which . . . which . . .’ ‘No date as yet,’ confirmed Howard.  At one thirty the doors were opened. The ‘funnel’ that Jack French had predicted now manifested itself, in the doorway, as many faculty members forced themselves through a small gap. Howard  on beauty and being wrong

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  By that time it was close to ten. With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples. Brown, naked, frail Lo, her narrow white buttocks to me, her sulky face to a door mirror, stood, arms akimbo, feet (in new slippers with pussy-fur tops) wide apart, and through a forehanging lock tritely mugged at herself in the glass. From the corridor came the cooing voices of colored maids at work, and presently there was a mild attempt to open the door of our room. I had Lo go to the bathroom and take a much-needed soap shower. The bed was a frightful mess with overtones of potato chips. She tried on a two-piece navy wool, then a sleeveless blouse with a swirly clathrate skirt, but the first was too tight and the second too ample, and when I begged her to hurry up (the situation was beginning to frighten me), Lo viciously sent those nice presents of mine hurtling into a corner, and put on yesterday’s dress. When she was ready at last, I gave her a lovely new purse of simulated calf (in which I had slipped quite a few pennies and two mint-bright dimes) and told her to buy herself a magazine in the lobby. “I’ll be down in a minute,” I said. “And if I were you, my dear, I would not talk to strangers.” Except for my poor little gifts, there was not much to pack; but I was forced to devote a dangerous amount of time (was she up to something downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such a way as to suggest the abandoned nest of a restless father and his tomboy daughter, instead of an ex-convict’s saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores. Then I finished dressing and had the hoary bellboy come up for the bags.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  After the meeting I was hoping to talk to Adrian, but Bennett whisked me away before Adrian extricated himself from the crowd around the stage. The three of us were already involved in a baroque trio. Bennett sensed my explosive feelings and did his best to get me away from the university as soon as possible. Adrian sensed my explosive feelings and kept looking at Bennett to see what he knew. And I already felt as if I were being torn apart by the two of them. It was not their fault, of course. They only represented the struggle within me. Bennett’s careful, compulsive, and boring steadfastness was my own panic about change, my fear of being alone, my need for security. Adrian’s antic manners and ass-grabbing was the part of me that wanted exuberance above all. I had never been able to make peace between the two halves of myself. All I had managed to do was suppress one half (for a while) at the expense of the other. I had never been happy with the bourgeois virtues of marriage, stability, and work above pleasure. I was too curious and adventurous not to chafe under those restrictions. But I also suffered from night terrors and attacks of panic at being alone. So I always wound up living with somebody or being married. Besides I really believed in pursuing a longstanding and deep relationship with one person. I could easily see the sterility of hopping from bed to bed and having shallow affairs with lots of shallow people. I had had the unutterably dismal experience of waking up in bed with a man I couldn’t bear to talk to—and that was certainly no liberation either. But still, there just didn’t seem to be any way to get the best of both exuberance and stability into your life. The fact that greater minds than mine had pondered these issues and come up with no very clear answers didn’t comfort me much either. It only made me feel that my concerns were banal and commonplace. If I were really an exceptional person, I thought, I wouldn’t spend hours worrying my head about marriage and adultery. I would just go out and snatch life with both hands and feel no remorse or guilt for anything. My guilt only showed how thoroughly bourgeois and contemptible I was. All my worrying this sad old bone only showed my ordinariness. — That evening the festivities began with a candidates’ party at a café in Grinzing. It was a highly inelegant affair. Great phallic knockwursts and sauerkraut were the Freudian main course. For entertainment the Viennese analytic candidates, who were hosting the party, sang choruses of “When the Analysts Come Marching In…” (to the tune of “When the Saints…”). The lyrics were in English, presumably—or at least in some language a Viennese candidate might regard as English.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Call the place whatever you like: the Mirrored Room, the Seventh Circle, the Silvermine, the Glass Balloon. I know, at least, that the name was in English. Very trendy and forgettable. Bennett, Marie, and Robin said they were sitting down to order drinks. Adrian and I began to dance, our drunken gyrations repeated in the endless mirrors. Finally we sought a nook between two mirrors where we could kiss, watched only by infinite numbers of ourselves. I had the distinct sensation of kissing my own mouth—like when I was nine and used to wet a piece of my pillow with saliva and then kiss it to try to imagine what “soul-kissing” was like. When we began searching for the table with Bennett and the others, we found ourselves suddenly lost in a series of mirrored boxes and partitions which opened into each other. We kept walking into ourselves. As in a dream, none of the faces at the tables belonged to people we knew. We looked hard and with mounting panic. I felt I had been transported to some looking-glass world where, like the Red Queen, I would run and run and only wind up going backward. Bennett was nowhere. In a flash, I knew he had left with Marie and taken her home to bed. I was terrified. I’d finally provoked him into it. That was the end of me. I’d spend the rest of my lonely life husbandless, childless, and neglected. “Let’s go,” Adrian said. “They aren’t here. They’ve taken off.” “Maybe they couldn’t get a table and they’re waiting outside.” “We could look,” he said. But I knew the truth. I was abandoned. Bennett had left for good. At this very moment he was cupping Marie’s huge sallow ass. He was fucking her Freudian mind. On my first trip to Washington at the age of ten, I got separated from my family while touring the FBI Building. I got lost in the FBI Building, of all places. Bureau of Missing Persons. Send out alarm. This was at the absolute height of the McCarthy era and a tight-lipped FBI man was explaining various things about catching communists. I was dawdling before a glass case, dreaming into the fingerprint specimens, when the tour group rounded a corner and disappeared. I wandered about, gazing at my reflection in the exhibition cases and trying to keep down my terror. I would never be found. I was more elusive than the fingerprints of a gloved criminal. I would be diabolically interrogated by crew-cut FBI agents until I confessed that my parents were communists (they had been communists once, in fact) and we would all end our days like the Rosenbergs singing “God Bless America” in our damp cells and anticipating what it would be like to be electrocuted. At that point I began to scream. I screamed until the whole tour group doubled back and found me, right there—in a room full of clues.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And then you’ll always have something to fall back on just in case you’re not Emily Dickinson.” “I suppose you’re right,” I said, and went home to sleep. Brian woke me up with a bang in June. I’m not exactly sure when the onset of it was, but sometime in mid-June, I noticed that he had become more manic than usual. He had stopped sleeping entirely. He wanted me to sit up all night with him and discuss heaven and hell. Not that this was so unusual for Brian. He’d always been extraordinarily interested in heaven and hell. But now he began talking about the Second Coming quite a lot and he talked about it in a new way. What if (he asked) Christ came back to earth as an obscure market research executive? What if nobody believed Him again? What if He tried to prove his identity by walking across the water on Central Park Lake? Would CBS Evening News cover the occurrence? Would it be billed as a human interest story? I laughed. Brian laughed too. It was only an idea for a science fiction novel, he said. It was only a joke. In the days that followed, the jokes multiplied. What if he were Zeus and I were Hera? What if he were Dante and I Beatrice? What if there were two of each of us—matter and antimatter, three-dimensional and no-dimensional? What if the people on the subway were really communicating with him telepathically and asking him to save them? What if Christ came back and liberated all the animals in the Central Park Zoo? What if the yaks followed Him down Fifth Avenue and birds sat and sang on His shoulders? Would people believe who He was then? What if He blessed the computers and instead of spewing out printed sheets about which housewives buy the most detergent, they suddenly started spewing out loaves and fishes? What if the world was really controlled by a gigantic computer and nobody knew it except Brian? What if this computer ran on human blood? What if, as Sartre said, we were all in hell right now? What if we were all controlled by complex machines which were controlled by other complex machines which were controlled by other complex machines? What if we had no freedom at all? What if man could only assert his freedom by dying on the cross? What if you walked across the streets of New York against red lights with your eyes closed for a whole week and you weren’t even grazed by a car? Did that prove you were God? What if every book you opened at random had the letters G O D somewhere in every paragraph? Wasn’t that proof positive? Night after night the questions continued. Brian repeated them at me like a catechism. What if? What if? What if? Listen to me. Don’t fall asleep! Listen to me!

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘ Thank you, Christopher,’ said Jack and then took a very long time to introduce Christopher’s replacement as temporary Housing Officer (Christopher was soon to be off on sabbatical to Canterbury), a young woman who now stood to speak of the recommendations Christopher had already outlined at great length. A wide-reaching, yet subtle movement, like a Mexican wave, passed through the room as almost everyone repositioned their backsides on their seats. One lucky sod now escaped through the squeaky double-doors – a feckless novelist on a visiting fellowship – but she did not retire unobserved. Beady Liddy watched her go and made a note. Howard now surprised himself by getting nervous. He went through his notes quickly, too agitated to follow his material sentence by sentence. It was almost time. And then it was time. ‘And now if you would turn your attention to the third item on our agenda for this morning, which relates to a proposed lecture series for this coming semester . . . and if I can ask Dr Howard Belsey, who is tabling a motion in relation to, to, to, this proposed lecture series – I refer you all to the notes that Howard has attached to your agendas, which I do hope you have given the proper time and consideration, and . . . yes. So. Howard, if you could . . . ?’ Howard rose. ‘Maybe it would be more . . . if you . . . ?’ suggested Jack. Howard made his way through chairs to stand next to Jack, facing them all. ‘You have the floor,’ said Jack; he sat down and began to gnaw fretfully on his thumbnail. ‘ The right to freedom of speech ,’ began Howard, his right knee quivering uncontrollably, ‘ on this campus, though strong, must yet contend with other rights . . .’ Here Howard made the mistake of looking up and around him  on beauty and being wrong as public speakers are advised to do. He caught sight of Monty, who was smiling and nodding, like a king at a fool who has come to entertain him. Howard stumbled once, twice, and then, to remedy the problem, fixed his eyes on his sheet of paper. Now, instead of embroidering lightly around his notes, improvising, throwing out witty asides and employing all the other loose, from-the-hip sophisms he had intended, he read rigidly and with great speed from his script. He came to a close abruptly and looked blankly at the next pencilled note he had left for himself, which said After outlining broad issues, get to point . Somebody coughed. Howard looked up and got another eyeful of Monty – the smile was demonic – and then back at his paper. He pushed his hair away from where the sweat was sticking it to his forehead. ‘Let me, um . . . Let me . . . I want to state my concern clearly.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Bernard dog with orbits like pansies. In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet- wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years. I had a cup of hot flavorless coffee, bought a bunch of bananas for my monkey, and spent another ten minutes or so in a delicatessen store. At least an hour and a half must have elapsed when this homeward-bound little pilgrim appeared on the winding road leading to Chestnut Castle. The girl I had seen on my way to town was now loaded with linen and engaged in helping a misshapen man whose big head and coarse features reminded me of the “Bertoldo” character in low Italian comedy. They were cleaning the cabins of which there was a dozen or so on Chestnut Crest, all pleasantly spaced amid the copious verdure. It was noon, and most of them, with a final bang of their screen doors, had already got rid of their occupants. A very elderly, almost mummy-like couple in a very new model were in the act of creeping out of one of the contiguous garages; from another a red hood protruded in somewhat cod-piece fashion; and nearer to our cabin, a strong and handsome young man with a shock of black hair and blue eyes was putting a portable refrigerator into a station wagon. For some reason he gave me a sheepish grin as I passed. On the grass expanse opposite, in the many-limbed shade of luxuriant trees, the familiar St. Bernard dog was guarding his mistress’ bicycle, and nearby a young woman, far gone in the family way, had seated a rapt baby on a swing and was rocking it gently, while a jealous boy of two or three was making a nuisance of himself by trying to push or pull the swing board; he finally succeeded in getting himself knocked down by it, and bawled loudly as he lay supine on the grass while his mother continued to smile gently at neither of her present children. I recall so clearly these minutiae probably because I was to check my impressions so thoroughly only a few minutes later; and besides, something in me had been on guard ever since that awful night in Beardsley.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  chair, but it got caught, and he ripped it slightly. That was his best hoodie. At last it was detached – he hurried as best he could after that heavy-set girl with the glasses. With every step more people seemed to place themselves between him and her. ‘Hey! Hey! ’ But there was no name to put on the end of Hey and a six foot two athletic black man shouting Hey in a dense crowd does not create easiness wherever he goes. ‘She’s got my Discman, this girl, this lady – just up there – sorry, ’scuse me, man – yeah, can I just get by here – Hey! Hey, sister! ’ ‘ZORA – wait up!’ came a voice loud by the side of him, and the girl he’d been trying to stop turned around and gave somebody the finger. The white people near by looked about themselves anxiously. Was there going to be trouble? ‘Aw, fuck you too,’ said the voice resignedly. The young man turned and saw a boy a little shorter than him, but not much, and several shades lighter. ‘Hey, man – is that your girl?’ ‘ What? ’ ‘The girl with the glasses you was just calling? Is she your girl?’ ‘ Hell , no – that’s my sister, bro.’ ‘Man, she’s got my Discman, my music – she must have picked it up by mistake. See, I got hers. I been trying to call her, but I didn’t know her name.’ ‘For real?’ ‘This is hers, right here, man. It ain’t mine.’ ‘Wait here – ’ Few among Levi’s pastoral circle of family and teachers would have believed Levi could launch so promptly into action after an instruction as he did for this young man he had never met before. He pushed swiftly through the crowd, caught his sister by the arm and began to talk to her animatedly. The young man approached more slowly, but got there in time to here Zora say: ‘Don’t be ridiculous – I’m not giving some friend of yours my player – get off me – ’ ‘You’re not listening to me – it’s not yours, it’s his – his ,’ repeated  On Beauty Levi, spotting the young man and pointing at him. The young man smiled weakly under the brim of his baseball cap. Even so small a glimpse of his smile told you that his were perfect white teeth, superbly arranged. ‘Levi, if you and your friend want to be gangstas , piece of advice: you’ve got to take, not ask.’ ‘Zoor – it’s not yours – it’s this guy’s.’ ‘I know my Discman – this is my Discman.’ ‘Bro – ’ said Levi, ‘you got a disc in here?’ The young man nodded. ‘Check the CD, Zora.’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake – see? It’s a recordable disc. Mine. OK? Bye now.’ ‘Mine’s recordable too – it’s my own mix,’ said the young man firmly.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “She may meet boys at her own lovely home,” I said. “I hope she will,” said Pratt buoyantly. “ ‘When we questioned her about her troubles, Dolly refused to discuss the home situation, but we have spoken to some of her friends and really—well, for example, we insist you un-veto her nonparticipation in the dramatic group. You just must allow her to take part in The Hunted Enchanters. She was such a perfect little nymph in the try-out, and sometime in spring the author will stay for a few days at Beardsley College and may attend a rehearsal or two in our new auditorium. I mean it is all part of the fun of being young and alive and beautiful. You must understand—” “I always thought of myself,” I said, “as a very understanding father.” “Oh no doubt, no doubt, but Miss Cormorant thinks, and I am inclined to agree with her, that Dolly is obsessed by sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet, and will tease and martyrize other girls, or even our younger instructors because they do have innocent dates with boys.” Shrugged my shoulders. A shabby émigré. “Let us put our two heads together, Mr. Haze. What on earth is wrong with that child?” “She seems quite normal and happy to me,” I said (disaster coming at last? was I found out? had they got some hypnotist?). “What worries me,” said Miss Pratt looking at her watch and starting to go over the whole subject again, “is that both teachers and schoolmates find Dolly antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey—and everybody wonders why you are so firmly opposed to all the natural recreations of a normal child.” “Do you mean sex play?” I asked jauntily, in despair, a cornered old rat. “Well, I certainly welcome this civilized terminology,” said Pratt with a grin. “But this is not quite the point. Under the auspices of Beardsley School, dramatics, dances and other natural activities are not technically sex play, though girls do meet boys, if that is what you object to.” “All right,” I said, my hassock exhaling a weary sigh. “You win. She can take part in that play. Provided male parts are taken by female parts.” “I am always fascinated,” said Pratt, “by the admirable way foreigners—or at least naturalized Americans—use our rich language. I’m sure Miss Gold, who conducts the play group, will be overjoyed. I notice she is one of the few teachers that seem to like—I mean who seem to find Dolly manageable. This takes care of general topics, I guess; now comes a special matter. We are in trouble again.” Pratt paused truculently, then rubbed her index finger under her nostrils with such vigor that her nose performed a kind of war dance.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Have you seen Zora?’ ‘Zora?’ ‘Yes, Zora.’ ‘I don’t see ’er. Before I see, not now.’ ‘Everything going OK? Enough wine and so on?’  kipps and belsey ‘Enough of everything. Too much.’ A few minutes later, by the doors into the kitchen, Howard spotted his unsubtle daughter hovering by a trio of philosophy graduates. He hurried over to effect her entry into this circle. He could do this kind of thing, at least. They stood leaning against each other, father and daughter: Howard feeling the alcohol and wanting to say something sentimental to her; Zora oblivious. She was focused on the conversation between the grads. ‘And of course he was the great white hope.’ ‘Right. Great things were expected.’ ‘He was the darling of that department. At twenty-two or whatever.’ ‘Maybe that was the problem.’ ‘Right. Right .’ ‘He was offered a Rhodes – didn’t take it up.’ ‘But he’s doing nothing now, right?’ ‘Nope. I don’t even think he’s attached to anywhere at the moment. I heard he had a baby – so who knows. I think he’s in Detroit.’ ‘Which is where he came from . . . Just one of these brilliant but totally unprepared kids.’ ‘No guidance.’ ‘None.’ It was a very average piece of Schadenfreude , but Howard saw how Zora was compelled by it. She had the strangest ideas about academics – she found it extraordinary that they should be capable of gossip or venal thoughts. She was hopelessly naive about them. She had not noticed, for example, the fact that philosophy graduate number two was involved in a study of her chest, out on messy display this evening in an unreliable gypsy top. So it was Zora whom Howard sent to the door when the bell went; Zora who opened the door to the family Kipps. The penny did not drop immediately. Here was a tall, imperious black man, in his late fifties, with a pug dog’s distended eyes. To his right, his taller, equally dignified son; on the other side, his gallingly pretty daughter. Before conversation, Zora waded around in the visual information: the  On Beauty strangely Victorian get-up of the older man – the waistcoat, the pocket-handkerchief – and again that searing glimpse of the girl, the instantaneous recognition (on both sides) of her physical superiority. Now they moved in a triangle behind Zora through the hallway as she babbled about coats and drinks and her own parents, neither of whom, for the moment, could be found. Howard had vanished. ‘God, he was right here. God . He’s around here some place . . . God, where is he?’ It was an ailment Zora inherited from her father: when confronted with people she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly. The three guests stood patiently around her, watching Zora’s fireworks of anxiety.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Her hair was red and frizzy. The foam brace she wore around her neck had what looked like coffee and food stains on it, and it squished the skin on her neck up toward her chin. Her face was like a bloodhound’s, folded and drooping, her sunken eyes hidden under very small wire-framed glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. I never got a good look at Dr. Tuttle’s eyes. I suspect that they were crazy eyes, black and shiny, like a crow’s. The pen she used was long and purple and had a purple feather at the end of it. “Both my parents died when I was in college,” I went on. “Just a few years ago.” She seemed to study me for a moment, her expression blank and breathless. Then she turned back to her little prescription pad. “I’m very good with insurance companies,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know how to play into their little games. Are you sleeping at all?” “Barely,” I said. “Any dreams?” “Only nightmares.” “I figured. Sleep is key. Most people need upwards of fourteen hours or so. The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.” She scribbled for a while on her pad. “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness. You should know that I’m someone who appreciates the subtleties of human experience. Being well rested is a precondition, of course. Do you know what mirth means? M-I-R-T-H?” “Yeah. Like The House of Mirth, ” I said. “A sad story,” said Dr. Tuttle. “I haven’t read it.” “Better you don’t.” “I read The Age of Innocence. ” “So you’re educated.” “I went to Columbia.” “That’s good for me to know, but not much use to you in your condition. Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned, having gone to Columbia. How’s your food intake? Is it steady? Any dietary restrictions? When you walked in here, I thought of Farrah Fawcett and Faye Dunaway. Any relation? I’d say you’re what, twenty pounds below an ideal Quetelet index?” “I think my appetite would come back if I could sleep,” I said. It was a lie. I was already sleeping upwards of twelve hours, from eight to eight. I was hoping to get pills to help me sleep straight through the weekends. “Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats. I’m not a religious person, but you could try visiting a church or synagogue to ask for advice on inner peace. The Quakers seem like reasonable people. But be wary of cults. They’re often just traps to enslave young women. Are you sexually active?” “Not really,” I told her. “Do you live near any nuclear plants? Any high-voltage equipment?” “I live on the Upper East Side.” “Take the subway?” At this point, I took the subway each day to work.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  haec omnia tibi et multa alia de Veneris insidiis orientur, ut vel unam de manibus omittas offulam: nec putes futile istud polentacium damnum leve; altera enim perdita, lux haec tibi prorsus denegabitur. Canis namque praegrandis, teriugo et satis amplo capite praeditus, immanis et formidabilis, tonantibus oblatrans faucibus mortuos, quibus iam nil mali potest facere, frustra territando ante ipsum limen et atra atria Proserpinae semper excubans servat vacuam Ditis domum : hunc offrenatum unius offulae praeda facile praeteribis, ad ipsamque protinus Proserpinam introibis, quae te comiter excipiet ac benigne, ut et molliter assidere et prandium opipare suadeat sumere, Sed tu et humi reside et panem sordidum petitum esto, deinde nuntiato quid adveneris, susceptoque quod offeretur, rursus remeans canis saevitiam offula reliqua redime, ac deinde, avaro navitae data quam re- servaveras stipe transitoque eius fluvio, recolens priora vestigia ad istum caelestium siderum redies chorum. Sed inter omnia hoc observandum praecipue tibi censeo, ne velis aperire vel inspicere illam quam feres pyxidem vel omnino divinae formositati addictum curiosius thesaurum." 20 “Sic turris illa prospicua vaticinationis munus explicuit. Nec morata Psyche pergit Taenarum, sumptisque rite stipibus illis et offulis, infernum decurrit meatum transitoque per silentium asinario debili et amnica stipe vectori data, neglecto super- natantis mortui desiderio, et spretis textricum sub- dolis precibus, et offulae cibo Sopita canis horrenda rabie, domum Proserpinae penetrat: nec offerentis 276 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VI

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There was one strain running through all that pseudonymity which caused me especially painful palpitations when I came across it. Such things as “G. Trapp, Geneva, NY.” was the sign of treachery on Lolita’s part. “Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island” suggested more lucidly than the garbled telephone message had that the starting point of the affair should be looked for in the East. “Lucas Picador, Merrymay, Pa.” insinuated that my Carmen had betrayed my pathetic endearments to the impostor. Horribly cruel, forsooth, was “Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.” The gruesome “Harold Haze, Tombstone, Arizona” (which at another time would have appealed to my sense of humor) implied a familiarity with the girl’s past that in night-mare fashion suggested for a moment that my quarry was an old friend of the family, maybe an old flame of Charlotte’s, maybe a redresser of wrongs (“Donald Quix, Sierra, Nev.”). But the most penetrating bodkin was the anagramtailed entry in the register of Chestnut Lodge “Ted Hunter, Cane, NH.”. The garbled license numbers left by all these Persons and Orgons and Morells and Trapps only told me that motel keepers omit to check if guests’ cars are accurately listed. References—incompletely or incorrectly indicated—to the cars the fiend had hired for short laps between Wace and Elphinstone were of course useless; the license of the initial Aztec was a shimmer of shifting numerals, some transposed, others altered or omitted, but somehow forming interrelated combinations (such as “WS 1564” and “SH 1616,” and “Q32888” or “CU 88322”) which however were so cunningly contrived as to never reveal a common denominator. It occurred to me that after he had turned that convertible over to accomplices at Wace and switched to the stage-motor car system, his successors might have been less careful and might have inscribed at some hotel office the archtype of those interrelated figures. But if looking for the fiend along a road I knew he had taken was such a complicated vague and unprofitable business, what could I expect from any attempt to trace unknown motorists traveling along unknown routes? 24By the time I reached Beardsley, in the course of the harrowing recapitulation I have now discussed at sufficient length, a complete image had formed in my mind; and through the—always risky—process of elimination I had reduced this image to the only concrete source that morbid cerebration and torpid memory could give it.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Sending work to magazines was entirely out of the question. Though I had been class poet in college and had won the usual prizes, I was now convinced that nothing I was writing was good enough to send anywhere. I viewed editors of quarterlies as godlike creatures who would not even deign to read anything short of masterpieces. And I believed this despite the fact that I subscribed to quarterlies and religiously read the work in them. The work was often not good, I had to admit, but still, I was sure my own must be much, much worse. I lived in a world peopled by phantoms. I would have imaginary love affairs with poets whose work I regularly read in quarterlies. Certain names came to seem almost alive to me. I would read the biographical sketches of the writers and feel I knew them. It’s odd how intimate a relationship you can have with someone you’ve never met—and how erroneous your impressions can be. Later, when I came back to New York and began publishing poems, I met some of these magical names. They were usually entirely different from what I’d imagined. Wits in print might turn out to be halfwits in person. Authors of gloomy poems about death might turn out to be warm and funny. Charming writers could turn out to be most uncharming people. Generous, open-hearted, altruistic writers might turn out to be niggardly, hard-driving, and jealous…. Not that there were any absolute rules about it, but usually there were some surprises in store. It was a most dangerous business to judge a writer’s character by what he wrote. But all that reality came later. In my Heidelberg days, I was immersed in an imaginary literary world which was pleasantly out of touch with the grubby reality. One aspect of this was my curious relationship with The New Yorker. At the time of which I’m writing, The New Yorker (and all other third-class matter) used to sail across the Atlantic. Maybe this was the reason that three or four New Yorkers (none of them less than three weeks old) always arrived together in a heavy heap. I used to tear off the wrappers like someone in a trance. I had a ritual for attacking this ritualistic magazine. It had no table of contents then either—just the reverse snobbery of those little bylines preceded by diffident dashes—and I would plunge in backward, scanning first for the names under the long articles, canvassing the short-story credits, and breathlessly surveying the poems. I did all this in a cold sweat to the thumping accompaniment of my heart. What terrified me was the possibility of finding a poem or story or article by someone I knew. Someone who had been an idiot in college, or a known nose-picker, or who (in combination with one or both of these things) was younger than me. Even by one or two months.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The old garage man beamed at her. I swung onto the highway. “Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?” “Because,” I answered, “your mother is dead.” 33 In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments—swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go. Part Two 1 It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel—clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. At first, in my dread of arousing suspicion, I would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, each containing a double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangement was ever intended for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy could be attained by means of the incomplete partition dividing the cabin or room into two communicating love nests. By and by, the very possibilities that such honest promiscuity suggested (two young couples merrily swapping mates or a child shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities) made me bolder, and every now and then I would take a bed-and-cot or twinbed cabin, a prison cell of paradise, with yellow window shades pulled down to create a morning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvania and rain. We came to know—nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation—the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown glaze, of fried-chicken bones.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Ah-ah-ah, said the little door. At 10 Killer Street, a tenement house, I interviewed a number of dejected old people and two long-haired strawberry-blond incredibly grubby nymphets (rather abstractly, just for the heck of it, the ancient beast in me was casting about for some lightly clad child I might hold against me for a minute, after the killing was over and nothing mattered any more, and everything was allowed). Yes, Dick Skiller had lived there, but had moved when he married. Nobody knew his address. “They might know at the store,” said a bass voice from an open manhole near which I happened to be standing with the two thin-armed, barefoot little girls and their dim grandmothers. I entered the wrong store and a wary old Negro shook his head even before I could ask anything. I crossed over to a bleak grocery and there, summoned by a customer at my request, a woman’s voice from some wooden abyss in the floor, the manhole’s counterpart, cried out: Hunter Road, last house. Hunter Road was miles away, in an even more dismal district, all dump and ditch, and wormy vegetable garden, and shack, and gray drizzle, and red mud, and several smoking stacks in the distance. I stopped at the last “house”—a clapboard shack, with two or three similar ones farther away from the road and a waste of withered weeds all around. Sounds of hammering came from behind the house, and for several minutes I sat quite still in my old car, old and frail, at the end of my journey, at my gray goal, finis, my friends, finis, my fiends. The time was around two. My pulse was 40 one minute and 100 the next. The drizzle crepitated against the hood of the car. My gun had migrated to my right trouser pocket. A nondescript cur came out from behind the house, stopped in surprise, and started good-naturedly woof-woofing at me, his eyes slit, his shaggy belly all muddy, and then walked about a little and woofed once more. 29 I got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact, how square that slam sounded in the void of the sunless day! Woof, commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woof went the door. Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. How simple!

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Here, a boy’s story is merely his “own.” This suggests someone made accountable at too young an age for the full burden of his personal narrative. White’s novel alludes to works of self-actualization like Ben Franklin’s witty autobiography. Then it comically tweaks our expectations of the typical young man’s upward climb into solvent respectability, independence, possible greatness: When I was fourteen, the summer before I went to prep school, a year before I met Kevin, I worked for my father. He wanted me to learn the value of a dollar. I did work, I did learn and I earned enough to buy a hustler. We are far past the boy-victim implied by Dr. Ray’s “wayward child.” Here we greet an intellectual full-born in search of information one can learn only during postcoital cigarettes, while lolling beside men or boys and girls either overqualified or unworthy. This work charts the terror of being left too much alone with one’s own intelligence. How soon all of that can turn on a young fellow! In the person of our narrator, we’re up against a youth with the ability to register every nuance, aesthetic to erotic, but often while missing some essential hearty emotional reward. Progress here involves this child’s relentless search for that one true fulfilling connection; when it fails, we find him quick to settle instead for a restless anatomizing, a cataloguing of types, the gathering of sensations for their own sake. White’s achieved and textural prose is similarly questing, now referring to the natural world, now obsessed with high art, soon readily unbuttoning into the lowest reaches of fugitive erotic pursuit. But behind this forward-moving pressure toward the Great Love, one feels throughout the book an immense vacuum provided and maintained by our nameless boy’s stunted, brilliant, shut-off father. Among the work’s gallery of vivid, contradictory, richly entertaining figures, this emotionally inert man comes to be the most powerful. Complacently fat, eager to seem athletically adept but actually a nonswimmer clumsy in a panicky way, this naked gent encourages his young son to serve as his live-in masseur. Kingly in reverse, as in photographic negative, the millionaire father offers no less potent an attraction for his own hiddenness, his nocturnal schedule. Loving best his Labrador retriever and Persian cat, the dad demonstrates a strange fussiness, like that pet-loving terrorist villain from Ian Fleming. The young narrator’s unmet affection and banked rage seem the fossil fuel driving his verbal acuity, his sometimes cringing wish to please, his dead-eye erotic aim.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I folded myself into a booth, took a little pill, and for about twenty minutes tussled with space-spooks. A quartet of propositions gradually became audible: soprano, there was no such number in Beardsley; alto, Miss Pratt was on her way to England; tenor, Beardsley School had not telephoned; bass, they could not have done so, since nobody knew I was, that particular day, in Champion, Colo. Upon my stinging him, the Roman took the trouble to find out if there had been a long distance call. There had been none. A fake call from some local dial was not excluded. I thanked him. He said: You bet. After a visit to the purling men’s room and a stiff drink at the bar, I started on my return march. From the very first terrace I saw, far below, on the tennis court which seemed the size of a school child’s ill-wiped slate, golden Lolita playing in a double. She moved like a fair angel among three horrible Boschian cripples. One of these, her partner, while changing sides, jocosely slapped her on her behind with his racket. He had a remarkably round head and wore incongruous brown trousers. There was a momentary flurry—he saw me, and throwing away his racket—mine!—scuttled up the slope. He waved his wrists and elbows in would-be comical imitation of rudimentary wings, as he climbed, bow-legged, to the street, where his gray car awaited him. Next moment he and the grayness were gone. When I came down, the remaining trio were collecting and sorting out the balls. “Mr. Mead, who was that person?” Bill and Fay, both looking very solemn, shook their heads. That absurd intruder had butted in to make up a double, hadn’t he, Dolly? Dolly. The handle of my racket was still disgustingly warm. Before returning to the hotel, I ushered her into a little alley half-smothered in fragrant shrubs, with flowers like smoke, and was about to burst into ripe sobs and plead with her imperturbed dream in the most abject manner for clarification, no matter how meretricious, of the slow awfulness enveloping me, when we found ourselves behind the convulsed Mead twosome—assorted people, you know, meeting among idyllic settings in old comedies. Bill and Fay were both weak with laughter—we had come at the end of their private joke. It did not really matter. Speaking as if it really did not really matter, and assuming, apparently, that life was automatically rolling on with all its routine pleasures, Lolita said she would like to change into her bathing things, and spend the rest of the afternoon at the swimming pool. It was a gorgeous day. Lolita!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Then came the hearing. A few questions from the bench, a few reassuring answers from the attorney, a smile, a nod, a light drizzle outside, and the appointment was made. And still I dared not. Keep away, be a mouse, curl up in your hole. Courts became extravagantly active only when there was some monetary question involved: two greedy guardians, a robbed orphan, a third, Kill greedier, party. But here all was in perfect order, an inventory had been made, and her mother’s small property was waiting untouched for Dolores Haze to grow up. The best policy seemed to be to refrain from any application. Or would some busybody, some Humane Society, butt in if I kept too quiet? Friend Farlow, who was a lawyer of sorts and ought to have been able to give me some solid advice, was too much occupied with Jean’s cancer to do anything more than what he had promised—namely, to look after Charlotte’s meager estate while I recovered very gradually from the shock of her death. I had conditioned him into believing Dolores was my natural child, and so could not expect him to bother his head about the situation. I am, as the reader must have gathered by now, a poor businessman; but neither ignorance nor indolence should have prevented me from seeking professional advice elsewhere. What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be snatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come a strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and foundation. I decided that at Beardsley (the site of Beardsley College for Women) I would have access to works of reference that I had not yet been able to study, such as Woerner’s Treatise “On the American Law of Guardianship” and certain United States Children’s Bureau Publications. I also decided that anything was better for Lo than the demoralizing idleness in which she lived. I could persuade her to do so many things —their list might stupefy a professional educator; but no matter how I pleaded or stormed, I could never make her read any other book than the so-called comic books or stories in magazines for American females. Any literature a peg higher smacked to her of school, and though theoretically willing to enjoy A Girl of the Limberlost or the Arabian Nights, or Little Women, she was quite sure she would not fritter away her “vacation” on such highbrow reading matter.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. For instance: I would not swear that there was not at least one occasion, prior to, or at the very beginning of, the Midwest lap of our journey, when she managed to convey some information to, or otherwise get into contact with, a person or persons unknown. We had stopped at a gas station, under the sign of Pegasus, and she had slipped out of her seat and escaped to the rear of the premises while the raised hood, under which I had bent to watch the mechanic’s manipulations, hid her for a moment from my sight. Being inclined to be lenient, I only shook my benign head though strictly speaking such visits were taboo, since I felt instinctively that toilets—as also telephones—happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects—it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another—carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart always break. Well—my car had been attended to, and I had moved it away from the pumps to let a pickup truck be serviced—when the growing volume of her absence began to weigh upon me in the windy grayness. Not for the first time, and not for the last, had I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary trivialities that look almost surprised, like staring rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveller’s field of vision: that green garbage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks, the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incompleted crossword puzzle of their wooden cells, that bug patiently walking up the inside of the window of the office. Radio music was coming from its open door, and because the rhythm was not synchronized with the heave and flutter and other gestures of wind-animated vegetation, one had the impression of an old scenic film living its own life while piano or fiddle followed a line of music quite outside the shivering flower, the swaying branch. The sound of Charlotte’s last sob incongruously vibrated through me as, with her dress fluttering athwart the rhythm, Lolita veered from a totally unexpected direction. She had found the toilet occupied and had crossed over to the sign of the Conche in the next block.