Desire

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 Annotated Lolita (1991)

  7I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals. If her share in the ardors she kindled had never amounted to much, neither had pure lucre ever come to the fore. But I was weak, I was not wise, my schoolgirl nymphet had me in thrall. With the human element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture only increased; and of this she took advantage. Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start of the Beardsley era—and went up to one dollar five before its end. This was a more than generous arrangement seeing she constantly received from me all kinds of small presents and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under the moon—although, of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or even a whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted very badly some item of juvenile amusement. She was, however, not easy to deal with. Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies—or three nickels—per day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed—during one schoolyear!—to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks. O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in the margin of that leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot. And just as every other day I would cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visit drugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughter in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now and then I would burgle her room and scrutinize torn papers in the wastebasket with the painted roses, and look under the pillow of the virginal bed I had just made myself. Once I found eight one-dollar notes in one of her books (fittingly—Treasure Island), and once a hole in the wall behind Whistler’s Mother yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and some change—say twenty-four sixty—which I quietly removed, upon which, next day, she accused, to my face, honest Mrs. Holigan of being a filthy thief. Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hoarding place which I never discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school’s theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood—or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Thus when I was pleasantly mocked and taunted by Fotis, I sayd unto her, verily now may I for this atcheived enterprise be numbered as Hercules, who by his valiant prowesse performed the twelve notable Labors, as Gerion with three bodies, and as Cerberus with three heads, for I have slaine three blown goat skinnes. But to the end that I may pardon thee of that thing which thou hast committed, perform, the thing which I most earnestly desire of thee, that is, bring me that I may see and behold when thy mistresse goeth about any Sorcery or enchantment, and when she prayeth unto the gods: for I am very desirous to learne that art, and as it seemeth unto mee, thou thy selfe hath some experience in the same. For this I know and plainly feele, That whereas I have always yrked and loathed the embrace of Matrones, I am so stricken and subdued with thy shining eyes, ruddy cheekes, glittering haire, sweet cosses, and lilly white paps, that I have neither minde to goe home, nor to depart hence, but esteeme the pleasure which I shall have with thee this night, above all the joyes of the world. Then (quoth she) O my Lucius, how willing would I be to fulfil your desire, but by reason shee is so hated, she getteth her selfe into solitary places, and out of the presence of every person, when she mindeth to work her enchantments. Howbeit I regarde more to gratify your request, than I doe esteeme the danger of my life: and when I see opportunitie and time I will assuredly bring you word, so that you shal see all her enchantments, but always upon this condition, that you secretly keepe close such things as are done. Thus as we reasoned together the courage of Venus assailed, as well our desires as our members, and so she unrayed herself and came to bed, and we passed the night in pastime and dalliance, till as by drowsie and unlusty sleep I was constrained to lie still. THE SIXTEENTH CHAPTER How Fotis brought Apuleius to see her Mistresse enchant.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child, “enfant charmante et fourbe,” dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her. So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles. A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger’s shivering child. Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree’s shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl hung over me in the métro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these one-sided diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night. Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Once, Christina had asked Daisy why she didn’t use the public library. Daisy said, “Oh, but I do. The bookshop is for books I just have to own.” Daisy didn’t buy just any book. She gave a lot of thought to each of them. Christina had never heard of this one, Love Without Fear. Daisy’s note said, Dearest Christina, I wish someone had given me this book when I was your age. I had so many questions but I was too afraid to ask them. Merry Christmas to a special young woman. It’s a pleasure to work with you. Daisy There was also a small separate package with a key to the office in a purple leather key holder. Her own key to the office. That meant they trusted her. It meant they thought she was mature enough to handle emergencies and to lock up after hours if she was last to leave. The key meant more than the book. Until she looked at the book. The book shocked her. And it made her wet down there. She’d have to keep it hidden under her mattress and read it only at night before she went to sleep. She would write a friendly thank-you note to Daisy, making a big deal out of the key and a smaller deal out of the book. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00010.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00010.jpg] LITTLE THINGS SAY A LOTBy Henry AmmermanDEC. 21 — When Elizabeth firemen hacked their way through the underbelly of the wrecked C-46, they piled the shoes, gloves, eyeglasses and other salvage into boxes that were carried into the Elizabethtown Water Company’s garage. The items revealed stories that for a moment made the victims seem alive. A set of medical records told of a soldier who had survived the Korean battlefield, only to perish here. A pile of press clippings and photographs of a man described as a “212-pound Brooklyn wrestler” reminded us that the strong fall with the weak. Other pieces of salvage, though anonymous, told their own stories. A pair of high-powered binoculars, the carrying case burned off, would never be used at a Florida racetrack. A child’s twisted bicycle would never be ridden in the warm afternoons. An anticipated Merry Christmas was evidenced by the gay holiday wrapping on a set of men’s pajamas. “Handle with care” was the admonition scrawled on the remains of a photo album. If only it could have been. 6 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] MiriWas it wrong to go to a holiday dance just a week after something horrible had happened in their town? None of her friends thought so. They hardly talked about the crash anymore. They wanted to dress up and dance and have a good time. There might be boys from the Weequahic section of Newark at the Y, older boys who wouldn’t necessarily know they were just ninth graders.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  This fivesome bounces along for a while, the widow and the fat woman keeping silent, the mother and grandmother talking to the child and each other about the food. And then the train screeches to a halt in a town called (perhaps) corleone. A tall languid-looking soldier, unshaven, but with a beautiful mop of hair, a cleft chin, and somewhat devilish, lazy eyes, enters the compartment, looks insolently around, sees the empty half-seat between the fat woman and the widow, and, with many flirtatious apologies, sits down. He is sweaty and disheveled but basically a gorgeous hunk of flesh, only slightly rancid from the heat. The train screeches out of the station. Then we become aware only of the bouncing of the train and the rhythmic way the soldier’s thighs are rubbing against the thighs of the widow. Of course, he is also rubbing against the haunches of the fat lady—and she is trying to move away from him—which is quite unnecessary because he is unaware of her haunches. He is watching the large gold cross between the widow’s breasts swing back and forth in her deep cleavage. Bump. Pause. Bump. It hits one moist breast and then the other. It seems to hesitate in between as if paralyzed between two repelling magnets. The pit and the pendulum. He is hypnotized. She stares out the window, looking at each olive tree as if she had never seen olive trees before. He rises awkwardly, half-bows to the ladies, and struggles to open the window. When he sits down again his arm accidentally grazes the widow’s belly. She appears not to notice. He rests his left hand on the seat between his thigh and hers and begins to wind rubber fingers around and under the soft flesh of her thigh. She continues staring at each olive tree as if she were God and had just made them and were wondering what to call them. Meanwhile the enormously fat lady is packing away her pulp romance in an iridescent green plastic string bag fall of smelly cheeses and blackening bananas. And the grandmother is rolling ends of salami in greasy newspaper. The mother is putting on the little girl’s sweater and wiping her face with a handkerchief, lovingly moistened with maternal spittle. The train screeches to a stop in a town called (perhaps) prizzi, and the fat lady, the mother, the grandmother, and the little girl leave the compartment. Then the train begins to move again. The gold cross begins to bump, pause, bump between the widow’s moist breasts, the fingers begin to curl under the widow’s thighs, the widow continues to stare at the olive trees. Then the fingers are sliding between her thighs and they are parting her thighs, and they are moving upward into the fleshy gap between her heavy black stockings and her garters, and they are sliding up under her garters into the damp unpantied place between her legs.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Despite his penchant for bad movies and Edward G. Robinson gestures, Brian was a genius, a genuine 200-plus IQ kid who arrived at Columbia with a record-breaking history of College Board scores, debating society trophies, “citizenship” awards (whatever they are) from every school in California he’d gone to, and an impressive history of psychotic breakdowns from age sixteen on. Except that I did not know about these until much later, after we were married and he was hospitalized again. This oversight was not so much due to deception on his part as to the fact that he never regarded himself as crazy. The world was. About that I certainly agreed with him—right up until the time he tried to fly out the window and take me with him. It was probably Brian’s brilliance and his verbal pyrotechnics which made me fall in love with him in the first place. He was a great mimic, a spellbinding talker, one of those gifted raconteurs who seems like something out of a Dublin pub or a J. M. Synge play. He had the gift of gab; he was the Playboy of the Western World (straight from Los Angeles). I’ve always set a high value on words and have often made the mistake of believing in words far more than in actions. My heart (and my cunt) can be had for a pithy phrase, a good one-liner, a neat couplet, or a sensational simile. Did you ever hear that American rock song called “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box” which appeared briefly on the air waves before being banned into Broadcasting Limbo forever? It went something like this: Baby let me bang your box Baby let me play on your pianer…. Well, in my case it should go: Sweetheart let me screw your simile Sweetheart let me sleep in your caesura…. It was definitely Brian’s braininess I flipped for. You don’t know what the other brainy boys at Columbia were like in those days: flannel shirts with twenty-five leaky ballpoint pens in their breast pockets, flesh-colored frames on their thick glasses, blackheads in their ears, pustules on their necks, pleated trousers, greasy hair, and (sometimes) hand-knitted yarmulkes held on by one lonely bobby pin. They commuted by subway from their mothers’ matzoh-ball soup in the Bronx to the classrooms of Moses Hadas and Gilbert Highet on Morningside Heights, where they learned enough literature and philosophy to get straight A’s, but never seemed to lose their gawkiness, their schoolboy defensiveness, their total lack of appeal.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them—sometimes three. —Alexandre Dumas From then on the merry-go-round began. I would go to meetings with Bennett, fully expecting to stay, swearing to myself that I’d never see Adrian again, that it was over, that I’d had my fling and it was finished—then I’d see Adrian and fall apart. I found myself acting out the vocabulary of popular love songs, the clichés of the worst Hollywood movies. My heart skipped a beat. I got misty whenever he was near. He was my sunshine. Our hearts were holding hands. If he was in a room with me, I was in such a state of agitation that I could hardly sit still. It was a kind of madness, a total absorption. I forgot the article I was supposed to write. I forgot everything but him. None of the ploys I had used on myself in the past seemed to work anymore. I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like “fidelity” and “adultery,” by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that if I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner. — After lunch on that first day of the Congress, I told Bennett I was taking off to go swimming and I cut out with Adrian. We drove to my hotel where I got my bathing suit, put on my diaphragm, took my other gear, and then left with Adrian for his pension. In his room, I stripped naked in one minute flat and lay on the bed. “Pretty desperate, aren’t you?” he asked. “Yes.” “For God’s sake, why? We have plenty of time.” “How long?” “As long as you want it,” he said, ambiguously. If he left me, in short, it would be my fault. Psychoanalysts are like that. Never fuck a psychoanalyst is my advice to all you young things out there. Anyway, it was no good. Or not much. He was only at half-mast and he thrashed around wildly inside me hoping I wouldn’t notice. I wound up with a tiny ripple of an orgasm and a very sore cunt. But somehow I was pleased. I’ll be able to get free of him now, I thought; he isn’t a good lay. I’ll be able to forget him. “What are you thinking?” he asked. “That I’ve been well and truly fucked.” I remembered having used the same phrase with Bennett once, when it was much more true. “You’re a liar and a hypocrite. What do you want to lie for? I know I haven’t fucked you properly. I can do much better than that.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  She seemed reluctant to explain what the danger was, but when I pressed her she finally said, “He’s oversexed. He’s tried to take advantage of the younger boys.” She then went on to assure me that I mustn’t despise the poor boy; he was, after all, brain-damaged in some way, under medication, unable to read. If God had gifted me with a fine mind He’d done so only that I might serve my fellow man. In this brief parting word of warning, my mother had managed to communicate to me her own fascination with the wild boy. The day had turned cool and the car windows were closed. The motor ran so smoothly that the ticking of the dashboard clock could be heard. When I cracked the vent open I heard volleys of birdsong but the birds themselves were hiding. In the valley below, empty of all signs of humanity except for the road, a mist was curling through the pines. I didn’t really know the owner of the camp, and so I felt awkward beside him, ready to discuss whatever he chose but afraid of tiring him with my chatter. I sat half-rigid with expectation, a smile up my sleeve. And I felt the sex-crazed boy behind me who was half stretched out on the backseat, the sunlight from between the passing pines rhythmically stroking his body. After it got dark we stopped for gas and a snack. Ralph, the special camper, said he was cold and wanted to sit up front with us just to keep warm. There was nothing affectionate or come-on-ish in his manner to me in the coffee shop; I could tell desire and affection had not clasped hands across his heart. He was alone with his erection, which I could see through the thin fabric of his summer pants. It was something he carried around with him wherever he went, like a scar. In the dark interior of the car, brushed here and there by a dim, firefly glow from the panel, Ralph’s leg pressed mine. I was forced to return the pressure lest I lean against the driver and cause comment. When I caught sight of Ralph’s face in the magnesium explosion of passing headlights, he looked exhausted, mouth half-open, a thirsty animal whose eyes had turned inward with craving. The camp, when we finally arrived at midnight, was a sad, cold, empty place. The owner had to unlock a thick rusted chain that stretched from tree to tree across the narrow dirt road. When we reached an open field our car waded slowly, slowly through grasses as tall as the roof and wet and heavy with dew. At the foot of the hill glimmered the lake through a mist—more a chill out of the ground than a lake, more an absence, as though this fitful, shifting dampness was what was left in the world after everything human had been subtracted from it.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Then he came along when we went out dancing at an underground party in Brooklyn on his last night in town. I wore tight jeans and a black Lycra tank top to show off arms I’d toned from many hours at the gym, the shirt’s low scoop making my breasts look bigger than they were. I’m usually too self-conscious about turning red from Asian glow to have any alcohol, but shortly after I drank the one vodka cranberry he offered me, I felt more free to hug him and smell his sweat. By the end of the night we hadn’t talked much, but he’d lifted me up onto a counter so I could rest my legs, which I wrapped around his hips from behind while he stood, while my lips couldn’t help but touch his neck. Though I sobered up as we rode an hour in a taxi with my roommates to get back to our apartment, where I managed to leave him in the hallway and close the door to my room, alone. He was waiting for me when I opened that door again, late enough the next morning that the summer sun was too bright behind me and his presence came as a surprise. So did his kiss, and the probe of his warm tongue. “I’m leaving in an hour,” he said. He probably suspected that he just needed to have his lips on my mouth and I would crumple with want. I confirmed that suspicion—but my desire came with the need to get him over with so that my life could keep moving. It was easier to accept our attraction rather than listen to the part of me that knew it would be a mistake, to give in to the fun instead of saying the no I wanted to say. I was almost thirty but hadn’t been in a situation before where I felt so conflicted about someone I was so physically attracted to. Maybe it was just prejudice, I told myself, how him being in the military colored my feeling that he wanted me but didn’t respect me, how it wasn’t right for us to be together. I compromised, told myself I only needed to make him come, that he would go away once he was satisfied and that I didn’t need anything else. I refused to let him undress me after he let himself into my room. He lay down on the futon mattress on my parquet floor and I focused on my mouth’s task, the act that once gave me pleasure and did then, too, despite whatever else I felt. I marveled at the thick, almost egg-white quality of his ejaculate that tasted oddly pleasant, before my mind returned to things other than sex, how I’d promised myself not to get involved with men for a while—least of all him—because I’d grown to rely on them to feel as though I wouldn’t break apart.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A poet à mes beures, I composed a madrigal to the soot-black lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes, to the five asymmetrical freckles of her bobbed nose, to the blond down of her brown limbs; but I tore it up and cannot recall it today. Only in the tritest of terms (diary resumed) can I describe Lo’s features: I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked red candy, the lower one prettily plump—oh, that I were a lady writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light! But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile. And neither is she the fragile child of a feminine novel. What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet—of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, from the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservants in the Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels; and then again, all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer’s ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is—Lolita. Wednesday. “Look, make Mother take you and me to Our Glass Lake tomorrow.” These were the textual words said to me by my twelve-year-old flame in a voluptuous whisper, as we happened to bump into one another on the front porch, I out, she in. The reflection of the afternoon sun, a dazzling white diamond with innumerable iridescent spikes quivered on the round back of a parked car. The leafage of a voluminous elm played its mellow shadows upon the clapboard wall of the house. Two poplars shivered and shook. You could make out the formless sounds of remote traffic; a child calling “Nancy, Nan-cy!” In the house, Lolita had put on her favorite “Little Carmen” record which I used to call “Dwarf Conductors,” making her snort with mock derision at my mock wit.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  No wonder, then, that my adult life during the European period of my existence proved monstrously twofold. Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. I was aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which was mine; both would be termed female by the anatomist. But to me, through the prism of my senses, “they were as different as mist and mast.” All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my throes quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body’s every plea. One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only objects of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel’s, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity. At other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years” (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young person”). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the other hand, a “wayward child” is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen years of age” (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. This is all very interesting, and I daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in single tone, but probably preferred a lad’s perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I learned, however, what they looked like, those lovely, maddening, thin-armed nymphets, when they grew up. I remember walking along an animated street on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slim girl passed me at a rapid, high-heeled, tripping step, we glanced back at the same moment, she stopped and I accosted her. She came hardly up to my chest hair and had the kind of dimpled round little face French girls so often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her young body which still retained—and that was the nymphic echo, the chill of delight, the leap in my loins—a childish something mingling with the professional frétillement of her small agile rump. I asked her price, and she promptly replied with melodious silvery precision (a bird, a very bird!) “Cent.” I tried to haggle but she saw the awful lone longing in my lowered eyes, directed so far down at her round forehead and rudimentary hat (a band, a posy); and with one beat of her lashes: “Tant pis,” she said, and made as if to move away. Perhaps only three years earlier I might have seen her coming home from school! That evocation settled the matter. She led me up the usual steep stairs, with the usual bell clearing the way for the monsieur who might not care to meet another monsieur, on the mournful climb to the abject room, all bed and bidet. As usual, she asked at once for her petit cadeau, and as usual I asked her name (Monique) and her age (eighteen). I was pretty well acquainted with the banal way of streetwalkers. They all answer “dix-huit”—a trim twitter, a note of finality and wistful deceit which they emit up to ten times per day, the poor little creatures. But in Monique’s case there could be no doubt she was, if anything, adding one or two years to her age. This I deduced from many details of her compact, neat, curiously immature body. Having shed her clothes with fascinating rapidity, she stood for a moment partly wrapped in the dingy gauze of the window curtain listening with infantile pleasure, as pat as pat could be, to an organ-grinder in the dust-brimming courtyard below. When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to their grubby fingernails, she said with a naïve frown “Oui, ce n’est pas bien,” and went to the washbasin, but I said it did not matter, did not matter at all. With her brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin, she looked perfectly charming. Her hips were no bigger than those of a squatting lad; in fact, I do not hesitate to say (and indeed this is the reason why I linger gratefully in that gauze-gray room of memory with little Monique) that among the eighty or so grues I had had operate upon me, she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. “Il était malin, celui qui a inventé ce truc-là,” she commented amiably, and got back into her clothes with the same high-style speed.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Wherefore as does a man who halts not, but goes on his way whatever may appear to him, if the spur of necessity prick him, so we entered by the gap, one in front of the other, mounting the stairway, which by its straitness parts the climbers. And like the little stork that lifts its wing through desire to fly, and, venturing not to abandon the nest, drops it down,2 even so was I with desire to ask kindled and quenched, going so far as the movement which he makes who is preparing to speak. My sweet Father did not cease, even though the pace was swift, but said: “Discharge the bow of thy speech which thou hast drawn to the iron.” Then securely I opened my mouth, and began: “How can one grow lean there where the need of food is not felt?” “If thou wouldst call to mind how Meleager3 was consumed at the consuming of a firebrand,” said he, “this would not be so difficult to thee; and if thou wouldst think how, to your every movement your image flits about in the mirror, that which seems hard would seem easy to thee. But in order that thou mayst find rest in thy desire, lo here Statius, and him I call and pray, that he now be the healer of thy wounds.” “If,” answered Statius, “I unfold to him in thy presence the eternal things he has seen, let my excuse be that I may not deny thee.” Then he began: “Son, if thy mind heed and receive my words, they shall be a light unto thee on the how which thou utterest. Perfect blood, which never is drunk by the thirsty veins, and is left behind,4 as ’twere food which thou removest from the table, acquires in the heart a virtue potent to inform all human members, like that blood which flows through the veins to become those. Refined yet again, it descends there whereof to be silent is more seemly than to speak, and thence afterwards distils upon other’s blood, in natural vessel. There the one is mingled with the other; one designed to be passive, the other to be active, by reason of the perfect place whence it springs; and, joined thereto, it begins to operate, first coagulating, and then giving life to that which it had solidified for its own material. The active virtue having become a soul, like that of a plant,5 in so far different that the former is on the way, and the latter is already at the goal, then effects so much that now it moves and feels, like a sea-fungus;5 and then sets about developing organs for the powers whereof it is the germ. Now, son, expands, now distends, the virtue which proceeds from the heart of the begetter, where nature intends all human members;

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  She cocked her head to one side and smiled. In the cold winter daylight I could see the thick layer of pancake makeup covering her face and neck but stopping short of her shoulders. The makeup was so evidently painted on and of such an unlikely hue that I gasped: this woman must be very old, I thought, to need such a disguise. Everything about her intrigued me and I returned day after day just to be near her. I watched her so hard that I forgot I existed; she provided me with a new, better life. For hours I stood in front of one bookcase or another reading as the dirty snow melted off my boots and left black tracks on the wood floor. First I’d remove the cap with earflaps and stuff it in a pocket; ten minutes later I’d unwind the maroon scarf. The coat came off and fell in a heap on the floor; then a sweater threw its twisted body onto the coat: clumsy wrestlers. The woman hummed and placed a small nickel-coated pot on the hot plate. The upper third of each windowpane was steamy; as a result, a passing man was striated into blurred and clear zones, his neck detailed down to the stubble but his face an embryo’s still streaming within the caul. Although it was only four the light was already dying; the world creaked from the cold and hugged itself hopelessly. Blue mounds of snow cast bluer shadows, but inside, everything was cheery and animated. The woman, whom the new customer called Marilyn, was laughing at his long, murmured story and her laugh was lovely. By the third long afternoon I’d spent there I’d fallen into conversation with Marilyn. She made some comment or other on the book I’d been holding for half an hour as I kept stealing glances at her and eavesdropping on her snatches of song and remarks to customers. She said to me, “I noticed you’re intrigued by the set of Balzac. It’s a very good buy—the complete works for just forty dollars. That’s about a dollar a volume. You can’t beat that. And it’s a handsome edition, the titles in gold stamped on leather, which may or may not be real. Turn-of-the-century.” I was not a fast reader. Months could go by before I’d finish a single book. The project of reading all of Balzac would obviously absorb the rest of my life. Was I prepared to make that commitment before I’d read even one of his novels? “How interesting,” I said, as I’d been trained to say to everything, even the grossest absurdity. “Who was Balzac?” She smiled and said, to spare my pride, “Ah, now there’s a good question. We’ll wait till Fred comes. He can tell us both.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She had been spiteful, if you please, at the age of one, when she used to throw her toys out of her crib so that her poor mother should keep picking them up, the villainous infant! Now, at twelve, she was a regular pest, said Haze. All she wanted from life was to be one day a strutting and prancing baton twirler or a jitterbug. Her grades were poor, but she was better adjusted in her new school than in Pisky (Pisky was the Haze home town in the Middle West. The Ramsdale house was her late mother-in-law’s. They had moved to Ramsdale less than two years ago). “Why was she unhappy there?” “Oh,” said Haze, “poor me should know, I went through that when I was a kid: boys twisting one’s arm, banging into one with loads of books, pulling one’s hair, hurting one’s breasts, flipping one’s skirt. Of course, moodiness is a common concomitant of growing up, but Lo exaggerates. Sullen and evasive. Rude and defiant. Stuck Viola, an Italian schoolmate, in the seat with a fountain pen. Know what I would like? If you, monsieur, happened to be still here in the fall, I’d ask you to help her with her homework—you seem to know everything, geography, mathematics, French.” “Oh, everything,” answered monsieur. “That means,” said Haze quickly, “you’ll be here!” I wanted to shout that I would stay on eternally if only I could hope to caress now and then my incipient pupil. But I was wary of Haze. So I just grunted and stretched my limbs nonconcomitantly (le mot juste) and presently went up to my room. The woman, however, was evidently not prepared to call it a day. I was already lying upon my cold bed both hands pressing to my face Lolita’s fragrant ghost when I heard my indefatigable landlady creeping stealthily up to my door to whisper through it—just to make sure, she said, I was through with the Glance and Gulp magazine I had borrowed the other day. From her room Lo yelled she had it. We are quite a lending library in this house, thunder of God. Friday. I wonder what my academic publishers would say if I were to quote in my textbook Ronsard’s “la vermeillette fente” or Remy Belleau’s “un petit mont feutré de mousse délicate, tracé sur le milieu d’un fillet escarlatte” and so forth. I shall probably have another breakdown if I stay any longer in this house, under the strain of this intolerable temptation, by the side of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride. Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of the Menarche? Bloated feeling. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from the roof. Grandma is visiting. “Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls’ magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have to be bedded down there.” The tiny madman in his padded cell.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, “impartial sympathy.” So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me. Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room. Props: old, candy-striped davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze—God bless the good man—had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed room, on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementoes, among these Dolores, were all over the place). She wore that day a pretty print dress that I had seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice, short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and, to complete the color scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. She was not shod, however, for church. And her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the phonograph. My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, cool skirt ballooning, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit. She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it—it made a cupped polished plop. Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of utter adoration—a radiance having something soft and moist about it, in which, with wonder, I recognized a resemblance to the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had when gloating over a new kind of concoction at the soda fountain or mutely admiring my expensive, always tailor-fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I would watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady and made that national grimace of feminine resignation (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping sideways) which, in an infantile form, I had seen Lo making herself. We had highballs before turning in, and with their help, I would manage to evoke the child while caressing the mother. This was the white stomach within which my nymphet had been a little curved fish in 1934. This carefully dyed hair, so sterile to my sense of smell and touch, acquired at certain lamplit moments in the poster bed the tinge, if not the texture, of Lolita’s curls. I kept telling myself, as I wielded my brand-new large-as-life wife, that biologically this was the nearest I could get to Lolita; that at Lolita’s age, Lotte had been as desirable a schoolgirl as her daughter was, and as Lolita’s daughter would be some day. I had my wife unearth from under a collection of shoes (Mr. Haze had a passion for them, it appears) a thirty-year-old album, so that I might see how Lotte had looked as a child; and even though the light was wrong and the dresses graceless, I was able to make out a dim first version of Lolita’s outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita, Lolitchen. So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naïvely lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He looked pleased. His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat. I was wearing a black suit, a black shirt, no tie. We sat down in two easy chairs. “You know,” he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin, “you don’t look like Jack Brewster. I mean, the resemblance is not particularly striking. Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company.” To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage … To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands … To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain … To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling—oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss! “No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters.” He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever. “Guess again, Punch.” “Ah,” said Punch, “so you have not come to bother me about those long-distance calls?” “You do make them once in a while, don’t you?” “Excuse me?” I said I had said I thought he had said he had never— “People,” he said, “people in general, I’m not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it’s absurd the way people invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre, they use the kitchen, they use the telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny accent, Captain.” “Quilty,” I said, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?” “Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?” “I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father.” “Nonsense,” he said. “You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as La Fierté de la Chair. Absurd.” “She was my child, Quilty.” In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by anything, but his blustering manner was not quite convincing. A sort of wary inkling kindled his eyes into a semblance of life. They were immediately dulled again. “I’m very fond of children myself,” he said, “and fathers are among my best friends.” He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat his pockets. He attempted to rise from his seat. “Down!” I said—apparently much louder than I intended. “You need not roar at me,” he complained in his strange feminine manner. “I just wanted a smoke. I’m dying for a smoke.” “You’re dying anyway.” “Oh, chucks,” he said. “You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you French, mister? Woolly-woo-boo-are? Let’s go to the barroomette and have a stiff—” He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Yes, when I find carrion, I like to clean it up. You said it, not me. The vulture metaphor is yours, ducks. The dead flesh is yours too. And Bennett’s.” “I think you like Bennett more than you admit. I think he turns you on.” “Can’t decide whether I’m queer or not,” he said, grinning. “I’ll bet that’s true.” “Think what you like, ducks. Anything to get out of really enjoying life. Anything to go on suffering. I know your type. Bloody Jewish masochist. Actually, I quite like Bennett, only he’s a bloody Chinese masochist. It would do him some good if you took off without him. It might show him that he can’t go on living this way, suffering all the time and calling in Freud as his witness.” “If I take off, I’ll lose him.” “Only if he’s not worth having.” “Why do you say that?” “It’s so obvious. If he takes off, then he’s not for you. And if he takes you back, it will be on a new footing. No more groveling. No more manipulating each other with guilt all the time. You can’t lose a thing. And meanwhile, we’ll have a great time.” I pretended to Adrian that I wasn’t tempted, but in fact I was. And sorely. When I thought about it, it did seem as if Bennett knew everything about life except that having fun ought to be part of it. Life was a long disease to be cured by psychoanalysis. You might not cure it, but eventually you’d die anyway. The base of the couch would rise around you and become a coffin, and six black-suited analysts would carry you off (and throw jargon on your open grave). Bennett knew about part objects and whole objects, Oedipus and Electra, school phobia and claustrophobia, impotence and frigidity, patricide and matricide, penis envy and womb envy, working through and free association, mourning and melancholia, intrapsychic conflict and extrapsychic conflict, nosology and etiology, senile dementia and dementia praecox, projection and introjection, self-analysis and group-therapy, symptom formation and symptom exacerbation, amnesiac states and fugue states, pathological weeping and laughter in dreams, insomnia and excessive sleeping, neurosis and psychosis until they were coming out of your ears, but he did not seem to know about laughing and joking, wisecracking and punning, hugging and kissing, singing and dancing—all the things, in short, which made life worthwhile. As if you could will life to be happy through analysis. As if you could get along without laughter as long as you had analysis. Adrian had laughter, and at that point I was ready to sell my soul for it. The smile. Who was it who said that the smile is the secret of life? Adrian had an antic grin. I too laughed all the time. When we were together we felt we could conquer anything merely by laughing. “You have to get away from him,” Bennett said, “and back into analysis. He’s not good for you.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Friday. Saw her going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose. Why does the way she walks—a child, mind you, a mere child!—excite me so abominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind of wiggly looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall. The ghost of a drag. Very infantile, infinitely meretricious. Humbert Humbert is also infinitely moved by the little one’s slangy speech, by her harsh high voice. Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across the fence. Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. Pause. “I must go now, kiddo.” Saturday. (Beginning perhaps amended.) I know it is madness to keep this journal but it gives me a strange thrill to do so; and only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script. Let me state with a sob that today my L. was sun-bathing on the so-called “piazza,” but her mother and some other woman were around all the time. Of course, I might have sat there in the rocker and pretended to read. Playing safe, I kept away, for I was afraid that the horrible, insane, ridiculous and pitiful tremor that palsied me might prevent me from making my entrée with any semblance of casualness.